femme conference!

click the image above for some info. on the national femme conference, which is being held in chi-town this august! i'm definitely going to be there with the femme mafia twin cities and cannot wait to see the amazing keynotes that are lined up, as well as the variety of workshops and performances. also, the femme conference is all-inclusive, so all the hot non-femme queers out there are welcome too...especially all of you single butch/genderqueer/trans boy types! spread the word and let me know if you're going! xo.

pride. le sigh.

i feel like a bad queer today. pride has come and gone and i did *nothing* to celebrate. in fact, i spent my saturday night with my queer-friendly straight friends playing rock band until the wee hours of the morning. i finally got to screech celebrity skin into a microphone with my friends on various back-up instruments. it was super sweet.

i don't know why i can't get behind pride anymore. i could say it's the commercialization of it, which it is somewhat. being in minneapolis during pride, the city that houses the headquarters of target, it's a little bit vomitous to see homos walking around with temporary rainbow tattoos with big target emblems in the middle. but that's not it entirely. my friends all went out last night, had a big gay time, and i'm sure i would've had a blast if i was with them. i just couldn't bring myself to do it though.

maybe it's the way that pride turns into a binge drinking fest, which i have no issue with necessarily except for when it's binge drinking done by a bunch of frat boy dykes with visors that make me want diiiiiieeee. popped collars, polo sport, and the who-has-a-better-6-pack contest amongst them is just so not appealing.

maybe i'm too old for this. but i'm only 26. should i really be this over it? i blame college. four years at a women's college where all we did was drink and buy into this gross fetishistic culture of talking about tits and bacardi 151. i wasn't even butch then or sporty or whatever...i was femme, but not out as femme because there wasn't any kind of space for that there. four years worth of all that grimey, sweaty, woo-hoo "pride" shit that has made me feel sour about it since.

but don't get me wrong either. i've been to prides all over the place, in various cities, since college and have enjoyed myself. nyc pride is fantastic and there's no way to not have fun there, whereas d.c. was just plain ol' underwhelming. i don't know what it is, but even my fonder memories of summers spent partying in the streets with a bunch of queers, covered in rainbows, and drinking margaritas smuggled in in nalgene bottles can't get me amped about it now.

i guess what makes me feel guilty, when i really think about it, is that as a femme, i recognize that i get away with a lot. i walk down the street and what i get noticed for or heckled for is almost never my gender or perceived sexuality. i'm read as a straight girl unless i'm arm-in-arm with some handsome boi type. and so i know that, in the spirit of pride which, lest we forget with all that beer and all of those tits, that what we're celebrating when we do pride is that queers exist and that we can organize and form mass and can be political and powerful. this is, after all, our remembering of stonewall, right? so i feel this obligation as someone who passes as straight 99% of the time to stand-up and state my queerness and my desire and to challenge people's assumptions that yes, queer can come in a body that wears red lipstick and dresses. here i am, come and count me. but even with all that on my mind, i couldn't get myself to the parade, to the various marches (including the trans march, which is way smaller, not commercialized, and struggles with visibility every year), or even to the afterparty at our local queer watering hole.

i want to be excited about pride again or maybe not even "pride" but just queerness in general. i want to take it back from its sponsors and i want it to feel inclusive and fun and political. i want margaritas and middle-of-the-street dance parties, and making out at random, but i want powerful protest signs and memory behind that too. acknowledgment of a history of queers that kind of gets lost somehwere for me in all that is "pride" currently.

did she really do that?

i've been busy spending my days since getting back from vacation endlessly visiting the apple website as i make and remake my new dream computer, as well as working on a conference paper for this big schmoozy national meow meow academic conference i'm leaving for tomorrow. at least they're showing the film "female to femme" by kami chisolm, which i'm totally amped about seeing. i've heard a lot of praise and a few seemingly viable criticisms, so i'll report back more on that later and let you know where i throw my hat on that debate.

in the meantime, i just wanted to post quickly about the absolute hilarity that is life sometimes. my most recent, serious ex (i.e. love-of-my-life, broke-my-hearts-to-bits ex) has resurfaced over the past several weeks. we stopped talking in november and i instituted one of those "don't contact me again, you ruined my life" policies. she didn't really abide by it. tried to contact me in february with no response from me and then sprung up again right before i left on my trip. it's a bad idea for us to talk. ever. i resent her for 100 reasons, she's perpetually unsatisfied with life and whoever she's dating, i'm over feeling like someone who just fills time for her, etc.

anyway, it was a struggle the past few weeks deciding what i wanted to do. had i moved on enough emotionally to let her in a bit or see what she had to say? should i just stay the course and run away faster than i ever had before? i was undecided. somehow, i managed to do both with the end result being a reinstitution of a new and improved "don't contact me again, you ruined my life, you arrogant butch fuck" policy. hopefully she'll stick to it this time, though who can say?

...and then today, because the internet is amazing and because sometimes after a bunch of lemons life actually just hands you lemonade in a tall, chilled glass... [insert dramatic pause]... i found out she got a cat and named him after me.

ok, so not exactly after me. i mean, we don't share the same first and/or last name, but she named him the stupid, cute nickname we used to call one another when we'd get grossed out over how "made for each other" we were. is that fucking precious or what? if this was 6 months ago, 4 months even, i'd feel sad or sentimental or some other nonsense, but at this point, it's just comical. and incredibly just and vindicating. mostly, though, just hilarious. i mean, can you think of a better, more ridiculous foray into an anecdote about dyke drama only to say, "...so she named her cat after me..."?! i challenge you all to post any stories of the like. come on, i need something to keep me laughing while i'm being all studious in a terribly unappealing, midwestern* city!


