WOMEN, THE ARTS, AND ACTIVISM: SUPPORTING THE SCENE

I’ve been involved with the Sarah Lawrence Women’s History Month Conference since 2009, planning 2010’s The Message is in the Music. This year (in its 14th year) will be my first time presenting my own work at the conference, and I am excited to be doing so with my cohorts in For the Birds. Here are the details for our panel THIS SATURDAY. I'll be presenting a slightly edited version of the paper I read at last year's Women Who Rock conference in Seattle.

SARAH LAWRENCE WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH CONFERENCE

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
4:30pm-6:00pm
Slonim Living Room

SUPPORTING THE SCENE: CREATING AND CURATING A FEMINIST SAFER SPACE

Feminist collective For the Birds will discuss the ways that gender informs their curatorial and activist practice, and their understanding of “safer spaces,” as well as how their scholarly journeys have been reflected in their own community-building experience.

Kate Wadkins, Sarah Lawrence College
Lauren Denitzio, Parsons the New School for Design
Sarah Hanks, CUNY Graduate Center
Roz Hunter, Sarah Lawrence College

For the full details, conference description, & schedule, click through the jump.

Breaking Boundaries & A Night of Spoken Word

via RE/VISIONIST

This weekend the Sarah Lawrence community will be celebrating Women's History Month with our 13th Annual Women's History Month Conference, Breaking Boundaries: Body Politics & the Dynamics of Difference.  Friday, the conference opens with a plenary featuring Marilyn Wann (author of Fat! So?) then a Night of Spoken Word featuring Maria James-Thiaw and Lara Frater, plus other artists: Ms. MaDonna Awotwi a.k.a. Sankofa the Poet, Jennifer Bartlett, Andrea Baker, Sheila Black, Shaashawn Dial, & David Wolach.

flier by Kate Wadkins | illustration by Cristy Road

A full conference schedule can be found here.

I'll be helping with the conference this weekend (along with fellow R/V staffer Thea Michailides) so I really hope to see you there! Excited about it all.

WOMEN WHO ROCK

(this one is for ADRIAN)

>> D.I.Y. MEDIA PANEL <<

JAMIE VARRIALE VELEZ

ZINE ARCHIVE & PUBLISHING PROJECT

MAGGIE OWSLEY

SEATTLE FANDANGO PROJECT

SEATTLE, WA

Alice Bag wrote a really great piece about the conference, and I want to echo her sentiment that it was super inspiring and reminded me that we need to continue to do this work. Also, the community in Seattle is like nothing I've ever seen: all of the academic folks are involved in community organizing, and the communal warmth was felt, even as an outsider.

Andreana Clay at QueerBlackFeminist wrote this (also beautifully-written) piece about an incident that went down during the panel discussion, which is important to read; it reminds us white folks that in order to be allies we should LISTEN first. It is amazing the connections that can be drawn between music and communication, feminism and respect, and all the rest. It made me proud to be presenting about my own journey through these issues with my comrade, Jamie. I want to write more on this, but for now, check out the articles I linked above.

WOMEN WHO ROCK + BEAT NITE

or ABOUT THIS WEEK/END...



Jamie Varriale Velez and I are participating in this great conference this week in Seattle. We’re on a “DIY Media” panel at the University of Washington/Seattle University's Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities conference. Here's a blurb about what we'll be talking about:

"Disassemble it and dialogue with me": Communication as Punk Feminist Cultural Activism

Using our experiences within the New York City DIY/Punk feminist community, we argue that learning to communicate effectively, both interpersonally and through media like music, blogs and zines, is the activism that produces the change that we want. Learning to communicate requires us to listen to each other and expand our cultural vernacular, bringing previously marginalized voices into a new narrative and changing the way we think. This process of learning to dialogue respectfully and productively does more than merely facilitate our feminist work; it is our feminist work.

Our presentation shares how this work has enabled us to organize and contribute to our communities, and create feminist art and spaces.

Facilitators: Jamie Varriale Velez, Kate Wadkins


DIY MEDIA panel
10am - 12noon

at Seattle University
901 12th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122

Bldg/Room: Administration 321

For more info: University of Washington & Women Who Rock Research Project

So, come say hi if you are in Washington tomorrow/Friday! We are among other great folks, too, so please see the full conference schedule here.

