The Voices of Femspec

CFP: “Kick *ss” Moms: Mothering and Reproduction in SF

2011-11-01T03:37:00.000-07:00

Deadline: Dec. 15 2011

Femspec is an interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to sf, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres. We have been in print since 1999 and boast of an advisory board that includes Suzie Charnas, Pamela Sargeant, and Samuel Delany. We are currently seeking submissions for a special issue or themed section dedicated to women who balance the worlds of adventurer and caregiver, with a focus on mothering and reproduction in sf.

Most female characters in sf, fantasy, and other supernatural genres do not have children. Those who do are often relegated to a peripheral role until the children are grown. However, characters who balance raising a child and saving the world can be fascinating. Why aren’t there more of them? We are interested in works that explore these issues, as well as writings about mothers and parents who have attempted to rearrange childrearing through creation of intentional community and work about the reconstruction of the breeding process socially in various genres. We are also looking for works that address the intersection of mothering and adventuring – including the adventure of construction of a new society freeing women from reproduction according to traditional norms.

We are hoping to find works which look beyond the stereotype of the mom who will protect her children to the death and investigate mothering at multiple levels including the creation of utopian and dystopian societies in which mothering is arranged differently. We are also interested in papers about teaching any of these works that experiment with reproduction and treatment of reproduction and mothering in early sf.

We would welcome works from the following genres, which address these issues:

Critical papers
Fiction
Non-fiction
Poetry
Book Reviews
Art Work

Please submit two copies of your piece to:

Valerie Guyant
625 Hibbard Hall
English Department
U of Wisconsin Eau Claire
Eau Claire WI 54701

or guyantvl@uwec.edu

Since Femspec is double anonymously peer reviewed, submissions must exclude any indication of your name. Along with your submission, include a separate sheet with:

The title and genre of your piece
Your name
Address
Email Address
Phone number
A two sentence abstract

If your work passes the first round, you will be asked for an electronic submission. All submissions should conform to current MLA guidelines, which can be found online at http://www.mla.org.

Any submission that does not arrive with sufficient copies will not be sent through the review process. Please note that only subscribers may submit to Femspec. To subscribe, please visit our website at http://www.femspec.org. Subscription must be in hand in order for the submission to be reviewed, and it must be maintained throughout the submission, review, and publication process.

If you have any questions, please visit our website or contact femspec@aol.com.

All copyrights will be maintained by Femspec.

The cover artist will receive two free copies of the issue.

CFP: Speculative Dimensions of Divination

2011-10-31T20:14:00.000-07:00

Deadline: Feb. 15 2012

Femspec (a peer reviewed journal dedicated to critical and creative works that challenge gender through speculative means in a variety of genres) is seeking submissions on speculative aspects of divination through any means including Tarot – particularly representations of Tarot and other readings in film, speculative literature, art, poetry, and popular culture.

Submissions that focus on the divination reading process and the spiritual medium reader using whatever tools at hand are particularly welcome and may include:

critical analysis as well as short stories, poetry, and excerpts from longer works
personal accounts of experiences working as a reader
memoirs and autobiographical accounts of spiritual and divination readers
scholarly papers about fiction, cultural products or ethnographies
participant observation and commentaries on representations of the spiritual reading in any aspect of popular culture, including evolution of contemporary decks in the women's spirituality movement, the practice ofpalmists or phone psychics, art, film, the phenomenon of internet readers, Tarot reading shops, booths on boardwalks or at carnivals and festivals such as Renaissance Fairs.

Papers collected will be reviewed individually or as a special section or special issue of the journal, depending on the volume received and on what is timely for publication. The journal is double anonymously peer reviewed. All copyrights will be maintained by Femspec. All submitters must have active subscriptions throughout the submission, review, and publication process. The cover artist will receive two free copies of the issue.

MLA format required. See the Femspec website (femspec.org) for paper submission format. For more information, contact femspec@aol.com.

CFP: Women, Myth, and Art (Special Issue)

2011-10-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

Deadline: 15 March 2012

Femspec, an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, announces a call for material on women, myth, and art.

Do you use myth in your creative writing in any genre, or art? Do you write about women artists and writers who do so? Do you critique or contribute to the growing body of feminist myth scholarship exploring what the ancient mythic archetypes such as these can contribute to women in the modern world?

Who made those images? What is the relationship between powerful goddess archetypes and the lives of women in the cultures that produced and worshipped them?

We are looking for publishable critical and creative material that explores women’s reclamation of myth from our own and other cultures, plus the creation and use of new myth.

See femspec.org for submission procedures. All submitters must subscribe and keep their subscriptions current throughout the submission, review and publication process.
The issue will contain an exclusive interview with Judy Grahn.

We also seek reviews of films, books, and any media including jewelry, popular culture, television shows, and music using myth to challenge the gender stereotypes of today.

All articles must be in MLA style. Authors are responsible for style conversion and copyediting and proofing accepted work. We are a peer-reviewed cross-over journal in numerous data bases and have been in existence for over ten years.

The Best of the Second Five Years

2011-06-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

This contest, which honors submissions to Femspec, is conducted every five years. We had two celebrations already, including one party at PCA in San Antonio which was attended by the two SF/F Area Chairs, two award winners, the Editor in Chief, two prospective interns who had just been interviewed and successfully came onboard, participants and audience members of Batya's Tarot panel, a mythologist with a book she had asked us to review, and various attendees walking by or who had noticed us in the program. The second was held at WisCon, a regular Sunday night party from 9 to 2 am with refreshments from Willie's, and readings aloud from prior issues especially most of the creative writing in the award-winning 6.1, of African America Women's Speculative Works. We will have our third event, a wine and cheese, in the book exhibit hall at NWSA in Atlanta, so come by! We will be the ones with balloons and party hats....

Judges: Annis Pratt, Janice Bogstad, Florence Howe, Gloria Orenstein, Laurel Lampella, Philipa Kafka, Rick Collier, and Robert Von Der Osten.

Nominees for fiction:
1: 7.1: Debra Schleef, "From the Archives of Drs. Pacek and Arriola"
2: 8.1/2: Fina Wisker, "New Blood"
3: 8.1/2: K.A. Laity, "Eating the Dream"
4: 9.2: Gina Wisker, "Recruitment"
5: 10.1: Finesia Fideli "The Resurrection of Lazarus"

And the winners are:
First Place: K.A. Laity, "Eating the Dream"
Second Place: Gina Wisker, "Recruitment"
Third Place: Debra Schleef, "From the Archives of Drs. Placek and Arriola"
Fourth Place Tie: Gina Wisker, "New Blood," And Finesia Fideli, "The Resurrection of Lazarus"

Nominees for criticism:
1: 10.2: Ritch Calvin, "'This Shapeless Book': Reception in Joana Russ's The Female Man"
2: 8.1: Eric M. Drown, "Business Girls and Beset Men in Pulp Science Fiction and Science Fiction Fandom"
3: 6.2: C.S'Thembile West, "The Competing Demands of Community Survival and Self-Preservation in Octavia Butler's Kindred"
4 : 9.2: Cristy Dwyer, "Queen Lili'uokalani's Imprisonment Quilt: Indomitable Spirits in Protest Cloth"
5: 10.1: Rebekah Sheldon. "Reproductive Futurism and Feminist Rhetoric: Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To. . . "
6: 6.2: J. Andrew Deman. "Taking Out the Trash: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and the Feminist Voice in American SF"
7: 7.1: R.C. Dorozario, "The Consequences of Disney Anthropomorphism"
8: 7.1: Debra Bonita Shaw, "Sex and the Single Starship Captain: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Star Trek: Voyager"

And the winners are:
First Place: Debra Bonita Shaw, "Sex and the Single Starship Captain: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Star Trek: Voyager"
Second Place: R.C. Dorozario, "The Consequences of Disney Anthropomorphism"
Third Place: C.S'Thembile West, "The Competing Demands of Community Survival and Self-Preservation in Octavia Butler's Kindred"
Fourth Place Tie: Cristy Dwyer, "Queen Lili'uokalani's Imprisonment Quilt: Indomitable Spirits in Protest Cloth"; Rebekah Sheldon. "Reproductive Futurism and Feminist Rhetoric: Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To. . . "; Eric M. Drown, "business Girls and Beset Men in Pulp Science Fiction and Science Fiction Fandom"
Honorable Mention: Ritch Calvin, "'This Shapeless Book': Reception in Joana Russ's The Female Man"

Nominees and winners for memoirs:
1: 8.1/2: Jane Davis, "The Value of Stupidity: Negative Values in Academia"
2: 8.1/2: Batya Weinbaum, "Memoirs of an Academic Career"
3: 8.1/2: Tina Andres, "Growing Thick Skin"

Poetry:
First place: Susan McLean, "Siren," 7.1, 2006.
Second place: Phebe Beiser, "Celebrating Holi," 10.1, 2009.
Third place: Glennis Redmond, "Scripted Hope," 7.1, 2006

Art: Cover Nominations:
1: 10.2: Kartika Affandi, Vinity or Aragon, 2006
2: 9.1: Helen Klebassadel, "Regeneration"
3: 7.1: Menoukha Case, "Ascent: Yes!"
4: 7.2: Jenna Weston, "The Grain Goddess"
5: 6.2: Diane B. Lekovic, "Burning City"

And the winners are:
First place: Helen Klebasadel, Regeneration; created 1999
Second place: Kartika Affandi, Vinity or Aragon, created 2006
Third place: Jenna Weston, The Grain Goddess, created 2001

Best special issue or themed section:
6.1: "Speculative Black Women: Magic, Fantasy and the Supernatural," Ed. Gwendolyn Pough and Yolanda Hood.

Reviews:
First: "Having a Good Cry by Robyn Warhol," Reviewed by Erin Smith, 6.2
Second: "Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, eds. Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery," Reviewed by Tanya Cochran, 6.2
Third: "The Rat Laughs by Nava Semel," Reviewed by Lank Ravin, 9.1

Other short-listed reviews:
"Demeter and Persephone: Lessons from a Myth by Tamara Agha-Jaffar," Reviewed by Simone Roberts, 6.2
"Women Write Pulp (Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place, Faith Baldwin, Skyscraper, Valerie Taylor, The Girls in 3-B, from the Series, Femmes Fatales)," Reviewed by Erin Smith 6.1
"Crafting the Witch: Engendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England by Heidi Breuer," Reviewed by Emily Auger, 10.2
"An Introduction to Western Esotericism by Nadya Q. Chishty-Mujahid," Reviewed by Emily Auger, 10.2
"Dearest Anne by Juduth Katzier," Reviewed by Lani Ravin, 9.1

We thank everyone involved. Look forward to a publication of The Best of Femspec: The First Ten Years, a forthcoming anthology of Femspec Books, and to further contests.

Calls for papers and special issues

2011-06-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

We have calls for papers currently operating for Divination as Speculative Literature (previously Tarot in Culture but modified to be more culturally inclusive); Motherhood in SF (formerly Kick Ass Mothers in SF but this got no submissions so we expanded); and Myth, Women and Art.

If you are interested in any of these please scroll through the archives or email us at femspec@aol.com.

Calls for papers when developed with an individual usually continue even if the individual working on the issue or themed section has moved on for some reason or decided not to complete the project. As this happens often due to discovery of the workload, illness, job loss, break-ups, needing to move or to defend a disseration, or a tenure struggle, over the years we have decided to pick up on and continue many special issues so as not to be drained of our resources going into the issues that otherwise would have been advertised by us and fizzled out. We will continue to do this to the best of our abilities, but since special issues notoriously take more time and energy than general queues, we are also not committed to coninuing all special issues if none of the edtors is particularly interested in doing the work.

Having said that, one of our interns who since moved on developed a call for a special issue about Halloween and related holidays which was circulated.So if anyone wants to come forward to pick up on that, since we are currently letting that one go, please let us know.

The two special issues edited by others are now Paula Gunn Allen, in its second stage of review but awaiting complete subscription payment, and Elisabeth Vonarburg in its first stage of reviw and all paid up. At this point, either of these could be issue 11.2 depending on receipt of completely revised manuscripts and funding. Or, as has happened in the past, if the PGA special issue is not completely subscribed and completed to our satisfaction we may pursue the ability to use sections of it as part of a general queue.

We are also interested in doing a Joanna Russ Tribute if anyone wants to coordinate it. Currently interviews with board members and others are planned.

We appeciate your respect for our scarce time and energy and any interest in keeping this fantastic though fragile journal afloat...which miraculously has continued to occur for a number of years.

Anonymous peer review process: read if you are editing for us

2011-06-05T15:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.publicationethics.org/

Above is the link that is mandatory for all new editors and special issue or themed sections editors to read.

In the past it has occurred that special issue editors do not understand the importance of anonymous peer review, or the importance of removing themselves from the review procss if there is a conflct of interest in expressed opinion.

Femspec prizes itself on being a peer reviewed journal as this helps with legitimacy for those in academe getting tenured.

Even if you are a specialist in the field editing a special issue for us or with us you must peer review, rather than review yourself knowing the names of the submitters, in order toprotect the standards of the journal.

Thnk you very much.

WisCon and other recent adventures

2011-06-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

Femspec offered its products for sale at a table at WisCon Memorial Day weekend, and made many new connections with future people interested in working on the journal and submitting materials for future issues such as women, myth and art, motherhood in sf, and divination.

We also had our awards party and celebration of the Best of Femspec's Second Five Years, on Sunday night. From 9 pm til 2 am the next morning, we read aloud from previous Femspecs with whomever came in, thus publicizing our winners as well as other authors.

All were amazed at the high quality of work we have been publishing, particular the fiction. Gina Wisker's "Recruitment" was a winner at about 1 am. We also read aloud most of the creative writing in the winning Special Issue, 6.2, African American Women's Speculative Works. By the next day, we had sold out of the entire issue.

Another awards party was also organized at the Popular Culture Association in San Antonio, at which two of the winners were present to behonored.

Look for us in the Exhibit Hall at National Women's Studies in Atlanta, in Nov., where we will have our final and third awards party for the second five years winners.

Good news--although we had decided to publish The Best of Femspec: Creative Writing from the First Ten Years ourselves, and launch it at the next PCA, the editor of Aqueduct Press said she would also like to work on it. So if anyone wants to help get it together, let me know.

I only went to two sessions, besides the one where I read from my novel. One was a Remembering Joanna Russ, at which I recruited contributors to the Joanna Russ Memorial Tribute. Still open...

And another was one on reproductive justice, which left me open to doing a special issue on the topic if anyone is interested.

Happy summer,

Batya

Available Positions in Femspec

2011-04-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

Femspec is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to challenging gender through science fiction, magical realism, myth, the supernatural, and other speculative works. Currently, we are looking for people to fill a variety of positions, which are listed below. All positions require three years of volunteer work as well as logging hours and tasks and participating in femspeceditorial wiki and SKYPES on a regular basis. All require and assume current subscriptions to the journal, professional demeanor, consistent communication, ability to take direction, responsible follow-through, love of the subject matter, and embracing our vision. This may lead to recommendations or future gainful employment.

If interested, send bio, vita, letter of interest, and two references to femspec@aol.com. If you are interested in more than one position, please indicate in separate paragraphs your suitability for each in your letter of interest. All applicants for positions must be current subscribers. (We have a special circumstances, household companion, retiree, differently abled, underemployed, unemployed, and student rate of $30. This is not currently posted on our website, www.femspec.org.) Interviews will be conducted through telephone or SKYPE.

Accountant: Someone to help us keep and prepare sound books.

Kickstart Campaign Project Manager: Kickstart has approved a campaign to raise money to print an anthology; the campaign project manager will make a video, explain the process and what feminist sf is on their webpage, make post cards, and set up the links.

Web Person: Updates website as each issue is released – which involves posting the cover, table of contents, abstracts, and showcasing any special features – and makes any changes requested by the editorial board, the editor, or direct supervisor.

Set-up Person: Puts each issue (two a year, between 80 and 280 pages) into the correct format to send to the printer. Sends material back to editor and proofreaders. Makes input into final document to send to printer. Responsible for maintaining electronic archive. Sometimes resizes graphics, designs covers, and works with advertisers to get acceptable files for use. Work may expand as we continue to produce anthologies and books.

Advertising Manager: Solicits and receives exchange ads from other publications such as scholarly journals or feminist media. Keeps a file of all the participating advertisers. Develops new ads on a regular basis and sends them to each publication in the format requested.

Arts Editor: Solicits art in the speculative vein and coordinates review of submissions of articles and cover art.

Drama Editor: Solicits drama submissions in the speculative vein, responsible for reviewing submitted materials, and encourages coverage of drama productions or festivals.

Contract Manager: Submits contracts to accepted authors, archives signed copies, amends contract language as necessary, and consults re-issues.

Manuscript Review Editor: Circulates initial manuscripts to at least two anonymous reviewers, gives feedback to author, ensures author incorporates feedback, re-distributes revised manuscript to one of the initial reviewers and to one new reviewer, and then either accepts or rejects the article. Writes rejection letter or submits completed article to wiki in general queue to be picked up for copyediting. Posts bio and abstract provided by the author.

Public Relations: Gets each book reviewed in significant publications and blogs. Collects such reviews and sends them to the web person to post in press coverage area. Plans and carries out promotional events for each new release (e.g. parties at cons or conferences, signings at bookstores, readings at universities, etc.).

Research and Development: Researches potential funders to determine time line and possible ways to breakdown the large grant we have developed to send to different agencies. Contacts the agencies to discuss the projects and to determine possible interest. Looks at previous funds received by other feminist media by agencies. Once a plan has been developed, works with editors to produce and disseminate a series of grants.

Donor Development: Contact current donors individually and inform them of the journal’s progress to solicit continuing support. Find new donors by gathering a list of women’s studies programs and popular culture programs and developing a campaign to approach the programs for support. Initiates the mutual fund so that donations to the fund may be solicited. Works with a lawyer to complete non profit status so that donors may receive a tax-deductible from Femspec.

Publishing Practicum Intern Coordination: Develops a policy to recruit and interact with interns who seek marketable skills. Teaches interns basic skills such as copyediting, press release writing, proofreading, manuscript submission and processing, writing calls for papers, etc. Helps interns assess jobs performed and become familiar with what skills they can list on their resumes. Writes intern reviews to help with placement.

Femspec Books and Production Associate Editor: Femspec is in the process of expanding into a publishing house. The associate editor will spearhead this project by talking to other feminist and independent publishers, developing a review process for manuscripts, researching what other publishing houses have done during their start ups, developing a timeline and process including guidelines for authors, etc.

Special Issue Editor: Develops calls for special issues. Works with the editors of the special issues throughout the process. Distributes the proposed call to ed board; makes moderations, gets final improvement, distributes widely. Develops a policy statement on the process and structure of special issues to post and utilize with all special issue editors. Ensures all submitters of each special issue are subscribes and keeps a subscription current throughout the submission, review and publication process. Trouble shoots the process and keeps all special issues moving at a timely basis. Can be two to four special issues being proposed or handled a year.

Contest manager: Announces and conducts poetry and fiction contests through vehicles such as Poets and Writers. In charge of the "Best of" contest, which occurs every five years.

Blogger: Encourages other bloggers, promotes the blog, makes blog updates (including ideas sent in by editors, updates about Femspec events, developments, or content) and posts announcement about our books and events.

Retreat Manager: Organizes Femspec annual retreat. This includes determining a time and place when key players gather for organizational planning, organizing the retreat’s agenda, keeping records, arranging catering, and organizing transportation.

CIFF Take Two

2011-04-02T11:00:00.001-07:00

Independent Shorts Program 11

This was the Saturday 11 am feature, which I picked because of the mention of a woman going to the moon in one film, and the mention of flying books in another. Also, Emmy Levine, our primary CIFF coverage from last year, mentioned that the shorts was a category more likely to be a repository of women directors. This Saturday morning visit was full of surprises and worth the time as well as the voucher.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, USA, 17 minutes) while not specifically challenging gender, illustrated in a delightful way the process of an author writing and creating a book in a library with an attendant audience of books eagerly helping him, and then flying off to author heaven led by a clutch of balloon-like books on a handful of strings as he regains his youth. Meanwhile, on the steps of the library, a youthful reader checks out the book he leaves behind.

The Spaceship (Emil Mkrttchian, Sweden, 25 minutes) was the one about the woman who wants to go to the moon. Turns out this is not science fiction at all, but the science fiction impacted imagination of a mentally challenged young woman who has a talking red rabbit to keep her company as she imagines her goal of getting there in imaginary spaceships. Abandoned by her mother who checks into a mental hospital when abandoned by her father, who is disturbed by having a child who is different, she cycles around town bearing the insult of “retard” by those who consider her different. She befriends the owner of a pizza parlor who refuses to hire her, although he too, as she eventually points out, harbors a fantasy: of going on a safari. She eventually does get him to give her a job, and cooks for other borderline, homeless, strange, and different people who dance in the streets enjoying her obviously innovative pizzas they are willing to take a chance on. There is a fantasy section when she goes to the moon, however; as she pops out, she sees an electrical being who turns out to be a vehicle for the flashback to her originally diagnosing psychiatrist who had thrown her father into a tizzy about how she would have a hard life, labeled for being so different.

Last Rain (Tony Sanchez and David Sanz, Spain, 20 minutes) doesn’t really challenge gender, but it could be about time travelling and past or future lives; go see it. It won a Oaxaca Film Festival.

Interview (Sebastian Marka, Germany, 20 minutes) seems, for a brief minute, to be a challenge of gender as a woman takes out an ad to send an actor to pose as a serial killer of women that her husband, a journalist, is interviewing; except, the killer answers the ad and actually kills her.

As the Rain Was Falling (Charlotte Joulia, France, 9 minutes) tricks the viewer into believing that a man and a woman caught in the rain start to have an affair. The bell rings interrupting their start of a kiss, and the viewer discovers the two are a separated couple passing off things and a kid at school. Doesn’t fit our category, but it’s still good.

Another good film is Heirlooms (Wendy Chandler and Susan Danta, Australia, 10 minutes), which is a series of short animations about precious objects of a series of children around the world.

35th Cleveland International Film Festival: Take One

2011-04-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

Bibliotheque Pascal
Szaboics Hadju, Dir.
Hungary, Germany 2010
111 minutes

Having nearly walked out of this film by a young male Hungarian director (b.1972) three times, in the end, I was glad that I stayed at this first film I have had time to sit and write up thanks to a reprieve at the Hospitality Suite next to the Ritz. The cinematography was beautiful, for one thing. Originally I picked the film off the program of the 35th Cleveland International Film Festival program due to the description that emphasized the interplay of fantasy and reality in the life of a young mother “called into question by child protection services after leaving her young daughter with a fortune-telling aunt” (44). Since I have been working on reclaiming the image of “the fortune-teller” in Western culture, both in film and in life, this drew me in.

We did not even get to meet the fortune teller until about a third of the way through the film. She was portrayed sympathetically and realistically—talking about the mortgage and the competition of the Gypsy who only told the customers good things who had moved into the neighborhood and cut into her business. After showing her reading cards for her niece, she merely looked at a palm or two and made dire predictions rather than using her powers to be transformative, feeding into the image of the palm reader that most have. And although she confesses on a grave that she does not believe in tarot or coffee grounds, she does read cards with which her clients expect her to be predictive. In fact, she makes a prediction that turns out to be false and is expected to raise a large sum of money to pay off a client. Hence the plot.

She takes tickets to have the crowd watch her grandniece dream; apparently, this brought on the action of Child Protective Serives. During the dream, the child sees her grandfather lead a brass marching band to liberate her mother from a house of prostitution in far off Liverpool, where her mother was about to be gassed to death and then raped to lines of Shakespeare’s Othello, after playing lines of George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc. There she had been raped by a john for wearing men’s clothing.

All the other prostitutes, also victims of the sex slavery system from Eastern Europe, play other characters in literature; after the marching band comes through from the power of the daughter’s active dream, they all stand bewildered on the street looking rather vulnerable in their variety of fantasy costumes.

The scene flashes back to the office of the social worker at Child Welfare who makes it clear to the sad but colorful Mona that if she really wants her daughter back, they cannot possibly put this rendition of the mother’s truth into the report—nor that the father jumped out of her from the sand at the beach. Nor that he ran out to the bathhouse the next morning. Nor that he convinced the soldiers after him for beating a gay guy to death to put all their guns down, ran, and then got shot. Nor that it was her own father who asked her to accompany him to Germany for his surgery and then sold her into sexual slavery, only to be shot himself and have the money he had paid for her be taken back.

After watching nearly the whole movie of the fantasy plot, the natural audience reaction is to feel quite disturbed and perturbed that the young mother is forced to create a mundane story of meeting a guy in the street in the city, being given a false name and place that he worked, that she couldn’t find him the next day that she chose to go into prostitution for the money and hated it….until we realize the longer she talks that this is indeed the truth, and the fantasy of the rest of the story had been made up.

The child welfare worker signs the papers with the toned down story after modifying a few items such as the man she met forced her to go into prostitution and that the young mother herself returned having decided to mend her ways. Ominously saying he is not quite sure what he will put in the report for the benefit of the child, after the mother leaves to the satisfaction of the typing secretary, the social worker indeed gives the recommendation to return the child to the biological mother.

In the last scene, we see the mother serving four scoops of pure air to the daughter from an empty bowl of soup, and pouring invisible milk from an empty pitcher, all the while saying how good the meal is. Playfully, the daughter demonstrates actively agreeing. We are brought to wonder if indeed the social worker’s hesitation to give the child back to the mother had not been correct after all. Then the camera pans out to show that the two of them are playing on sets of kitchens and bedrooms in a fancy goods department store. Recognition clicks. Goods are displayed for consumers in an economy where the cash to purchase them is not there.

The film does challenge gender through speculative means, surrealism, and magical realism. However, my urge to walk out was to avoid watch a rape, and I took no pleasure in the glorification of women’s victimization and female objectification. I also did not enjoy a pattern in my mind forming as I was remembering that the audience award at this festival a couple of years ago had also been about prostitution, and that the Jewish Film Festival in Cleveland has similarly had a film a couple of years ago about the Eastern European sex traffic trade, also focusing on a woman who had chosen to leave the country to go into prostitution to send her money to her daughter.

But where are the images of strong women fighting in Israel against the Occupation, or the ways women have been organizing in Eastern Europe, and all the ways women have been against this and other issues? I wondered this to myself, as I saw the man who had purchased Mona from a sexual slave parade introduce her to the habit of shooting up and encouraging her to contact him if she ever wanted to try it again. I had to force myself to remember that there were other films at the festival that I had not seen, or had not seen yet—such as the film about the women’s art movement of the 1960s and 70s (!Women Art Revolution 122) and the film about the woman who translated five Dostoevsky novels into German because she believes literacy can be spiritually uplifting (The Woman with the 5 Elephants 122).

So I stayed and watched the blood spurt from the man as his sexual slave bit his tongue. In the fantasy she almost got away, and it was the power of her daughter’s dream of liberation, even though she must have felt abandoned, that saved her.

35th Cleveland International Film Festival BE PART OF THE STORY; Tower City Cinemas March 24-April 3 2011. Cleveland, OH. Program Book.

Process for Book Submissions to Femspec Books

2011-03-23T11:12:00.001-07:00

Process for Book Submissions
1. Subscribe to Femspec at femspec.org.
2. Submit an excerpt of 50 pages or less following procedures stated online.
3. Explain in the submission process that you have a book length manuscript that you would like us to consider publishing as a special issue as well as the excerpt. Describe the book, the genre, the intended audience, and your qualifications as an author to reach this audience as well as your marketing plan and what you could do to help us reach out.
4. The excerpt will go through the normal peer review process.
5. At the end of the process, we will either
a. reject the excerpt and say we are not interested in pursuing publication;
b. accept the excerpt for publication;
c. request revisions of the piece;
d. request to see the entire manuscript for publication of a special issue;
e. initiate discussion as a publication as a product of Femspec Books, which would require submission of the entire manuscript and a pricing process which would require your contribution. A publication as a special issue or as a piece within a general issue would not.

Special issues, products of Femspec Books, or general issues with your piece are available in bulk to buy at a twenty percent author’s discount, so that you may buy and promote your products at speaking events and on your own.

We also have available on a contract basis press release services, eblasts, and books on CD, travel drive or ebooks productions which can get your product distributed in alternative forms.

Finally, if you publish an entire book with us, either as a special issue or as a Femspec Book production, you may contract for book review services by people in our networks, and for an interview in Femspec by a member of our team to give you additional exposure.

Good luck and we look forward to seeing your manuscript! Please read our webpage at femspec.org to determine whether your manuscript is a good fit with us prior to submission.

We also provide initial editorial consultations for $65. After an initial consultation, the editorial rates are $50 an hour or $10 a page, whichever you find more workable to get your manuscript into publishable shape.

These services are available whether you select to submit to Femspec Books or elsewhere.

Our editors have years of experience in both critical and creative publication to put at your service.

Our interest is in serving you to the best of our capacity. We are not attached to your publishing in Femspec, although of course developing our own mission is our primary motivating goal.

CFP: Femspec's Special Issue on Motherhood and Reproduction in the Speculative Imagination: Lived in Reality and As Created in Fiction and Other Genres

2011-01-28T03:32:00.000-08:00

Are you a "strong" mom? Do you kick butt and take prisoners in real life or your imagination? Do you know of a strong mom in real life who would make a great character in sf, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, or other supernatural genres? Can't think of any but wish you could?

These are the types of questions that led a group to discuss the idea of the "Kick *ss Mom" at WisCon, which is a feminist-centered, science fiction and fantasy convention held in Madison, WI every year. At WisCon 33, amongst a number of interesting panels was one that addressed a specific, focused issue:

Most female characters in SF, fantasy, and other supernatural genres don't seem to have children. Those who do are often relegated to a peripheral role until the children are grown. However, characters who balance raising a child and saving the world can be fascinating. Why aren't there more of them?

What we discovered during the panel, however, is that many could think of a number of female characters who seem to belong to the category, if the definition of a "Kick *ss Mom" is modified to include women who are strong in ways that don't always include carrying a sword while swaddling a baby.

The more interesting questions, beyond identifying individual characters, became "what/who is a mom" and "what does it mean to 'kick *ss'"? For instance, is Buffy a mom to Dawn? Do the women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland kick butt? Can a planet be a mom in this discussion? Are all strong moms also strong role models? If so, where do we place "evil" female characters in this discussion if they have given birth? Does giving birth automatically make someone a mom or is emotional commitment more important than biology?

As you can probably tell, the discussion became very animated during our panel discussion, and it seems like the sort of discussion that ought to continue. To that end, Femspec is interested in producing a special issue centering on issues such as those mentioned and any others pertinent to the general focus of women, motherhood and reproduction in the speculative imagination.

We are looking for works which go beyond the stereotype of the mom who will protect her "cubs" to the death and aim to investigate mothering at multiple levels of the child's development, how mothers who continue to be adventurers deal with the issues related to mothering, moms of adventurers, and how they "fit" in the genres mentioned (Molly Weasley comes easily to mind but there are so many others), and the "disappearing baby" syndrome that is used so often to put a woman in jeopardy, where her baby vanishes in some mystical fashion and returns as an adolescent or adult later in the story, having been absent for all of the "mothering" portion of his/her/its young life.

Do you have a story to tell? A poem to share? A piece of art that could be reproduced in print? An author to interview? An area on this topic on which you could develop an annotated bibliography? Do you want to critically analyze the differences between moms in myth and contemporary fiction or look at the unique ways that fantasy film portrays mothers and mothering? Do you know women who have parented children in unusual ways, going beyond the norm to create modern mythic prototypes of new ways of living, for example, by challenging gender by how they raised their kids in community? Do you have an idea not mentioned? Propose it and let's see what sort of a celebration of mothering we can produce together!!

ALSO PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS AND/OR TELL US OF PEOPLE WHOSE WORK WE MIGHT WISH TO SOLICIT FOR THIS ISSUE.

Here are the details:

Submissions should be mailed to Batya Weinbaum at:
1610 Rydalmount
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118

We need two copies, and a subscription, as all submitters must be subscribers from the onset and all the way through to publication.

Submissions must *exclude* any indication of your name on them so that your piece may be read anonymously.

Include a separate sheet with the title and genre of your piece, your name, address, email, phone and a two sentence abstract.

Also, include a disc with your document in Word and .rtf format.

All submissions should conform to MLA standards, as found in the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. MLA guidelines can also be found online at: http://www.mla.org.

Any submission that does not come in with sufficient copies will not be sent through the review process.

We will accept submissions through June 15, 2011.

Please note AGAIN that only subscribers may submit to Femspec. To subscribe, go to http://femspec.org. Reduced rates for special categories (student, retired, disabled, un or underemployed, household member of another subscriber) available for $30 but must be mailed by check with your submission.

Add $10 to all outside of the US submissions.

E-mail editorial enquiries should go to Batya Weinbaum at: femspec@aol.com.

If you have to make up silver jewerly, try Taxco

2011-01-25T07:41:00.000-08:00

For years I have been dreaming and trying to get ancient goddesses I have collected from historical research made into pendants. I dropped the images off in Bali, and in Varanassi, to no avail. But in just one week, I left withover 60 pendants and a better understanding of the business, with all intents to go back. Plus I have on-going relations with suppliers, and an invitation to study with one of the talleres (workshops) to learn the process myself. Every day I string another goddess along a string of gorgeous glass, stone and wooden beads. So, try Taxco.

Like I said, it took only one week. I arrived on Monday at 2 pm thinking I would give myself a day to relax after getting off the DF bus. But once I had a room, I was out hiking the cobblestone streets in search of a laundry. On the way back, I popped my head into a little store in the side of a woman's garage and asked if she knew where I could have some designs made up. She pointed across the street to Jaimes.

I carefully crossed the slanting cobblestone street. After all, at the laundry a woman had fallen and hurt herself. I did not want to be traveling through some foreign country on crutches again!

Across from the store were three or four steps and I climbed and entered. I gave the man who came to the counter (about 35, has been working in the trade since he was 7) a copy of a picture of a friend of mine Athena wearing a t-shirt she had bought from me at Fishing Creek Reunion in October.

The image was my rendition of an image of an ancient Israeli goddess from the Tanach period, about which I had learned at a workshop a Starwood last summer (2010). The presenter had distributed a xerox from an archaelogical journal. Apparently, her existence questions the monotheistic roots of Judaism. She holds the world in her arms, so maybe she is the original creator, the mother of the world. A la the Virgin of Guadalupe here.

By the next day I had a sample. The young man had xeroxed the image, reduced the picture to the size I wanted, glued her on a block of silver, and carved her face, body and details out laboriously with a series of hand and mechanical tools. The next day I ordered ten. By Thursday I had all of these, each different, as he altered them through conversations--no, she needs toes; no, this is a crown and this hair; no, no eye on what she is holding because she holds the world not a child; she is in a coffin so the edge needs to be straight; and that circle? it represents a vagina and has to be higher...and wonderful conversations and experiences. We discussed what these images meant, how they related to the ancient goddesses in Mexico, the relationship between the Egyptians and the Maya...how long the maestros had been studying, and many other images. The son of the founder of the shop tried his hand at one, as did the master craftsman in his seventies who had taught the younger man his trade and art.

Here are a few more. Below you will see the mermaids (sirenitas) which are from an ancient coin discovered in India. The Buffalo Woman (mujer y buffalo) is a woman celebrating herself by jumping up and down on the back of a buffalo, a fertility symbol as well. Also an ancient coin from India, according to my research.

I plan to have a long term working relationship with Jaimes. Each of these pendants can be purchased. You can pay through the paypal make a donation page on the journal (femspec.org) which supports our operations. Thanks so much.

Hebrew Goddess--$130
Mujer y buffalo--$150
Sirenitas--$120

You can also market these on commission for us, and if you like, send me images you would like to have reproduced. I can work them up for you.

Batya

Special Issue Process

2011-01-15T03:45:00.000-08:00

1. Editor proposes idea to Femspec.
2. Editor drafts call paper and sends to Femspec to circulate to board.
3. Board returns to special issue editor with input.
4. Once the cfp is approved, the editor is required to subscribe.
5. The editor is requested to look at other special issues of Femspec as orientation.
6. Editor circulates cfp and informs Femspec of where and how the issue is advertised.
7. Editor works from here on in with Special Issue coordinator who ensures that:

a. Femspec is kept informed of who is submitting.
b. Editor understands how to carry out a peer review process, including that it is her responsibility to line up independent readers specializing in the area of the special issue.
c. Editor understands responsibility to collect book reviews, as well as only previously unpublished work in English since Femspec will own copyright on all texts published (fiction or non-fiction).
d. Editor has informed all submitters of the necessity to subscribe and to keep a subscription current throughout the process.
e. Editor may have input on cover art and design.
f. Editor will be asked to assist in funding production of the issue with grant funds from her institution.

8. Once manuscripts have been collected, editor sends them out for anonymous review, collects comments, sends them to authors, collects revisions and assembles a project with appropriate introduction and cover.
9. This is submitted in duplicate in hard copy to the editor with one copy completely free of any names or identifying information. All art must be in Jpeg 350. All permissions must be held or obtained by the editor. No additions to the project are accepted after this initial submission.
10. Femspec reads this, and sends one copy to a reviewer. All comments are returned to the editor who is responsible for getting authors to revise in a timely process.
11. Authors and editor are responsible for copy editing and bringing completely into MLA style.
12. The revised manuscript is returned to Femspec again in duplicate hard copy, with one version again completely free of any identification of author. The other copy must have all art completely and properly labeled with name, title and date. The editor must also provide a complete response to all items requested in the revision, with a point by point explanation of how the requests were met.
13. Femspec sends the revised copy to the same or a new reviewer. If accepted, the issue moves to production. At that point, bios are also submitted electronically.
14. All files are sent to the line editor, and then to the set up person. The set up person forms an issue. The file is sent to the editor for proofreading. This usually takes two rounds and it is up to the editor whether she or he wishes to send individual files to authors.
15. After the issue goes to the printer, the editor works with the web person to set up the abstracts, table of contents and special features announcing the material on the web page.
16. Next the special issue editor works with the publicity people to do outreach to the public about the existence of the issue--getting it reviewed, announced on lists and at conferences.
17. The editor is then asked to be part of the special issue advisory committee working with the special issue coordinator to help troubleshoot and advise future issues.

If you have to stay on Isla Mujeres...

2011-01-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

Casa Espana. Avenida Francisco y Madera.

Get off the boat Turn left. Take the first right. It is on your left.If you are looking for the real thing and want authentic experience, try this.

Hotel owner Antonio Rios Chale is a direct descendent of the Magana family. Senor Magana used to sit in a white suit and determine all transactions on the island, according to island lore. Any problem or disagreement, everyone came straight to him. According to his utterances, the participants in the feud would act. And that was that. This was before paved roads and street lights.

I first came to know Antonio when he was still working in private practice as a dentist. I had a four year old with bad teeth at the time, and probably needed some dental work myself as well. Also some letters indicating to the government that due to the necessity of emergency dental work, our tourist visas of already several months had to be extended… things like that. I remember screaming in the chair I was going to come back in my next life as a chicken, because he told me chicken had no teeth as I slunk away from his hypodermic needle in his overstuffed chair.

Thus Antonio came to be a friend, and a go-to person for me, the longer I lived on the island. I believe once I read his palms. I know that I read the palms of at least one of the women who worked for him, who I last saw dancing in the square right up in front of the knock-out band from Merida (also in white suits) with her son in a dashing hat on New Year’s Eve.

Antonio has the habit of ending any conversation with, if you need anything let me know. I used to take him up on this frequently, without realizing this was part of the direct lineage of the ruling family tradition. And thus, quite possibly merely part of his social conditioning rather than anything personally indicating that he thought of me as a friend.

The latter realization clicked one morning this time back when I ran into Antonio at one of those outdoor tables of the restaurants where he can be found on Café Hidalgo, the main drag, regular according to schedule. He breakfasts every mmorning over the newspapers with a couple of his brothers. But to protect his privacy, I will keep his hours out of this post and let you figure out for yourself when you get down here just when that is.

I think in this particular instance, I wanted to know how to put a restraining order on one of my neighbors who kept calling me a slut (ramera, in Spanish--I had gone to ask him the word to better explain the situation to my landlord). He said yes that could be done here, and the problem was probably she was Canadian. And I needed her full name.

I answered, funny, my landlord had said the same Canadian thing, and I would have to get the full name from him,

Antonio, inquisitive and supportive person that he is, inquired as to who my landlord was. Javier, I answered. Oh, Javier Ravell? My primo. . . he was a professor, and a Maganua as well, descended from the man in the white suit and thus also everything clicked…both he and Antonio in the manner in which they conducted themselves definitely carried on the family line.

