Beyond Visibility: Illuminating and Aligning Femmes in NYC is a day-long event for LGBTQQI2 folks on self-identified femme/inine spectrums to come together in conversation, coalition, and celebration of *all* the parts of ourselves and our many communities. Events are taking place in NYC, Toronto, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, and beyond.

On Sunday January 15 from Noon-2p, femme/inine folks are invited to enjoy a Brunch and Skillshare Salon. At 2:30p join a Community Discussion moved along via transformative facilitation, where everyone will have the opportunity to contribute their needs, desires, and celebrations. This will be followed by break-out groups to continue engaging in intersectional topics such as Safety, Pride & Shame, Truth-telling, Health and more. From 5-6:30p, take a dinner break and participate in documentation including a zine table, blogging station and photo booth!

Because Beyond Visibility aims to create and hold femme/inine queer space to ally with and learn from each other, and to discuss ways to align organizing and organizations to ensure that femme communities grow as intersectional sites of gender justice, the brunch, discussion and break-out groups are free, intentionally safer-spaces, and for only femme-spectrum people of all ages, genders, and abilities.

An additional function of Beyond Visibility is to illuminate the cultural, political and artistic work of participating individuals and groups, and so all are welcomed to the two cultural events taking place. At 7pm at Judson Church, join us for a Literary Salon including Kate Bornstein, Trina Rose, Cristy Road, Nath Ann Carrera, Dondrie Burnham, Alejandro Rodriguez and more. This event is $2-$10.

Starting at 10pm, head over to Brooklyn and the Cabaret/Dance Party where Hana Malia & Glenn Marla bring biting performance art, Serpentina of the Coney Island Side Show makes sparks fly, musical stylings from Jazzmen Lee-Johnson & new work by Sassafras Lowery! DJ’s Shomi Noise and Nolita spin fierce femme tunes all night! Allies welcome to attend & dance the night away with us! This event is $5-$12.

This event is co-produced by 20 local organizers and is partnered with the bi-annual Femme Conference [www.femme2012.com/]. Beyond Visibility takes place the day the Conference releases its 2012 call for performers and workshops, and aims to generate conversations that grow local community as well as resonate into the Conference, which is taking place in Baltimore August 17-19, 2012. Co-sponsoring organization include the Heels on Wheels Roadshow [www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com], NYC’s own glittery performance art queer femme tour, Feminist Press [www.feministpress.org/], and QUORUM Forum [http://quorumnyc.org/].

For more information on the NYC event, please visit: www.beyondvisibility.femme2012.com/

Find the event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/beyondvisibility

A toolkit of ideas for femmes in other towns to hostess their own femme gatherings are here:
www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com/toolkit/

I have been wrapping the two around my resilient self ever since I escaped the mean evangelicals who raised me* and as I live with the everyday tragedies of being treated “female” in a society that has some very fucked up attitudes towards femininity.

My newest piece is a natural development out of my active interest in discoverable routes to embodiment in Western society, and physical exercise as a site where I have come back into my body when nothing else was working. I see the two playing together as a route to healing that is covered up tragically in language of sizeism, fat-hating, perpetual youth-seeking, tacky dance moves, expensive DVDs and the strange cult of celebrity that is the Exercise Teacher Superstar.

Exorcise takes the darling of Homorobics and crosses it with a healing justice mentality, a generative somatics modality, and wraps it all in great spandex.

by Laura Beeston for 2Bmag

During the piece, which looks a lot like an aerobics class I am teaching and is played as audio directions I am , there are a series of exercises that I show the audience with the intention of spectators becoming participants. These exercises include: Taking Space and Saying No Arm Circles; Melt Your Pussy-Ice Squats; Shield/Invisibility Cloak Lunges and Circles of Closed Communication.

Part of this project involves inviting people to participate with me: I did a push-up based series in December, and I’m interested to develop works that have deeper participatory elements than an individual challenge — though I like those too. Drawing strength from endurance-art tactics of artists like Marina Abromovich, the piece is intended to go on “until I have to stop,” but its presence in cabarets up to this point has given it time tests of about 8-10 minutes. For VENT the time limit will be extended further towards the pieces’ natural lifespan, which is as yet unknown.

