Elevate Difference

Interviews

Written on the Body of The Erasable Woman

When did you start writing poetry? At a very young age—probably when I started writing with chalk on my bathroom door or adding my own two cents to my parents’ biology textbooks they tell me I always furiously flipped through. I experienced a lot of racism, (hetero)sexism, and different kinds of regulation at a young age too, and I think what that did was make me really quiet and closed up in a lot of ways.

Women's History Has Many Points of View

With the question "who gets to write history?" at its center, RE/VISIONIST is an online publication started by a handful of graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College who study women's history. Many historians push to catalog the discipline of history as a pure science, but this group is instead interested in critiquing the supposed objectivity of their discipline, and giving credence to subjective perspectives. Even more, the editors aim to analyze history through the lens of multiple feminisms.

Living and Loving in Dos Lenguas

Janet Romero-Leiva is a queer, feminist, Latina visual artist and writer whose work explores immigrant displacement, denied aboriginality, queer and of colour existence, living and loving in dos lenguas, and the continuous intersection of identities that shape who she is and how she moves in this world. Janet immigrated to Canada at the age of seven and has since been trying to find her footing between America of the north and America of the south.

Nirvana of Pussy: A Conversation with Tucker Max

All I wanted to know was if Tucker Max was for real. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, he is. Explaining that if he has learned anything over the past five years, it is that people are fucking stupid, clearly the infamous Tucker Max was extraordinarily candid when we talked about his new book Assholes Finish First.

The Necessity of Climate Change: Women of Color Speak from the Ivory Tower

Morgane Richardson graduated from Middlebury College in 2008 feeling that American colleges recruit women of color, but have no idea how to address the issues they face once they are enrolled. As a result, many of these women suffer depression, anxiety, and isolation in silence. Morgane decided to do something about this situation, and less than two years later, she has collected submissions from women all over the country who have had to navigate issues of race, class, and gender at elite, predominately white college campuses. With these stories, Morgane created Refuse the Silence.

Monica Droga: Indie Musician, Bollywood Star, Feminist

Gone are the times when people would migrate only to the West to find better lives. Now we witness a reversal of sorts, with NRIs going back to India to seek the same opportunities that their parents or grandparents had left India to find. Monica Dogra is one such NRI who is rocking the independent music scene in the homeland.

Hide Your Face(book) in Shame: Facebook and The Censorship of Female Sexuality

A lot can happen in ten minutes. You can make your morning commute to work. You can do twenty sit-ups. You can have an orgasm. If you are business owners Molly Adler and Matie Fricker of Albuquerque's Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center, ten minutes can be all the time you need to inform people about the hazards of labiaplasty.

Exposing One of the Greatest Intrusions of Religion into American Politics

Some interviews are more timely than others. In this one, producer and filmmaker Reed Cowan explained his underlying motivation for writing, directing, and producing the critically acclaimed documentary film 8: The Mormon Proposition.

Maria's Story: Twenty Years Later

Earlier this month, I saw a twentieth anniversary screening of Maria's Story: A Documentary Portrait Of Love And Survival In El Salvador's Civil War at The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Before attending, I had an abbreviated understanding El Salvadorian politics, and the subject of the documentary, Maria Serrano.

Voice of an Angel: Talking to Jill Andrews

When I first spoke to singer Jill Andrews, I was quite shocked when she first answered the phone. Her voice was low, slow, and groggy, which wasn’t what I was expecting. You see, Andrews quite literally has the voice of an angel. As it turned out, I was waking her up from a peaceful nap with her infant son, Nico. Nico was born around the time that Andrews’ critically acclaimed, Tennessee-based band, The Everybodyfields, broke up.

A Day in LA: A Conversation with Kevin McCollister

Kevin McCollister is a serious and shy man who spends his days working in a Los Angeles office and his nights walking around the city’s less stylish neighborhoods snapping photographs of churches, taco stands, mariachis, the homeless, and LA landmarks like the Fourth Street Bridge, Union Station, and Olvera Street.

