All blog posts published in June 2009 - Shameless Magazine - your daily dose of fresh feminism for girls and trans youth

All posts published in June 2009

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- Shameless Women
Amanda Mabro: Jazz, Indie-Rock, and Cabaret flare

June 18, 2009 • Desirée O

Every other Thursday I profile a new incredible woman, each from a different walk of life. Different professions, causes, backgrounds, ethnicities, orientations, and anything/everything else!

I’ve been working a lot on my music lately and I’m happy to be able to introduce you to another wonderful performer I’ve met along the way, the amazing Amanda Mabro…

A 29 year old Montrealer with Egyptian, Greek, and Austrian roots, Amanda Mabro is a performer who was encouraged by supportive parents to explore her artistic passions and whims at her own pace. By perfecting a sound “that fuses the smooth and sultry vocal stylings of jazz legends, the raw energy of indie-rock and blues, and the mysterious theatrical flare of German and French Cabaret,” Amanda creates unique and memorable songs that she has included on her second EP Wine Flows.

(more inside…)
Metro Shows Us Some Love

June 18, 2009 • Stacey May Fowles

The lovely Canice Leung gives She’s Shameless some love in today’s edition of Metro:

As a high-schooler, I spewed my emotions into a well-guarded journal. In English class, I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own. (Her theory: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”) I wondered if self-reflection was my own rite of passage — a notion explored in She’s Shameless, an anthology to be released next week by Shameless, a Toronto-based alt-magazine for young women.

The essays are honest, but as co-editors Stacey May Fowles and Megan Griffith-Greene wrote in the book’s introduction, “This is not an after-school special.”

The voices of young women are rarely heard. Adults, often men, are invited on TV to wring their hands about teen-girl crises and asked how to “fix” these problems. This is what makes She’s Shameless remarkable. The essays neither condone nor condemn; some contributors display regret, but their bios tell of eventual successes as “proud feminist mamas,” university graduates, artists.

Canice Leung is a former editor of Ryerson University feminist magazine McClung’s, copy editor at Metro, ardent feminist and loudmouth.

Read the entire review here.
It has arrived!

June 17, 2009 • Stacey May Fowles

She’s Shameless is fresh off the printer and will be across Canada in bookstores shortly. We’d like to take this moment to sincerely thank all of our wonderful contributors who made this book such a fantastic project. We hope you’ll enjoy reading their courageous and exciting contributions as much as we enjoyed working with them! We’d also like to thank the wonderful folks at Tightrope Books for being supportive of the project from day one.

If you’re in Toronto, you can already pick up your very own advance copy from Pages Books and Magazines. (We also encourage you to order the book from your local independent book store.)

And don’t forget the official launch, our first ever Prom/Anti-Prom, next Tuesday at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. We’ll be featuring contributors from the book, alongside some teen writing superstars, in a fun-filled night celebrating all our favourite shameless women and girls!

She’s Shameless / She’s Writing: June 23rd

She’s Shameless launches June 23rd in Toronto at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto!
SHE’S SHAMELESS / SHE’S WRITING

Shameless magazine, This Is Not A Reading Series and Tightrope Books celebrate the launch of She’s Shameless: Women write about growing up, rocking out, and fighting back
Featuring contributions from Zoe Whittall, Emily Pohl-Weary, Julia Serano, Dianah Smith, Shannon Gerard, and many more.

(more inside…)
- Event Listings
- Media Savvy
Young Inspirations launch this Thursday!

June 16, 2009 • Megan Griffith-Greene

There’s a great new project from the amazing women behind the Medina Collective (which we’ve written about here and here) and the Art Gallery of York University: Ladies First. The participants are all girls from Brookview Middle School, and they have been working together to make their own magazine, using writing and visual arts to explore issues of social justice and representation. The magazine launches this Thursday, and it looks like it’s going to be a fantastic event! I hope you’ll join me to help them celebrate. Congratulations, Ladies First!

