Feminist Press

Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

mandy — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0000

By Meghan Huppuch, Mandy Van Deven, Joanne N. Smith

Difficulties concentrating in school, shame, depression, guilt, fear, low self-esteem, poor body image, and powerlessness are just some of the repercussions that victims of sexual harassment at school experience, according to research conducted by Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). This Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization works to “improve gender and race relations and socioeconomic conditions for [the] most vulnerable youth and communities of color.” Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Megan Huppuch of GGE have collaboratively written Hey, Shorty!, which tells GGE’s story, while providing a model for teens to teach their peers what constitutes sexual harassment and how to prevent it. The book also gives activists, educators, parents and students a hands-on guide to combat sexual harassment and violence in their schools and neighborhoods.

In September 2001, just a few months after GGE had started meeting to play basketball, an 8-year-old girl was raped on her way to school in the area. In response to the victim blaming that GGE founder Joanne Smith heard, she decided to discuss gender stereotypes and discrimination with the girls in the league. This evolved into Gender Respect Workshops, developed and facilitated by Mandy Van Deven with male and female students in the classroom. She discovered that sexual harassment was a major issue in the lives of the students, particularly girls and LGBTQ youth. Soon after, the Sisters in Strength program was born, and today it has become a paid year-long internship for teen girls of color to advocate for the enforcement of sexual harassment policies in New York City public schools through workshops and direct action.

Sisters in Strength’s first task was to raise awareness about the problem in the community, which led to their making Hey... Shorty!, a short film that later won Best Youth Documentary at the Roxbury Film Festival. They screened their film at the Street Harassment Summit, where they shared what they had learned with other members of the community.

A second Sisters in Strength project involved hands-on participatory action research. The teen interns collected information through surveys, focus groups, and slam books, or notebooks with written prompts that students can respond to anonymously. After compiling their data, they concluded that sexual harassment was rampant and normalized. Their research results were presented at GGE's Gender Equality Festival to other community organizations. Under Meghan Huppuch’s leadership, GGE went on to form the Coalition for Gender Equity in Schools with more than twenty other area organizations.

The work of GGE may well have given us the solution to bullying that we have so desperately sought. When we are sexually harassed, we believe we are alone and somehow deserve this treatment. In other words, we internalize our pain and suffer in silence. But from GGE’s research and community action, we see that this pervasive problem lies not within the person being harassed, but with the external forces that perpetuate and enable sexual harassment to exist in our schools and on our streets.

GGE is an empowering initiative for teens, our future leaders, and Hey, Shorty! is an essential resource for parents, teachers and community leaders who want to take action against bullying and sexual harassment in their communities. Chock full of capacity-building activities and ideas, Hey, Shorty! is indispensable for anyone who wants to create an environment where everyone thrives.

Written by: Heather Leighton, April 30th 2011

The Reality Shows

tina — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Karen Finley

Feminist Press

Described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as someone with the “power to disturb,” Karen Finley is a woman with her finger on the pulse of America.

Renowned for her performance art, she is an underground favorite and a feminist idol. Her ability to tie satire, sex, and snappy political commentary into every aspect of her work is a brilliant, modern-day re-vamp of the “personal is political” mantra.

Finley’s most recent book, The Reality Shows, is a collection of transcripts from performances spanning the last decade. “Make Love” is an intimate recollection of the September 11 attacks and “The Passion of Teri Schiavo” is a biting and brilliant essay on America’s almost hysterical infatuation with the “victimized woman.”

Finley’s fictional portrayal of political and pop culture figureheads is challenging and at times, absurd. In “George & Martha” she describes, in great detail, a fictional affair between Martha Stewart and George W. Bush. Later on, the reader ventures inside the mind of Silda Spitzer in the days following the prostitution scandal that forced her husband Eliot to resign as the Governor of New York.

Finley’s plays, complex in nature, daunting, and a hotbed of controversy and debate, are simplistic at their core. Each essay, performance piece, and poem invites the audience to take an introspective look at the passions and insecurities that govern most actions. Finley has an incredible ability to peel back the layers of the world’s most powerful figureheads and reveal the fragility underneath. In a world driven by hysteria, misinformation, bias, and greed, this is a truly refreshing take on the American political landscape.

The Reality Shows is not a book that a large audience will appreciate, but that’s never been Finley’s style. It is a thought-provoking, laugh-producing read that will leave the reader wanting to see more of the world filtered through Finley’s eyes.