Ariel Gore on Women, Happiness, and Self-Determination

Ariel Gore’s new book Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness asks the question, “Can women be smart, empowered, and happy?” Here, Ariel Gore offers her ideas on happiness and advice for women seeking change in their lives. **In order to write this book, you kept a journal where you tracked the things in your life that made you happy, and you asked a lot of other women to do the same.

Resistance Through Writing: An Interview with Victoria Law

Feminist Review recently interviewed writer and activist Victoria Law on her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.

Starstruck

Over the past twenty years, director Jane Campion has created some of the most thrilling depictions of femininity on screen. From the Academy Award-winning The Piano to the dirty yet pretty _In the Cut_, Campion's sensually earthy films depict worlds seen through the eyes of women.

Personal Politics

The Feminism 101 dictum “the personal is political” has been writ large across third wave feminist founder Rebecca Walker’s work since she published her first book, the 1995 anthology To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism—her generation’s response to second wave feminism. Since then, she has written memoirs and edited anthologies that explore her own biracial identity (_[Black, White, and Jewish: Au

Subversive Art Star

Artist Jerilea Zempel turns brutal machines of war into “warm and fuzzy” sculptures through her subversive crochet projects. She achieved brief Internet stardom via The Colbert Report when Stephen Colbert called her “a dangerous returning American”—aka an artist who crochets covers for SUVs and tanks—after she was detained by U.S.

Doppelgänger Alert!

Coming onto the hipster scene in Germany just one year ago, Missy Magazine looks at pop culture, fashion, art, sex, and music through a feminist lens. Missy is being called the "little sister" of Emma, the country's leading feminist magazine known for its serious journalism (think Ms.), but Missy doesn't need anyone to watch over her; she's standing on her own two feet, out of the shadow of her so-called older sibling.

Speaking Truth to Power

“I’m no longer scared to hear people’s truths, and that has been incredibly liberating,” says feminist writer, filmmaker, and activist Jennifer Baumgardner. Truth-telling has been at the heart of Baumgardner’s work since she left Ms. magazine in the late-90s to become a prominent third wave feminist leader.

Talking Funny With Jennie McNulty

Jennie McNulty is a stand-up comedian and professional football player who can be seen every Monday hosting LOGO’s "Walking Funny with Jennie McNulty," on which she interviews female comedians and sports personalities while taking them on a power walk. She recently chatted (over the phone, sitting down) with Elevate Difference about how laughter and exercise are especially important in these tough economic times. How did you decide to become a stand-up comedian? I had gone to school and got a degree in psychology.

Live Through This

In the late nineties, playwright, singer-songwriter, and spoken word artist Sabrina Chapadjiev was an impassioned student playwright in college when she experienced an intensely creative period that put her on the brink of self-destruction. She had recently learned that a young, fierce playwright she had long admired, Sarah Kane, had committed suicide, and she was worried.

Feminist Media Reconsidered

Some of the most incisive feminist analysis today is being published in the groundbreaking make/shift magazine. Started by three activists – Jessica Hoffmann, Daria Yudacufski, and Stephanie Abraham, who first worked together as founders and editors of the feminist zine LOUDmouth – make/shift is run by an editorial/publishing collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives.

Reclaiming Feminist Motherhood

In 2003, _The New York Times Magazine _published “The Opt-Out Revolution,” by Lisa Belkin, a now nearly infamous contribution to the never-ending “mommy wars” collection of work. The cover story asserted that the nation’s most educated career women were “opting out” of their professional lives to become full-time stay-at-home moms.

Galaxy is Out of This World!

Galaxy is a trio from Toronto, a land that seems to be catapulting all its potential stars across the upstate New York touring void and smack dab into our city. Emma McKenna, Maya Postepski and Katie Stelmanis bang out the brooding, plangent guitar rhythms and alternately pretty and snarling vocals of a young Sleater-Kinney, and in the painful absence of that band, S-K fans may be eager to turn to the raw rhythms of another female band with similar talent and political conviction.
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