Gender & Sexuality

I ignored the Slutwalk in Toronto. It only caught my attention when my friends and fellow activists started debating the nature of the walk. The critiques began immediately - that this was yet another white feminist project excluding women of color. There were articles written about the leadership's colorblindness and charges that the only reason the media was reporting it was because scantly-clad white women were involved. My initial thoughts were to sympathize with demonstrators while questioning the leadership and the tactic of reclaiming of the word “slut.” In the back of my mind, I considered how the word "slut" elicits natural solidarity among women.  Every woman knows the intention of being called a “whore” and a “slut,” and many experience it one time or another. 

After hearing the debates for days, I checked my Facebook and saw that there was a La Marcha de las Putas (“March of the whores”) in Mexico against sexual harassment that was inspired by the Slutwalk in Toronto. The rally-goers protested how the term “whore” is used against women when they are assertive and challenge male authority. The message of the march confronts the double-edged sword used against women (sometimes called the Madonna/whore complex, or Marianismo): women are thought to be morally superior to men and at the same time considered over-sexed and untrustworthy. It was La Marcha de las Putas that really pierced me and made me pay attention.

Like any radical, progressive or socialist, I celebrated New York State's (NYS) legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward full legal equality for LGBT people. All the while, remembering that the Federal Defense of Marriage Act excludes married gays and lesbians from the federal benefits that come with marriage.

However, the way in which same-sex marriage legislation was won in NYS leads me to rethink my political assessment of the issue. For a number of years, I have disagreed with many on the left who argued that while we should support the right of same-sex couples to marry, the focus of the mainstream LGBT organization on marriage was an adaptation to hetero-normativity and tended to ignore the substantive social and economic oppression of queers. I believed that this attitude might lead radicals to abstain from mass, socially disruptive struggles for marriage equality as a democratic-civil right.

Despite what some on the organized left are arguing, the NYS same-sex marriage legislation was not the result of mass mobilizations and struggles. There have been no mass demonstrations, sit-ins at County Clerks offices or even dissident local officials officiating at same-sex marriages in defiance of NYS law. Instead, mainstream LGBT organizations in NYS engaged in a tepid lobbying and TV/radio ad campaign.

I don't know whether to call it a rash or not, but the recent reporting of the suicides of young gay men should certainly raise alarm bells. I would be interested to know if this was a cluster or just an average that is finding the light of day because of the higher profile of some of these tragedies. In any case, it stands in stark contrast to the popular version that official Hollywood, the mainstream Gay movement and the current administration currently pedal where gays are widely accepted and on their way (if not in this election cycle, the next) to full equality.

This year, Hampshire College’s annual reproductive justice conference --held from April 9 to 11-- seemed to come at a ripe moment. Just two weeks earlier, President Obama had signed an executive order affirming that the new health insurance exchanges would have to conform to the existing rule prohibiting federal funding from being used for abortion. Feminists -- from those who had advocated compromise to others who were continuing to fight for single payer -- were debating the worth of the healthcare reform bill.

In the opening plenary, Marlene Fried, Director of Hampshire’s Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program, which hosted the conference, called for activists to “demand that President Obama rescind the executive order…[and to] demand that we get a Justice [to replace Supreme Court Justice Stevens] who stands for justice,” but for the most part Obama’s policies and the right in the US figured far less prominently than they might have.

Instead, the conference focused broadly on the ongoing struggles that simultaneously confront intersecting oppressions, such as better treatment for women prisoners, health justice for immigrant communities and reproductive self-determination for teenagers.

In these days of incessant scare mongering around 'the obesity epidemic', I have been wanting to write about how I experience fat activism.

The cold-blooded murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller on May 31st sent shockwaves across the United States.

The California Supreme Court decided to uphold Proposition 8 as a legal amendment to the s

The controversy around Barak Obama's unfortunate selection of Rick Warren for the inaugural invocation has focused primarily on his public gay bashing and support for California's Proposition 8, an

There are protests in dozens of cities across the United States against the California state Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage.