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Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour

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Jennifer Bilek

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“The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end. When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl. The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own. I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.”

PoetryFeminismIntersectionality
Book:Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
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“Brother-in-law was now seriously cross and I was touched by his crossness. Somebody McSomebody was wrong then. People in this place did give a fuck. But there was something else about brother-in-law, something linked to that strange, communally diagnosed mental aberration that he had around women. For all his idolatry, all his belief in the sanctity of femaleness, of women being the higher beings, the mystery of life and so on, he couldn't grasp any abuse towards them other than what he termed rape. Rape for brother-in-law wasn't categorised. It wasn't equivocations, rhetorical stunts, sly debater tricks or a quarter amount of something or a half amount of something or a three-quarter amount of something. It was not a presentation package. Rape was rape. It was also black eyes. It was guns in breasts. Hands, fists, weapons, feet, used by male people, deliberately or accidentally-on-purpose against female people. "NEVER LIFT A FINGER TO A WOMAN" - if ever it had existed - third brother-in-law's teeshirt, to everyone's embarrassment, would have said. According to his rulebook - mine too, at least before the predations upon me by the community and by Milkman - the physical-contact aspect could be the only aspect. That meant that what was not of that trespass, not that kind of physical - stalking without touch, tracking without touch, hemming-in, taking over, controlling a person with no flesh on flesh, no bone on bone ensuing - could not then be happening. So it came about that of everybody who had heard of the wooing of me by Milkman, third brother-in-law was the only one who, unquestioningly, hadn't considered it to have taken place. Not seeing mental wreckage then, seemed one of his downsides.”

FeminismRapeKinds Of Violence
Book:Milkman
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