While I'm gone, Lauren Denitzio will be covering for me at STOREFRONT; we'll be open late for Norte Maar's BEAT NITE this Friday, from 6pm-10pm. Needless to say, go visit BRAIN WAVES! Lauren is in the collection so it's a pretty exciting event.

"RIOT GRRRL: TRACES OF A MOVEMENT" & THE FEMINIST CONTINUUM

photo courtesy of Dragana Drobnjak

A few Fridays ago my friend Rachel and I indulged in lots of art activities, walking from PS1 for Printed Matter's Art Book Fair, to Prints Gone Wild in Williamsburg, and back. Saturday, we walked to Long Island City for more. I quickly bought a ticket and ran to the "Riot Grrrl: Traces of a Movement" conference session while my pals continued to check out the tables at the Book Fair.

I sat down and a good friend of mine, Dragana, happened to be sitting right next to me, camera in hand. Dragana took photos of the entire slide presentation, and when we got near the end, I gasped in surprise (seriously).

Jenna Freedman, founder of Barnard Library's zine collection, featured selected images of the collection, tracing the history of twenty years of zines from the original riot grrrls through today. In one of her last images, she projected the caption "EveryGrrrl plans a feminist conference," with a scan of our [For the Birds'] She-Bang pamphlet from this year. I think of DIY feminist cultural production in a continuum, something that is always in conversation with its history, present, and future. This one moment really solidified that feeling. My review of the conference might explain what I am getting at a little more.

You can read my review of the conference now at Elevate Difference, featuring another photo by the lovely Dragana.

OLD NEWS IS NEW AGAIN

I HAVE A FEATURE UP AT RE/VISIONIST this month. An updated edit of my review of the plenary panel at "The Message is in the Music: Hip Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music & More" conference, including Mimi Thi Nguyen and Fiona Ngo, and an illustration by the lovely Cristy C. Road!

In sync with Sarah Lawrence’s recent call for papers for 2011’s Women’s History Conference, I am syndicating my review of the plenary panel from this year’s The Message is in the Music: Hip Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music & More with RE/VISIONIST (it is also currently published in this year’s Women’s History newsletter). Specifically Ngo and Nguyen’s papers, in the context of the Conference at large, really inspired me to pursue my thesis work on masculinities in punk rock. Watching other scholars dare to take on pop culture subjects like music gave me hope and certainty that cultural production is worthy of an historical treatment.


This article is also timely as it preempts the publication of International Girl Gang Underground, a compilation zine about the way riot grrrl has influenced punk feminist cultural production over the past twenty years. Nguyen’s early iteration of her paper, “Aesthetics, Access, Intimacy” or “Race, Riot Grrrl, Bad Feelings” will be included in the zine, nestled in among scene reports and personal stories from all over the world.

Read the full article here.

Review of Critical Intersections conference up at Elevate Difference

My review of this pretty great conference was published at Elevate Difference yesterday.

Critical Intersections was cosponsored by Barnard Center for Research on Women and the New York Women's Foundation, its core focus on the inextricable link between reproductive justice and women's economic security. With a sampling of seventeen New York City organizations, the conference provided a wide array of interpretations of “reproductive and economic justice,” with that definition as a point of intersection for multiple struggles: economic, gender-based, racial, and community-specific.

Read the full review here.

LADY ZINE PARTY

or "Thoughts on riot grrrl, feminisms, & race at the Lady Zine Party"

My friends Sheela and Julie hosted a "LADY ZINE PARTY" on the rainiest Saturday in recent memory. We met at Julie's apartment, and after homemade pizza and alcoholic Shirley Temples, we did a go-around and introduced ourselves.

One of the highlights was that a lot of people at the zine party weren't necessarily influenced by riot grrrl or had never done a zine. At least one person wasn't from the U.S., and everyone else seemed to grow up all over the country. There was a reality TV contest winner, folks who work at various nonprofits for the advancement of women, lots of grad school students, and some of my best friends. In the go-around, there were some tense discussions about why some young girls are so averse to the term "feminist". We talked about how the term "feminist" can sometimes be a misnomer and generally not conducive for communities of color and/or working class women. We also talked about how for youth, the "F" word can be a scary thing.