This is no academic exercise — I needed this healing to work, and I need it to keep working. I need deeply physical experiences to push out the ways that my family’s version of xianity tried to scare, reason, or beat out all my ideas and courage and replace them with demure, unsure self-effacing. I need self-determined physicality, including sexual expressions, regularly as a way to get into my skin, on my terms. I need to breathe in the ways I am part of a world that also needs healing from many forms of oppressions; the ways I am neither alone nor broken.

This piece queers and plays with representations of femininity and Appropriate Activity** — I do not look “good” while working up a bustling heart rate. I turn an awkward shade of red and get sweaty. Makeup runs. Sequins and glitter fly off. In this, the piece reflects the ways we can ask ourselvs to do better then “beauty,” and traces towards that which Mia Mingus recently exhorted us to do: “move to toward the ugly” as a form of deeper inclusion. All bodies, moving through, can be together in this.

This piece premiered in Philadelphia at Geppetta‘s Lemonade Sweaty Summer Series on July 17 and went international in Montreal at the Meow Mix for Perver/cite August 3 with Jordan Arsenault, Alex Cafarelli and other artists. One function that is so exciting to me as an artist is finding these kind of performance spaces where we can experiment with new works; I’m thinking Rebel Cupcake is also surely on that list. Next this piece is upcoming at Brooklyn’s VENT Festival on Sept 25, as curated by the multitalented Maya Suess.

*Ruth O’Brien referred to this phenomena of radicals coming from fundamentalist/conservative homes as being “raised by wolves.” No offense, wolves.

**I’ve also been thinking a LOT about the kinds of things Women Are Supposed To Do To Heal From Abuse…but that’s a whole other writing piece.

What am I doing there? July 31 – Aug 4 I’m visiting my chosen family in Toronto. There are biological *kids* now! Aug 2 there will be a BBQ at Cecilia’s house so please come by if you are in T.O. Otherwise I’m thinking dig yr own amithyst for $7!!!!, visiting Exile in Kensington market and packing my van for a naked beach trip!

Aug 4-8 I’ll be hanging around Montreal for Perver/cite, just, you know, giving two workshops and performing a *new* piece that incolves multi-colored spandex:

• Saturday workshop [time TBA]: Keep It In The Family, with Coral Short + more: As I build the pervert bingo we’ll be playing, I’d LOVE answers to the question “what kinds of family perversions have *you* played?”
• Sunday workshop [time TBA]: Queering Sci-Fi For the Revolution, with Jenna Peters Golden + more. What sci-fi books inspire you to stay on the team and ho do they do that?
• Sunday evening: performing at Meow Mix/Spectacle Benefit for Projet 10 with Rae Spoon & Peaches LePage, NO/HO/MO + more @ La Sala Rosa.
  

Also this trip launches The Abundance Project: a new Tumblr / multimedia project that my sweetheart and I have been scheming and writing and dreaming on for awhile. Part zine, part interviews and part online documentation via tumblr. Lots of thoughts on the high-voltage topic of scarcity and abundance through the lenses of class, art, activism, and love in liminality.

And because I’m travelling, I’ll be working on my existing Tumblr, MFA in DIY, where I’ve been documenting pictures of amazing shit I see when I get it together to leave the house for the last 2.5 years.

If you want to stop and take in so that you too can have wild, wild dreams, may I suggest attending ALL [or at least one] of the Fame and Shame in the lower east side performances taking place each weekend all month. I made the website and produced/designed the posters illustrated by Ms. Cristy Road.

But because it’s nice out and I’d rather be outside, I’m thinking briefly about upcoming events and arts. like…

The Cocktail Party Performance Evenings, June 3 & 8 @ ABC No Rio.
A response to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, rather than a re-performance of T.S. Eliot’s play, though we’ll see what transpires. Curator Tallahassee Idlewild describes her intent: “In re-envisioning the anatomical place-settings of a formal dinner party into the looser affiliations of a cocktail party, stepping back from such explicit biological determinism, this project seeks to present a more fluid idea of gender, one which encourages and facillitates re-invention and self-creation, and a host of heros of a different sort.

