CWLU Herstory Blog

Alison Kafer will talk about,"Queerness, Disability, and the Foundation for a Better Life" at the University of Illinois at Chicago on September 26.

Summary of the talk:

In the years since 9/11, the philanthropic organization the Foundation for a Better Life has funded a public service campaign touting "community values" and "character development," arguing that these values will result in a "better life" and future for the United States. Representations of disability and illness play a large role in this campaign, with a majority of billboards praising individuals with disabilities for having the strength of character to "overcome" their impairments. Using insights from feminist and queer theory, Alison Kafer offers a crip reading of these billboards, tracing their adherence to a neoliberal politics of sentimentality and their potential subversion by disability activists.

Alison Kafer is an assistant professor of feminist studies at Southwestern University where she teaches courses on feminist and queer theory, activism, and disability studies. She is currently co-editing an anthology with Susan Burch on the intersections between Deaf Studies and Disability Studies for Gallaudet University Press

PLACE

• DHSP Building, 1640 West Roosevelt Road, 1st Floor Auditorium
• Wednesday, September 26th from 2:00 to 3:30 PM
• Refreshments will be provided! The lecture is free and open to the public.

ACCESS:

Adella Ladjevardi of Zohe Film Productions contacted us about a new film that will open in Chicago at the Siskel Center September 14-18.

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is a global conversation among women that spans 17 countries. According to the film's press kit:

Never before in our collective human history have so many women had such freedom to construct a life of their own creation. Yet old structures and realities still haunt us; many women are looking for new role models, but finding them difficult to identify for lack of precedent and because even today women so often remain the invisible, silent class...From South Africa to California, from Sweden to India, the film creates a cross-cultural story about common experiences of modern female life on issues such as love, socialization, marriage, work, childrearing, aging, violence, spirituality, death, politics.

Filmmaker Jennifer Fox has divided the film into three 2 hour episodes. She used an innovative technique she calls "passing the camera" to make the women's conversations more intimate and less artificial. I know I plan to see it. You can visit the film's amazing website at www.flyingconfessions.com.

View the trailer and some brief reviews after the jump.

And please remember…your buck stopping here is a two-for-one deal: you get the books you need AND you support an independent feminist, neighborhood bookstore with people, books, and other treasures to be found inside.

Women and Children First hit a financial rough patch earlier this year, but an outpouring of support from WCF loyalists put them back on track.

If you are a tourist in Chicago,

Anne Enke's new book called Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism is now in production. It is a study of Midwestern feminism to be published by Duke University Press in October 2007. Anne visited us a while back and we had a long discussion about the unique character of the Midwestern women's movement.

In the book, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, she describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape.

They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy.

The cover of Anne's book includes a poster from the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective.

No, this is not a headline from The Onion, we really did get an inquiry from ABC-TV to participate in their primetime show "Wife Swap." They were looking for a feminist moms "who are proud to be wearing the pants and ruling their roost."

Wow.

We had just spent a wonderful evening with feminist media critic Jennifer Pozner the night before. We forwarded the ABC-TV email to her the next day...not surprisingly, she was not surprised.

According to ABC," Each week from across the country, two families with very different values are chosen to take part in a two-week long challenge. The wives from these two families exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms) to discover just what it's like to live another woman's life. "

For the morbidly curious, we have copied their e-mail message: