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Gloria Lucas

Gloria Lucas is self-described as a “chubby warrior, DIY punx educator, and eating disorder survivor.”  Growing up Latina, she felt that her experience wasn’t covered in the mainstream media when it came to body image and eating disorders.  Most of the studies that had been done regarding eating disorders focused on white women.  Eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of any health condition, making them a major issue.  Without studies evaluating the impact of eating disorders on different races, cultures, and communities, Lucas felt that this creates a lack of culturally sensitive treatments.

Lucas sought out to educate people on her experience, so she could start a conversation about how eating disorders are not solely a white woman’s issue. In 2014, Lucas founded Nalgona Positivity Pride, a body positivity-centered organization for women of color in Los Angeles.  Her work fights against the exclusion of WOC in eating disorder research and also grapples with issues regarding mental health within her own culture.  Part of her initiative to start the conversation surrounding the WOC experience with eating disorders is to erase the cultural taboos surrounding them.  Growing up, having an eating disorder in her community was not understood.  Her parents did not know how to react or respond to her struggle.  By making her and the struggles of WOC with their body image more visible, she hopes to make these issues recognized by those within communities of color.

There are multiple platforms for Nalgona Positivity Pride.  Nalgona Positivity Pride has an instagram, a website, and an etsy shop (only to name a few).  On these media related platforms, Lucas and her team share stories, debunk myths about the WOC experience, educate people on colonialism and decolonizing feminism, and advertise events they will be conducting.  The organization in itself is a resource for WOC battling eating disorders and body dysmorphia, in addition to being educational for all people.  The WOC experience with eating disorders is fundamentally different from the experience of white women, and Lucas makes that known.  Nalgona Positivity Pride sets itself apart from other organizations by recognizing how “colonization, assimilation, systematic oppression, and racism play in the development of low self esteem and mental illnesses like eating disorders among people of color.”  Lucas and her organization debunk the myth that they are the problem, and fight fatphobia and racism within body positive movements.  Nalgona Positivity Pride is a truly inclusive organization that accepts that there is diversity in how women look.  Gloria Lucas is doing imperative work by dismantling a system that excludes the experiences of WOC, and creating resources for WOC struggling with eating disorders and other mental health issues.

Ramirez , Tanisha L. “Meet The Woman Who’s ‘Decolonizing’ Body Positivity For Women Of Color.” Huffington Post, 25 Apr. 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/meet-the-woman-whos-decolonizing-body-positivity-for-women-of-color_us_57101b91e4b06f35cb6f1c9f.

Beck, Abaki. “Feminist Hero Friday: Gloria Lucas, Founder of Nalgona Positivity Pride.” POC Online Classroom , 2 Dec. 2016, www.poconlineclassroom.com/blog/2016/11/30/feminist-hero-friday-gloria-lucas-founder-of-nalgona-positivity-pride.

Reichard, Raquel. “Women Crushing the Patriarchy Wednesday: Gloria Lucas.” Latina, 14 Oct. 2015, www.latina.com/lifestyle/our-issues/wcw-gloria-lucas?page=1%2C1.

Cusido, Carmen. “'Eat Up': How Cultural Messages Can Lead to Eating Disorders.” NPR, 7 Dec. 2015, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/07/458490852/eat-up-how-cultural-messages-can-lead-to-eating-disorders.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Alice Bag

Alice Bag is a singer, songwriter, musician, artist, educator, and feminist. Alice was the lead singer and co-founder of the influential group The Bags — one of the first punk bands to form during the first wave of punk rock in Los Angeles. The Bags are widely thought to be one of the central bands in early Hollywood punk (around 1977-78).

          At the same time, however, Bag is more than just this. She is "a vital link in American culture" representing second-wave feminism and the creation of two music genres: death rock and punk. Bag taught at After the birth of her daughter in the 1990s, Bag founded At Home Bomb, an "all-female community safe space that addressed social constraints put on women both domestically and in the arts" (TKW).

          Bag also spent several years as a teacher in Nicaragua, teaching English as a second language to schoolchildren. Bag's own parents did not speak English, and her years as a schoolteacher highlighted the importance of understanding and nurturing children, no matter how they sound.

          Today, Bag works with her organization, Chicas Rockeras SELA, (Girls Rock of Southeast LA); Chicas Rockeras is a Spanish-language rock summer camp for girls in the Southeast LA area. The camp promotes diversity, inclusivity, and aims to provide Latina girls with an outlet for their feelings that extends beyond what they're dissatisfied with.

Works Cited

Jackson, Jhoni. "Alice Bag is a Chicana Punk Icon, But She's About to Release Her Very First Album." Remezcla, Remezcla, 15 Jan. 2016.

Martens, Todd. "L.A.'s original punk Alice Bag is back, and she has a lot to say on her first solo album." The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 29 Jun. 2016.

TKW. "Interview: Alice Bag." The Le Sigh, The Le Sigh, 1 Sep. 2016.

Wolfe, Allison. "Chicas Rockeras: Empowering Girls in Southeast Los Angeles." Ampersand, Ampersand LA, 26 Apr. 2016.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

“resisting, renewing, and regeneration”“For me, living as a Nishnaabekwe is a deliberate act – a direct act of resurgence, a direct act of sovereignty.” (1) 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a prolific Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg artist, writer, academic, activist and a member of Alderville First Nation. Through her work and activism, she has played a central role in the decolonization and resurgence of Indigenous nations in Canada. She received her PhD from the University of Manitoba and teaches in colleges and universities across Canada. Currently she is a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University. (2) She has published two edited volumes including Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (2008) and This is an Honor Song: Twenty Years Since the Barricades (2010) and The Winter We Danced (2014) and has written a number of non-fiction books, including Islands of Decolonial Love (2013) and This Accident of Being Lost (2017). (3) She has written for publications such as Now Magazine, Spirit Magazine, The Link, Briarpatch Magazine, Huffington Post, and Canadian Art Magazine. 

“We are also in our fourth century of gendered colonial violence and so I think we can’t afford to be anything but political. Teaching our kids our languages is political. Breastfeeding is political. Learning from our youth is political. Every time we connect to any piece of our homelands, that’s political.” (4)

Leanne was a strong voice in the worldwide Indigenous protests known as Idle No More (http://www.idlenomore.ca/), protests which have taken the form of civil disobediance, hunger strikes, and public demonstrations like flash mobs and Round Dances. These actions which originated in Canada have sparked further action as far away as Gaza, and . (5) Idle No More is a movement organized in 2012 by Indigenous Women in Canada as a means to “assert Indigenous inherent rights to sovereignty and reinstitute traditional laws and Nation to Nation Treaties by protecting the lands and waters from corporate destruction.”(http://www.idlenomore.ca/story) Sparked by the introduction of Bill C-45 and the Navigable Waters Protection Act which allowed for developers to build around lakes and rivers without notifying the government - just the latest in terms of governmental oppressions of Native people - Idle No More is a movement that centers the contemporary legacy of colonialism and dispossession. (6) 

Leanne wrote one of the central texts of the movement, Aambe! Maajaadaa! (What #IdleNoMore Means to Me). She explains Idle No More as “the latest—visible to the mainstream—resistance and it is part of an ongoing historical and contemporary push to protect our lands, our cultures, our nationhoods, and our languages. To me, it feels like there has been an intensification of colonial pillage, or that’s what the Harper government is preparing for—the hyper-extraction of natural resources on indigenous lands.”(7) Much of Leanne’s work, has been about “resisting, renewing, and regeneration” in opposition to extraction of land, culture, resources, people. Her art, activism, writing and teaching is centered around creating an alternative to oppression, rather to  create a movement that is replenishing, a “continuous rebirth.” (5)  

((Simpson speaking at an Idle No More protest in Peterborough, Ontario. Source: http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson)

When asked, “How does your activism intersect with your writing?” Leanne Simpson answered;

“The base of both my writing and my activism and really everything I do is a fugitive desire to be Nishnaabekwe in every way I can. I want to connect with every piece of our land. I want to know how my ancestors thought. I want to know our language and our ceremonies. I want to know all of our place names and stories. I want to sing every song and dance every dance. I want to be part of a community that creates the next moments in the most beautiful of ways. And I need my homeland to do that.” (8)

Creative interpretation of Leanne Simpson’s poem, “Leaks” from the book Islands of Decolonial Love with the quote “you are not a vessel for white settler shame / even if i am the housing that failed you”  (8) 

(By Leah Parker-Bernstein) 

Works Cited: 

(1) Simpson, Leanne. "Aambe! Maajaadaa! (What #IdleNoMore Means to Me)." Decolonization. December 21, 2012. Accessed October 18, 2017. https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/aambe-maajaadaa-what-idlenomore-means-to-me/.

