The Femme Sharks are busy. I’m collecting some Femme Shark links to make it easy for Leah & Zuleikha, plus since she’s a correspondent for FemmeCast, I try to stay up on all the latest Shark happenings.
THE FEMME SHARKS are a movement founded by LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA* and ZULEIKHA MAHMOOD** to reclaim the power of femmes as fierce, tough, hungry girls who are the leaders and defenders of our communities. In March 2008, we got so pissed off at the stereotypes about femme being stupid, weak, and all about the drama, that we decided to claim being sharks, to reinscribe femme as tough, voracious, and complicated. We also want to make it clear that being femme is not about being Barbie, it’s about how we live in our
bodies, how we make community, and how we access power, as queer and trans women, as people with disabilities, as survivors, as people of color. If you want to know more, read the manifesto, and our zine- all our holes are hungry, hungry for justice and fucking.
Read the Femme Shark Manifesto here.
Join the Facebook group here. The Femme Shark communication is primarily focused through the FB group.
Episode 5 of FemmeCast is all about Femme Sharks. Listen to it. Shark shark shark it up!!
You can get Femme Shark Communique’s #1 & 2 by pay-paling a donation to femmesharks@gmail.com.
*Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a fierce femme QTPOC queen, writer, performer and cultural worker. The author of Consensual Genocide, her writing has been published in Yes Means Yes, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Brazen Femme, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The Word. She writes for Bitch, Colorlines, Hyphen, and Make/Shift magazines, and performs and tours her work throughout North America. In 2006 she quit her day job to co-found of Mangos With Chili, North America’s only annual touring cabaret of queer and trans of color performers. With her SBBFFF (Slutty Brown Best Femme Friend Forever) Zuleikha Mahmood, in 2008 she founded the Femme Sharks, a movement of tough, hot queer femmes of color (with some down white girls) who are the leaders and defenders of our communities. She believes in making her dreams real, loves her ability to rock a tiny miniskirt and five inch platforms all winter, and can frequently be found at the Gaza demo or outside the club with her best friend brown femme and jam fam. After a decade living in Toronto after running away from America at 21, she is a new devotee of the beautiful city of Oakland, CA, where butch tops teach yoga and you can pick up studs at the farmers’ market.
**Zuleikha Mahmood is a queer mixed Afghan American writer who lives in
Oakland. She has work forthcoming in Kohl, an anthology of Afghan
American women’s fiction, and has self-published several zines,
including The Ancestors Were Sharks!/ The Ancestors Hate Us?. In 2008,
she performed at Writers with Drinks, San Francisco in Exile, Queer
Open Mic, Femina Potens, as well as in the National Queer Arts
Festival, and she also toured with Mangos with Chili, a queer and
trans people of color performing arts cabaret. Zuleikha is committed
to documenting the lives of Muslim drop-outs, fuck-ups, sluts, and
queers.