So if you want a nice place to stay, with a big mirror on the way out so you can see how your tan is progressing and how you look in that new dress or shirt, small and intimate with about 13 rooms, tourists of all types from all countries, an inner courtyard with many plants and tables under palapas to eat off of, roosters that crow, frequent warbling of other birds, internet that most of the time actually works, a small pool and a PAN official in the gobierno in case anything goes wrong (he now works in public health),and a refuge from aggressive neighbors, Antonio’s place is your place, and Antonio is your man as well.

Over the years he has helped me translate articles about to go to press that needed to be rescued from the GOOGLE translator program, providing more information about altars and such than I had ever been privy to before; filled me in on the back stories of land take overs, who goes to jail and why and how PRI helps them get out when it serves their own interests, and the growth of PAN opposition for the benefit of the artesanos when PAN had complete control; pointed out the progress of the lives of the people when all I could see was the glut of the development of higher priced tourism; offered to get fireworks approvals for my daughter’s birthday celebration, and just been a good friend all around. You can rent weekly or monthly or by the night, and if you are about to lose one housing and haven’t yet negotiated the next, he will get you some room on an interim rate as well at the drop of a hat.

Six caracols if you need a place to stay in Isla Mujeres. In my book, if you want a real feel for the island, the absolute best.

if the palmist says you have green hands, you may end up on Isla Mujeres

2011-01-10T09:03:00.000-08:00

If you have to eat on Isla Mujeres…one place not to miss in Diane and Victor’s Le Bistro Francais. Established in December of 1995, decorated with bright and vibrant colored tiles from Cancun, the restaurant was one of the first to point towards the future of the hike upwards in level of income of the average Island tourist. I remember going to Le Bistro Francais, with the excitement of the French restaurant opening years ago, for the baked potatoes. Diane was the first to serve them on the island. This year I popped in on Dec.26 right after my cold set in craving her delicious French onion soup, served with as many plates of fresh cooked hot rolls as the waiters can bring. For the budget traveler, definitely a meal in itself.

The trick to a good restaurant, Diane explains, is not the food, but the person waiting tables. She reports that many people have come to Le Bistro Francais over the years due to the charms of her husband Victor, who is also the chef. He learned everything from his wife, Diane, who had studied French cooking since she was seven years old. The people like Victor’s work and his food. According to Diane, lots of people come every year to see Victor. He always comes to the table to greet them with a smile and friendly words. This year my daughter wanted Diane’s French toast for our special New Years brunch. I had the delicious bagel with cream cheese, green pepper and garlic spread.

Le Bistro Francais has been written up in the New York Times (Jan. 21,2007, Patrick O’Gilfoil Healy)—the only restaurant covered in this NYT visit, according to the Minister of Tourists in Cancun who came over to congratulate her for being one of the two restaurants chosen to be written up in all of Quintanaroo. Her dreams right now include selling the restaurant with a mini three-apartment hotel upstairs so she can retire and write her cookbook. Years ago, a palmist read her fortune and said she had green hands and would live by the sea surrounded by water, so you bet she did.

Lonely Planet, the French tourist book Routeur, four stars in the Brooklyn Journal of Food for both breakfast and dinner—many experts have noticed this pleasant vibrant hideaway at Avenida Matamoros 29, catty cornered off the hustle and bustle of Calle Hidalgo’s nightclubs.

And no wonder. The food is always fresh and the vegetables always disinfected. You can come for the very popular breakfast from 8 am to noon, when the restaurant is always crowded in wintertime, customers even forming lines, according to Diane, waiting for the restaurant to open at 6 am, and for dinner from 6 to 10 pm. The unique fare includes flamed filet mignon, the garlic bread, the portabello salad. All has original sauce, such as the very popular mix of lemon and caper dripping on fish and the Caesar salad, which I tasted myself. Ditto the coq au vin, the special French cooked chicken, the recipe for which came from a famous French chef. You can find the most fresh lobster and shrimp brought by the same man who buys direct from the fisherman every day at the best price on the island.

Victor’s art on the menu, walls and ceilings shows he hails from Merida, with the primitivistic colors shapes—lobsters and fish look at you from the walls. He has been on the island since he was 16, when he came here in the Navy. Diane preferred his art to that of the professional she hired at first. Diane is French Canadian; they both know three languages.

Come to see for yourself and check out the affordable prices. You will not be disappointed. The unusual drink list is a draw too—imported French and Chilean wine, brandy, cognac, kahlua. Try the crepe suzettes, pastas and ravioli too. . Five caracols…the highest.

if you have to eat on isla mujeres...

2011-01-02T14:40:00.000-08:00

If you have to eat on Isla Mujeres…

Where have all the editors gone? Not to the MLA although that is where I usually am at this time of year to be on Chat with an Editor and various CELJ panels (Council of Editors of Learned Journals). This year I am back on Isla Mujeres off the coast of Cancun instead, since they changed the time of the conference, and also because it was time to organize my daughter’s diezyochoiera.

Ours was a hybrid tradition, since we were not even here for her 15^th, and she wanted to be in Mexico on the island where she was born for her liberation, or the year of becoming no longer a minor. I had promised the Mayan midwife who had worked with me at my daughter’s birth to do an oral history, as a continuation of my dissertation fieldwork (see Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities) so in addition to laboring away over 11.1 in internet cafes, putting in to WisCon for our awards celebration party, here I am attempting to also engage in some field work.

First thing you notice when you come back to Isla after two and a half years is that the island has become a Tower of Babel. Coming in on the ferry you see high rises, and walking down the streets of down town, you really begin to wonder, are you even in Mexico? Israeli restaurants, Italian cafes, Asian and Thai restaurants, Argentinian steakhouses, a French Bistro…even a Chabad House with a Chanukah menorah street lighting party. Many of the old places are gone, both restaurants and hotels, replaced by establishments catering to the higher priced tourist. No longer a romantic place where you come lose yourself and discover who you are again, but a place where you come and stay on target with your cell phones and your wifid directories where you look up on the internet where to eat and where to go. In the internet cafes, you can overhear people skyping with their stockbrokers, or even walking down the streets past the market as they buy and cell stock via cellphone. The island has become a destination place for travelers from Australia, Norway, Japan. The old-timers struggle to connect behind the scenes at expat fundraising parties for one charity event after another—HIV AIDS prevention, the English school.

But if you have to eat, the best place to do it is a little hole in the wall across the street from the hospital called Pita Amore. Ricky the owner is from Merida and brings the pita in direct from the old Lebanese baker who doesn’t even speak English. Ricky, who studied cooking in NYC, says there have been 20% Lebanese in Merida since WWII. He serves up four kinds of sandwiches in the pitas, each for under 40 pesos which is remarkable on an island where breakfast now costs seven bucks. What has happened here seems to have been the impact of NAFTA that broke down protectionism and let foreigners have businesses, so the little family establishments with murals on their walls and open hearts have been driven out. But also, as in Bali when the terrorist explosion of the nightclub drove tourism down, those who were there had to pay and pay. The old licuado shop for years on the side of the centro is closed, but we have three high priced Italian helado shops. Perla de Caribe on the Sea Wall is shut down, but a new high rise hotel towers over and eclipses the cemetery. And those who want to stay open charge even eighty pesos for French toast…since tourism is thin, the prices go up for those that still come or remain. Why is tourism thin? Well first of all, the Mexican president told everyone not to come when the Swine Flu was happening. Then there are all those travel advisories against the killings and deaths and shootouts in Cancun. Little things like that. And the cost of the ferry is now 70 pesos each way,what with the second line opening, each line had to raise the price to stay afloat.Ricky reports the prices doubled overnight in one day, from 35 to 70 on July 25, 2009, really hitting folks without local residence cards. All the fish in the vicinity have been plucked and the cost of gas to go far enough out to get fresh fish has gone up so high that even in Las Lomitas the economical fishing restaurant, you get charged 100 pesos for fresh fish. One of the major fishing cooperative closed, leaving only four. The cooperatives' store went out of business. If you want to find fish to cook yourself, better have personal contacts. Or a lot of time to search out fish on the beach.

Need I go on? But Ricky’s offers a counter to all this. His place is small but he caters to the budget traveler who comes in and orders a take out to take back to Pocna, the hostel for international travelers, that now costs ten dollars a night (up from four). And to the local regulars like George who tried to open a bar next door that didn’t work who comes in almost every night with his dog, Sadie. And if you need to do some internet, Ricky will even let you use his computer. His attitude is he is nothing without you, and he makes you feel loved. Customers can sign his wall, like a graffiti project. The chipotle and cream sauce on the pita either with meat or with chicken or purely vegetarian (the latter is what drew me there when trying to find a restaurant for my daughter’s party) is very hot and spicy. But good. And the attitude is good, and the heart.

So if you have to eat, it’s a start. .

Short Review of: Let Me In (written by Ola Liota Weinbaum)

2010-11-10T04:32:00.000-08:00

Let Me In. Dir. Matt Reeves. English, 2010. Horror film.

Another vampire movie? The knee-jerk reflex is of course to ask, why? Yet this film breaks, for me, new ground as the main character is a compelling, deftly controlling "twelve-year-old" little girl. Eternally living and yet on the brink of death if she is starved of human blood, she uses a nasty strain of co-dependence and grabs a boy every fifty years or so to do the killing for her. Why exactly they convince themselves to do this, I'm not sure, except for the fact that the girl is endearing (though, refreshingly not over-sexualized), seems more vulnerable than she is, and the boys she selects are lonely, weird, and need somebody whom they can help. So they grow up, taking care of this parasite by doing the dirty illegal work of murder and harvesting, while the girl who was their first love stays innocent in a string of apartments and drinks to her satisfaction. To be fair, the boy whom this film focuses on did get some help from her, both psychological and physical, in dealing with his bullies. Those jerks will never grace the halls of any school again. This movie features a strong, natural, and powerful, young female and makes the point that girls can hold a film together without exposing their cleavage.--olw (Written by Ola Liota Weinbaum)

For more information on this film, click on the film's title above.

A Midsummer Night's Press Announces a Call for Submissions

2010-11-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

http://amidsummernightspress.typepad.com/amsnp/2010/09/cfs-for-2-anthologies-of-jewish-gay-and-lesbian-poetry.html

A Midsummer Night's Press announces a call for submissions for two anthologies celebrating queer Jewish poetry:

Flamboyant: A Celebration of Jewish Gay Poetry
edited by Lawrence Schimel

and

Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry
edited by Julie R. Enszer

to be published in Spring 2011.

"We are looking for poems that celebrate and question, meditate and intimate, argue and reconcile contemporary queer Jewish identity. What is queer Jewish experience in the twenty-first century? What poetry expresses queer Jewishness today?

Whether you write about interfaith queer parenting, cruising in shul, how it feels to sign a ketubah in a country that won't recognize our same-sex marriages, fetishing a sheggitz or being fetishized, we want to read about it and share it with others who want to read it as well.

What are our sacred texts for today? If they don't yet exist, write them. What are our queer Jewish blessings, curses and prayers?

While there is a rich tradition of queer Jewish writers who have made an indelible mark on our literature over the years, from Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich, to Allen Ginsberg and Edward Field, we are looking for work that reflects queer Jewish identity in the new (secular) millennium. As such, we are open to either unpublished work, or work that was published since 2000 (this would include work originally published in a magazine or anthology before 2000, which was later collected in a book published after 2000).

We welcome voices from across the spectrum of Jewish identity, from observant to merely cultural, and their intersections with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities and experiences. We are open to all styles of poetry, from formal to free verse. We welcome queer Jewish voices from outside the U.S., and are willing to consider translations into English (It is the translator's responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem in English).

Both anthologies are open to previously published work, but it is the poet's responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem.

We welcome work from Jewish trans poets, as long as the content of the work is revelant to either gay or lesbian experience.

There is no limit to the number of poems which may be submitted, as long as the Jewish and queer content are both relevant."

Submission instructions:

Title file with the initials of the anthology and author's last name: F-Surname.doc or MH-Surname.doc
Include your name, your mailing address, your email address, and a bio WITHIN the .doc file with your essay, as submissions will be separated from emails to be read.
Submit your work by email as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format to: queerjewishpoetry@gmail.com

Deadline: November 30, 2010.

Payment will be three copies of the anthology per contributor.

About the editors:

Lawrence Schimel is the author or anthologist of over 100 books, including Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories; Kosher Meat; Best Gay Poetry 2008; First Person Queer; PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality; Two Boys in Love; The Future is Queer; etc. He has won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Spectrum Award, and other honors. He writes in both English and Spanish, and his work has been translated into 27 languages.

Julie R. Enszer is the author of the poetry collection Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2010) and the chapbook Sisterhood (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in numerous Jewish, feminist and queer publications, including Bridges; Jewish Women's Literary Annual; Sinister Wisdom; Calyx; Women's Review of Books; Feminist Studies; Washington Blade; Lambda Book Report; etc. She is also the founder of the Lesbian Poetry Archive.

About the publisher:

A Midsummer Night's Press is an independent poetry publisher, publishing primarily in two imprints:

Fabula Rasa, dedicated to work inspired by myth and fairy tale, which has published Fortune's Lover: A Book of Tarot Poems by Rachel Pollack, and Fairy Tales for Writers by Lawrence Schimel
Body Language, devoted to queer poetry, which has published "This is What Happened in Our Other Life" by Achy Obejas; "Banalities" by Brane Mozetic, translated by Elizabeti Zargi; "Handmade Love" by Julie R. Enszer; and "Mute" by Raymond Luczak.

http://www.amidsummernightspress.com

The 10.2 Cover Art: Challenging Gender in a Sexist Society

2010-10-09T03:52:00.000-07:00

Artists generally seek to engage, inspire, and challenge others with their art or creative work. Others may simply create something just to express outwardly what is deep inside themselves, a part that is invisible to the outer world but known only by them. The artists whose work has been selected for Femspec in particular tend to voice their beliefs or thoughts of feminism, gender, and sexuality with the hope or expectation that we will be enlightened, or at the very least, entertained by their art. Whatever their reasons are, it's safe to say that artists do their part in providing the world with a numerous range of unique perspectives, all of which to consider while we expand on our own consciousness or awareness.