(2) "Leanne Betasamosake Simpson appointed distinguished visiting professor." Ryerson University. March 21, 2017. Accessed October 18, 2017. http://www.ryerson.ca/news-events/news/2017/03/leanne-betasamosake-simpson-appointed-distinguished-visiting-pro/.

(3) Simon Fraser University. “Restoring Nationhood: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson”. Filmed [November  2014]. YouTube video, 01:08:13. Posted [January 2014]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH1QZQIUJIo.

(4) Winder, Tanaya . "Interview with Leanne Simpson." As Us. Accessed October 18, 2017. https://asusjournal.org/issue-4/interview-with-leanne-simpson/.

(5) Klein, Naomi. "Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More's Leanne Simpson." YES! Magazine. March 05, 2013. Accessed October 18, 2017. http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.

(6) Flegg, Erin. “Changes to Navigable Waters Protection Act dangerously undermine environmental protection, say critics.” The Vancouver Observer, 1 Jan. 2013, www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/changes-navigable-waters-protection-act-dangerously-undermine-environmental-protection.

(7) Simpson, Leanne. "Idle No More: Where the Mainstream Media Went Wrong." The Dominion. February 27, 2013. Accessed October 18, 2017. http://dominion.mediacoop.ca/story/idle-no-more-and-mainstream-media/16023.

(8) "RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award Leanne Simpson on the significance of storytelling." Canada Writes. June 20, 2014. Accessed October 18, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20150424185103/http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2014/06/rbc-taylor-emerging-writer-award-leanne-simpson-on-the-significance-of-storytelling.html.

(9) Simpson, Leanne. Islands of decolonial love: stories & songs. Arbeiter-Ring Publ., 2016.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Assata’s Daughters

“I believe in black woman and knowing that if you are under the age of 18 there is no organization for you to join. Assata’s Daughters grew out of that need. It’s a space for young black women to learn about black radical tradition and the black lives matter movement.”-Page May (Vivanco)

It’s inspiring to see the power, May saw a “gap” in education, a need in her community, and immediately set to work to fulfill it! This is a prime example of doing the work for liberation outside of the system. This is essentially a gap in the Chicago Public School System and the Department of Education as a whole. While Assata’s Daughters works to address those systemic issues they chose to fill the need first. 

In an interview for the red eye around Chicago grass root organizing Page May is asked: What real changes have you seen as a result of the public outcry?

May: We are holding people accountable. After months of pressure, we finally got [the recommendation to have police officer] Dante Servin fired. We also got [Police Superintendent Garry] McCarthy fired. The masses finally recognize how awful Rahm Emanuel really is. U. of C. is building a trauma center on its campus. Stop and Frisk will now be tracked for the first time in the history of the CPD. Reparations were won by survivors of Jon Burge's torture. (Vivanco)

I just wanted to highlight the real life impact this organization is putting into their community. With this list of accomplishments one might assume this is a longstanding organization like the NAACP or ACLU and while they have worked in collaboration with these entities,  Assata’s Daughters was launched just a short two years ago, partially with the financial support gained from a You Caring campaign for $10,000-which superseded its goals. (YouCaring)

Main word to describe this organizations work? Intergenerational. In the aforementioned interview with Red Eye, founder Page May, insists on the inclusion of elders. They also have the Akerele (ah-keh-REH-leh  one who is strong in spite of being small) program for toddlers to pre teens and then the Ominara (oh-mee-nee-rah  freedom; independence) program for teens to young adults. They work with young girls introducing them to Assata Shakur and her revolutionary politic and love of Black people. (Assets Daughters) 

Community Gardens

THE X MODEL The structure of Assata’s Daughters organization is first off purposefully kept small. Decentralized and broken up into four main inputs of work, intersecting and supporting each other, hence the title X Model. They developed their own model of leadership!  To create balance while running multiple, independent programs under the principle of non-hierarchal leadership!!

Below is my attempt at reimagining the world, or my immediate world interests through this model and what that might look like. I am so excited at the idea of a non hierarchy I immediately thought of Smith as an institution and what would it look like to apply the X Model to our current system. What if students, staff, faculty, and the Board of Trustees worked as an interdependent entity instead of a bureacracy? My imagination grew wild and I began to explore utilizing this model in Government with the people, city, state, and nationals intersecting and supporting one another. While this exact model might not be perfect it starts with the freedom and power to reimagine structures at all. 

All in all Assata’s Daughters collaborate to do intersection work on issues such as prison and police abolition, not reform but eradicating, defending, and disbanding which includes working to resist police violence, dismantling ice. They also work towards gaining quality public schools, access to healthcare, resisting violence against women and femmes. Focusing on economic stability, gender equity, well-resourced communities without police and without prisons and without gentrification, in addition to abolishing anti-blackness. It’s a big order, one that will change the globe, I hope to join the work one day.

Watch the video below to see how Assata’s Daughters utilizes politics to out incumbent Anita Alvarez.

Works Cited 

Reid-Cleveland, Keith. Organizers Stopped Traffic On Lake Shore Drive During NFL ‘Draft Town.’ http://blackyouthproject.com/organizers-stopped-traffic-on-lake-shore-drive-during-nfl-draft-town/

 Vivanco, Leonor. ‘5 young Chicago activists answer 5 questions about the movement.’  http://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-five-activists-answer-five-questions-20160122-story.html 

https://www.youcaring.com/assata-s-daughters-366482

http://www.assatasdaughters.org/how-we-work/ 

[wocfeminists-blog]

Dolores Huerta

http://www.blogpyramid.com/the-aries-woman-linda-goodman.html

Dolores Huerta, born Dolores Fernández in Dawson New, Mexico on April 10, 1930, has led a life dedicated to activism since her early adulthood. Huerta lived in New Mexico until age three, when she and her two brothers moved with their mother to Stockton, CA upon her parents’ divorce. Huerta’s father, Juan Fernandez, was a union activist who went on to become a state assemblyman- to which Huerta attributes the inspiration to become an activist herself.

Huerta graduated from Stockton High School in 1947 and continued to Stockton College. However, her studied were interrupted by her first marriage to Ralph Head. The marriage lasted briefly but the couple had two daughters. After the divorce, Huerta returned to complete her AA degree and began teaching. She worked at grammar school but realized that she could not provide much help to students who came to class hungry and needing shoes. This sparked the beginning of her activist career.

In 1955, Huerta helped Fred Ross start the Community Service Organization (CSO) of Stockton which worked to end segregation, police brutality, discrimination as well as to improve socioeconomic conditions of farm workers. During her time at CSO, Huerta met Ventura Huerta a labor activist whom she married and had five children with.

https://www.doloresthemovie.com/

In 1960, Dolores started the Agricultural Workers Association and worked to obtain Spanish language voting ballots and drivers tests, public assistance and pensions for people working in the Bracero program and voter registration drives. Huerta met Cesar Chavez, also a CSO official, through Fred Ross and though the two were skeptical of each other, worked alongside each other. Chavez then became the director of CSO but along with Huerta, left CSO because of its lack of attention regarding farm workers. In 1962, Huerta and Chavez created the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to help farm workers. In 1965, AWA and NFWA became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Huerta coined the slogan “Si se puede!” for the labor movement in California and the southwest. Huerta was the primary negotiator in contracts with Coachella valley grape growers while Chavez organized strikes. After 5 hard fought years, the UFW signed an agreement with 26 grape growers that vastly improved working conditions for farm workers, including reducing harmful pesticide use and initiating unemployment and healthcare benefits.

