Tag Archives: queer

Girlzone is WEEKLY now

21 Aug

In addition to out big semester focus (Semester 1: Rad Sex & Consent/Semester 2: Bluestockings Week) the Wom*n’s department does stuff all over the place (WAC, stitch n bitch, FFFFilms & Girlzone) every week to create community and a space for students to learn and grow as feminists and people and friggin’ make friends and all that stuff you’re meant to do at uni.

So here’s the thing, due to popular demand: Girlzone is WEEKLY now.

At 1pm on Thursdays in the Wom*n’s Room.

There’s free tea and cake and donuts and other grrls who are queer or questioning. Lemme make this clear: that can mean bi, pan, trans, poly, celibate, lesbian, and not-quite-sure. Like seriously, you are welcome.

It’s now necessarily a queery-style brain-breaking ideological conversation (not that it’s off-limits), it’s just a chill time to chat with others socially. And eat cake.

The Facebook event is here. You don’t have to press attending if you don’t feel comfortable with people on your Facebook seeing, but know you’re welcome :)

- Amy xx

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My Pie Town

4 Aug

My Pie Town is a project by Debbie Grossman, who reworks and re-imagines a body of images originally photographed by Russell Lee for the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940. Using Photoshop to modify Lee’s pictures, Grossman created an imaginary, parallel world – a Pie Town populated exclusively by wom*n (editor: only white wom*n though it would seem). The images are revised in subtle ways, making the reading of them very complicated and compelling. The sixteen images  in the series are both color and black and white, and are all based on Lee’s unpublished series on Pietown, a homesteaded community in New Mexico.

The original  photographs are available either through the Library of Congress or through the Web. Grossman says of the project “I’ve begun to think of Photoshop as my medium – I’m fascinated by the fact this it shares qualities with both photography and  drawing… I enjoy imagining My Pie Town working as its own kind of (lighthearted)  propaganda”.

Continue reading →

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NOWSA wrap-up

28 Jul

A graphic of large multi-coloured letters reading NOWSA, and smaller plainer text in front reading Network Of Women Students Australia

A group of rad wom*n recently made the trek up to Sydney for NOWSA 2011 at the University of New South Wales.

Is anyone interested in doing a bit of a write up about it to post here?

 

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Farrago: Autonomous Spaces

28 Jul

This article in Farrago talks about autonomous spaces. While the specific example here is the Queer Room and the Queer Department, it is easy to see how these ideas can apply to the Wom*n’s Room and the Wom*n’s Department.

“Autonomous areas, which are reserved for the use of a particular identity group, are not always popular. The charge of “reverse discrimination” is often levelled: why should any group have access to resources that aren’t available to the wider population? Another criticism that worries me more is that autonomous spaces can be too exclusive. If entry is based upon adherence to a strictly defined identity group, then people who would otherwise benefit from access may be made to feel unwelcome…”

Have a read, and leave your responses in the comments.

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A Series of Questions

28 Jul

Check out an amazing photography project, ‘A Series of Questions’, at L. Weingarten’s site:

“This ongoing body of work explores the power dynamics inherent in the questions asked of transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and gender-variant people…

The subjects hold signs depicting questions that each has had posed to them personally— some by strangers, others by loved ones, friends, or colleagues. Presented on white wooden boards, the questions are turned on the viewer, shifting the dynamics under which they were originally asked, and prompting the viewer to cast a reflective, self-critical eye upon themself, revealing how invasive this frame of reference can be.”

These are just a few examples of the photos in the project.

“As a greater number of subjects and questions are accumulated, a relentless conversation of questioning emerges. Attention is directed not on the backgrounds of the transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, or gender-variant subjects, but on the dynamics at work in these conversations.”

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