Here are the full details:

MAGAZINE LAUNCH: YOUNG INSPIRATIONS
Bold, Smart, and Putting Ladies First!
Thursday June 18, 2009, 5-8 pm
Art Gallery of York University

On Thursday June 18, 2009 the Art Gallery of York University and the Medina Collective present the launch of Young Inspirations, an urban arts magazine featuring articles and art work by Ladies First, a group of young women from Brookview Middle School who took part in a collaborative after-school urban arts mentorship program. The magazine launch will also feature an exhibition of recent artwork and a commissioned mural by Ladies First, music by DJ L’Oqenz, and spoken word performances by Rita Nketiah and Keisha Monique Simpson.
(more inside…)
She’s Shameless: E.J. MacBain

June 15, 2009 • Stacey May Fowles

In the weeks leading up to the launch of She’s Shameless: Women write about growing up, rocking out, and fighting back, we’ll be posting sneak peak excerpts from the book.

E.J. MacBain is a writer and editor living in the Northeast. Her nonfiction has previously appeared in Hip Mama magazine. She is the proud feminist mama of a toddler son and a baby daughter.

I’m Still Here
E.J. MacBain

1982: Roller skates with rainbow knee-highs, braided friendship bracelets wet to the skin, blueberry Slurpees all summer from 7-Eleven, John Cougar cassette tapes of “Jack and Diane,” the secret purple-clad, girls-only club, and threats from the older junior high school girls in the public library, who pretend that Crayola markers are boys’ mini-dicks and suck them to show us: This is what you have to do when you get to seventh grade.

My parents’ divorce, my mother’s suddenly-single freak-out, the parties with her divorcée jet set, and her new boyfriends, boyfriends, boyfriends, while I sat with my friends and wondered about the state of their parents’ love (and sex) lives and why the Girl Scout badges never fit, why I never graduated even from Brownies, and why all the boys loved all the girls who didn’t look a thing like me, Kate, Heather, or Eve with her wicked thoughts and her slumber parties that turned to late-night viewings of the porn channel’s Midnight Blue. What would Prince do? Who was Sheila E., and how could she be so sexy and play the drums? Why was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue so titillating, and why did my Dad hide it? Were we the only ones who had to hunt so hard for soft-core porn?
(more inside…)
- Miscellaneous
Sister Suffragette Sing Along!

June 13, 2009 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

I am procrastinating from the home stretch of my thesis and singing along to this karaoke version of Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins! What a great way to send a thesis about feminism into the future!
- Film Reel
Seeing the World in Different Ways…

June 12, 2009 • Michelle Schwartz

Last week, Heather Wood Rudúlph wrote an article for Huffington Post highlighting five reasons we still need feminism. Number four on that list was as follows:

Obsessed, Bride Wars, Bridezillas and everything else that paints women as crazed (in various and sundry ways) to find, keep, and marry a man.

To that, I say “Amen, sister.” I am quite sick of living in a world that offers men movies like The Hangover or the oeuvre of Judd Apatow, where shlubby loser guys get to have all the fun and women exist only as punchlines to the jokes, and offers women… well, very little. Except for, y’know, a chance to fight with each other over said shlubby men.

The white heterosexual male still rules Hollywood and sometimes I think that will never, ever change. Not when I read articles like this one, in which an earnest and talented young screenwriter is told repeatedly by both professors and producers that the world doesn’t want to see a movie starring a woman, or about a woman, or even a movie where two women talk to each other about something other than a man.

To this I say, fine. If Hollywood insists on offering me nothing in the way of suitable entertainment, well, then, I will make my own fun! I have long been a devotee of fanfiction, if only because, as a queer girl, I gotta take representation where I can get it. If Hollywood isn’t going to give me a TV show where the hero is a woman who just happens to enjoy making out with other women, well, I am not going to scoff at any writer who helps to fill that gap. Plus, I’ve always thought there’s something rather subversive about fanfiction, about taking the subtext, or even the text, and seeing it in a radical new way.

And thus, I present, Bride Wars: The Alternative Story, in which, using nothing but film stills, one of the most sexist, misogynist movies of the year is turned into nothing short of a glorious lesbian love story. Don’t you just love it when the two women get married at the end? Everyone say it with me: Awwwwwww.

