by Josie Lehrer

Before a standing room-only house at the debut presentation of the Mens Story Project in August 2008, Kenyatta, a 60 year-old writer from Harlem, describes how, at the age of seven, he proudly shared with his parents a poem he had written. Since many contemporary African American poets were gay, they glared at him with suspicion and disapproval. For the next 30 years, he never shared a single piece of his writing with his parents for fear of bad consequences.

Reading a letter he wrote to his father, Robert Haaland, the first transgender candidate to be elected to San Francisco public office, declares that his …


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Healthy Masculinities: A Pro-Human Endeavor

by Ariel Dougherty

Exuberance and bravado! Gumption and sweat! Vision and breadth! These are among the many elements that composed the literal collective experience of 28 women who came together in 1977 to produce one of the truly dynamic womens publications to emerge from the Womens Liberation Movement.

That publication was Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. The energy and commitment lasted 15 years and produced 27 issues, which are viewable online. Today the rosy cheeks, bright eyes and …


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“The Heretics�: Film Invigorates Feminism, Art, Politics3 comment(s)

by Talia Carner

At a mid-October U.N. session commemorating the 15th Anniversary of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the international community to commit resources to improve women's health and gender equality.

How much has changed since 1994 In 2009, across the globe, women are still positioned as far inferior to men in every public spherepolitical, religious, legal and economic.

No country is free of a womans problem, be it full legal rights, maternity care, access to …


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Women Are the Solution, Not the Problem1 comment(s)

by Heather MacGibbon

What is Feminist Art This is a question that art historians and critics have pondered in the last 40 years in the wake of second wave feminism in the U.S. and abroad in the 70s. Is it simply work made by women Does it espouse a particular philosophic, aesthetic or critical stance toward society

Lauren Ross answers these questions indirectly with an intriguing look at the work of seven feminist video artists from the last decade in the exhibit she curates,Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video, running through January 10, 2010 at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for …


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Third Wave Video Art: Sarcastic and Serious8 comment(s)

by Kate Bornstein

Gender rights are often reduced to the rights of women and the rights of men. But over the past 15 yearsby means of postmodern theory, as well as more precise biological confirmationWestern Culture has parsed gender into far more than simply two genders.

I wrote the book, Hello, Cruel World, using gender as a hierarchal system (comprised of more than two) to illustrate the ways in which a hierarchal system of oppression can cause an unaware person to experience suicidal thoughts. Gender, …


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Teens, Freaks, Outlaws and Alternatives to Suicide

by Donna Nelson

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This poem "Barrettes, Bandages and Butterflies," was inspired by my friend who passed away in April. The poem is about the malignant nature of domestic violence, but also the venomous feeling of entitlement that some human beings feel they possess over another human life. So many mothers have been robbed of the right to witness their daughters progression in life because their childs fate was unjustly decided. Many divine souls have been broken and lost. Since they can no longer speak for themselves, I feel its a duty to give them a voice.


"Barrettes, …


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A Poem: Barrettes, Bandages and Butterflies

by Nancy Genova

The Death of Dream is a play about domestic violence that is slightly different from other artistic pieces that have been developed on the subject. In the play, codependency is acted out so the audience can enter into the victims and perpetrators space and begin to process what goes on in their world.

Initially I wrote The Death of A Dream because I needed to. This piece was tugging at me. I work in health care and have a graduate degree in Public Administration, but I have an undergrad degree in fine arts, as well. I am a survivor of domestic violence. Now its as if all my worlds; private, personal, professional and artistic are converging.



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The Death of A Dream: Layers of Domestic Violence

by Christine E. Hutchins

There is very little new under the sun. Misogyny in art, literature and other records dates as far back in Western culture as documentation itself.

Misogyny comes from Greekmisogunia from misos ('hatred') and gyn ('woman'), explains Answers.com

But misogyny as a practice -- the enforcement and celebration of the subordination of women -- flourished unnamed in English until the seventeenth century.

