Jeanne Vaccaro

You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive is a collection of graphic work by comic artist and activist Seth Tobocman. The artwork dates back to 1980, when Tobocman and Peter Kuper founded the political comix magazine War World 3 Illustrated, and critical issues of this era are addressed, including Reaganomics, the AIDS pandemic, gentrification struggles in New York City, the occupation of Palestine, and the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive was originally published in 1989 and then again ten years later. Both times it sold out quickly. This most recent acquisition and printing from AK Press is a sign of Tobocman’s work's longevity, and the continued demand for his politically conscious art.

Tobocman is a fixture of New York City’s downtown punk scene and the Lower East Side squatter’s movement. Chances are local readers have seen him in his Lower East Side neighborhood, maybe reading at Bluestockings or ABC No Rio. Tobocman, like his comics, is accessible, present, and engaged in his community. His comics have never been recognized or celebrated by the mainstream art market, which is not surprising considering his critique of bourgeois conformist politics, and Tobocman produces art for the street, not the gallery.

This latest release of You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive gives longtime fans, as well as first-time readers, a chance to enjoy Tobocman’s art and utilize his images (as activists and community organizers often have) to produce political posters, buttons, patches, and graffiti. The direct and utilitarian nature of Tobocman’s work, and of comic art in general, is so appealing because you get an immediate, straightforward, and high impact method of communication and direct action marketing. You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive is a creative, in-your-face resource and a critical tool for resistance.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, April 14th 2010

Diagnosing Difference

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Annalise Ophelian

Floating Ophelia Productions

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is referred to as “the Bible” by the psychologists and psychiatrists who utilize it to diagnosis and treat patients. A project of the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM was first published in 1952 and subsequently revised in 1968, 1980, 1987, 1994, and 2000; the forthcoming 2012 edition is currently in formation. If you’re feeling bored, dear reader, let me cut to the chase and tell you why this all matters.

As feminists well know—hello, hysteria!—a diagnosis of mental disability may simply be an accusation of difference or a punishment for refusing to comply with political, economic, aesthetic, or social demands. Diagnosis is not always, if ever, a neutral process. It is, instead, a process of translating behaviors (such as homosexuality or sexual fetishism) into identities (“deviants” or “perverts”). Paying attention to the historic and political context within which the DSM operates reveals not simply the prevalence of bias, but the fallacy of objectivity in social scientific inquiry.

Diagnosing Difference, directed by queer, clinical psychologist Annalise Ophelian, tackles the politics of diagnosis and the impact of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) on transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. The full-length documentary features interviews with trans-identified mental health professionals, activists, and scholars who speak to the burden of GID. Dylan Scholinski, for example, recounts being forcibly locked up in a mental hospital at age 15 for being “an inappropriate female.”

Public health advocates Willy Wilkinson, Cecilia Chung, and Renata J. Razza discuss the importance of re-educating health care providers with culturally competent and trans-positive information. The GID diagnosis, which is often required before doctors will administer hormones or provide gender reassignment surgery and government agencies will legally change a person’s name or sex on a driver’s license or birth certificate, does not represent the experience of many trans people. The GID criteria demands an individual unambiguously live and present as their “opposite” gender and deny any affiliation with their gender assigned at birth.

However, even the varied identities of transgender, transexual, gender queer, gender variant, and so on testify to the multiplicity of gender expressions beyond simply man or woman. The GID diagnosis reifies gender norms, privatizing gender variance as a “problem” for individuals. As Pauline Park, trans activist and founder of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, often remarks, “I don’t have a Gender Identity Disorder; society does.”

Diagnosing Difference builds an important bridge between mental health professionals and community advocates, and participates in the growing GID-reform movement. The documentary is a vital project for educators, public health advocates, social workers, and doctors, and anyone interested in the gender politics.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, January 1st 2010

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Ayala Fader

Princeton University Press

A “mitzvah” is colloquially translated as “a good deed,” but this Hebrew word actually means “commandment,” and observant Jews believe in 613 “mitzvot.” The commandments structure daily life and religious rituals, such as prayer, dietary habits, and romantic and sexual relationships. When a young woman becomes a Bat Mitzvah she is responsible for practicing and adhering to commandments outlined in the Torah.