In the 1970’s, Huerta organized a national lettuce boycott which paved the way for the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Huerta became the first Vice President of the UFW and co-founder of the UFW radio. She continued working towards a better immigration policy and better health conditions for farm workers.

In 1988, she was brutally beaten by San Francisco police officers during a rally against George H.W Bush. She suffered six broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. After Chavez’s death in 1993, Huerta stepped down from UFW but continues a life of activism and social change.

Huerta is the recipient of awards such as the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom Award (1993), she was also admitted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. Among other awards Huerta received are the Eleanor Roosevelt Award (1998), Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship(2002) which was used to create the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President barack Obama in 2012.

Works Cited

“Dolores Huerta.” Dolores Huerta Foundation, Dolores Huerta Foundation, 17 Mar. 2014, doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/.

"Dolores Huerta." Notable Hispanic American Women, Gale, 1993. U.S. History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/K1624000134/UHIC?u=ereader_his_gale&xid=70e5e02d. Accessed 11 Oct. 2017.

Godoy, Maria. “Dolores Huerta: The Civil Rights Icon Who Showed Farmworkers 'Sí Se Puede'.” NPR, NPR, 17 Sept. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/17/551490281/dolores-huerta-the-civil-rights-icon-who-showed-farmworkers-si-se-puede.

Kim, Inga. “The Rise of the UFW.” The Rise of the UFW – UFW, United Farm Workers, 3 Apr. 2017, ufw.org/the-rise-of-the-ufw/.

Michals, Debra.  "Dolores Huerta."  National Women's History Museum.  National Women's History Museum, 2015.  06 October, 2017.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Dolores Huerta.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22 Sept. 2017, www.britannica.com/biography/Dolores-Huerta.

Turan, Kenneth. “Dolores Huerta Has Been Jailed, Beaten, Mocked by Glenn Beck. A New Doc Shows Why She Won't Shut up – LA Times.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 7 Sept. 2017, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-dolores-review-20170907-story.html.

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Travis Alabanza

“Travis Alabanza is a performance artist, theatre maker, poet and writer that works and survives in London, via Bristol. Their multidisciplinary practice uses a combination of poetry, theatre, sounscapes, projection and body-focussed performance art to scream about their [survival as] a Black, trans, gender-non-conforming person in the UK. ”(3) They have been performing in the UK poetry scene since 2015 and since then have gained much attention from their work, being referred to “as one of the most prominent emerging queer artists in the UK (As noted by Dazed, Prancing Through Lifeand MOBO)”(3) In the past three years, they have programmed and starred in a variety of performances, working with other artists such as Mykki Blanco and Alok Vaid-Menon. Alabanza is also one of the 2016/17 artists in residence at the Tate Modern, a major museum in London.

In an interview with Louis Shankar for the online magazine hiskind, Alabanza responds to the question, do you feel activism is important to your work? “When I think about activism I think about how my art is inherently political. Existing in these spaces, especially as a black body that is outside of gender binaries in spaces that are historically white, I’m taking up space in a political way. My role in art and my role as I gain more social capital in these places is to then redistribute who is being seen, and that’s still a form of activism. I never kid myself and think that art is going to be the leading force of a movement but I do think art has a really important place in it.” (1) Alabanza’s work is incredibly effective in proving the role of art in activism. Their work allows for individuals to see themselves reflected and their experiences validated. This is especially important for conversations that are so often silenced or not thought of as important, such as the amount of street harassment and violence experienced by trans femmes of color. Alabanza, through both their chapbook and their performances, speaks to the violence they experience daily and in this act of sharing creates a space for art to be both a process of communal conversation and healing. 

Trans femmes of color have historically been on the frontlines of activism, even if queer histories have worked to erase these movements, as is seen in the often whitewashed remembering of the Stonewall riots. White supremacy, patriarchy, cisnormativity etc. put specifically trans femmes of color at the intersections of these oppressive systems. Alabanza’s work both responds to these systems and resists them, while building a community both online and in person that supports and centers trans femmes of color using the medium of performance.

Additionally, their work makes the necessary intervention into conversations of trans identities that often erase and ignore gender nonconforming people. In an interview prior to a performance of their show BURGERZ they speak to the question of agency over one’s body as a black transfemme saying, “...the narrative around trans ideas and identities to Non binary femmes is one that often takes away our agency too. We still have a trans politics that is incredibly binary, and often that removes agency from my own identification.” (2)

In the same interview they respond to a question about the importance of selfies and archiving for them personally, saying, “The idea of archiving is very important to me; so sometimes when I’m feeling low and looking through my Instagram, reminding me of the looks I served or when I felt  my gender or not dysphoric, it really helps me to remind myself that there was a time when I didn’t feel dysphoric.” All the photo’s in this Tumblr post are taken from their social media accounts, where one can find a seemingly endless stream of content, providing information on their next shows, their most recent poetry, and their daily life.

In many of Alabanza’s interviews, they talk about the variety of forms activism can take and the importance of acknowledging and supporting the less public activism that so often takes place in their communities. “I think of the activist Tobi Adebajo who runs a femmes of colour group and tirelessly she organizes healing days, she organises workshops, where we come [and] do lots of things, like gather, braid hair, make spells, eat, chill… I feel  these communal activism is what’s keeping us alive, it’s what’s keeping us and what’s reminding us that we have community, that we have family and that we can find a safe space.”(2) Travis Alabanza is one of these people creating communities, essential communities, that provide the support, love, and understanding that is so necessary for survival, healing, and thriving. These communities can be so hard to find in real life, which is why Alabanza’s online content is such an important aspect of their activism, because of it’s ability to have these conversations on such expansive platforms. 

Note: As a poet, I imagine Travis Alabanza is very specific about the words they use to describe themself and I wanted to honor how they choose to describe their life and their work. While I think it is incredibly important for me to be sharing their work on this platform, I also felt it was important to avoid participating in the often violent practice of naming, gendering, and determining narratives of trans and nonbinary people of color without their consent. For these reasons, I chose to directly quote much of their biography from the “about” section on their website and have included many quotes in this post to share their work in their own words.

Sources:

1. https://hiskind.com/travis-alabanza/

2. http://shadesofnoir.org.uk/travis-alabanza-on-burgerz/

3. http://travisalabanza.co.uk/about-2/

4. Here is the link to Alabanza’s newly released chapbook! http://travisalabanza.bigcartel.com/

Photo description: 

Above photo is a picture of Travis Alabanza standing outside. The photo was originally posted on their facebook account with the caption:

“‘I think when we look at transness, there is a real danger to just focus on our violence, or our surgery, or our this… and obviously this book is about violence, but I think violence is complex – a lot of the times I’m experiencing violence after experiencing pure joy, or in between joy, or just after a show, or DURING a photoshoot – I wanted violence to sit in between how it does in my life. [The fact] that trans feminine people have to learn to juggle and dance between intense emotional states in order to survive.’ an interview on Read The Muse is up that is looking at my chapbook 'Before I step Outside (you love me)'. Have a look here: https://readthemuse.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/an-interview-with-travis-alabanza-before-i-step-outside-you-love-me/. You can still order my chapbook, and stay tuned for more reviews and interviews. image credit: Holly Revell.”