Kartika Affandi Koberl is an artist who certainly expresses a unique perspective, especially as she challenges ideas of gender through her artwork. An interesting sculpture of hers boldly adorns the cover of 10.2, our most recent issue.

As you can see from the photo, it is a fiberglass sculpture of colorful and odd-looking phalluses, all of which have different heads or faces. My first reaction to this display was to laugh. The artwork is a bit humorous in its boldness. I thought to myself, what exactly is this artist trying to convey about the male gender? I thought one possible theory was that the phalluses, particularly the commanding one in the middle, represented the male ego in society and the man's fight to maintain his leading role in a changing world where women are rising both professionally and perhaps socially. I also thought the art was a representation of male egos or personalities and how they each operate in a male-dominated society. Then when I studied the art more carefully, I noticed some things about the faces that would suggest a possible play on words. For instance, the middle phallus's head appears to have a glove on it (it is a shape of a fist but looks like a gloved fist), so I immediately thought of the term "glove," another word for "condom." The orange phallus has the head of a rooster or chicken, so the term "cock" entered my mind, which is another term for a penis. I also thought it could represent an arrogant or "cocky" man. The pink one is a fish, which made me think of a blowfish... which of course caused me to think of the act of fellatio. I wasn't sure if these connections were just coincidental or if the artist did in fact have these terms in mind (consciously or subconsciously) when creating this thought-provoking sculpture. I wasn't very sure what the sleeping phalluses meant, and couldn't quite make out their "faces," but thought possibly they represented impotence or the impotent male. If so, I pondered, were they symbols of men in society who have no influence or power in the world, or do they simply represent men whose egos do not stand at attention like the others do? As you can see, art like this can spur many different interpretations.

So, what was the artist really thinking when she created this potentially controversial piece of art? During an interview with Femspec, Kartika explained that the inspiration for the art first came from a visit to a sex shop in Amsterdam, where she noticed condoms with different heads. A couple years later she made the sculpture, and from reading the interview in 10.2, each penis represents a type of man with the heads serving as symbols of their personalities, etc. The middle phallus represents an arrogant man; the one with a chicken's head represents a philanderer, or as Kartika put it, "a man who is already married but likes to be with other women" (for a chicken always wants more food); the one with a fish head represents a "slippery" man and one who "thinks like a woman;" and the two that are asleep represent men who have worked hard (Kartika in Femspec 10.2, 65-66).

One could say that perhaps the artist is objectifying men by using their sexual parts as representations of the men themselves, as if their phalluses define who they are. Yes, they are defined by their personalities, but why use phalluses to represent men? The truth of the matter is, what other way could she have shown us that the sculpture is about the male gender? We've all been taught that the first way to differentiate between genders is to identify the sexual parts of the person. Women have often been objectified in the same way by the media, society, and men. Do you think the artist was turning the tables and reversing sexism? Or was she mocking the male gender to make up for the objectification and disrespect some men have shown towards women? During the interview, the artist claimed regarding the sculpture: "I'm not trying to shame men. I'm not against men. I'm just having a lot of fun" (Kartika in Femspec 10.2, 66). Some could argue that the fun is at the expense of the male gender. Normally, I would say that if women should not be objectified, then men should not be as well. To rally against the mocking and objectification of women but accept the same treatment of men would make us hypocrites, and would pose a double-standard way of thinking. However, this is ART. Art doesn't have to play by the rules. Perhaps though, when reflecting on Kartika's art we should be a bit more open-minded when witnessing art created by male artists that portrays the female gender in the same light, lest we be caught in the double-standard.

Here are some comments from the artist herself regarding the art: "One says, standing in the middle with the metallic color, 'I am rich, good looking, and many girls are around me.' And the other one with the cock-head says 'I am a simple man but it is easy to find someone beside my wife (chicken are used to being in the garbage).' The other fish head is very slippery, so do we as wives have difficulty understanding what our husbands want? The smaller size, pale blue, says 'Will you please all shut up! I have done my job.' It's all about men's behavior."~Kartika

No matter how one interprets this art or feels about it, it is safe to say that many would agree that this artist is gutsy to create a sculpture such as this, especially since she did so in Indonesia, a country that is largely populated by Muslims. The Muslim culture is known to be strict about many things, some of those things being gender, sexuality, and expression. However, as Kartika mentions in 10.2, areas like Indonesia are not quite as limited now as they were twenty years ago due to globalization. Nevertheless, it is a culture that is still mainly male-dominated, still holds sexist ideas, and still tries to silence or oppress its women. Thankfully, the artist discussed here was neither silenced, nor afraid to express herself as she saw fit.

Now it is your turn to speak up. What are your impressions or interpretations of the art on the cover of 10.2? Did it shock you? Make your comments in the comment area and/or participate in the polls at the bottom of the home page. Thank you for your time and participation!

~Kelly VanBuren

Call for Abstracts: Popular Culture and Political Theory

2010-09-20T04:28:00.000-07:00

Homer Simpson and the Promise of Politics: Popular Culture as Political Theory
Edited by Joseph J. Foy and Timothy M. Dale

"Abstracts are sought for an edited volume exploring political theory/political philosophy as presented through popular culture. This volume is to be published through the University Press of Kentucky as part of their politics and popular culture series, which includes Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture and Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent through American Popular Culture. For additional information, please see the attached 'Project Overview.'

The chapters of this book will consider the political theory represented by major works of popular culture, written to examine these ideas in the context of great political thinkers and influential political ideas. The typical chapter will select a film, television series or musical artist, or a genre of examples from any of these categories, and examine the popular culture artifact in the context of a collection that covers a wide range of popular culture texts organized to provide a relatively comprehensive look at the political theory canon through a popular culture lens. The book is intended for readers being introduced to political theory (first and second year college students), or readers generally interested in the intersection between cultural and political studies.

Contributor Guidelines:

Brief abstract (100-500) words describing the popular culture artifact employed and the political theory/political philosophy examined
Resume/CV for each contributing author

Abstracts may be submitted to dalet@uwgb.edu. Please contact this address if you have any questions regarding the project.

Although abstracts are currently being sought, authors who have unpublished essays relevant to this collection are encouraged to submit."

Please forward to all potentially interested contributors

Timothy Dale
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Department of Social Change and Development
Mary Ann Cofrin Hall, B310
University of Wisconsin, Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311-7001
Phone: 920-465-2061 Fax: 920-465-2791

An Interview with Piper Martin at Twin Oaks

2010-09-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation of interviews with members of Twin Oaks. The theme is the possibility of using the imagination to collectively challenge gender with various intentional organizations of child care responsibilities. The opinions and recollections expressed are those of the individuals interviewed, and are not necessarily reflective of the community or of the people about whom they speak.

As you can tell, if you have been reading the previous entries, most Twin Oaks members are very busy. They have to keep up with a quota of 42 hours of assigned labor a week, although older members get a pension of one hour off per year per week starting at the age of 50. That is, at the age of 50, you only have to work 41 hours; at 51, 40, and so on down the line.

Nonetheless, no matter what the age, it becomes a challenge to corner a member and schedule a block of time--45 minutes, an hour--which he or she can pencil on on a labor sheet to sit down and reminisce in front of a computer about any topic under consideration.

As a guest, I too have a labor sheet, and am required to make quota, so my time is also under high demand. This Sunday morning, Piper and I have about 45 minutes before I go to water the orchard behind Morningstar, a job Elsa gave me, and Piper goes to wash and cut apples.

I gave Piper an article I had written from oral history I had done with women in Palestine/Israel while I set up the session, and then organized to begin my questions.

Piper, at the age of 86 and three quarters, having lived on Twin Oaks around 30-35 years, moved here first in March of 1971 but then left a few times and returned. She remembers the time when children lived away from their parents in Degania, a building named after a kibbutz in Israel. I asked what she could tell me about the Degania system.

Piper: First of all, I think you have to put it in the context of how different Twin Oaks was then from now. We had a much higher quota and less resources. Quota was 49-51 hours a week.

Q: What do you mean by quota?

P: Quota is part of our elaborate system of equalizing the community's work load among all members. Once a year, we vote in the Trade-Off game for our best guess of how many hours of work we want to do to earn our income and to do our daily living chores like cooking, total that up and divide by the number of members, and get the number that is called "quota." In reality, this requires many compromises in the things that we would like to be creditable as quota hours in order to keep the quota, or required number of hours, average, per week. It is perfectly OK for members to "bank" their extra hours and spend them later.

Whenever we were not getting enough work done, we raised quota to get closer to what we wanted. Most of the time just raising the quota left us not yet getting what we wanted. And allowance was very low. It could have been only a dollar a week. Or ten dollars a month. Something very minimal. Now it is minimal by other people's standards but it is 86 dollars a month now. When our allowance was so low, we were making do with a diet inferior to what most of us wanted. That included things like baloney sandwiches. When a cheese sandwich was served, if we wanted an extra slice of cheese, we had to pay a nickel out of that tiny allowance. This was before we were making our own cheese, before we even had any cows. So to work more hours meant we could improve our community diet. And there were other things like that. If people needed eye glasses, you pretty much did without them, unless you had parents who paid for your eye glasses. Turn-over was extremely high then. A lot of people came with these wonderful visions and found they couldn't stick it out. But also this many years later, it is funny to think how many people came expecting it to be an easy life with lots of sex and time to play music and life an easy life.

But we had this vision and the parents originally participated in this vision that the children would not be owned by their parents, that the children would be Twin Oaks children, that we would collectively enjoy them being Twin Oaks children and we would collectively take responsibility for them being our children.

Q: What happened with that vision?

P: Well I think one of the main things that happened was that the parents did not feel the community took as good care of their children as they could by themselves, even if they had to go back to the mainstream. Back in the mainstream, they could get grandparents to help them, often grandparents with money. There were only 30-40 members at the time, so lots of complications happened--jealousy, when we didn't believe in jealousy. We believed in equality. We wanted every body to have everything. And here we were. So when the parents left, they would leave with their children. If they left the community, they took their children with them, which was not the understanding we had started with in attempting communal parenting. The idea was that if the parents left, the kids would stay and other people here would parent them. So it was a very serious job to take on a primary for one of these babies. There were various levels, but the ones who were equivalents to the parents were essentially saying they were taking on the child for life just as the parents were. So Josie Kincaid and two other young women--one was named Freddie--and a hammocks manager for so long-- were intensely committed to this idea that their children were going to be community children, and their children were going to get super care.

For a couple of years we had had no children at Twin Oaks after blaming ourselves for the poor care of the children at Twin Oaks who had left with their parents. So this time we waited until we had completed Degania and had what we thought were super super conditions for children to grow up. Meaning that before these babies were born, we had handles to the doors down low where toddlers could reach them and electric outlets up high where toddlers could not reach them--all sorts of things to make life good for our children. And we even had a glorified crib. Do you know about the Skinner cribs? For example, a soft mesh mattress was used so that urine could go straight through and the infant did not have to wear diapers 24 hours a day. There were other things about the crib such as a fan attached to the outside so that the child would be cool. We were basing this all on the fictional book Walden Two by BF Skinner. When Skinner came to visit, we started proudly showing him the crib. We just had one of the special cribs and were wondering whether we could make another one ourselves. Skinner looked very flustered as he tried to explain to us that the crib was supposed to be right in front of a large window so that the child could see birds coming and going, the weather through the sunshine, clouds and rain, etc. And instead, we had placed the crib in a small special room up against blank walls with windows, high above the crib, that the child could not look out of. And then we tried to make up for it by putting commercial mobiles in the crib. I don't remember the year. Skinner only made that one visit. He wanted to come earlier, but we said, we don't feel ready yet. Would you first wait for us to invite you?

Walden Two was about a thriving large community that already had lots of resources. And here we were a little struggling community with maybe 4 per cent of the number of members that the Skinner community had, trying to see what we could provide for our children. So some mild degree of disagreement between the parents and the non-parents started as soon as the first metas got labor credits for watching and recording the actions, and the number of hours the infants slept, and the number of times they peed, and all that, while the rest of us worked "much harder".

Q: What is a meta? And why did they have to keep records?

P: Metas are a name we picked up from Israel. The Israeli name is longer but it started with those letters, of the name of the person watching the children in the kibbutz. Record keeping was part of our idea of how to take super care of the children. People took childcare shifts and we wanted each shift to be well informed to do a superb job.

I never was a meta. I was part of the non-parent, non-meta group.

Q: How did you view the situation?

P: I was extremely disappointed when it failed. I actually had been seriously considering the possibility of adopting a child to raise under these experimental conditions, although I was over 50 by this time. It was supposed to be security for the children, the best possible life for the children. But the program wasn't enough to fulfill the metas, some of whom went on to have their own biological children to add to the roster of Twin Oaks children. Some metas tried especially hard. One I remember in particular was Eve. She wanted to be the kind of meta who would not have her own child but would spend her life as one of the mothers of these communal children. But, apparently after a lot of soul searching, she did leave the community. And left the children feeling as if a mother or father had left them. This was a warning to all the biological parents and to the community that we could not count on anybody to stay and feel as responsible as the real parents did. This is where the vision hit the reality. Eve made it known to the community that she was feeling unfulfilled. I think she tried to get pregnant and couldn't.

But by that time we also discovered that the biological parents wanted to have a bigger say in what the children ate or didn't eat, whether the children brushed their teeth or not, whether they dressed in gender-specific clothes. Some people thought we should train their kids from the beginning to wear girl clothes and boy clothes. For the boys to wear girls clothing---that was a big leap. Some of the community was in favor and some not.