Mitzvah Girls is Ayala Fader’s ethnographic study of young Hasidic girls becoming adults in a deeply structured religious community in Brooklyn, New York. There’s been almost no scholarship on this particular demographic, although as an anthropologist Fader understands that women are often responsible for bearing and reproducing culture. By studying children and young adults becoming women, Fader in effect presses the pause button and allows the reader to observe the moment girls become Jewish women.

Fader’s rich ethnographic research takes her into the homes, synagogues, and schools of Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. She is especially interested in the history, structure, and use of Yiddish, and in how linguistics shape and reflect everyday Jewish life. Fader explores words themselves to illustrate how meaning shifts in relationship to religion and gender.

Hasidic Jews are stereotypically right wing, one of the guaranteed Republican voting blocs in New York City, and gender roles are rigidly defined in Hasidic communities. Women are expected to raise large families, keep kosher households, and visit the Mivkah—or ritual bath—after menstruation. Looking into the Hasidic world from the outside, I confess that it’s quite easy to judge, to assume that these women are victims. Mitzvah Girls challenges that assumption, and Fader’s in-depth study foregrounds Hasidic women’s agency. She demonstrates how young women and girls negotiate the secular world, its modern temptations, and even feminism. Mitzvah Girls is an extraordinarily fascinating read.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, December 31st 2009

make/shift: feminisms in motion (Issue 5)

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:04:00 +0000

Edited by Daria Yudacufski, Jessica Hoffmann

I am a magazine junkie, so much so that I look forward to spending time in airport terminals, subway cars, and doctor’s offices just to feed my addiction. My drugs of choice—US Weekly, Elle Décor, and Gourmet—don’t exactly resonate with my daily experience as a feminist, vegetarian writing a philosophy-heavy dissertation about performance art in a cramped Brooklyn apartment. Perhaps it’s this disconnect that I find appealing, as I escape into the worlds of Jon & Kate Plus 8, this season’s must have lawn accessories, and sausage on the grill. Reading make/shift represented an entirely different—if equally seductive—journey, one in which my activist and intellectual life was reflected on the page.

The magazine, published biannually in March and September, is more an academic journal than Bust or Venus but just as clever and far more relevant (to me, at least). make/shift both reports on and seeks to generate culture and action by fostering an expansive feminist dialogue. It features events (El Mundo Zurdo: Gloria Anzaldúa Conference), performers (Good Asian Drivers), and stories (sexual violence within activist scenes; celebrating the other F word—fat; and queer labor politics) that might be deemed uncool or unmarketable in another feminist publication.

Instead of hawking DIY cutesy crap and indie fashion make/shift features a regular column by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (author and editor of Nobody Passes and That’s Revolting) and punk rock activist Nomy Lamm as a Dear Abby. I especially enjoyed the “Letter from the Editors,” in which Daria Yudacufski and Jessica Hoffmann critique the economic growth model of publishing success and articulate alternate forms of sustainability for make/shift. Rather than “building up” the magazine (increasing print run or online presence), the editors are “building out”—reaching across divergent communities to create a heterogeneous dialogue and vision of feminism.

Photo credit: My Ecdysis

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, August 11th 2009

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:27:00 +0000

By Lois Ahrens

PM Press

As activists know all too well, crafting a political message and effectively mobilizing an audience is an elusive task. In The Real Cost Of Prisons, Lois Ahrens and her contributors beautifully stage a difficult dialogue—about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs”—with comics.

Comics are an accessible, popular form of education, and most importantly, addictive, and hence become a subversive way to raise awareness. The Real Cost of Prisons Project has distributed 115,000 comics to the incarcerated, affected families, and social justice organizations free of charge. Comics are just one part of the organization’s mission to end mass incarceration; since Lois Ahrens founded organization in 2000 a coalition of artists, activists, and researchers has produced and distributed educational materials about the costs—material and affective—of the prison industrial complex and it’s devastating impact on family preservation, women’s reproductive rights, rural economies, and much more.

“What does it cost to lock up 2.3 million people each day in the world’s biggest prison system?” ask Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore in the introduction to The Real Cost Of Prisons. In addition to the staggering economic costs (the U.S. spends $60 billion per year on prisons) that could otherwise be directed at health care, public education, and other social services, the human costs are immeasurable.