Photo description: Drawing of Travis Alabanza based on a photo from their instagram account with the quote “I never kid myself and think that art is going to be the leading force of a movement but I do think that art has a really important place in it” taken from this interview: https://hiskind.com/travis-alabanza/ 

Photo description: Photo collage using a picture of Travis Alabanza with words over it. Originally posted on Travis Alabanza’s facebook account with the caption: ‘“And I'm searching for a politics that goes beyond man and women’ A page from my chapbook 'Before I Step Outside (you love me)' which you can still order online:http://travisalabanza.bigcartel.com/”

[wocfeminists-blog]

Dorothy E. Roberts

Dorothy E. Roberts is a Black woman feminist, an acclaimed scholar of race, a distinguished academic, public intellectual, and social justice advocate. She is a leader in transforming public thinking on reproductive rights and racial justice; and writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Roberts challenges commonly-held views about race, calling us to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us. Her activism and scholarship shifts understanding and policy on reproductive health, child welfare and bioethics especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans.

Born on March 8, 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, Dorothy Roberts pursued her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School. Upon graduating, Roberts went on to teach at Rutgers University, Northwestern University, Stanford University and Fordham. Additionally, she also participated as a fellow at Harvard University's Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. Roberts currently serves as a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she holds joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies, Sociology, and the Law School. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies.

  Women of color’s reproductive autonomy is constantly under attack by society. Many of those who stand beside Black women in the daily struggle of human and civil rights tend to leave out Black women’s reproductive health concerns. Even the mainstream reproductive rights agenda, which mobilizes around women’s health, has routinely ignored Black women’s health concerns. Women of color and Black women feminist, such as Dorothy Roberts, continue to counteract, bring awareness, and educate on Black women’s health. They bring needed attention and support to important reproductive health struggles and policies that are most likely to affect Black women; not only as it pertains to abortions, but also other often ignored struggles. In Killing The Black Body, Roberts argues, that the traditional “feminists focus on gender and identification of male domination as the source of reproductive repression often overlooks the importance of racism in shaping our understanding of reproductive liberty and the degree of “choice” that women really have. Poor Black women are blamed for perpetuating social problems by transmitting defective genes, irreparable crack damage, and a deviant lifestyle to their children.”3 This argument not only highlights some of the issues of invisibility Black women face in mainstream feminism, but it also demonstrates the lack of intersectional sensitivity for women facing both racist assumptions and sexist expectations. An example of this is displayed by the expectation that Black women are to have children; while at the same time, Black women are routinely punished and criminalized based on their motherhood.

Roberts emphasizes that we cannot afford to ignore the intersection that racism, classism, sexism, and capitalism plays in impacting the lives of Black women in society. She argues that it developed from slavery (rape, abuse, property, slave status through motherhood), to unjust institutions and policies. Black women’s wombs have been deemed producers of social disadvantage and it is widely thought that by controlling “that” one can control the undesirable race. This is evident in the forced sterilization, welfare stipulations, the imprisonment of Black mothers, production of “desirable bodies” through reproductive technology, and more; but still, not only are these issues not being addressed, they are intentionally made invisible. Dorothy Roberts contributes to Black women’s organizing for the Reproductive Justice Movement that fights for the true MEANING of LIBERTY, and sheds lights on these injustices. She uses her writings, teachings, and Ted talks to challenge injustices faced by Black women. Roberts “proposes an approach to the reproductive rights that acknowledges the complementary and overlapping qualities of the Constitution’s guarantees of liberty and equality. This approach recognizes the connection between the dehumanization of the individual and the repression of the group. It provides a positive claim to state support for poor woman's procreative decisions that counters proposals to cut funding both for children born to women on welfare and for abortion. It also adds a compelling dimension to the feminist claim that reproductive liberty is essential to women's political and social citizenship.  

Dorothy Roberts fights for the freedom, rights and protections of Black women and will forever represent RESISTANCE. #TrustBlackWomen 

Painting By: Shakayla Lawrence

1 www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/roberts1/

2 Dorothy E. Roberts, “Killing the Black Body: A Twenty-Year Retrospective” <www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcjJfkVQaQ>

3 Roberts, Dorothy: Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997; Vintage paperback, 1999).

Works Cited 

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011).  

www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/roberts1/

www.sociology.sas.upenn.edu/content/dorothy-roberts

Roberts, Dorothy: "Colonizing and Decolonizing Black Women’s Bodies" <www.youtube.com/watch?v=laL0AyssYY8>

 Roberts, Dorothy, “Killing The Black Body: A Twenty-Year Retrospective” <www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcjJfkVQaQ>

Roberts, Dorothy: Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997; Vintage paperback, 1999).

Roberts, Dorothy: Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies, 10 DUBOIS REV. 313 (2013) (with Sujatha Jesudason). 

Roberts, Dorothy: The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities, 56 STAN. L. REV. 1271 (2004).

[wocfeminists-blog]

Komako Kimura

Komako Kimura was an actress and suffragette who worked to bring Japanese women the right to vote in the early twentieth century, a time in which such work was cause for arrest. In response to other women’s rights movements in Japan at the time, Kimura and a group of three other women, most of whom were the wives of officials in the Japanese government, formed a women's suffrage society which published the magazine “The New True Woman” (Shin Shinfujinkai) and held meetings to discuss how best to gain political autonomy. “The New True Woman” worked to reach out to women and educate them on the movement domestically and globally, as well as encourage them to make strides for their own liberation. Kimura and her organization were at the forefront of the Japanese women’s movement, but pressure from the government caused the group to fall apart, and in 1917 she traveled to work with the US suffragette movement and garner support for her work in Japan.  (Blackwell)

Unfortunately very little was recorded by the women's movement about her time in the states, a silence which I feel speaks more about what American suffragettes felt was important than the importance of her work. In early 1917 she visited “national suffragette headquarters”and spoke with Alice Stone Blackwell, feminist reporter and editor of “The Woman Citizen” publication, which published a short piece from Kimura about her visit. It was during this visit that the most famous image of Kimura emerges, as she marches in the US with her “WOMAN SUFFRAGE PARTY” sash and dual American and Japanese flags. (Blackwell)

  In the article with Blackwell Kimura states, “I am told that a dancing suffragist is something that America does not understand” and goes on to talk about how theater was not only a source of pride and joy for her, but was also an avenue for her feminist work.

“The women of the stage have an opportunity to talk to men of affairs… She (the actress) is treated with respect. She is allowed to mingle in the discussion - whatever it is. Her opinion is often worth while and it is often listened to. So we find in the Japanese actress a woman conversant with the big issues of the day, a woman who is given the chance to broaden and grow. In this was I came to know that there were women on the other side of the world fighting for liberty and thought and action and creed.” (Blackwell)

Kimura also discusses the importance of financial independence, and how her position as the manager of two theaters in Tokyo has allowed her to publish her magazine, which she also expressed interest in publishing in the US (which unfortunately never came to fruition).

Despite the years she spent in the United States, Komako Kimura is invisible in American scholarship on the suffragette movement. Ties between the American and British suffragists are well documented and well studied, but the contributions of women of color, domestic or international, are relegated to footnotes. Nearly all English language writing  on Kimura is in the form of newspaper articles from 1917 and 1918, short blurbs with extremely racist and sexist undertones that spend entire paragraphs describing her as dainty, delicate, and quiet. One even made a long metaphor comparing her to the character of madame butterfly. It was this grossly inaccurate equation of Kimura to one of the exemplars of the stereotyping of Asian women which led me to my art piece: the killing of Madame Butterfly. 

In it, Kimura is crushing in her hand a butterfly made of the articles that used this patronizing tone to belittle her and her work. It is angry, defiant, and determined, attributes that Asian women are not allowed in racist/sexist discourses.

“I know what can be done. I know what will be done. And I shall never give up.”

-Komako Kimura (Blackwell)

  Works Cited

Blackwell, Alice Stone, ed. "The New Women of Cherry Blossom Land." The Woman Citizen 1 (1917): 183. Google E-Books. Web.

"Japan." Woman Voter [Melbourne] 10 Oct. 1918: 4. Trove. Web.

"Japanese Actress Is Here To..." Star Tribune [Minneapolis] 26 May 1918: 64. Newspapers.com. Web.

