Year: 2012

Posted on

The Task Force is Hiring

A search has just been launched to fill two key permanent full time positions here at the Task Force: HR Director & Board Liaison. Will you please forward this link and the attached job descriptions to people you know over the next 3 days? It sounds like applications will begin being reviewed next week. http://www.thetaskforce.org/about_us/employment

The Task Force is an equal opportunity employer. Women, transgender people, and people of color are especially encouraged to apply. The Trans Audit Committee, which I’m a part of, would love to see a pool of gender non-conforming and transgender candidates applying for these jobs. For your information, in addition to our general benefits package for full time employees, The Task Force also offers a health supplement for gender identity-related care.

The functions of these positions are very important to executing the mission of the Task Force. We will be working expeditiously to fill them. Here is a little more about each job:

Human Resources Director –

The Human Resources Director is responsible for all aspects of human resources, including the Task Force’s programs for recruiting, orientation, workplace training, and staff performance evaluation.

Executive office Board Liaison –

The Executive Office Board Liaison serves as the primary staff support to the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Foundation and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund. Continue reading “The Task Force is Hiring”

Posted on

GLBT Partnership: Appleton, WI

We recently went to the 15th anniversary celebration of the local GLBT Partnership here in Appleton. It’s an amazing thing, really: a small group of people decided to create a safe space for LGBTQ teenagers here in the Fox Valley in 1997 because there were no existing support groups or safe gathering places for them.

Imagine.

They still struggle for funding, so if you want to help out queer youth who actually need the help – and are living in a place that isn’t very queer friendly – this is a great way to do it. You have to go to this PayPal account – under SKenevan’s name – and in the memo line indicate that it’s for the GLBT Partnership. Honestly: this group is tiny and very, very necessary. (Feel free to tell them I sent you if you do donate!)

One of the group’s founding members, Shannon Kenevan, who was honored at the celebration, wrote this piece about the group:

The Fox Valley GLBT Partnership is turning 15 years old this fall. For those of you under age 30, you probably don’t remember a time in your life that the Partnership did not exist. It’s always been there to offer weekly support and leadership development to youth ages 14-18 who identify as LGBTQ, as well awareness and educational programs for the rest of our community. Those over age 30 may remember back to their teenage years when there were no groups like the Partnership. Continue reading “GLBT Partnership: Appleton, WI”

Posted on

What Got Eugene Debs Arrested

Actor Mark Ruffalo delivers the speech that sent presidential candidate Eugene Debs to jail for 10 years. He knew they’d arrest him if he gave it, and he gave it anyway. It was 1918. Two years later he would run for president again, but that last time, from jail. He got nearly a million votes, too. He was a Socialist.

He’s one of my heroes. This C-SPAN bit is good, but I prefer books, anyway, and liked Salvatore’s biographySalvatore’s biography, although his own writings are great, too. And, um, might be useful for those who keep using “socialist” to describe Obama’s presidency.

Posted on

Race & Gender & Life Expectancy

So this is shocking news: whites who don’t graduate high school have a life expectancy that’s four years shorter than it used to be. And look at this:

In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

Uneducated white women are now living not even as long as black women with the same lack of education. That is honestly shocking. The life expectancy of uneducated black women has always been horrible, but now even more women are dying at the same rates.

But then there’s this guy:

“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. “It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.”

Um, what? Bad health care, single parenting with little to no safety net (which can cause more stress), substance abuse (especially of prescription drugs and cigarettes), sexual violence… is this really hard to work out?

The one good part, I suppose, is that the percentage of everyone without high school diplomas is down from 22% to 12%.

So much for feminism being redundant in America, eh?

Posted on

Keeping Up with Buck

I’ve always been a fan of Buck Angel’s – because he comes from an industry where genitals couldn’t be more important (porn) and yet he managed to make having a vagina work, and that as a person who is undoubtedly male. He also did the first trans-on-trans porn, with Alannah Starr, waaaaay back in 2005, and taught an entire porn crew how not to stutter when saying “her penis” and “his vagina”.

But the cool thing is that he’s now decided to do sex ed, as because he’s retiring from porn. Do also check out this interview with him by Tristan Taormino. Right now he’s down at Southern Comfort (oh, the irony of the name for a trans man with a famous vagina) which happens this fall weekend annually.

Posted on

Gaga Feminism Blog Tour

J. Jack Halberstam’s new book, Gaga Feminism, is out, and it is a fascinating read; I highly recommend it. For those of you who are turned off my academic writing but like gender theory, give this a try. It’s funny, first of all, but it’s also the kind of book that leads you to think in new ways and to ask new questions. I had a revelatory moment thinking about the inter-generational quality of queer culture, and honestly, that’s only mentioned in passing. This one sends off really useful sparks.

I asked the author to comment the intersection of basic legislative issues that have been in the news – saying “vagina” in the state house, “legitimate rape”, issues of choice/abortion, etc., in the context of gaga feminism, and here is Halberstam’s response:

When did “vagina” suddenly become a fashionable term? First Lisa Brown, a state representative for Michigan, shocked her Republican colleagues when she used the word “vagina” to try to debate anti-choice legislation in her county. When Brown and another colleague were silenced for supposedly turning a polite conversation into one lacking in decorum, Eve Ensler pulled into town to save the town with another long speech on vaginas – The Vagina Monologues!! Meanwhile, Republicans got into their own hot water while debating vaginas – Republican Rep. Todd Akin called upon an apparently vast and deep reservoir of knowledge about the female body and its reproductive potential when, in defense of his indefensible position that rape victims should not have access to abortion, he suggested that in a “legitimate” rape, the female body would mysteriously reject the offensive sperm and protect itself from pregnancy. And then of course, feminist writer Naomi Wolf put out her own take on the suddenly hot topic and provided us with a “biography” of the vagina.

Wow! How to make sense of all these vaginas, some of them with brains (Wolf), some of them with primal prophylactic powers (Akin), some of them with so much to say (Ensler). In my new book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, I do not use the word vagina at all! Instead of pitting bodies with vaginas against bodies with penises, I argue that we are living in a new world where the categories of male and female are rapidly being updated all around us. In this world of sperm banks, IVF, queer families, butch daddies, transgender men and women, heteroflexible women, pretending to be offended by the use of the word “vagina” in a public speech or making insupportable claims about rape and pregnancy are not just quaint and old-fashioned, they signal a deep ignorance about the world we live in and the enormous changes that have taken place within it in the last two decades. So rather than making the vagina talk back to the idiocy of Christian or Republican hypocrisy by giving it a biography or a monologue, it is time to move on from simple, genital genders and start actually engaging the many forms of gendered embodiment that are moving us out of the age of normativity and into a new era of going gaga!

The next stop on the tour is at Queer Fat Femme, who is generally and specifically amazing, so do go check that out.