In the comic “Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children,” illustrated by Susan Willmarth, we learn about the cost of incarceration for women and their children: One out of every 109 women in American is incarcerated, on parole, or on probation. Half of all women in prison are incarcerated more than 100 miles from their families. Seven million children have a parent in prison, on probation, or on parole. Seventy-nine percent of all women in New York State’s prisons are Black or Hispanic.

The Real Cost Of Prisons documents the vital efforts of the movement to end mass incarceration, and is an exceptional resource for all activists seeking creative ways to build and sustain a political movement.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, July 9th 2009

Alice Fantastic

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:04:00 +0000

By Maggie Estep

Akashic Books

“I read faster than I breathe,” panted Maggie Estep. The author furiously delivered her signature sassy staccato while reading recently from her sixth novel, Alice Fantastic, at Inquiring Minds independent bookstore in Saugerties, New York. Estep quickly seduced the audience with her sharp tongue, much the way she first seduced me with her spoken word at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s. As a performance poet Estep was infamous for her feisty feminist anthems like “Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere” and “The Stupid Jerk I’m Obsessed With,” and she brings that same frantic energy and dark humor to her narrative prose.

In Alice Fantastic, we meet the women of the Hunter family. Alice is a 36-year-old professional gambler working at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York. Her life is happening to her, but in a moment of unexpected clarity she decides to take charge and ditch her fungus of a boyfriend, Clayton, who she refers to as “The Big Oaf.” Alice asks her racetrack buddies to “take care of” of Clayton, but when things don’t go as planned she retreats to hippie enclave Woodstock, New York to be with family. Family, in Estep’s complex configuration, is Alice’s younger half-sister Eloise, a toy designer whose boyfriend has just died in an accident, and her mother Kimberly, a recovering addict and on-again, off-again lesbian caring for seventeen rescue dogs. Alice Fantastic is full of over the top, bizarre and impossible drama, plus lots of torturous sex (Alice and Eloise accidentally bed the same man), trips to the dog park, chain smoking, and bisexuality (Kimberly reverts to heterosexuality; Eloise becomes a lesbian). Underneath Estep’s colorful imagination is an emotionally honest portrayal of family, and the ever-fraught relationship between mother and daughter.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, June 28th 2009

Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:35:00 +0000

By Sue-Ellen Case

Palgrave MacMillan

Feminist and Queer Performance is a collection of eleven previously published essays by Sue-Ellen Case, a Professor of Theatre and Critical Studies at UCLA. Exploring topics as diverse as butch-femme aesthetics, cyber-minstrelsy, W.O.W. Café, and performance artists Kate Bornstein, Annie Sprinkle, and Split Britches; Feminist and Queer Performance illustrates the history and breadth of Case’s scholarship and sustained engagement with feminist politics and lesbian cultures. In her introduction Case describes the intellectual and political “climate changes” that influenced her thinking about identity and performance. This personal narrative also functions as a history lesson, tracing the evolution of Case’s writing from 1989-2007—when the essays were originally published in various journals and anthologies—and her emerging interest in self-representation, bodily knowledge, and new technologies.

Case is invested in methodological forms that challenge the “objective” and universalizing voice of history–such as performative language and identificatory speech (“I” statements). She argues for writing practices that disrupt the unmarked, patriarchal voice of research, and embarks on a journey to find a “lesbian voice.” In fact, Case compares writing lesbian theory to hanging out in lesbian bars. In “Making Butch: An Historical Memoir of the 1970s,” she evokes the first-person to produce a campy critique of masculinity. Case foregrounds “everyday” performances like bar culture, clothing, and attitude to theorize lesbian culture and identity, especially butch-femme aesthetics.

The voice of Feminist and Queer Performance is an inviting one–curious, self-reflexive, and hopeful. Case is no doubt committed to bridging the divide between theoretical language and political praxis, and easily mixes anecdote and activism into her scholarship. Although not exactly “jargon” free, Feminist and Queer Performance is accessible to a diverse readership. It’s essential reading for burlesque dancers, radical cheerleaders, drag kings, and anyone else interested in the performance of feminist and queer politics.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, April 30th 2009