"Mme. Kimura Is Here to Study Feminist..." The Brooklyn Daily Eagle 28 Apr. 1918: 23. Newspapers.com. Web.

"One Woman Who Dares." Daily Herald [Adelaide] 15 Jan. 1918: 4. Trove. Web.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Katsi Cook

Katsi Cook is a midwife and works at the intersection of environmental justice and reproductive justice. She is a member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk tribe. She was born in 1952 in the St. Regis Reservation in Akwesasne, New York, which is on the U.S-Canada border. She attended private Catholic Schools throughout her youth, and later was a member of the first class of women accepted at Dartmouth University. However, the American Indian Movement (AIM) sparked her interest and she left school to pursue a career in activism.

She then helped with the “White Roots of Peace” which was a group that travelled and taught native knowledge. In 1977, Cook began learning about midwifery after a 1977 conference in Loon Lake, NY, which gathered people from the Six Nations to discuss issues of sovereignty for Native peoples. One issue identified during this conference was control of reproduction, which inspired Cook. She returned home in 1980 to practice midwifery and helped develop the Akwesasne Freedom School as well as founded and directed the Women’s Dance Health Program. Additionally, in 1984, she started the Mother’s Milk Monitoring Project, which monitored levels of PCB in breast milk to address the environmental impact of industrial development of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project, which had begun in the 1950s. This project as well as Katsi Cook’s reproductive rights activism has challenged the “pro-choice” movement to expand beyond abortion and adopt a  lens of reproductive justice.

“Woman is the first environment. In pregnancy our bodies sustain life. At the breast of women, the generations are nourished. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of those generations both to society and the natural world. In this way the earth is our mother, the old people said in this way we as women are earth.” 

From 1994 to 1998, she worked with the Six Nations Iroquois on environmental issues. Additionally, Cook has participated in national and international women’s health movements such as serving on the board of the National Women’s Health Network, involvement in the Nestle boycott, and work with Mayan midwifes in Guatemala. She is also the “founding aboriginal midwife” of the Six Nations Birthing Centre, where she is an integral part of student training, curriculum development, and community education. She is also the director of the Lewirokwas Midwifery Program of Running Strong for American Indian Youth. She is currently in the process of developing the First Environment Institute to help restore indigenous puberty rites, which will assist in advancing maternal and child health on the Akwesasne and Pine Ridge reservations. She continues to work for environmental justice and the reproductive rights of her people.

Cook, Katsi. “Katsi Cook Papers, 1977-2008 Finding Aid.” Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections, Sophia Smith Collection, 2010, asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss432_bioghist.html.

Follet, Joyce. “Voices of Feminism Oral Project: Katsi Cook.” Smith.edu, Smith College, 25 Oct. 2005, www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Cook.pdf+ .

“Katsi Cook ~ Mohawk Midwife.” Midwives of Color, 25 Mar. 2015, midwivesofcolor.wordpress.com/midwives-of-color/wise-woman/katsi-cook-mohawk-midwife/.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Katsi Cook

Katsi Cook is a midwife and works at the intersection of environmental justice and reproductive justice. She is a member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk tribe. She was born in 1952 in the St. Regis Reservation in Akwesasne, New York, which is on the U.S-Canada border. She attended private Catholic Schools throughout her youth, and later was a member of the first class of women accepted at Dartmouth University. However, the American Indian Movement (AIM) sparked her interest and she left school to pursue a career in activism.

She then helped with the “White Roots of Peace” which was a group that travelled and taught native knowledge. In 1977, Cook began learning about midwifery after a 1977 conference in Loon Lake, NY, which gathered people from the Six Nations to discuss issues of sovereignty for Native peoples. One issue identified during this conference was control of reproduction, which inspired Cook. She returned home in 1980 to practice midwifery and helped develop the Akwesasne Freedom School as well as founded and directed the Women’s Dance Health Program. Additionally, in 1984, she started the Mother’s Milk Monitoring Project, which monitored levels of PCB in breast milk to address the environmental impact of industrial development of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project, which had begun in the 1950s. This project as well as Katsi Cook’s reproductive rights activism has challenged the “pro-choice” movement to expand beyond abortion and adopt a  lens of reproductive justice.

“Woman is the first environment. In pregnancy our bodies sustain life. At the breast of women, the generations are nourished. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of those generations both to society and the natural world. In this way the earth is our mother, the old people said in this way we as women are earth.” 

From 1994 to 1998, she worked with the Six Nations Iroquois on environmental issues. Additionally, Cook has participated in national and international women’s health movements such as serving on the board of the National Women’s Health Network, involvement in the Nestle boycott, and work with Mayan midwifes in Guatemala. She is also the “founding aboriginal midwife” of the Six Nations Birthing Centre, where she is an integral part of student training, curriculum development, and community education. She is also the director of the Lewirokwas Midwifery Program of Running Strong for American Indian Youth. She is currently in the process of developing the First Environment Institute to help restore indigenous puberty rites, which will assist in advancing maternal and child health on the Akwesasne and Pine Ridge reservations. She continues to work for environmental justice and the reproductive rights of her people.

Cook, Katsi. “Katsi Cook Papers, 1977-2008 Finding Aid.” Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections, Sophia Smith Collection, 2010, asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss432_bioghist.html.

Follet, Joyce. “Voices of Feminism Oral Project: Katsi Cook.” Smith.edu, Smith College, 25 Oct. 2005, www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Cook.pdf+ .

“Katsi Cook ~ Mohawk Midwife.” Midwives of Color, 25 Mar. 2015, midwivesofcolor.wordpress.com/midwives-of-color/wise-woman/katsi-cook-mohawk-midwife/.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Dolores Huerta

http://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/

Dolores Huerta, born Dolores Fernández in Dawson New, Mexico on April 10, 1930, has led a life dedicated to activism since her early adulthood. Huerta lived in New Mexico until age three, when she and her two brothers moved with their mother to Stockton, CA upon her parents’ divorce. Huerta’s father, Juan Fernandez, was a union activist who went on to become a state assemblyman- to which Huerta attributes the inspiration to become an activist herself.

Huerta graduated from Stockton High School in 1947 and continued to Stockton College. However, her studied were interrupted by her first marriage to Ralph Head. The marriage lasted briefly but the couple had two daughters. After the divorce, Huerta returned to complete her AA degree and began teaching. She worked at grammar school but realized that she could not provide much help to students who came to class hungry and needing shoes. This sparked the beginning of her activist career.

In 1955, Huerta helped Fred Ross start the Community Service Organization (CSO) of Stockton which worked to end segregation, police brutality, discrimination as well as to improve socioeconomic conditions of farm workers. During her time at CSO, Huerta met Ventura Huerta a labor activist whom she married and had five children with.

In 1960, Dolores started the Agricultural Workers Association and worked to obtain Spanish language voting ballots and drivers tests, public assistance and pensions for people working in the Bracero program and voter registration drives. Huerta met Cesar Chavez, also a CSO official, through Fred Ross and though the two were skeptical of each other, worked alongside each other. Chavez then became the director of CSO but along with Huerta, left CSO because of its lack of attention regarding farm workers. In 1962, Huerta and Chavez created the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to help farm workers. In 1965, AWA and NFWA became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Huerta coined the slogan “Si se puede!” for the labor movement in California and the southwest. Huerta was the primary negotiator in contracts with Coachella valley grape growers while Chavez organized strikes. After 5 hard fought years, the UFW signed an agreement with 26 grape growers that vastly improved working conditions for farm workers, including reducing harmful pesticide use and initiating unemployment and healthcare benefits.

In the 1970’s, Huerta organized a national lettuce boycott which paved the way for the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Huerta became the first Vice President of the UFW and co-founder of the UFW radio. She continued working towards a better immigration policy and better health conditions for farm workers.