Sex Worker Cabaret, June 12 @ Public Assembly [tickets]
Sarah Jenny and I bring you five videos and eleven performers to celebrate sex worker self-determination and survival.

Also, while my video Working Girl Blues will not be at the NYC Cabaret, it will be at San Francisco’s Sex Worker Film and Art Fest May 28th at The Roxie, and at London’s Sex Worker Film Festival June 11, 2011, at Rio Cinema.

• March 19 was JFREJ’s annual Purimschpiel, and Terra Incognita members Irit Reinheimer, Jenna Peters-Golden and I put together a video/sound/visual art installation, 18 Keys.
• April 3 is the next Hot Pink Mass, at the Lesbian Herstory Archives!
• And April 15 – 28 Heels on Wheels Roadshow is at it again, doing 11 shows in two weeks through the Midwest and back to NYC.

Heels on Wheels Glitter Roadshow

This is the second [annual!] queer performance art cabaret I’ve co-produced. We are going to Pittsburgh, Columbus, Bloomington, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, Ypsilanti, Detroit, Philadelphia and home to New York City!

I’m hitting the road in my beloved van April 15-28, 2011, in search of new friends, fantastic adventures and siblings in the struggle, along with Heather Acs, Shomi Noise, Geppetta, Amanda Cheong and Lixnne Disaster.

We have a video and are fun[d]raising via kickstarter — all donations include admission to our show!

Liberation magic, anti-capitalist robots, Medusa-themed puppet theatre, riot grrl dance parties, and the story of stardust accompany the journey of us six queer femme artists and activists as we tour from Brooklyn through the Midwestern U.S. this April. You’re invited to enjoy the spectacle as these dazzling troublemakers create a world of radical extravagance and thought-provoking glamour. Full schedule and info on the artists on our site: http://www.heelsonwheelsroadshow.com/

Purim: 18 Keys with Terra Incognita

Taking the idea of liberation, work, and making wishes, Irit Reinheimer, Jenna Peters-Golden, and I created a two-room installation for JFREJ’s annual Purimschpiel spectacle.

The first room had two mobiles made of keys, and a table with a prayer book, cloves, and keys with tags hand-stamped with “Sustencance” “Self-Determinsation,” Cooperatives,” etc. Walking into the next room, we installed projected images of domestic, factory and sex workers from the last 80 years or so as seen through a keyhole, a multi-channel soundscape of keys, and three altars each to the different types of work. Each altar had a bowl where you placed the key as an offering.

Leg & Face Hair as a [Femme] Birthright

I’ve been working slowly on a text and video piece about class and body hair, and have been filming myself taking clippers to my legs for a few months. I took this little project outside my apartment last month and while it’s hard to tell, yes that is a grand piano behind me, and yes, I am pulling something out of my vagina.

We’ve got hella sex-worker-led media.

There’s the upcoming deadline of April 7 to propose work to NYC’s Sex Worker Cabaret taking place June 12, plus Red Umbrella Diaries, a storytelling event, is also on April 7 it’s at 8pm and free! Hostessed by Audacia Ray
 at Happy Ending [302 Broome Street between Forsyth and Eldridge, in New York City]
.

The Sex Worker Film & Art Fest has a call for submissions due March 30, as does Hook Collective for INTERSECTION: Stories Through Art by Sex Workers of Color due April 15 AND you can submit to a sex worker zine that Sarah Jenny and SWOP-NYC is putting together [deadline May 1], to “showcase the diversity of sex workers’ experiences of all genders, sexualities, ages, abilities, nationalities, immigration statuses, and ethnic backgrounds.”

March 18 saw an amazing cross-country Sex Worker performance-art activism called 86 The Violence! in which sex workers painted red targets on their bodies, and symbolically tied their hands, eyes, or mouth with red fabric for 86 minutes [which the NYTimes covered] to support the formal endorsement on March 10 by the US government of UN Recommendation 86, to …ensure access to public services paying attention to the special vulnerability of sexual workers to violence and human rights abuses. Earlier in the month the US released its report to the U.N. saying, “We agree that no one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution.” UJC has an info page here, SWOP has a press page, and Bound Not Gagged has a piece breaking down the UPR.