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH NEWS

Crossposted with katewadkins.com

Myself and four other women from the Sarah Lawrence Women's History Graduate Studies Program have been working on an online publication since last semester. We are officially launching tomorrow, in concurrence with Women's History Month and in time for the 12th Annual Women's History Conference at Sarah Lawrence this weekend. My title is officially "Web Editor". That means a lot of different things, some important ones being that I designed the website and the header too.

The publication is called RE/VISIONIST. Here's a little bit about us:

RE/VISIONIST is an online publication created by students of the Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History Graduate Program. In the interest of fostering dialogue, RE/VISIONIST aims to promote a critical analysis of history and contemporary issues through the lens of multiple feminisms. We focus on the intersections of lived realities and histories, such as the experiences related to race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We strive to keep the question, “who gets to write history?” on the table.

I will also take this moment to gently remind you that the Women's History conference, The Music is in the Message: Hip-Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music & More, starts on Friday. The panel I am moderating on Riot Grrrl is on Saturday, March 6th, at 1:00PM.

RIOT GRRRL PANEL @ SLC WOMEN'S HISTORY CONFERENCE

HELLO FOLKS, IT'S ALL HAPPENING!

You may already know that I will be moderating the Riot Grrrl panel at Sarah Lawrence College's 12th Annual Women's History Conference: "The Music is in the Message".

What you don't know:

1. The panel is on Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 1:00PM

2. I am honored to say that the panel features author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, Marisa Meltzer; contributor to Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now!, Julia Downes; and my friend and comrade in the Girl Gang Underground, blogger Jamielynn Varriale.

3. My dear friend Cristy Road did the illustration for the cover of the program.

As to be expected, I am so humbled and excited to be part of this! I'm geeking out on the conference and hope you all can make it. I am posting the info that pertains to me here, but the entire program is seriously phenomenal, and best of all: it's FREE (so no sorry excuses). My classmates in the Women's History program will be facilitating the other panels, so you'll get to see their fabulous faces too.

RIOT GRRRL HISTORY

EXCITING NEWS  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


I will be moderating the riot grrrl panel at Sarah Lawrence College's Twelfth Annual Women's History Month Conference.

The Message is in the Music:
Hip Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music, and More

Twelfth Annual Women’s History Month Conference
at Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, New York

Friday & Saturday, March 5 & 6, 2010

Keynote speaker: Carmen Ashhurst, former president of Def Jam Recordings and Rush Communications, and author of the forthcoming book, Selling My Brothers: The Movement, The Media and Me

Music has long served social movements as a sound track, as a means of communication, and as its own arena for activism. While multiple generations of feminists have used music in these ways, it has played especially vital roles for those born since the 1970s. This conference will explore the ways in which young feminists have defined and expressed politics through music and musical cultures and communities. Among the questions we will ponder are: How does music reflect sites of agreement and conflict among different groups of feminists? How have movements like Riot Grrrl and Hip Hop feminism attracted young women to feminist activism? How do young feminists’ uses of music compare with those of earlier generations?

[Call for Proposals from Sarah Lawrence College]

WE DID IT!

[photos via for the birds collective]

Cross-posted with FOR THE BIRDS:

The Queer Eye for the DIY workshop we did at Visions in Feminism was a major success! There was super-smart audience participation, we received really great feedback, and we even got interviewed by The Nation and the Washington City Paper! We also met a bunch of nice folks and sold lots of stuff at the distro table. Thank you DC, for such an awesome Saturday. Photos from the workshop can be found on For the Birds' flickr, or on the gallery of our website.

FTB @ VISIONS IN FEMINISM CONFERENCE

I'm crossposting something I blogged about on FOR THE BIRDS. Myself and some other Birds will be presenting at a conference this weekend. Here's the info:

FOR THE BIRDS feminist collective + distro will be both tabling and presenting at the upcoming Visions in Feminism conference in Washington, DC on April 4th, 2009. Our workshop, "Queer Eye for the DIY," is in the 2:00PM-3:30PM timeslot.

More info on the conference can be found at: http://vifconference.wordpress.com/

From the website:

Visions in Feminism is a local conference held annually in the DC area since 2001. Originally hosted by the University of Maryland, the conference has been held at American University for the last three years. Each year Visions in Feminism seeks to provide a forum for diverse perspectives on feminist praxis.