In 1988, she was brutally beaten by San Francisco police officers during a rally against George H.W Bush. She suffered six broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. After Chavez’s death in 1993, Huerta stepped down from UFW but continues a life of activism and social change.

Huerta is the recipient of awards such as the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom Award (1993), she was also admitted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. Among other awards Huerta received are the Eleanor Roosevelt Award (1998), Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship(2002) which was used to create the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President barack Obama in 2012.

http://doloreshuerta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/DoloresFinalPoster.jpeg

Works Cited

“Dolores Huerta.” Dolores Huerta Foundation, Dolores Huerta Foundation, 17 Mar. 2014, doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/.

  "Dolores Huerta." Notable Hispanic American Women, Gale, 1993. U.S. History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/K1624000134/UHIC?u=ereader_his_gale&xid=70e5e02d. Accessed 11 Oct. 2017.

  Godoy, Maria. “Dolores Huerta: The Civil Rights Icon Who Showed Farmworkers 'Sí Se Puede'.” NPR, NPR, 17 Sept. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/17/551490281/dolores-huerta-the-civil-rights-icon-who-showed-farmworkers-si-se-puede.

  Kim, Inga. “The Rise of the UFW.” The Rise of the UFW – UFW, United Farm Workers, 3 Apr. 2017, ufw.org/the-rise-of-the-ufw/.

  Michals, Debra.  "Dolores Huerta."  National Women's History Museum.  National Women's History Museum, 2015.  06 October, 2017.

  The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Dolores Huerta.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22 Sept. 2017, www.britannica.com/biography/Dolores-Huerta.

  Turan, Kenneth. “Dolores Huerta Has Been Jailed, Beaten, Mocked by Glenn Beck. A New Doc Shows Why She Won't Shut up – LA Times.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 7 Sept. 2017, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-dolores-review-20170907-story.html.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Katsi Cook

Katsi Cook is a midwife and works at the intersection of environmental justice and reproductive justice. She is a member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk tribe. She was born in 1952 in the St. Regis Reservation in Akwesasne, New York, which is on the U.S-Canada border. She attended private Catholic Schools throughout her youth, and later was a member of the first class of women accepted at Dartmouth University. However, the American Indian Movement (AIM) sparked her interest and she left school to pursue a career in activism.

She then helped with the “White Roots of Peace” which was a group that travelled and taught native knowledge. In 1977, Cook began learning about midwifery after a 1977 conference in Loon Lake, NY, which gathered people from the Six Nations to discuss issues of sovereignty for Native peoples. One issue identified during this conference was control of reproduction, which inspired Cook. She returned home in 1980 to practice midwifery and helped develop the Akwesasne Freedom School as well as founded and directed the Women’s Dance Health Program. Additionally, in 1984, she started the Mother’s Milk Monitoring Project, which monitored levels of PCB in breast milk to address the environmental impact of industrial development of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project, which had begun in the 1950s. This project as well as Katsi Cook’s reproductive rights activism has challenged the “pro-choice” movement to expand beyond abortion and adopt a  lens of reproductive justice.

“Woman is the first environment. In pregnancy our bodies sustain life. At the breast of women, the generations are nourished. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of those generations both to society and the natural world. In this way the earth is our mother, the old people said in this way we as women are earth.” 

From 1994 to 1998, she worked with the Six Nations Iroquois on environmental issues. Additionally, Cook has participated in national and international women’s health movements such as serving on the board of the National Women’s Health Network, involvement in the Nestle boycott, and work with Mayan midwifes in Guatemala. She is also the “founding aboriginal midwife” of the Six Nations Birthing Centre, where she is an integral part of student training, curriculum development, and community education. She is also the director of the Lewirokwas Midwifery Program of Running Strong for American Indian Youth. She is currently in the process of developing the First Environment Institute to help restore indigenous puberty rites, which will assist in advancing maternal and child health on the Akwesasne and Pine Ridge reservations. She continues to work for environmental justice and the reproductive rights of her people.

Cook, Katsi. “Katsi Cook Papers, 1977-2008 Finding Aid.” Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections, Sophia Smith Collection, 2010, asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss432_bioghist.html.

Follet, Joyce. “Voices of Feminism Oral Project: Katsi Cook.” Smith.edu, Smith College, 25 Oct. 2005, www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Cook.pdf+ .

 “Katsi Cook ~ Mohawk Midwife.” Midwives of Color, 25 Mar. 2015, midwivesofcolor.wordpress.com/midwives-of-color/wise-woman/katsi-cook-mohawk-midwife/.

[wocfeminists-blog]

M.I.A.

M.I.A. is a woman of colour, rapper, pop culture icon, radical feminist, and political activist. From performing at the Grammy’s nine months pregnant to flipping off the audience at the superbowl half-time show, M.I.A has cultivated her reputation as the antithesis to the quintessential pop-star. Her body of work is an inspired kaleidoscope of rap, punk, nursery rhymes, and traditional south asian tunes that demands its own lexicon: gangsta shoegaze. M.I.A.’s music is also her primary platform for activism, she has tackled subjects like the refugee crisis (Borders), terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing (Born Free), the Trump administration (P.O.W.A) and much more.

As Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, she was born to a family of Tamil revolutionaries. Her family was forced to flee Sri Lanka during the civil war, they emigrated to Britain as refugees. Her first album Arular, named after her estranged father, captured the refugee experience through anecdotes about learning to say the word “banana”, her own socialist views (Pull Up The People), and an ostentatious self-referential rap track (Bucky Done Gun). Since then, Arulpragasam has established herself as an icon in an industry severely lacking in the representation of South Asian women. Her style is loud, bold, garish, and a much-needed middle finger to the stereotypes and fetishization associated with the “submissive Asian woman” archetype. Though her radical political stances have garnered outrage and criticism, M.I.A. has never failed to thrive on controversy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Bdw4HJ7Z0

The themes of misogyny,and the exploitation of women are recurring in Arulpragasam’s craft; M.I.A. has been outspoken about inclusive intersectional feminism and her experience as an Asian woman (Boom Skit, Paper Planes) while capitalising on an international perspective that is often underrepresented in the media. “If you’re talking about feminism within America, you’ll be promoted. But if you’re an outside feminist and you’re talking about something critical of the US law, then they would see that as a threat that needs to be buried,” she says in an interview with the Guardian. Philosophical differences aside, M.I.A. is a pioneer in the whitewashed terrain that is main stream media. She plays by her own rules and refuses to be silenced. M.I.A. is the provocateur we need.

Works Cited:

“Controversy Queen M.I.A On Feminism & Using Art To Raise Awareness About Important Issues.” GirlTalkHQ, 4 Apr. 2017, girltalkhq.com/controversy-queen-m-i-a-on-feminism-using-art-to-raise-awareness-about-important-issues/.

Hattenstone, Simon. “MIA's Revolution.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Oct. 2013, www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/19/mia-interview-super-bowl-google.

Iqbal, Nosheen. “MIA: 'This Is a White Country, You Don't Have to Spell It out to Me'.”The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/20/mia-white-country-you-dont-have-to-spell-it-out#img-2.

“M.I.A. and the Real 'Bad Girls'.” Hyphen Magazine, 31 Aug. 2015, hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2012/02/mia-and-real-bad-girls.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Heba Y. Amin

(picture: https://transmediale.de/content/heba-y-amin)

Born in Cairo Egypt in 1980, Heba Yehia Amin attended Macalester College in Minnesota where she received her B.A. in Studio Art. Following her undergraduate degree she went on to gain an Apprenticeship in Painting, two Post-Baccalaureate Certificates, and an MFA during her time in the United States. After returning to Egypt where she worked for a period of time, Amin moved to Berlin, Germany where she is a working artist, professor, and has been participating in artists residencies such as the Bethanien artist residency. In 2015 she formed the Black Athena Collective with fellow artist Dawit L. Petros with the objective of engaging in research and artistic experimentation that addresses political issues and the constructed landscape of the Red Sea region connecting Eritrea and Egypt. The group uses many methods to observe, critique, and question  territorial borders in relation to bodies.