Only when men and women began to write against rather than with culturally entrenched misogynist practices did misogyny get a name in England and …


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In A Word: The True History of "Misogyny"

by Sir Jesse of Decatur

Transmen and XX chromosomal men are equally affected by laws designed to chip away at a doctor-patient relationship. People in the reproductive justice community should be allies to those who are trans, gender variant, or have had transgender experience. Often people who were assigned female at birth, or as some would say born a female, may have bodies that are configured to the vulnerabilities and horrors that arise when discussing topics of unwanted pregnancy and abortion. All of them, including the pregnant man and others similarly situated, need access to healthcare and reproductive justice …


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Southern Reproductive Justice and Trans Alliance2 comment(s)

by Barbara Kahn

The artsfilm, theater, music, literature, comic books and graphic novels, fine arts and craftsinfluence the image of women in the world, whether we are ignored, misrepresented or stereotyped. Lack of funding and other support puts the depiction of women in the hands of those who are self-sufficient, who have significant financial resources or who consider women as less than equal in the world.

A recent study of 25 womens funds showed that only 1.5 percent of their grant dollars and 3.3 percent of their grants went to Arts and Culture. The study "Accelerating …


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Women in the Arts: How They Can Change Your Life

by Angela Bonavoglia

On a sizzling summer night, I head to the Outpost Lounge in Brooklyn to Switch N' Play's Open Drag Night to watch gender-based performances, mainly by drag kingswho I'd never heard of before this year.

I'm greeted at the door by Ellen Vas. I've worked with Ellen and known her as a smart, quick, efficient staffer in a highly regarded Manhattan communications firm. She's also a no frills lesbian, very butch. But tonight, Ellen's not around. In her place is her drag king personae: Manny Mango.

Manny's short dark hair is moussed up and spiky. He's sporting long thin sideburns and a

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OPEN DRAG NIGHT AT THE OUTPOST LOUNGE4 comment(s)

by Carolyn Gage

The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we …


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The Ladies' Room: A Complicated Conversation3 comment(s)

by Rev. Donna Schaper

Who tells women and girls who we are Of course it is we who tell us who we are. Then again, maybe not. The rhetoric holds that no one tells us who we are; the fact is that many have penetrated our hearts and minds.

The existential and heartfelt reality of gender today, yesterday but hopefully not tomorrow is that women give away agency, authority and autonomy.

It comes in quiet ways. What I hear my heart say is, "I want this, can't have it, don't have the support, the cash, the time, the will. I have the previous failures of will, insults, sexism, so many reasons that you'd think my heart was filled with others instead of me. Whoops -- it is. My heart is …


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Rolling with the Role3 comment(s)

by Janis Hashe

Two twentysomething women reviewed the movie, Terminator Salvation, in my local Chattanooga paper earlier this summer. "Generally one of three things was happening on screen," wrote one, "something was exploding, a robot was attacking someone, or people were beating each other. Loudly. Very loudly."

The other reviewer commented, "Why would the paper send two young women to review a film that is clearly geared toward men"

I was profoundly disappointed that neither of the reviewers put Terminator Salvation into its real genre: Dickflick.

For years I have campaigned (so far fruitlessly) against the contemptuous phrase "chickflick," primarily …


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The Dickflick Defined1 comment(s)

by Mary Lou Greenberg

In the Winter 1998 issue of On The Issues Magazine, writer Angell Delaney projected a bright future for women's professional basketball and its influence on breaking traditional gender roles in her article, "A Whole New Ball Game: Playing like a girl is no longer an insult. It's a hoop dream millions aspire to."

For an update on where things are today, On the Issues Magazine talked with Kym Hampton, who at the time of the 1998 article, played center for the New York Liberty, one of the original teams in the

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Women Still At the Hoops, But Parity Scores Low2 comment(s)

Spring 2012 Café --Level the Playing Field: Girls, Women and Sports

Winter 2012 Café --Abortion

Fall 2011 Café --Activism

Summer 2011 Café --Women, War and Peace

Spring 2011 Café --The Ecology of Women

Winter 2011 Café --The Conning of the Feminists

Summer 2010 Café --EQUALITY...How much further away?

Spring 2010 Café --The Feminist MInd

Winter 2010 Café -- Passion, Freedon & Women

Fall 2009 Café -- Race, Feminism, Our Future

Summer 2009 Café -- Our Genders, Our Rights

Spring 2009 Café -- Lines in the Sand

Winter 2009 Café -- New Revolutions we Need

Fall 2008 Café -- What is Terror for Women?

Summer 2008 Café -- Works Hard for her Money: Feminists and Prostitutes

Spring 2008 Café -- HIV/AIDS Blowback hits Women Hard