* this is not to hate on the midwest generally. after all, i do live in the midwest. just the particular city i'm going to is hardly somewhere to be stoked over. so yeah, tell me funny things, no? xo!

updates 'n such

i've been taking it easy on the beach the last few days since finishing finals. i have about 100 things i want to post about, but a slower than slow internet connection on which to do it. so i'm jotting things down and making notes of all the things i need to get down on this blog once i get home. so for now, it's back to the sand and the gulf, but expect to be hit with a barrage of updates in no time at all. don't lose faith in me yet tiny, but faithful and lovely, handful of readers!

xo.

fat/queer anthology project!

here's one of the many side projects i'm working on! i say "side" because anything not part of coursework or studying for prelim exams counts as "side." bleh.

--

Call for Submissions

Working Title: Spilling Over: A Fat, Queer Anthology
Contact: spillingover@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2008

Despite the attention given by queer studies to the materiality of bodies and the cultural and social inscriptions that designate them, still a dearth of both scholarship and literature exists around intersections of gender, sexuality, and fatness. As fat studies begins to emerge as a viable academic location of inquiry, questions surface as to how fat bodies, deemed “excessive” in their trespasses of size and space, create even more complex subject positions when compounded by queer desires. This proposed anthology seeks contributions addressing junctions of “fat” and “queer” in pieces that consider the representations and resistances of non-normative corporeality and also writings considering the theoretical conceptions of these intricate subjectivities. Spilling Over will reflect the notions of excess, boundaries, and containment implied by the labels “fat” and “queer” both singularly and collectively. In the form of scholarly writing and creative non-fiction pieces, essay submissions might consider (but are not limited to):

• theorizing the concept of “excess” as it pertains to fatness and queerness
• fat and queer identities; personal narratives; reclaiming “fat” and “queer”
• notions of (in)visibility, hypervisibility, and passing and/or privilege
• intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, age, and religion
• the economics of the obesity “epidemic” and the diet industry
• fat, queer art and performance; performativity
• pleasure, sex-positivity, eroticizing non-normative bodies
• acceptance movements, political activism, resistance
• the engagement of feminism with fatness
• global, transnational, transcultural constructions of fat, queer bodies and lives
• critical reflections of fatness and queerness in media, literature, film, music, and visual arts
• the rhetoric of fat oppression, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, responding to and/or addressing hate speech

By December 1, 2008, please send your 2,000 – 6,000 word submission, along with your complete contact information and a 50-100 word biography, to spillingover@gmail.com with the subject line of “Spilling Over – Submission.” Submissions must be received in 12 point Times New Roman font and sent in via Word documents (PDFs will not be accepted). Pieces will be reviewed and decisions made by April 2009. Please note that accepted submissions will be approved on a tentative basis, pending editorial board approval once the anthology has secured a publisher.

Questions can be directed to me at spillingover@gmail.com or visit the MySpace page at www.myspace.com/spillingoveranthology

Please distribute widely.

also.

despite colossal arguments that make my blood pressure shoot through the roof, how else am i to write my last final paper of all time when in a week and three days, i'm going to be here:

mmm. sanibel island, fl.
who cares if i'm going with my parents and my 83 yr. old g'ma?
whateva, haters.

excess baggage.

i'm thinking more and more lately about the intersections of fatness and queerness, particularly now in my own day-to-day life, not just academically, and what that means for the spaces i'm comfortable in and those where i'm not. it's interesting how when i'm in public and looked at because of my size, it is absent also of a queer read. because i'm femme and thus usually invisible as queer, the spectacle that my body becomes is only because of the "excessiveness" of my size and not also a reaction to my gender or my sexuality. this, of course, becomes complicated when i am in the presence of people who are visibly queer and takes on another dimension entirely when that person is clearly romantically linked to me. these are moments that i both cherish and fear because the transgressions are actually palpable. my fatness and my queerness, when they're both noticeable, create opportunities for rethinking love, desire, and sex despite size and despite who i'm fucking. these opportunities for conceiving differently, progressively even, of fat queer bodies, though, is also of course, made possible by the fact that i'm white and that i'm seemingly within a normative economic class. so there's potential here for blowing people's minds a bit, but there's also this overwhelming sense of danger that goes beyond queer bashing and the already serious danger of that. because now what must be taken into consideration is not only hatred of queerness, but also of fatness and the feelings of repulsion that inspires in people, let alone when fat sexuality is being made so open.

this is all to say that yesterday, when i was at a may day festival, surrounded by thousands of people and my friend - a brown, non-American, butch, my former lover - attempted to hold my hand as we made our way through cheese curd stands and kids running haywire with pink and purple paper streamers, i froze for a reason. and not because i didn't want her to take my hand because i feared what holding hands would signify in a relationship that is already complicated by our past as people who once loved a little and fucked a lot. i hesitated because of just how queer - because of the "excess" present in my size, our gender, our intimacy, our difference in skins - we were in a space where things seemed safe enough, but how and when do you really know? it was only two seconds worth of deliberation before i folded my fingers up with hers, but it's another example of thinking about this junction between sexuality and size and how it's real world stuff, daily stuff, that constantly reinspires my academic work on all of this.