Amin’s personal work has a strong focus on research-based investigations into the ways that urbanism and technology are imposed upon countries, communities and individuals. She uses “research and work [to] address themes related to urban theory, media urbanism, film and new media art. They investigate the impact of infrastructure on the human psyche  through junctures, glitches and flawed memory.” ("/Heba Amin”). Amin explores these themes in her works Project Speak2Tweet, As Birds Flying, and An Astronomical Determination of the Distance Between Two Cities to name a few.

(Still from: As Birds Flying http://www.hebaamin.com/works/as-birds-flying/)

In July of 2015 Amin, along with Caram Kapp and Don Karl, was hired by the show Homeland  to produce Arabic graffiti to dress the set of a constructed Syrian refugee camp. Homeland, and American soap opera that follows a female CIA officer as she works to protect the United States. The show is blatantly racist and fosters extremely harmful Islamophobia rhetoric and stereotypes. The issue of Islamophobia in American media is a large and detrimental one. Often times representations of Muslim and middle eastern peoples in American media are reduced to characters that are victims with no agency or terrorists that have a proclivity for violence. These gross misrepresentations are often what build American’s understandings of what Muslim and Middle Eastern people are like leading to greater rates of xenophobia and racism towards them. According to some research “one study found that reliance on media for information about Muslims was associated with Americans’ support for public policies targeting Muslims three months later. These policies included military action against Muslim countries, separate and more thorough airport security lines for Muslim travelers, and revoking the right to vote for American Muslims.” (Saleem). By creating and fostering negative representations of Muslims and Middle Eastern people Homeland is actively contributing to this culture of fear.

(Translation: “Homeland is a Joke and it didn’t make us laugh” Photo:http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/23/opinions/opinion-homeland-graffiti-artists/index.html) 

When Amin and her partners were offered an opportunity to create graffiti that was going to be featured on the show they were initially hesitant to accept the job. However due to the informal nature of the project—they never signed contracts—Amin, Kapp, and Karl decided that they would create graffiti that directly critiqued the show. They created a series of slogans in arabic—everything from “Homeland is Racist”, and “Homeland is Watermelon”, to “There is No Homeland”—and painted them on the set. When the episode aired the artists named themselves “The Arabian Street Artists” and released a statement which quickly gained attention. The news that these artists critiqued the shows racism through its sets spread quickly and ended up in newspapers around the world. In one interview Amin has said: “It wasn’t just that we made people laugh—it was also a form of criticism. It was in keeping with a point we were making, the idea that media manipulates the narrative, how the region is depicted. The fact that we became a big story kind of furthered our point of what the focus is on in the region. We tried to use the opportunity to talk about those issues—about what consequences a show like Homeland and many others have on an entire region—and not just about our media hack.” (Hynes, Amin). By creating a piece that was so easily accessible Amin and her partners were able to open up conversations regarding Islamophobia and racist depictions of middle easterners in the main stream media.

Works Cited

"/Heba Amin, Egypt--Conflict Area/Country of Reference: Egypt."Artraker. Artraker CIC, 2014. Web. 11 Oct. 2017. <http://www.artraker.org/heba-amin/4586002617>.

Amin, Heba Yehia. “BIO.” Heba Amin, Heba Amin, www.hebaamin.com/bio/.

Amin and Petros. ‘Black Athena Collective.’ 2015, Facebook page.

Hynes, Eric, et al. “Interview with Heba Yehia Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl of Homeland Is Not a Series.” Field_Of_Vision, First Look Media, 20 Dec. 2015, fieldofvision.org/interview-with-heba-yehia-amin-caram-kapp-and-don-karl-of-homeland-is-not-a-series/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Saleem, Muniba. “Spreading Islamophobia: Consequences Of Negative Media Representations.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 Apr. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/spreading-islamophobia-consequences-of-negative-media-representations_us_58fe682de4b06b9cb91963fb.

[wocfeminists-blog]

MONICA CARRILLO ZEGARRA

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z93OVyenbD8

Afro- Peruvian writer, poet, singer, musician, community leader, journalist, human rights advocate, and feminist Monica Zegarra Carrillo was born on October 25 1984 in Lima, Peru. Growing up in the capital, away from the main community of Afro- Peruvians, Monica experienced explicit racism starting at a very young age. Afro-Peruvians represent about 7-10 percent of the country's population and suffer disproportionate rates of poverty and discrimination. In an article for Americas Quarterly, Monica states, “There’s no other place in South America that has the same levels of offensive, aggressive racism as Peru. The other day I left my house...and counted the number of insults I received in 20 minutes: 12. People say these things and they don’t run away, because they feel they’re in the right.”

She took her experiences with her to the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos in Lima, where she studied communications and created a radio program dedicated to women’s rights [source]. She went on to study International Law at Oxford University and Performance Interactive & Media Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College. In 2001, she served as a coordinator of the Peruvian youth delegation to the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. Later that same year she founded LUNDU Center for Afro Peruvian Studies and Advancement with the help of friends and family.

LUNDU means “successor” in Kikongo, an Angolan dialect, and refers to a traditional African dance and. The centers are after-school spaces for young people to connect and use art as an outlet for expressing their frustrations about racism in Peru. On weekends Carrillo goes to El Carmen with a team to organize workshops that focus on sexual education in response to the growing number of people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. In 2008, Monica started the Media Observatory, whose mission it was to analyze volumes of Peruvian print media to detect contents of racial discrimination. She led the first legal process through which the Peruvian government sanctioned a TV Channel for a racist show "El negro Mama" for the stereotyping of slaves and criminals as Afro-Peruvians. The case was won by Lundu and was the first of its kind.

Monica has gotten international recognition of her activism. In 2007 she rang the bell for NASDAQ in the International Women Rights Day and was a keynote speaker in the Invest in Women Gala hosted by International Women’s Health Coalition. Monica was in the documentary Series Black in Latin America, which was aired on PBS. She was the image of the campaign “Every Human Has Rights” of the organization The Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Carrillo was honored by Rutgers University with 16 other women from around the world who stand out in their fight against gender violence. Her work was also featured in PBS, Univision, Aljazeera, BBC.

As a musician, Carrillo’s musical alter-ego Oru, creates poetry that mixes afro-beat, hip-hop and Afro Peruvian music to bring attention to the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. In Yoruba language, Oru means tomorrow, beginning and sun. Monica represents her artistic name by painting half of her body when she performs. She describes the painted side of her body as her art and the unpainted side as the right against racism. Oru’s art piece entitled “Unicroma” included a CD, a book with the collaboration of 8 musicians and dancers and has been featured on MTV Europe. Her poetry was translated in Catalan and German and is studied by universities in Italy, Chile, Argentina, Peru and the European Union.

Works Cited

admin. “Monica Carrillo Zegarra -Peru.” The Americas Poetry Festival of New York, 12 Sept.

2015, http://www.poetryny.com/?p=670.

Castillo, Andrea C. “Mónica Carrillo: «Soy Una Médium Entre El Pasado Y El Presente».” El

Comercio, 28 June 2015,

http://elcomercio.pe/viu/actitud-viu/monica-carrillo-medium-pasado-presente-168313?foto=6.

“Mónica Carrillo Zegarra: ‘Creo En La Memoria Genética.’” El Comercio, 26 June 2015,

http://elcomercio.pe/viu/actitud-viu/monica-carrillo-zegarra-creo-memoria-genetica-

67870.

“Mónica Carrillo Zegarra Biografia.” Ecured.cu,

https://www.ecured.cu/M%C3%B3nica_Carrillo_Zegarra. Accessed 12 Oct. 2017.

“PERU + VIDEO.” NEO•GRIOT,

http://kalamu.posthaven.com/peru-video-monica-carillo-afroperuvian-youth.

Accessed 12 Oct. 2017.

