[-empyre-] a last minute plea for discussion about transfeminism

[dj lotu5]

hi all,

everyone has been so giving this month, its been really amazing and hard
to keep up with!

i wonder if we could go back to Tara's question about transfeminism, and
how people think of this term and if its important to them. The kind of
ethics I discussed earlier that I learned from Ronell and Haraway, I
could call that a Feminist Ethics of Uncertainty, that accounts for our
finitude in our ability to make ethical and political decisions. I
recently read a good article on queer/feminist squats and the tensions
there between queer and feminist peeps, here:

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0508/doucettehuber/en

and i know the queer/feminist divide is long and painful and deep, not
just from reading about sandy stone's experience but also from my own
personal experiences with some second wave feminists...

and i was recently part of a panel artist talk in LA for MFA
Conversations II, where we discussed an art piece by Joanne Mitchell
that chronicles the changes in the book "our bodies, ourselves", which i
found fascinating. but i really feel like the whole MFA Conversations II
show (which is still up and you can see it including my 25 min video
documentation of becoming dragon) engages head on with a lot of the more
recent struggles within feminism and third wave feminism that, say, the
WACK show at the moca in LA conveniently left out by ending with the
years it did. The struggle for inclusion of women of color, transwomen
and sex positivity is a lot of what i know to be third wave feminism.
Yet, while feminism has always been a core part of my approach to
politics and my experience of life, i wonder where it fits without
essentialist definitions of woman. And I know that its a long
discussion, going to back of all of Haraway's writing... But after
cyberfeminism decompiling the notion of woman and after decades of
poststructuralist and deconstructionist challenges to essentialism, I
still here people talking mostly about women when they talk about
feminism. Really my own work even seek to sort of expand the notion of
gender to the point that sandy stone said during one of our talks "i
worry about the notion of gender floating away here". Of course there is
still gender based violence all over the world on a daily basis, and I
struggle to get my students and nieces and sisters to understand the
relevance of feminism even while I question its revelance to our current
/evolving ideas of identity...

out of breath, stopping there...

  m


-- 
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