Q: So it broke down over gender roles--the parents did not want their boys wearing skirts?

P: No, they did not want the community deciding whether their boys would wear skirts. It was also over whether their kids could eat sugar....was it important to have supervision over tooth brushing...little daily things. Too many by far to have community meetings over all these things. Remember there was no precedent anyplace. Walden Two did not talk about details like this. As far as we knew we were the first ones trying to benefit our children by behaviorist methods in a group setting. We didn't have any resources to go visit kibbutzim to learn how others had done things until after our whole effort was history.

Q: Had you already raised your own children before this?

P: : Oh yes. My youngest was in college at Antioch. After the first year, the students there were self-supporting. I had no financial obligation any more. My older daughter had graduated from college and had a job in NYC, and my son, who had stayed with his father after our divorce, was on his own at that time.

Q: Having raised your children in a nuclear family, what was the appeal?

P: It was a major appeal of the community in the first place that we were going to do a better job than on the outside raising children.

Batya: Thank you for being such a good resource.

Barbara Ardinger's "Transmutation" Will Enchant You

2010-09-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

Barbara Ardinger wrote an enchanting story about a beautiful woman who seemed to have everything, yet does not possess a soul, and in which an Alchemist must find her a soul, lest he be destroyed by the Lord Bishop's orders. Although the author has mentioned that the story is an "alchemical version of Beauty and the Beast," I can't help but also be reminded of The Wizard of Oz due to the girl in this story lacking something vital (in this case, a soul), something that would obviously be impossible to live without.
As the Alchemist was trying desperately to locate or create a soul for this woman, in the back of my mind I of course wondered whether she already possessed a soul, thus also carrying a similar moral to the story as the one in The Wizard of Oz ("you've always had it, my dear").

The story is beautifully written, and does seem to contain a moral within it. When the Alchemist's housekeeper tells the couple to go and be together in their home in the wilderness (a home the soulless woman dreamed of), she also stated that she would show the Lord Bishop how they have found their souls. It's possible the housekeeper, who appears to be a good witch, will either trick the Lord Bishop to save the couple, or actually performed a spell in which a soul would be provided to the woman, thus sparing their lives. But I actually feel the story implied something more meaningful, which is that the woman already had a soul within her all along... for one could not possibly love another without one.

To read this beautiful story, click here.

~Posted by Kelly VanBuren

Femspec announces Femspec Books

2010-09-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

New start up of the publishing imprint Femspec Books.

So far this imprint has published a trial run of one full-length novel in the genre that Femspec usually publishes and a second book just off the press. Contact us for review copies.

The journal is starting this press because after ten years positioned in the publishing business, bringing out 500 plus artists, critics and authors, we have been approached numerous times with full-length manuscripts. Thus we feel uniquely situated to bring out authors who will already have an audience with us (our readers) and to whom critics and reviewers will already turn, on our recommendation.

Not only will we increase our profits, but we will enlarge our impact on the literary universe, which was our goal in the first place---to broaden the understanding of the speculative genre, to make it more inclusive, which most feel we have done.

We will offer the same sort of peer-review we do for the journal and will retain our integrity as a respected press.

Our first two trial run publications (to get out the quirks) are my own:

The Nightmares of Sasha Weitzwoman, a 583 .p novel about a woman who goes to Jerusalem to cover the first Intifada and gets caught in a haunted hotel in West Jerusalem, previously excerpted in the Jewish issue. Available for $26 plus shipping and handling, $35.

Opening Palms, a book I have been selling at festivals which is based on a column I wrote for the Santa Barbara Independent for a year and a half. $10. Plus shipping and handling, $15.

Contact us if you have manuscripts of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Look soon also for Fermspec Productions, producing music cds and books on tape.

Batya Weinbaum

The "Primary System" at Twin Oaks

2010-09-16T12:57:00.000-07:00

Here I am in the Rainbow Room in Morningstar at Twin Oaks, the community in Louisa, VA where we are interviewing people about childcare because a member has given us a thesis on sf and feminist theory she wrote a few years ago that we are considering for our motherhood issue. The room is named for the large rainbow prism on the window made by a member in the south facing window of the living room where Elsa, age 35, lives. She is nursing Ridgely, age 8 months, as we speak. She is also the mother of Luuk, age 6. She moved here in order to raise chuildren collectively, among other reasons.

I asked Elsa to speak about the primary system because I first met her baby on some one else's body. Rick, a recent new member, wore her baby on his belly in the dining hall and I was surprised not realizing Rick had a child. I saw other children strapped to the bodies of people I did not realize had had children since my last visit. Then I realized I was looking at babies on the bodies of people who were not their biological parents. I asked Elsa how the system of primary care being provided as labor credit hours that all members can perform effects her life as a mother, and the lives of her children.

Elsa: The kids here at the age of 6 or 7 need to start doing a tiny bit of community work (one hour a week). So teenagers need to work several hours a week, and one teenager here was interested in forming relationships with the younger kids. So one particularly responsible fourteen year old cares for my six year old once a week for two hours and takes labor credit for his time and takes labor credit towards meeting his work requirements.

Batya: How does this effect your life as a mother?

Elsa: I get a lot more free time than other mothers of a baby and a homeschooled child without having to pay money, although you can get childcare on the outside world. Here I pay labor because the commodity we trade at Twin Oaks is hours.

Batya: How do you trade hours?

Elsa: Well, I was just using that figuratively instead of trading money. In truth, the child gets hours for his care so the more hours I give away to other people to take care of him, the less hours I can take to take care of him myself.

Batya: So what work do you do for the community to substitute for the child care hours the community gives you to care for your own kid?

Elsa: I manage the fleet of 16 automobiles. This is a substantial amount of time. This takes all told to deal with the maintenance of the cars with me and a few helpers 15 hours of work a week.

Batya: So who are these people who help you?

Elsa: There is one man who worked as a mechanic on the outside before he moved here, but doesn't want the responsibility of management. There is one who is learning as he goes, and there one woman who knew absolutely nothing about cars when she started. Nothing. She couldn't check her oil level.

Batya: So when I see Rick wearing a skirt with your boy baby strapped on his belly, I can think of you teaching a woman how to change oil on cars?

Elsa: Yes. That sounds about right.

Batya: Thanks. I think that makes my point that Twin Oaks is using the collective imagination to challenge gender! But how do you think this primary system effects the lives of your two boys?

Elsa: Let's continue this later because I have to get some money and a bra and shoes to leave the farm.

Call for Papers: Sexing Science Fiction

2010-09-09T02:12:00.000-07:00

Editors Sherry Ginn, Ph.D and Michael G. Cornelius, Ph.D would like everyone to know:

"A scholarly treatment of the issue of Sex in Science Fiction is currently under consideration for publication by McFarland Publishers as part of its Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy series (series editors Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III). This book, tentatively entitled Sexing Science Fiction, will be a collection of articles, with the general objective of filling the gap in the literature about this topic. Although treatments of the issues surrounding sexuality have been published, none has been so recently, and this book aims to explore the myriad ways in which authors writing in the genre, regardless of format (e.g., print, film, television, etc.), envision the ways in which different beings express this most fundamental of behaviors.

At its core, the construct of "science fiction" is something of an oxymoron. "Fiction" denotes fantasy, fancy, that which is divorced from "reality." Certainly fiction has always spoke to and explored what is considered to be real or reality, but in its very construction one sees the seeds for a departure from the tangible and into realms that exist beyond this real world. "Science," however, suggests a specific discipline grounded in reality, based on predictable principles of action and inaction. Science is the study of the physical world in all its varied manifestations; it relies on observation, experimentation, and the judicious recording and interpretation of reality and fact. The two together then, create that aforementioned oxymoron: "science fiction," which for all intents and purposes could be translated into "real unreality." More than a genre like fantasy, which creates entirely new realms of possibility, science fiction constructs its possibilities from what is real, from what is indeed, possible, or conceivably so. The fact that science fiction and its most common manifestations--space flight, technology, alien realms--are so connected to the future, and to our visions and re-visions of the future, suggests that the genre is concerned not with what is unreal, but rather with what may be real, or may soon be real. The flights of fancy that govern science fiction are grounded in the tangible, in the realm of what is possible, real, hoped for, and feared.

Of course, in life and in fiction, few things are more "hoped for" or "feared" than sex, and sex's many manifestations in our world delight, confound, and enrage. Debate about sex, its role and its function, its form and its meaning, permeate every aspect of our culture--philosophically, ideologically, culturally, religiously, politically. Sex is both "real" and "unreal" or perhaps, "surreal." We discuss the future of sex and sexuality quite vociferously. It is part of us, something we both acknowledge and dissuade, something we are both prideful of and ashamed of as a culture, as individuals, as members of sexually-based relationships.

This collection then, looks to understand and explore these two areas of "unreal reality," to note ways in which our culture's continually changing and evolving mores of sex and sexuality are reflected in, dissected by, and deconstructed through the genre of science fiction. The editors would like to see papers that challenge and affirm the ways in which sex and sexuality relate to the genre of science fiction itself. Both of these fashioned notions--sex and sexuality and the genre of science fiction--should be forefront in the work, as ways in which to interrogate specific texts, symbols, movements, writers, subgenres, or other like areas.

The following is a suggested grouping of topics, but it is by no means exhaustive. This list is meant merely as a preliminary guideline. All relevant topics related to Sex in Science Fiction will be considered.

Manifestations of female or male sexuality as differentiated or highlighted by the genre of science fiction
Sexuality in general as it relates to the genre as a whole
Un-or non-gendered sexuality found in science fiction
Sexual identity
Sexuality and reproduction (both inter- and intra-species)
Sexuality and technology

Deadline for formal proposals is 1 December 2010. Send abstracts of 500 words to Sherry at DoctorGinn@gmail.com. Use this address for any questions you may have concerning the project as well.

Editor Sherry Ginn is the author of Our Space, Our Place: Women in the Worlds of Science Fiction Television (2005). Her monograph on power and control in the Whedonverses will be published by McFarland in 2011.

Michael G. Cornelius is the author/editor of eleven books, including two previous collections for McFarland Press, three works for Chelsea House, and several works of fiction."

Sherry Ginn, Ph.D.
Rowan Cabarrus Community College
1531 Trinity Church Rd
Concord, NC 28027
USA
DoctorGinn@gmail.com

Michael G. Cornelius, Ph.D.
Department of English and Mass Communications
Wilson College
1015 Philadelphia Ave
Chambersburg, PA 17201
USA

Are you teaching a feminist sf/fantasy book? Blog it!

2010-09-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Tell us a bout your blog and we will link it....

Angela Carter. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is teaching Angela Carter's 1972 novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman at Wabash College, a liberal arts college for men in Indiana, North America. There's an active blog here: http://literaryculturaltheory.blogspot.com/ where the students are discussing their reactions and insights to the book.

Paula Gunn Allen Issue: Sample CFP

2010-09-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

This issue is now closed, but shows you what is coming up, and also, how to structure a cfp if you are interested in writing one:

CFP: Special Issue to Honor Paula Gunn Allen

FemSpec, an “interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to critical and creative works in the realms of SF, fantasy, magical realism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres,” is accepting submissions for a special issue to honor Paula Gunn Allen (PGA) tentatively scheduled for Fall 2009. (now, Fall 2010).

Topics may be stimulated by, but are not limited to, concerns raised in her interview with John Purdy in 1997 ("And Then, Twenty Years Later . . .": A Conversation with Paula Gunn Allen, by John Purdy, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 9(3), 5-16, Fall 1997 retrieved 8/19/2008 from http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/paula/PGA-int.html). 20 years after the Flagstaff conference that resulted in the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, PGA identified continuing issues in Native American literary criticism in the context of a major shift:

1] “There was nothing then, and now there's everything.” We welcome essays that detail or engage her contributions to that shift, and/or that identify, assess, and/or remedy problems in the field.

2] “Something was said today, something about answers. And I wanted to say, no, no, no. That's not the point. It's not about answers; it's about good questions.” Building on any of the questions PGA’s work asks us to consider, how can we develop continuing lines of inquiry? For example, in Sacred Hoop she demonstrates that we need not reinvent the wheel with imagined gynocracies. How does the paradigm she describes inform Native American women’s literature?

3] “Very little of our literature is the literature of protest, of oppression … Most of it is the literature of the spirit or the literature of ritual. Almost all of it is, call it political voice and drama, is always informed by the presence of this knowledge that there is always this other world, with which we are always engaged. It isn't over "there" somewhere; it's in our presence and our midst and we are in its presence and its midst.” Feminist speculative literature is predicated on “what ifs.” If we were to continue as we are – what would future dystopias be like? If we were to dismantle oppressive cultural schemata (race, class, sexuality, ability, gender) and live according to an egalitarian paradigm – what could future utopias be like? PGA’s work can push these queries further. For example: what are the implications of an equi-present spirit world for the dystopia/utopia binary?

4] “My own calling has always been of the spirit ...” What are the relationships between women’s speculative literature, criticism, and spirit work?

We seek critical articles, artwork, poetry, and fiction. Articles and fiction can be up to 15 pages. All submissions should conform to MLA standards (see www.mla.org). For further information, please contact special issue guest editor, Menoukha Case, at menoukha@yahoo.com.

Submissions marked "PGA" should be sent to:
Menoukha Case
POB 51
Gt. Barrington, MA 01230-0051
(now also co-edited with Stephanie Sellers)

Please submit 4 copies on which your name, address, and contact points do NOT appear, accompanied by a separate page that includes title, genre, your name, address, phone, and email. Submissions with insufficient copies will not be sent through the review process. To submit, you must be a subscriber for calendar year 2009. To subscribe, include a check made out to FemSpec or subscribe on line and send a print out of the receipt with your manuscript. Full price is $40, low income price is $25. Ask your library, public or institutional, to subscribe.