Steagall, Lance. “Civic Innovator: Monica Carrillo, Peru.” AmericasQuarterly, http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/556.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, walkerart.org

“All art is political...Art is narrative in its nature and each piece of art we create is an active choice to prioritise one narrative over others. This is political.” - Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an artist, writer, teacher, Black, Sunni Muslim woman. She is also an avid X-Files fan and loves cordyceps fungi. She is continually inspired by poets like Emily Dickinson and Harryette Mullen, and artists like Faith Ringgold and Zanele Muholi. Rasheed has taught in public high schools and been an artist in residence at several museums and arts organizations, such as the Bronx Museum of Art and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. She writes for major publications and her own private fiction. Rasheed’s life and art are robust, complicated, joyful, and idiosyncratic.

Rasheed was born in East Palo Alto, California in 1985. As a child, Rasheed spent much of her time reading books, doing science experiments, playing with her brothers, and creating art. While her family is Sunni Muslim, Rasheed was exposed to a great diversity of faiths growing up that broadened her curiosity (Gore). By the time she was twelve years old, the land value in northern California had risen substantially, and her family was unlawfully evicted from the house they were renting. Over the next ten years, Rasheed’s family, including her mother, father, and four brothers, struggled to find permanent housing. Rasheed received her BA in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College in 2006, and her Ed.M in Secondary Education from Stanford University in 2008. Additionally, she was an Amy Biehl Fulbright U.S. scholar to South Africa in 2006. Rasheed has spent much of her time in South Africa, including studying abroad there. She is now based in Brooklyn, New York (Gleisner). Following her graduation from Stanford, Rasheed taught social studies in public high school in New York.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed. No Instructions for Assembly I, 2013. Photo © John Groo.

Rasheed’s work and life have centered on the archive. Rasheed’s family moved between temporary shelters and motel rooms for the majority of her adolescence and during this time she began to archive her life in these transient spaces. Her archiving impulse carried into adulthood and eventually to her art. Rasheed is interested in the narratives that objects, pictures, and text can tell separately, in tandem, and in conversation. Some of her pieces have included prayer beads, hair clippings, and found images. Her materials have been collected from dumpsters, Ebay, family members, and flea markets. The archive is also a contested space for Rasheed. She speaks about the complexity and privilege of the archive for chronicling black lives. Attending to this history, she uses her art to create an archive of fragmented stories. Rasheed wants to imagine “how the archive can be reborn in non-traditional and more democratic sites that take into consideration both access and intent” (Campion).

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Future Perfect/indices & marginalia, 2015. Photo © Dyani Douze.

Most recently, Rasheed has been involved with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, an art collective focused on “the interdependence of care and action, invisibility and visibility, self-defense and self-determination, and desire and possibility in order to highlight and disavow pervasive conditions of racism” (New Museum). Rasheed centered her work for the group around the archiving, however, her role within the collective was also an organizational one. Rasheed reflects on her experience with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter as informative on the work it takes to sustain an activist network. The collective grew in response to the violence against black lives in the United States and created a space for both joy and mourning for black women artists (Rasheed).

Rasheed is continuing to push the limits of seemingly straightforward concepts. She is opening discussions around the archive, black and Muslim identities, family and national histories, and even what constitutes art. While she takes a dynamic and ever-evolving approach to her art, she vows to remain an assertive and unapologetic black and Sunni Muslim woman. 

Works Cited

"Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter." Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter :: New Museum. N.p., n.d. Web.

Campion, Darren. "Other Histories: An Interview with Kameelah Janan Rasheed « Paper Journal." Paper Journal Other Histories An Interview with Kameelah Janan Rasheed Comments. N.p., 20 June 2013. Web.

Gleisner, Jacquelyn. "The Archives of Kameelah Rasheed." Art21 Magazine. N.p., 15 Apr. 2015. Web.

Gore, Sydney. "Kameelah Janan Rasheed Explores Her Curiosities Through The Visual Arts." NYLON. NYLON Media I, LLChttps://nylon.com, 21 Feb. 2016. Web.

Rasheed, Kameelah Janan. "2016: The Year According to Kameelah Janan Rasheed." Walker Art Center. N.p., 22 Dec. 2016. Web.

Watercolor by Sara Hollar, 2017.

[wocfeminists-blog]

Thandiswa Mazwai

photo source: https://tinyurl.com/ybj3ut2h

Thandiswa Mazwai’s story is marked by birth- by her birth into a political moment that was part of the convulsive waves of the birth pains of the nation of South Africa as it exists today. She was born in South Africa, in the same year when the Soweto Uprising took place. The Soweto Uprising was a violent clash between police officers and black South African Students who were protesting the language of instruction in South African secondary schools, pushing for it to move away from Afrikaans. She has often alluded to her birth in such a notable moment of black South African resistance of emblematic of her commitment to solidarity with advocacy for the decolonization of institutions.

Thandiswa is the embodiment of what it looks like to exist in postcolonial, post apartheid South Africa. She is an activist, and an artist who straddles the urban and the rural. Her music refuses to be confined into language or genre, never conforming, often transgressing, always progressing, and fiercely relentless in its allegiance to the indigenous and its innovative blend of jazz and traditional South African musical forms. She speaks to what it means for art to be indigenized- owned and produced from the people of a colonized land, for the people of a colonized land. Thandiswa uses her musicality as the locale for resistance. One notable moment in this resistance occured in 2009, when she refused to sing the Afrikaans portion of the South African national anthem (the same language that the Soweto Uprising were protesting against). While she was met with backlash, her stance sparked discussion in South Africa about the boer nationalism and its role in the repression of post-apartheid consciousness.  

source: https://tinyurl.com/ydyyvujg

It’s impossible to do justice to the person that is Thandiswa without making mention of her immense contribution to Kwaito, a South African musical sub-genre that emerged in the 1990s. Developed deep in the disenfranchised townships of South Africa, Kwaito was a musical genre that was, like Thandiswa, born in the thick of political insurgence. It is a sub-genre of house music, which contains nods to Hip-Hop, and is very much in conversation with the revolutionary origins of the same. Thandiswa pioneered the genre with her band, Bongo Maffin. With them, she produced five musical albums.

She describes her place in activism as that of a conduit. She fiercely advocates for the place of black women in the struggle, amplifying their voices, and “honoring the sound of [black] women’s rage”. Her music is concerned with unpacking the issues of what it means to be black in South Africa; to be a part of a demographic majority that harbors such a recent history of segregation and lives through systemic oppression today.

photo source: https://tinyurl.com/ybettk8x

Thandiswa has been an activist for the decolonization of the South African education system. Most recently, and very much true to the story of her birth, her work in activism has involved her alliance with the efforts of students in South African University in their #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall. She has been described as the griot of her generation, invoking the spirits of those who came before her. She follows the footsteps of revolutionaries- women in South Africa whose music was the anthem of the struggle such as Miriam Makeba, a musician fondly remembered as “Mama Africa” who spent 30 years in exile for her activist efforts against the South African apartheid government. (The second video included below is a Bongo Maffin Kwaito remake of Makeba’s hit song, Pata Pata, in the spirit of calling upon those who came before her in the struggle using musical resistance.)

Here’s my creative response: 

Sources:

Gunner, Liz. “Music, Culture and Identity during and after Apartheid.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2009, pp. 775–777. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40283292.

ROBERTSON, MARY. “The Constraints of Colour: Popular Music Listening and the Interrogation of 'Race' in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Popular Music, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, pp. 455–470. JSTOR, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23359913.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Af53af289ee6a4cc0219b23fd04befaef

MAKHENE, MAGOGODI, et al. “The Ethics of South African Identity.” An Ethical Compass: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2010, pp. 3–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npcw7.6.

"Thandiswa Mazwai | Afternoon Express #285 | 19 July 2016” Uploaded by Afternoon Express, July 21, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pEC5sGAohM

Thandiswa Mazwiya, Unknown, http://www.thandiswa.com/

Priscilla Takondwa Semphere