Genderlicious

Some music for your weekend: I was thrilled to recently learn about Jhameel, a pop-orchestra musician who covers T Pain songs and whose lyrics (according to his bio) "revolve around such topics as Middle Eastern womanhood, homosexuality, and urban prostitution, giving voice to the silent margins of society."

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is next week. Having not grown up in North America and having taken a fairly circuitous route to feminism, the first time I ever heard of Michfest was about seven years ago in the Inga Muscio book Cunt, where Muscio talks about what a transformative experience it was to be completely surrounded by only women for a week. Then, a few years later, while I was attending a writing retreat for women of colour at the Leaven Centre in Michigan, one of the women began to talk about Michfest, and their womyn-born-womyn policy (WBW), i.e. the fact that only cisgendered women could attend Michfest. I was stunned.

Yesterday Lisa from A Woman's Ecdysis sent me a call for submissions to an anthology she is editing, called Dear Sister: Letters to Survivors of Sexual Violence.

Lisa wrote:

I encourage you all to submit and forward this call widely. As we know the prevailing silence around sexual assault, it is my hope and request that you take a moment to contribute to this outreach and forward this to any and all allies and survivors of sexual violence. If you know of any coalitions, agencies, shelters, or organizations, feel more than free to offer this to them.

This is a long time vision of mine to build something for survivors and, I hope, this is just the beginning of community healing and radical memoir.