I Wanna Talk about Riot Grrrl Legend Kathleen Hanna!
Kathleen Hanna is many things including the lead singer of Bikini Kill, one of the primary bands associated with the Riot Grrrl movement in the 90s. In addition to the punk rock shows they played, they distributed a lot of zines so folks could take them home and share ideas.
I went to the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum Conference and it was Rad!
October 22nd and 23rd I attended the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum’s 22nd Annual National Issues Conference in Washington, DC. Say that five times fast. In short, it was wildly more awesome than I expected it to be.
In this article I go down the rabbit hole about how much I enjoyed hearing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jamilah Lemiuex, Elizabeth Plank, Nina Turner, Laurel Richie, Tina Tchen, Jana Babatunde-Bey and many more powerful and amazing women speak at this event!
Bridging the Gaps between Feminisms by Being Better Allies to One Another
I have an article up on Everyday Feminism today about working across different kinds of feminisms. A lot of the work I do in my activism is bridging gaps between folks who believe differently and yet all still call themselves feminists. We can work to do things differently if we work on our ally skills, and leave room for rage and compassion.
Check out the article! Building Allyship and Finding Room for Multiple Feminisms.
SUMMER BEACH READS: Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger
And beyond just telling us the who, where, what and how of her life, she’s extremely revealing about her process. Not just some of the deepest parts of her personality (as Kate says in the book, “Life’s better without secrets,”), like her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, but also the internal process of what it was like to be here. She cracks open her heart and shows us the internal realities of growing-up and adulthood prior to transitioning, many ongoing touchstones of what it was like knowing she was “girl,” how she related to it and how she either leaned into it or away from it with facial hair, women, weight and clothing. Her lifelong battle with anorexia, how she learned to starve herself and then how she learned to think she could be pretty while being voluptuous. What it is like as a cutter, the pain and relief and how she used it to get through. Vivid plans for suicide attempts.