And they lived happily ever after…

Interested in adding some female oriented fanfiction and subversive subtext to your summer reading list? You’re just in time! Next month is the second annual International Day of Femslash.
Girls Rock, Better Believe

June 12, 2009 • Anna Leventhal

Why should Portland have all the fun? This August Montreal is hosting its first ever Rock Camp For Girls, a five-day camp where girls learn to play an instrument, form a band, and finish up by playing a show for their hysterical, screaming, panty-tossing fans.

From the organizers:

Rock Camp is a space where girls discover and express their talents, and become leaders in creating their own kind of cultural production through music. Female musicians and community members support girls through instrument instruction, tech tutorials, band practice and skill-building workshops.

RCfG is putting on a number of fundraisers over the next while to help finance the camp, one of which is tomorrow night, and features Giselle Numba One, who I posted on long ages ago, Nightwood, Little Scream, and DJ Lynne T of Lesbians on Ecstasy. There’s a word for it: “ladysplosion”. No, wait, I mean “awesome”. And also “not to be missed”.

Key details:
Saturday June 13th
Il Motore, 179 Jean-Talon Ouest
Show starts at 9:30pm
$10

Here’s Giselle Numba One with a little taste of what you might find on Saturday.

For more details on Rock Camp For Girls and related events, check out their site.
- In My Opinion...
Oh third wave, where art thou?

June 11, 2009 • Diandra Jurkic-Walls

I am in the thick of submitting the second draft of my thesis. Over the past few weeks I’ve updated essays I wrote over a year ago, saying “yes” to every edit my thesis-supervisor has suggested, and incorporating newer material because my research just kind of stopped at 2007. One of the articles I’ve come across in my search for newish material, “What is Third Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” by R. Claire Snyder, sums up the major arguments/actions of the third wave.

She also stakes a claim:

“third-wavers do not feel the need to spend a lot of time constructing ambitious theoretical analyses or justifying on what grounds they are acting; they just do it.”

And I wanted to pose a question to the greater Shameless community (if you identify as third-wave or not):

When you act politically or feministy do you know the theoretical argument behind what you’re doing? Or do you just do it?

For me, it’s a mix of both. I like engaging with feminism and being an activist/feminist in my community without thinking about the theories and reasons behind it. Feminism is inside me, this is who I am, what action I take is a direct reflection of this gut-feminism. But, I also love to wrestle with theories about why I participate the way I do and contribute the way I do (hence this crazy thesis about the third wave). I’m always surprised by is how easy it is to put the third wave (and younger feminists) into that non-theory category: as if we’re unable to talk our way out of the box we’re in.
- Bibliothèque
- Body Politics
Freedom to Choose

June 10, 2009 • Anna Leventhal

Reading the story posted below, I was struck by a couple of things. One is that although we hear a lot of reasons as to why women should have the freedom to choose what to do with our bodies, we don’t hear a lot of stories of actual women making that choice. At least not lately; I remember the good old days of Degrassi Junior High (1987), when Erica got pregnant and her decision to have an abortion sparked controversy and discussion - but at least it was out there. Why is it that we seem to have devolved since the 70s and 80s? Many women are afraid to talk about abortion, for fear of reprisal from anti-choice factions, or even just friends and family.

I’ve been living in a shed for the past two weeks at the Anchor Zine Archive and reading a lot of Doris zine by Cindy Crabb, and remembering just what an amazing writer she is. Her stories of her three abortions are frank and frankly empowering:

When I was pregnant I forced myself to look at the diagrams. Memorize the text instead of blocking it out. The eggs are formed in the ovaries, they go down the fallopian tubes… I only read it when no one was around. I locked the door and was jumpy and nervous, scared someone would catch me. I hid it like pornography.

It seemed almost cliche, but learning about my body and the changes going on in it, and knowing that it wasn’t out of control, it made me feel like my body was strong and mine. It was a way I’d never felt before.

The abortion itself wasn’t too bad. I had it done at a feminist health clinic and the women there took care of me the way it should be done. They held up a mirror, and that was the first time I’d seen those parts of me. They explained every touch and every second of the procedure. Now you’ll feel the speculum, this is the local anesthetic, you’ll feel some cramping now as she dilates the os, breathe deep.

(more inside…)