We’ve got legal movement.

NOLA’s Women With A Vision filed a federal suit to challenge Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature statute on behalf of nine sex workers who have been criminally stigmatized under NOLAs 205-year old law which criminalizes folks who solicit oral sex and anal sex as sex offenders. Co-counsel Andrea Ritchie, co-author of the just-published book, Queer Injustice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, says “Police and prosecutors have complete discretion and are given no guidance whatsoever as to when and who to charge with a Crime Against Nature, and when and who to charge with prostitution. This leaves the door wide open to discriminatory enforcement targeting poor Black women, transgender women, and gay men for a charge that carries much harsher penalties. That decision can change the entire course of a person’s life.” More info on the case here. And Jordan Flaherty wrote a great piece on it here.

NYC’s excellent Sex Workers’ Project at the UJC has been working on getting the No Condoms As Evidence bill passed. Watch their PSA to get indignant,  call or email to tell the Senate Codes Committee members to vote “YES” on S323 and check out SWP’s PSA: No Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution.

And we’ve still got creative strategies for self- and community care in the face of criminalization, violence, and coercion.

These are collected thoughts from the past few weeks, still being formed and very open to your thoughts and feedback.
This op-ed which appeared in New Yorks’ Newsday, written by the Sex Worker’s Project [clearly they are hauling ass these days!!] does several things well: it advocates for sex workers without speaking for them, it points out that police are a big part of the problem of work-related violence that sex workers face, and it recommends actions. I’ve been thinking a lot about Transformative Justice* in relation to violence against sex workers, but I’m experiencing dissonance because I can’t fully reconcile that otherwise overarchingly whole model with solutions.

While there is massive institutional violence that affects huge swatches of people — state coercion & violence, racism, colonialism, economic exploitation and scarcity panics under capitalism — most of the interpersonal assaults in our society (especially sexual ones) are committed by people who know one another. Fact**. But in the case of sex workers this is definitely not true — unless her assailant is a beat cop s/he recognizes or a regular who flips one day. . So much sex work is also a site of healing, both for workers and clients. And like most jobs, a huge chunk of sex work is just everyday life means ya gottagetmoney and gottapaytherent work, so let’s not label too much of it either violent or transformative. So much of this work is set up as a site for “stranger” violence based simply on the high level of stranger interaction, and due to a terrible combo of moralism and criminalization on one side and situationalism or coercion on the other.

I don’t have any idea if or how the community accountability model in transformative justice can work in situations where there is no ‘community’ to hold a violent client accountable for his actions. There may be a community of girls unwilling to see him, but the nature of secrecy around this work makes his capacity to find someone who doesn’t know about the ban high. Message boards and their vetting system really only work for clients who are already self-selecting to be non-isolated hobbyists and while I can dream a little dream of vigilante bands of clients getting together to avenge the assault of a favorite  “community” sex trade workers, and who share care strategies with one another, it seems incredibly far away from the shame-full, compulsarily monogomous and criminalizing society in which this violence takes place.
 I think of all the clients I’ve ever seen, the ones who were high or wasted or weird, the ones who were kind or handsome or pleasantly eccentric and though they form a kind of community in my mind, they don’t form community in real time. They are isolated from each other, and we — client and worker — set up barricades that preclude us knowing too much about each other, too.

I’m reminded by Jenna Peters-Golden of Philly Stands Up! That “accountablity is not step one, it’s often step five or six” when working with people who have caused harm, and in so find that wrapping my head around the perspective of thinking about creating conditions of community and a set-up of safety for sex workers that would support client accountability makes me experience a kind of pre-burnout at the consideration of the task. Shifting conditions of work is just one issue, removing the cops from our jobs and prison from the picture is another, creating a society that doesn’t hate sex workers specifically and women in general is another – to add the idea of dissolving the isolation and individualism that breed sites where the former issues can reduce to individual instances of violence that end with peripheral-at-best access to perpetrators feels overwhelming.

