Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Two months from today, there’s be an event based on Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing: Erotic Stories book, which Veronica Vera wrote the forward to & which includes a story by me. I’ll be reading, as will Miss Vera, amongst others.
Do come! It should be a fun night!
Yesterday was the start of Banned Books Week, so go out & buy one of the many books people objected to this year. Among them, the regulars: Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, two by Toni Morrison, and new ones on the list seem to have been chosen for having homosexual themes/characters: And Tango Makes Three, Gossip Girls, Athletic Shorts; and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
You can find a Banned Books Week event near you, or you can just go out & buy one of the Top Ten most challenged books of 2006.
Monks have already been beaten and several people have been killed. Please sign this petition to get the UN Security Council to help protect them, to enable them to peacably assemble, as they have done for the past few weeks.
They are raiding the monasteries and cutting off contact with the rest of the world:
“The big missing piece of the puzzle is what is going on in the minds of the senior leadership,†said Thant Myint-U, a former United Nations official who is the author of a book on Myanmar, formerly Burma, called River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma. “Nothing that they have said in the last 20 years would suggest that they will back down,†he said.
(Get his book if you want more background on what’s going on currently, or if you want to know more about Burma and the 8888 Uprising.)
I’m worried now we won’t hear anymore, or won’t hear much, unless & until the UN gets more involved. It is quite odd to see actual video footage of what’s going on in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) on television. That beautiful huge gold pagoda you may see in the background is Shwedagon Pagoda, and the gold is – the real thing. But the demonstrators have been gathering at the oldest pagoda in Yangon, Sule Pagoda, which is the center of the city.
Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh – has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” – maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?
In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,†I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.
SOUTHERN COMFORT CONFERENCE 2007
KEYNOTE ADDRESS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15TH, 2007
One Community, One Family
by Jenn Burleton, TransActive Education & Advocacy, Portland, OR
Thank you to the organizers of this amazing conference and in particular, Cat Turner, Lola Fleck and Elaine Martin. And I must thank my longtime friend, Mariette Pathy Allen. My life has been truly blessed as a result of knowing her and sharing many adventures with her…some of which are suitable for sharing with the whole family.
When Cat Turner called back in January and invited me to come to Atlanta I was of course, very honored. I was also surprised. After all, we’d never met. I’d never attended a previous Southern Comfort Conference and I am not, in my opinion anyway, one of the gender community heavy hitters.
Continue reading “SoCo Keynote: Jenn Burleton”
It turns out that Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There is on the recommended reading list for 10th graders at Dana Hall School of Wellesley, MA. (News courtesy Vickie Davis’ blog.)
Way to go, Jenny Boylan. Her next book, I’m Looking Through You, is out next year. Keep an eye peeled her this fall/winter for a Five Questions With… interview with Boylan about the new book.
The author who came up with three of the most extraordinary characters of children’s literature has died, her publicist confirmed today. Madelaine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, which shaped so many of our lives, died in a nursing home of natural causes at the age of 88.
Those three characters were all children, and children who defied stereotypes: (1) Megaparsec, the pugnacious, practical and strong older sister of (2) Charles Wallace, who is a brilliant, delicate, intuitive boy. And then there is (3) the frequently forgotten but equally lovely Calvin O’Keefe – poor, gangly, and heroic.
For me, all of them – plus the Wallace parents, the angelic Proginoskes, and of course Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit – lived in a universe (well, several) I longed for. A Wind in the Door was my favorite of all her books, one I will take the time to re-read this weekend, in her memory.
It’s an extraordinary thing for me as she was the author whose stories inspired me to pick up a pen: the first story I ever wrote, when I was about 9, was a terrible knockoff of A Wrinkle in Time I called “Rainy Day.” My sister always related to Meg, and not too surprisingly, I always felt a simpatico with Charles Wallace.
Godspeed, Ms. L’Engle. Thank you for everything.
I have good news, & good news, & bad news.
The good news is that at the last minute, I’ve been invited to teach a Gender Studies class up at Merrimack College this fall.
The other bit of good news is that the Trans Partners Group is meeting at the Center today, September 5th, at 7:30 PM.
The bad news is that I’m teaching on Tuesdays & Thursdays, & so I will be in Boston on Wednesdays when the trans partners group meets.
I have been so enjoying co-facilitating this group & it nearly kills me not to be able to continue. I will be teaching in Wisconsin coming January as well so it seems the August group was the last group I’ll attend until April or May 2008 when I’ll be back to residing in New York fulltime. I will miss the group a lot – both personally & as an advocate for partners.
If any of you who attend the group want to get in touch, you know where I am.
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing: Erotic Stories
It turns out young black men have a better chance of getting made fun of for reading books than for playing sports. Not news, I know, but the commentary on how that fact intersects with gender is:
John Thomas, superintendent of the Aliquippa School District, said the notion that black men who read books are less masculine is one that should be dispelled in the African-American community. “It’s just as powerful to carry a book as it is to carry a football or a basketball, because the power of knowledge is in the books,” he said. “If we prepare our bodies for the gridiron or the basketball court, to me it’s just as important to prepare your mind to survive in society. The body will soon wear out for athletic competition, but knowledge you have will carry you through life.”
What’s interesting to me is that the cultural forces that would discourage black men from learning – because being brainy isn’t considered “masculine” or “strong” – are exactly the opposite of the ones at play that have historically kept women from learning, who are/were told that being too brainy makes a woman “unfeminine.”
& When cultural forces say being smart isn’t masculine to one group, & too masculine to another, you know there’s something rotten in Denmark.