No Ass At All

Love it. Aisha Tyler does what can be considered a response to Sir Mix A Lot's "Baby Got Back", but instead, Tyler creates a hilarious anthem for women who have smaller booties, while weaving in interesting themes of identity, race and body image.

Ahh, you didn't want Sir Mix A Lot's anaconda anyway.



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Men's Story Project Screening @ SF Independent Film Festival

If you missed the Men's Story Project last year (which I almost performed in, and also glowingly reviewed in this blog... this is some serious ish people!), you now have a chance to watch it, either in San Francisco (Roxie) or Berkeley (Shattuck Cinema). Screen dates are February 8th, 10th and 22nd. Click here for schedule and venue details.

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Filmed at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley with a standing-room-only audience, this film shows the powerful debut presentation of the Men's Story Project - a new performance/dialogue project examining social ideas about masculinity for the purpose of social change.

Described by audience members as "groundbreaking," "transformative," and "something that needs to keep on happening," this performance highlights 16 Bay Area artists, activists, and first-time presenters, ages 22-60, sharing stories about their lives through slam poetry, monologues, music and dance.

The stories address subjects including platonic love between men; images of African American masculinity; religion, homophobia and HIV/AIDS; disability and sexuality; testicular cancer and wholeness; men's public restroom rituals; an Oakland activist's refusal to continue intergenerational patterns of violence; spirituality inside San Quentin; transgender identity and gender fluidity; relationships with fathers and other family members; and gratitude to lifelong mentors.

Presenters include Robert Haaland, the first transgender candidate elected to SF public office; Leroy Moore of Sins Invalid; Galen Peterson of Oakland's Art in Action; and members of the Berkeley and SF slam poetry championship teams.

www.mensstoryproject.org

This One Goes Out To The Boys On The Double Dutch Team

Hey peeps, wassup. I've been blogging about super intense stuff lately, I felt the need to take it down just a notch. I found this clip on Feministe, and it definitely spoke to me. Its about a little black boy who joins a double dutch team (traditionally a "girls game"). He is teased and bullied, but is also skilled and happy, doing what he loves. Even moms was like hell no at first, but she comes around. Kudos to gender outlaws and supportive allies!

I am of the belief that rigid gender roles hurts everyone. The socially acceptable boxes of "masculinity" and "femininity" are tiny, suffocating, and often make soulfully taxing demands (ie, boys can't have feelings besides anger, girls should take care of others before themselves). So I find this to be a story of triumph. I wish that my sister, when she was a pre-teen got this kind of support from her school. In those days, she was a tomboy who could kick a ball better than most. And she would play football with the boys all the time (soccer to most people in the US, not Jamaica tho!!), some boys didn't even realize they were playing against a girl cuz she was rockin a short fro like a lot of the boys. But when it came to inter-school competitions, she was not allowed to be on the team. Sigh. Effed up. When we moved to the US, my sis was on a high school all-girls team though, and she excelled. But I am sure the exclusion that she experienced earlier stayed with her.

This one goes out to the boys on the double dutch team, the girls playing rough and tumble, everyone in between living their lives, and gender outlaws everywhere. May we all let the fire in our chests burn bright, and may these silly boxes just fade away already. Bless up!

Beyond Masculinity: Essays By Queer Men On Gender & Politics

Samhita put up a post at Feministing that links to this free, interactive, and sleek online anthology. It looks pretty amazing, I plan to comment more after some reading. Be sure to peep BeyondMasculinity.com.

"There Is No Homosexuality In Iran": Gender Reassignment Surgery as a Solution To Illegalized Homosexual Activity.

I can be amazed with how the constructs of race, gender and sexuality manifest with such diversity around the world. On a personal account tip, my amazement was more like shock when I was travelling in West Africa, and Ghanaians would refer to me as... white. Apparently, a lot of the way that race is constructed there is that a drop of white blood makes you white. That got my head spinning. Also, by being from the United States, which is considered to be predominantly a "white culture", (and a culture of affluence), by default, all citizens of the United States are considered to be relatively rich- and culturally white. It was pretty shocking for my black butt to finally get to the motherland and then be called white, that's for sure. But it also definitely cemented the fact that these social assignments (in this case, race) are concepts that we create as we go along, whatever culture we are in. In a lot of the West, we have decided to believe that a drop of black blood makes you black. Shoo, in apartheid South Africa, Chinese were applying to be reassigned as Japanese so they could gain privilege, and more recently have been fighting to be considered black.

I say that to preface this phenomenon in Iran, where homosexuality is considered an illegal offense punishable by death- and gender reassignment surgery is encouraged to create the appearance of heterosexual unions. These unions are recognized by the government and society. So while the Supreme Court decision that was passed in California a couple days ago would not fly anytime soon in Iran, there are laws there that give transfolks the same status as biological men and women- and biological women gain a lot of privilege becoming what we call transmen. Last year President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran shocked many when he said at Columbia University, “In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country.” But because of how gender and sexuality is constructed in Iran, essentially President Ahmadinejad was speaking a culturally determined truth.

Jessica Mosby of the Women's International Perspective writes about this, and the film covering this phenomenon called Be Like Others. Really a very interesting and enlightening read.

In further research on the subject, I found a document called State Sponsored Homophobia that lists the laws in almost 100 countries that illegalize sex between consenting same sex adults. My own beloved Jamaica is in the list of course. The laws in Jamaica use leftover British colonial jargon like "buggery" and actually only criminalize men having sex with each other. If you ask me, which is a muuuuuuch larger conversation, the Jamaican brand of homophobia is directly related to a) being colonized by the Christian and Victorian "sex is dirty" British b) having a particularly harrowing version of slavery that included only having African men work on the plantations. After decades of men being worked to death, being raped as boys, and basically only really being able to have sex with other men (voluntary or forced), the plantocracy considered it to be more "profitable" to bring African women to the plantations as well, and having forced reproduction of slave labor instead. In my opinion, these two factors created misguided rage towards men who have sex with each other (and women who would dream of witholding sex from men), and til today there is an association in the collective unconscious that correlates the nightmare of slavery with homosexuality, making it something that needs to be "burned".

hmm. That will be another post discussed more in depth for sure.