I keep returning to a mental/theoretical sticking point about the privilege of having a community to draw on, and the ways in which there are a critical mass of people needed to leverage for gaining buy-in. In communities of political or identity alignment, isolation of people who cause harm makes accountability harder because there’s no place to work from to make them care, but there’s somebody who knows someone who brought in the accountability team, right? People in sites of extreme isolation – creepy clients or potential allies who are in bad spots — need care, too, but via what opportunity and at what cost to communities who need healing? It’s unclear if there is an accessible community for the clients who have caused harm, and I’m wondering if the model we cull from the exquisite analysis of TJ is instead the one of safety/healing/aftercare/community-building, and if the powerful model of accountability as a means to prevent and mitigate violence and harm is not applicable in the world of commercial sex work.

Chicago’s YWEP describes transformative justice as “community-based harm reduction,” and I think this framing opens the door to see how TJ might fit. The other work besides accountability is healing, and this is a site where there are massive connections between TJ frameworks and solutions for some of the struggles sex workers face: this still-massive task of unpacking the history of violence folks have faced intersectionally with the concrete instances of harm and transposing that whole experience over community- and peer-led work to build structures of safety. This safety/healing thus has at least two aims: to gain power in terms of information and strategy sharing, so that people feel they are on an equal footing with clients, and the obvious internal care work of devising frameworks, strategies, and resources for self care, recognizing trauma, accessing resources, navigating a crisis situation, and building community support systems.

“Ultimately, if we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all of our exploitation. Whether we’re working in the sex industry, a restaurant, or in a university, we’re being exploited by those who are benefitting from our labour. So, if we want to end exploitation, we don’t give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation.” — Nandita Sharma, in Upping the Anti 10

I guess an answer is, still, in part, to decriminalize and thus render the policing and imprisoning of sex workers [trust, the opposite of helping someone is jailing them!] and to use that site of “worthiness” to brush away moral stigma, a task that is no small feat. Jane Addams wrote a hundred years ago about the difficulties in “reintroducing prostitutes to the society they have offended.”

Does anyone have info or resources on TJ [or even Restorative Justice] and sex workers? I’m not yet willing to accept that they don’t mix well, and I’m curious if anyone has a nonfiction model where they have.

* Simply, using community leverage to confront people who cause harm and help them, survivors and their communities to heal and change violent behaviour without involving the State and with a consciousness of the intersectionality and institutionalization of violence throughout society — see Gen5.

** Over 85% of children know their abusers [Gen5]; at least 75 percent of all survivors know their attackers; 80 percent of all rapes occur in the home [citation]

I want to thank everyone who attended the New Stories/Old Stories Mass for your excitement & participation, and if you weren’t able to make it, for your support. Just in case you looove memories [or are curious] here’s a little teaser video of the Mass’s intro.

I also want to let you know that there are plans in the works for Masses on a monthly basis. Because it just feels better when ya do it often, right? So stay tuned, stay pink, and achoo!

* ps wasn’t that WHOLE thing awesome?! Thank you QuORUM FORUM organizers, hosts/esses, participants!!!

Trisha is my troublemaking sister and I need her.

She’s groundbreaking and rule breaking and break dancing and heartbroken but prevailing and she manifests. She is my lesson in asking for it, in getting it. Trisha is quite simply, a bad girl; the part of us who wants to be out of control and who has all the faculties to do it and succeed at being unbounded — without causing major damage. Trisha is intentional.

*********

I wrote a brief history of the genesis/discovery of Trisha and if you’re really ethnolinguistically curious, there is also a Lexicography describing Her name/s and traits. I’m thinking of Trisha as I work on A Month of Sundays, a long-format collection of what will be both more sermons/masses/revivals from the Hot Pink Mass and accompanying text. Winter projects! A-choo!

• If you want to register, please do it NOW for the low cost of $75 because the price goes up to $95 on the 19th.
• If you want to get hundreds of femmes to check your organization out, why not advertise in the program? Rates start at $50 and a whole frickin page ad is only $120.
• Oh! And the conference has a blog with a daily countdown/femme reasons to attend the conference! So check it out and comment – our voices are *all* crucial!

And – because the Femme Family is hustling so many of us out to beautiful Oakland for the event, we’re throwing one more fun[d]raiser party on July 23: SPEAKEASY OF FEMME! Check back or find FemmeFamilyNYC on evil ol facebook for party details…