Deadline: June 15, 2009

Sample disabilities CFP for future special issue editors, and work still needed on disabilities

2010-09-07T07:18:00.000-07:00

Sample of cfp, issue on disabilities needs material

Although this one only received one submission, we are considering that submission at this point and would talk with you about any material you have that might still fit. We decided to post this as a sample for future editors of special issues, but, two birds with one....post?

“Extraordinary Women” “Extraordinary Women” Femspec, an interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to SF, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres, welcomes submissions for “Extraordinary Women,” a special issue or themed section dedicated to women and disability.

In her book Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson establishes that “Many parallels exist between the social meanings attributed to female bodies and those assigned to disabled bodies.”

We are interested in critical and creative works, including memoir and nonfiction narrative, that explore these parallels.

Possible topics include but are not limited to: Aliens and freaks Disability, technology, and the cyborg Adaptation and survival Women with disabilities in myth and folklore Disability and feminist spirituality The “alien” experience of being a woman with a disability Intervention and accommodation (alien, supernatural, technological, or other) "(Un)natural” women Ability/Disability in Octavia Butler’s work Writing, feminism, disability “Coming out” as non-normate (disabled, queer, other?) Passing” as normate

Please submit three copies of your piece to Deborah Bailin at this address: 2101 Susquehanna Hall, English Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Submissions must *exclude* any indication of your name on them so that your piece may be read anonymously. Include a separate sheet with the title and genre of your piece, your name, address, email, phone and a two sentence abstract. Also, include a disc with your document in Word and RTF format. All submissions should conform to MLA standards, as found in the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. MLA guidelines can also be found on-line at http://www.mla.org. Any submission that does not come in with sufficient copies will not be sent through the review process. Please note that only subscribers may submit to Femspec. To subscribe, go to femspec.org. All editorial enquiries should be e-mailed to Batya Weinbaum at femspec_at_aol.com.

Issue 10.2 is Now Available

2010-09-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

Femspec is happy to announce that our newest issue 10.2 is now available to order. This scholarly journal covers a range of intriguing topics, such as speculative imagery that challenges gender and people's views of gender, gender experimentation or role switching such as female masculinities, witchcraft, the Tarot, transcendence, the goddess and the Divine, and themed space.

The content within this compelling issue provokes questions about the meaning of gender and how it's presented in literary works of not just science fiction and fantasy genres, but all works of literature in any genre. The journal can prompt one to examine what we've been taught about gender, and the rules or stereotypes that seem to box us into a tight role or identity in which those of the free-thinking variety wish to break free from. We cannot be true to ourselves, nor have a true voice if we succumb to such labels and limitations.

The authors in the issue allow an awareness to take place within the reader, in which one may learn to grow from experiences to develop into a more cohesive self, and that cultural oppression, sadly, still exists as we struggle to overcome traditional and narrow views on gender. The journal may cause one to look at both male and female points of view which exist in society, and how differing assumptions can complicate objective examinations of feminist literature, as well as what feminism is all about.

The issue also presents material that is strange yet entertaining, and unusual yet compelling and reflective, such as a fiction piece about love shared between two beings from different planets.

The issue poses such questions as: Why does female masculinity exist in children's fantasy? Why are female characters in literature considered powerful or adequate only when they exhibit characteristics that are traditionally male? What effect does fairy-tale literature have on gender theories within different cultures? Is it too late for us to change our thinking regarding gender, or are the rules, roles and meanings too much set in stone?

As a collective whole, issue 10.2 portrays how gender has significant contributions to the world and how we choose to live in it, how we identify ourselves and others, and how we may be able to break free from existing gender constraints, initiating a change in outdated and current mindsets or ways of thinking.

~Kelly VanBuren

10.2 Contributors/Authors:
Emily Auger, Anne Balay, Ritch Calvin, Shari Evans, Ardys Delu, Daniel Hill, Phillipa Kafka, K.A. Laity, Gillian I. Leitch, Lani Ravin, Maria Shine Stewart, Susana Sussman, Batya Weinbaum, Li Weinbaum.

Femspec journal is edited by:
Batya Weinbaum

Contributing Editors: Diane DiPrima, Marleen S. Barr, Samuel R. Delany, Gloria Orenstein, Darko Suvin.

Advisory Board: Suzy Charnas, Florence Howe, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent,
Editorial Board:
Cristina Bacchilega, Beatriz Badikian, William Clemente, Kathe Davis, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Phillipa Kafka, Sylvia Kelso, Laurel Lampela, Lynne Reed, Gina Wisker.

Prepress Production by Ritch Calvin

For more information on this issue, visit http://www.femspec.org

To subscribe or make a donation, you can do so at http://www.femspec.org/06_involvement.html#donations

Note: Our new Femspec site is still currently under development

Reviewing roots, rock and revolution byEmma's Revolution

2010-09-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

This morning I stretched my back on a yoga ball at Twin Oaks in the collective dance/music/film/relax space, listening to Pat Humphries and Sandy O sing about how the earth was a living planet, following a star, and we don't know where we are going but we can change the universe just by being who we are. What a way to stretch!

The momentum flowed into me and with a jolt I was back on Fenn Fes, the post-Mich gathering in August where we all sat around in a talk circle after the festival and discussed the state of the world and politics, all of us, all the women and even a few men in the circle. No division into backstage for performers, paying festigoers kept out by ropes and security guards....the merging among us all as women and people striving to make a change in the universe was expressed in this circle, and in this CD that the two of them gave me to review after the small gathering ended.

Produced by James McVay and a product of Moving Forward Music in 2006, the well-produced CD with a great photo of the two young rising folk music/women's music stars has a long thank you that really lets folks into the feel of what it means to get into your music and to get it out. Acknowledgements for fundraisers, cashews, input musically, and so much more imparts a flair of where the two women are coming from.

I had to laugh as I danced to the lyrics of "Vote," where the enumeration of how many numbers the government can keep--of wars, investments, interest--really calls into question why it is so difficult to count our votes.

The fluctuation between critiques of harsh political realities and softer gentler croonings about where did you sleep, did you have some peace indicate how you get through this political world that is so crazy--find and nurture the vibration of love..

I think you will love this CD if you get your own, at many festivals where they vend or http://www.emmasrevolution.com/.

-Batya Weinbaum

The Ethics of Editing---A Feminista from 1998

2010-09-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

This is the compilation of a discussion that occurred on the Women's Studies listerv around the time of the founding of our journal. We revisit it from time to time to refresh ourselves in what our intention was in founding a feminist journal. We ask that all editors who work with us either on the board or as editors of special issues or sections read this, to bear in mind that we see our role as supporting authors rather than as gatekeepers. Thank you very much. And a special thanks to Ritch Calvin who relocated it from an archive so we could use it on this new blog.

THE ETHICS OF EDITING--A FEMINISTA

This feminista was developed by consolidating responses to the following post
on the women's studies list on LISTERV. We would ask editors, writers and
publishers to be aware of the issues discussed, particularly feminist editors
of journals. Please copy, spread the word, post, and contact me if you are
interested in developing this into a publishable article.

"I recently had an article cut by a collective before they had even read the
revisions they had asked for, which took me some time doing. There was no
commitment to publishing even though they asked me for extensive work two
times. That was a feminist collective. My co-editor was asked for revisions
four times by a feminist journal that then did not use her work. We are
starting a journal partly because of negative experiences of articles being 'rewritten' at the editorial level by people we assumed were not steeped in
feminism or in our content. Can anyone out there who has experience editing a
feminist journal, or anyone who has contributed to a journal, help in
formulating a 'feminist ethics' on the editorial end? I would hope this
discussion would relate to many experiences that many of us had, and could
lead to better responses than 'don't bug me for details' when things like page
length after extensive requests for expansions and deadlines are requested of
the editorial board by the author. I have read some sociological analysis of
the editors of journals seeing their role as gatekeepers to academe, trying to
make it easier for the would-be's to drop out. Well, we 'wanna be' better--fairer to authors--and want to hear the rationale that some 'feminists' might have for such spurious treatment of authors as a group."

We are young faculty members, professors emerti, founders of journals, journal
editors, editors of presses and anthologies, conference organizers, writers,
authors, feminists, and frequent contributors to edited collections and
feminist media/platforms, including online lists. We have experience we would
like to share. In some ways, our experience has spanned a continuum from what
we perceive to have been sheer thoughtlessness or total insensitivity to our
points of view as authors to what we perceive to have been male-like power
efforts to silence us as women. In consideration of the limits of our upaid
time as working women and in some case as working mothers seems highly
hierarchical, un-grassroots and unfeminist. Frequently we experience power
moves--if you don't like it, this is how we are and shove onward. Some of us
have gotten the distinct impression that some feminists (for whatever reason)
just don't want to hear/read some points of view from some women authors.
So--they simply cut you off, cut out what you've written, or otherwise try to
silence you.

The ethics of the publishers, which we believe is the essential point to
discuss, some would say, arise from the present economic situation involving
both the "publish or perish" assumption which makes it possible for editors to
believe we will put up with anything, and the mega-mergers going on. Yet we
believe that there is a feminist ethic for editors & writers. Formulating a
feminist editorial ethics would start with fundamental respect for any woman
author's point of view as she has crafted it in her writing. Editors can
strive for accontability with good footnotes and references. That said, once a
paper is accepted, editors can ask that it fit to a certain length -- but the
author should have right of final edit. Trust the author, give the author the
power to say what she wants to say the way she wants to say it. Particular
issues are: editing for clarity vs.editing that changes the meaning of what
the author wrote; suggestions that enhance the author's intended meaning
vs.suggestions that change what the author is saying or sends into irrelevant
topics; honesty as to what the editors are looking for in their issue/volume;
non-negotiable demands after the article/chapter has been accepted andrevised
as requested;timeliness.
Sometimes, since manuscripts can work with only few minor changes, authors
decide not to send it their manuscripts back to feminist journals who are
asking for revisions again and again again and instead submit them to
journals that, to be honest, will look better for tenure review. Many young
scholars in other fields who want to publish in feminist journals to broaden
our audience to include a feminist-minded community, might decide to stick with
discipline-based journals (which will be better for us professionally anyway)
because we get tired of doing revisions for a year and half on 25 page
article!

On the other hand, we have even more unhappy stories about no editing
being offered at all. And that, too, is a problem not only a problem among
feminist publications, but everywhere. Publishers don't seem willing to pay
for editors to edit anymore, as so many of us have complained about when we
read overwritten books filled with errors that cry, "Oh, please, someone edit
me before anyone sees what I am in this raw state!" Then there are those
people working at publishing houses on both books and magazines who are
diligent and brand new and think that in order to earn their wages they must
change every word you've written. The ethics of has to discuss not only the
ethics of the people actually doing and receiving the editing, but the ethics
of the publishers.

In the interest of "professional decency," these events should not happen
again. The behavior we describe is not only unfeminist by our standards, but
also uncivil, unkind,irresponsible, unprofessional, and churlish:

*a feminist collective cutting an article from an issue before they had even
read the
revisions they had asked for

*a feminist journal asking for revisions four times and then not using the
work

*articles being "rewritten" at the editorial level by people not steeped in
or even adverse to the author's perspective or content

*responses like "don't bug me for details" over asking things like
stipulated page length after extensive requests for expansions

*continuing to ask for revisions after an author has asked to be told if a
decision will be made by a certain time, as if it could be, when it wasn't

*keeping an article for three years with four revisions, each one different,
and
continuing to send it to people who didn't think the author did, and then
rejecting it

*a journal refusing to print a critique of an article that was based on
invented sources, theory and language in their own journal

*a feminist journal asking an author to revise a manuscript twice, only to ask
for more major additional changes (with no guarantee of a publication) since
it was still not the article that they wanted to read.

*sending contradictory messages--one reader comment wanting more,going off in
directions which had nothing to do with the point of the chapter, showing she
didn't understand it or hadn't read it; and others wanting pages cut.

*significantly changing what was said through the editing

*non-negotiable cuts at the last minute in the interest of page length

*so alienating the author that she feels what is being published is not
really hers even though she has her name on it

*accepting everything and making positive responses initially when editors
are not sure they will get enough for a book, and then weeding out what they
didn't really want over 18 months by asking for revisions and saying the focus
of the chapotr does not meet the definition of the volume, asking for a
different chapter completely

original contributors to the above, although unfortunately Ruby Rohrlich is now dead:

Batya Weinbaum batyawein@aol.com
Jacqueline Thomason <jackiet@SIRIUS.COM>
Myrna Estep <estem@LAKE.OLLUSA.EDU>16022 Oak Grove, San Antonio, Texas 78255
<estem@lake.ollusa.edu> JAMI
schweit2@ix.netcom.com (Mary Schweitzer)
Ruby Rohrlich <rohrlich@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Susan Koppelman Huddis <Huddis@AOL.COM>
shirclif@tempest.coedu.usf.edu (Barbara Shircliffe)
npearson@runet.edu (Nelda K Pearson)

submitted by Batya Weinbaum, East Hardwick, VT batyawein@aol.com

Here I am with Mala, at Twin Oaks...

2010-09-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

As announced previously, we will be doing a motherhood issue. Partly this issue, which had as its genesis a panel on kick-ass mothers in sf at Wiscon, was revitalized by my discovery of Mala's 96 pp. thesis done at New College of Florida at the age of 22. Entitled "Post Gender Parenting: Reproduction and Childrearing in Feminist Science Fiction," the whole idea, she explains was "what parenting would be like without genders, or beyond genders." I was inspired to include one of our initial initiatives, which was to write about how the ideas we follow in the sf genre pan out in reality as well.