Written by: Cheryl Santa Maria, April 11th 2011

Rape New York

beth — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Jana Leo

Feminist Press

Rape New York: Jana Leo’s title seems to defiantly ask its readers to ‘rape’ New York. It also simultaneously turns ‘rape’ into an adjective with which to describe New York City. Fascinated with this title, I pondered the difference a comma could have made. Rape, New York would then turn ‘rape’ into a borough of the city. This wordplay is not insignificant in Leo’s ultimate argument.

Leo begins the book with a straightforward and chilling narration of the day she was "non-violently raped" by a stranger in her Harlem apartment. The rest of the book narrates not only the six years following the assault but also how she came to live in New York City in the first place, and specifically how she came to live in the apartment in which she was raped. Through referencing place in the book's title, Leo locates 'rape' directly and uncomfortably beside New York, thereby exemplifying her major argument: namely, that (literal and metaphorical) location matters. Gender, poverty, and race are factors that matter in determining who rapes whom and who gets raped. These factors also contribute to one’s relationship to space, and rape and space have a close relationship indeed.

Leo considers the many ways place, particularly the places we identify as 'home', is bound up in the act of rape. Leo describes in great detail her feelings and experience of displacements following her rape. As the rape occurred in her home, Leo has nowhere to go to feel safe afterward—the rape took the security of home away from her. She insightfully considers how most rapes occur in, or in close proximity to, women's homes, and beautifully weaves this together with a critique of home as a female/feminine space.

In her systemic analysis of the factors that caused her rape, Leo focuses on the lack of security in her apartment and how and why dangerous places are both created by and uphold capitalism. She accessibly writes about the deep connections between the low-income neighborhoods filled with people of color that disproportionately fill prisons and how these neighborhoods are the ones that become gentrified locations for urban development—spelling out the way capitalism benefits from poverty and creates high crime areas in the interest of devaluing property that can then be 'developed' by the rich. That her rape occurred in a badly kept apartment on a block in Harlem under the control of a grossly wealthy, philanthropist slum landlord is no accident, explains Leo.

Leo understands the difficult line she walks (and I would argue she walks it successfully) between widening the scope of ‘blame’ from the individual who perpetrated her rape to the wider system of capitalist, racist, and misogynist societal causes. She does not deny the rapist's personal agency nor erase the choice a perpetrator makes to commit rape. In one of her most challenging conclusions, Leo writes, “The fact that rapes relate to poverty, especially the perpetrator’s poverty, makes it, to a certain extent, a default effect of capitalist exploitation and not simply the result of mental illness.” Leo fights the urge to simply pathologize the perpetrator by suing her landlord for his negligent role in her rape by failing to providing a safe and secure building in which rape (and other crimes) would less easily occur.

Leo’s powerful voice and clear minded critique make her a fine guide through the messy terrain of overlapping oppressions and sexual violence. While dealing with complicated intersections, and often adopting an academic tone, Rape New York is an accessible and extremely valuable addition to the conversation of violence against women.

Written by: Sam McBean, March 30th 2011

We, Too, Must Love

admin — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:09:00 +0000

By Ann Aldrich (a.k.a. Marijane Meaker)

Feminist Press

We, Too, Must Love is Ann Aldrich’s second book of Kinseyesque reporting on New York City lesbians in the 1950s. At the time of the book’s original publication, in 1958, it was revolutionary. Any public debate or information on lesbians at the time had been strictly in medical and psychological terms. This in-depth look at the lives of lesbians in New York City was both shocking and lifesaving. The most poignant aspect of the book is that the text was written by a lesbian woman. She’s giving her observations and experiences in the lesbian community a powerful voice. As the back of the book declares, “The effect on women was electric.” This new pressing from The Feminist Press includes letters written to the author from lesbians, confused or angry parents, gay men, and friends that are both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

The key element of the book, for me, is that it, first and foremost, declares that lesbians are not a homogenous group. Many different forms of identity, education, social mobility, political commitments, professional aspirations, and sexual desires are portrayed with equal importance. It shows how all of these variants allow smaller communities to develop and, in each of those groups, even smaller cliques and couples emerge.

We, Too, Must Love is a fascinating read and provides a rare look into an era of queer history.

Written by: Jen May, January 30th 2007