I discovered she had written such a thesis which applied ideas of feminist theorists to sf writing under the direction of Miriam Wallace, who supervised her, but did not herself specialize in science fiction, when going on a walk around the perimeters of Twin Oaks (www.twinoaks.org), a community I have been visiting over the years and where my teenager was living for the summer on her own. Mala told me she had written her thesis on this topic when she discovered I was editing a feminist sf journal. Having given me a copy, I read it with complete absorption. Subsequently, I wondered how she felt about the theories and issues she discussed back then, having had the opportunity to live the ideas she had read about by now.

Her thesis, which we will publish either in whole or in part, covers such topics as Boundless Nurture Vs Benign Neglect: The All-Female Societies of Herland and Motherlines; Erasing Difference, Overcoming Dualism: The Hermaphrodite Societies of Sturgeon and Le Guin; Reproductive Equality in Marge Piercy and John Varley, and genetic and social engineering in Sherri Tepper and Doris Lessing.

Mala Ghoshal, age 35, has lived on Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Louisa, VA, for ten years. She and her partner of 16 years are the parents of Zadek, almost 5, and Samir, age 1 and a half. I am interviewing her in her gorgeous spacious room with a view of the woods and a deck in the "SLG" which stands for a small living group building in the community. Her small living group includes 11 people, including four kids and seven adults. Each has his or her own room, except in this community, the pronoun "co" is often substituted for "his" or "her." We each had to schedule in an hour in our labor sheets to arrange this meeting.

Q: Can you tell me what theorists you chose to use in this thesis and why?

M: I chose to focus on three feminist theorists writing in the seventies and early eighties: Shulamith Firestone, Mary O'Brien, and Adrienne Rich.

Q:Why did you focus on these three, and which of their ideas did you find most relevant for how you have lived your life raising your children outside of a nuclear family structure in the community you live in today?

M: Even though I went to college in the mid-nineties, I was very interested in and identified strongly with second-wave feminism and wanted to draw attention to second-wave theorists. Firestone and O'Brien talked more about biology and Rich more about social structures, so her work is most relevant to raising children in a context other than a nuclear family.

Q: What drew you to the second wave theorists, and do you identify yourself as part of the "third wave?" Why or why not?

M: I liked the second wave's focus on very tangible issues: pay equity, violence against women. When I was in college "psychoanalytic feminism" was the hip thing and I was impatient with that. I felt like we hadn't yet won the struggles the second wave had initiated. I felt like, when violence against women is a thing of the past and women are getting paid as much as men, then maybe I'll be interested in reading about feminist appropriations of Freud. I've always been a little skeptical of the term "third wave."

Q: Well, we could keep having discussions about theory, because this is so interesting, but can you tell me more about why you moved to Twin Oaks? Was the opportunity of raising children outside a nuclear family structure part of the draw?

A. Definitely. I was also drawn here for economic reasons: I liked the idea of living in a Marxist society, where the workers own the means of production; where there isn't an owning class and a producing class; where we say, "From each according to cos ability, to each according to cos needs." We also live out the Marxist ideal of not being tied to one job; I can be a gardener in the morning, a tofu maker in the afternoon, a librarian in the evening.

And I was drawn to the ideal of living in a community that was tribe-sized, manageable, 100 people who all know each other and are connected to one another and feel responsibility toward one another.

Look for further interviews in the special issue on motherhood on how she felt reading this thesis later, and in particular, how she found the ideas from theory and fiction worked out in practice when raising children in an alternative structure. Look also for an interview with Elsa, a mother of two living in the same community.

Special Issues: How to Create One and What's Coming Up

2010-09-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

Femspec currently has a special themed section on Octavia Butler in the making, plus an entire special issue on Paula Gunn Allen, another one on motherhood in sf, and another one on Canadian author Vonarburg, edited by Amy J. Ransom, which will contain pieces in both English and French. We had one on disabilities but only received one submission. If you are interested in submitting materials on any of the above authors or themes, let us know; we will connect you to the appropriate editor. And if you are interested in starting up a themed section or issue, here is what you need to know:

1. All contributors, including the editors, need to be current subscribers to the journal.This means in order to submit materials, your authors and you must subscribe at the initial stage of the process. The process will go a lot smoother if you and your contributors actually read the journal and know what kind of journal you are working with as we work to support you to bring your work into print. Read us, get to know us, and be committed to be in dialogue with us.
2. You must send us a proposal of what you intend to do; we circulate this amongst our editorial consensus people and get back to you before the call for papers can be circulated or posted.
3. You are responsible for circulating and posting your cfp, and of notifying us of where you do. You must also send us a complete cfp for us to use in our issues and on our electronic sites.
4. You receive the papers and submissions, and then you circulate them for anonymous review following the review procedures as described on our web page (femspec.org) under "review process."
5. When you have received comments, returned them to your authors, and received revised papers back that you are ready to submit as a section or a whole issue, you submit two hard copies to us in which all names have removed from the table of contents and the pieces so we are also doing anonymous review.
6. I read one copy, and send another copy to a selected editor either from our board, or a specialist if no one on our board is willing or able to review the material.
7. We make a decision and send our comments to you. If we ask you to revise, you get your authors to revise and return the entire project with a letter describing how you or your authors met our requests. We may accept the whole project; we may accept most of it but not all. We may ask for substantive revisions, or we may say that we accept the project contingent upon your agreeing to the minor revisions we request. We make these decisions with a view towards the longevity of the journal and keeping to our mission and standards.
8. We do not reprint works previously published in English.
9. We generally retain all copyrights including of creative work and cover art.
10. This process can take 12-18 months.

If you would like to see some of our successful themed issues, look for 2.2, our Native American issue; and 6.2, our African American issue. We also have had a girls issue, a sf film and reproductive technology issue; a horror issue; and a Jewish Women's issue. We consider our special issues some of our finest work, because of the nature of the dialogue that ensues as different communities talk with each other, even though this requires a lot of work. We like each issue to include book and media reviews, interviews, art, critical works, and creative works, as well as something for girls. We don't always hit all those bases, but we like to as we conceive of the audience of special issues as going beyond the general readership of the journal, although also including the readership of the journal. We can make available to you editors of ongoing or previous special issues to provide mentoring and support throughout your work.

Thanks for your interest!

Batya Weinbaum, ed.

Here I am at Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Virginia....Batya Weinbaum, editor

2010-09-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

What does that have to do with challenging gender, you might ask?

Well, at dinner on the large picnic tables outside ZK the collective dining hall, I heard there was a queer studies study group. And on the labor sheet that I got today, cleaning the dining hall, cooking and doing the laundry as well as food preparation all counted for the same labor credits as packing tofu, gardening, and office work.

In other words, the invisibility of housework is made visible.

I can even claim labor credit for elder care, if I make salt-free food for a woman in her eighties who is having high blood pressure. So I returned ready to cook with my special cook books.

And less than twenty years ago, all the kids under five lived in Dagania, the building I am living in now, which was named for a kibbutz near the Galilee in Israel.

That is how I got here. The place reminds me of a kibbutz and I was very happy when I lived and worked on one when I was 19. Hence the name, Batya. Given to me in the grapefields as I picked grapes at 4 am.

And stay tuned for the revitalization of our motherhood issue, which was once named the Kick Ass Mothers Issue, that started out of a session at WisCon in 2009. Not many papers came in , but we are revitalizing it because a woman here named Mala wrote a thesis when she was in school in Florida about 13 years ago in which she looked at science fiction novels and feminist theory about mothering and reproduction. Now she has been living here and raising her children in a community that was started to test out the theories of BF Skinner, eg, behaviorism, and the place has gotten way more interesting than that. Men wear skirts, women can go topless; for about 25 years there has been a tremendous women's gathering which I came to this year once again. My beautiful goddess paintings were on all four corners of the circle where people ate, and I attended sessions on the women's movement, where has it gone, and radical spirituality. Out of the whole festival circuit I had been to this season, this one was the most grassroots and radical because it was run by a commune rather than by a corporation trying to stay afloat. Instead of charging high price tickets, women bring their own food to put in a collective kitchen for a potluck, and one or two meals are provided a day. And even in the performance on Sat. night, anyone can share. Some sign up, and as the night goes on, more and more women get up and sing or recite a poem or dance or drum. Meanwhile the fire is blazing. You should come next year. A hell of a lot of fun.

Call for Papers (Film & History)

2010-08-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Papers are needed regarding:

"Lust in Space: Love in Science Fiction Film and Television"

2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television

November 11-14, 2010

Hyatt Regency Milwaukee

www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory

Final Deadline: September 15, 2010

AREA: Lust in Space: Love in Science Fiction Film and Television

"Science fiction typically relegates matters of the heart to perfunctory sub-plots. As Dale Arden says in the 1980 remake of Flash Gordon: "Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!" Yet science fiction also places love, sex, and reproduction in provocative new contexts. What are the stakes in a "mixed marriage" when the partnership crosses species, not just races or religions? How does love or family thrive in a utopian (or dystopian) future defined by sleek machines and hyper-efficiency? Does sentience in a computer or robot entail the capacity to love? How do cinematic stories of time travel challenge the ethics of cultural, sexual, or technological interference? Why are scientists, engineers and astronauts so often sexless in film, and what happens when they do fall in love (or in lust)? From the high seriousness of George Lucas' THX-1138 (in which love is the ultimate act of defiance in a totalitarian future) to the low comedy of Back to the Future (in which a teenaged time-traveler fends off the advances of his teenaged mother), this area will treat all cinematic and televisual forms such as adventure, drama, farce, social commentary, allegory, and more, as it explores the role of love inside the boundless space of science fiction.

Topics that would naturally fall within this area include:

Human-alien couples in series television (Babylon 5, the Star Trek universe)
Human-alien one-night stands (Star Trek, Starman, Barbarella, Species)
Loving robots (AI, the Terminator universe, Bicentennial Man, Wall-E)
Strange pregnancies (Humanoids from the Deep, Demon Seed, Village of the Damned, Junior)
Love and Time Travel (Back to the Future, Time after Time, Forever Young)
Dystopian Love (THX-1138, Gattaca, Children of Men, Zero Population Growth, Fortress)
Love in Space (Rocketship X-M, Saturn 3, Mission to Mars, Red Planet)
The Family of the Future (Meet the Robinsons, Lost in Space, Phil of the Future)
Love in the Laboratory (The Desk Set, Creator, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk)
Man-Made Women: (Metropolis, Bride of Frankenstein, Weird Science, SimOne)"

Please send your 200 word proposal by e-mail to the area chair:
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Social and International Studies Department
Southern Polytechnic State University
1100 South Marietta Parkway
Marietta, GA 30060
Email: bvanriper@bellsouth.net (email submissions preferred)

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).

Reference:
Femspec 10.2., 2010, pp. 128-129

Call for Papers for "Doctor Who in Time and Space"

2010-08-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

Dr. Gillian I. Leitch needs papers for an upcoming book titled Doctor Who in Time and Space. As stated in the Femspec journal issue 10.2, "A scholarly treatment of the BBC series Doctor Who is currently under consideration for publication by McFarland Publishers. This book, tentatively entitled Doctor Who in Time and Space, will be a collection of articles. Its general objective is to fill the dearth of literature about this longest running science fiction television series by providing analysis of the content and phenomenon of Doctor Who, both the old series (1963-1989) and the new series (2003-present), as well as its associated cultural products, such as book tie-ins and audio plays.

The book will be divided into four main themes:

1. History/Legacy
Article topics could include: history of the series on British television; broadcasting Who in the United States, Canada and Australia; Doctor Who movies; spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures; cancellation.

2. Characters/Characteristics
Article topics could include: enemies and foes (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master etc.); individual Doctors; Companions, race gender, identity, role; UNIT and representations of the military; the TARDIS; the Doctor's ethics.

3. Production
Article topics could include: the Producers (John Nathan Turner, Russell Davies); technology; production values; content; adapting the shows for the DVD market.

4. Fandom
Article topics could include: fan clubs; fan fiction; fan communities; conventions.

This list is meant merely as a guideline. All relevant topics related to Doctor Who will be considered."

Deadline for formal proposals is September 1, 2010. Please email Gillian I. Leitch at gilliandoctor@gmail.com with your proposals and any questions you may have concerning the project.

~(Gillian I. Leitch, Ph.D.)

Reference:
Femspec10.2., 2010, p. 127

Our Current Issue

2010-08-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Issue 10.1 is nearly 150 pages chock-full of interesting things to read. It includes poetry and a riveting article by Phebe Beiser, reviews of great books such as Mothers and Other Monsters, and Seers, Witches, and Psychics on Screen as well as other cool pieces by our intelligent contributors (such as Nava Semel, Meg Easling, Kyra Glass von der Osten, Phillipa Kafka, Derek R. Sweet, and Li Weinbaum, to name just a few).

Here is an excerpt of Batya Weinbaum's editorial remarks of issue 10.1 (taken from ProQuest):

"In the seventies, I studied writing in NYC with Marguerite Young, the author of the picaresque, psychological novel of the road from which these quotes derive--a journey of the human spirit in which a grown woman looks for her lost nanny who had abandoned her as a child, depicting a search for a bizarre reality in a fascinating world intertwining illusion and nightmare that had been heralded by international underground readers as the Arabian Nights of American life.

Li Weinbaum's review of Going Under keeps up our connection to the fantasy genre, and her review of The Gay Gene Discovery will keep our readers abreast of futuristic sf caricaturizing the Clinton family with Hillary as Lady President, Ellen "Generous" as psychiatric social worker, and where AIDS activist Linda Jones Feinberg depicts an analysis of a society threatened by a wave of abortion of gay fetuses." ~Batya Weinbaum.

This excerpt can also be found on the home page of the new Femspec site: http://www.femspec.org/new_site/01_home.html