Planned Parenthood Action, “A note to the leaders who’ve betrayed us: you’ve cast your votes, and on Nov. 6, we’ll cast ours. Pledge to vote” ppact.io/pledge
Archive for Blog
“Your shaming was no match for survivors affirming each other’s worth”
Category: Blog /
Women’s March on Washington & NYC – Everyone is using the “F” Word…Resources & This week’s updates
This election exposed and ignited the willful ignorance and hateful rhetoric of sexism and racism. We have an opportunity as the world is watching, to voice our values of treating each other and ourselves with dignity and respect. When we speak bravely and listen with respect, social evolution happens. No matter what…we’ll keep moving forward – Meredith Villano, Co-Founder, Paradigm Shift NYC
We’re honored to support the historic Women’s March on Washington & Women’s March on Washington- NYC Chapter, and local sister march Women’s March on NYC
This week’s latest march information & resources
Facebook/Twitter: Women’s March on Washington, Women’s March on Washington- NYC Chapter, Women’s March on NYC, @womensmarch @nycwomensmarch
Find a Bus to DC– STILL AVAILABLE & MarchMatch – get or give help to get down to DC, ParkingPanda pre-book parking (call to check road closures)
Sister Marches Nationwide, Parents support & text alerts for families, home sharing, accessibility for the differently abled
Free poster downloads from The Amplifier Foundation, Inside Out Project’s March action- post your portraits
Paradigm Shift’s Facebook updates
Register to get an accurate head count
“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.” – Gloria Steinem
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.” – G.D. Anderson
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” – Audre Lorde
““My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it’s very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.” – Ani DiFranco
Category: Blog /
2/6 at 7 PM – Women & Men As Allies Post Election – Save the date
* Partner Event – We support our long-time partners, Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities and Feminist.com. Michael Kimmel, Author of “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men” and “The Guy’s Guide to Feminism” (among others), has been a featured Paradigm Shift NYC speaker for the launch of both books. Mr. Kimmel is the founder of Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University. Paradigm Shift NYC did not produce this event.
Category: Blog /
Call for Ideas: Women, Action, & the Media’s WAM! It Yourself
From our partners at WAM!:
What could happen in your community when local media makers, activists, journalists, artists, academics, and more come together to fight for gender justice in the media? Discover what’s possible by participating in WAM! It Yourself from March 21 — April 1.
During WAM! It Yourself (WIY), folks across the continent come together to meet, plan, build, and organize for gender justice in the media. Think of it like a decentralized conference where the sessions that are relevant to your community take place in your own neighborhood. You’ll have that same after-conference buzz of motivation and inspiration that gets you fired up about the future — and the best part is that you can put it to use right away, because you’re home.
We need you to help us make 2016 the biggest WAM! It Yourself yet! Nobody knows your community better than you do, so we’re standing by to help you bring your ideas for a WIY event to life. Movie screenings, workshops, panel discussions, salary negotiation trainings, pitch sessions, open-mics, book clubs, poetry readings, and happy hours are just a few of the events we’ve held in the past, but the sky’s the limit!
Rest assured that you’ll have support from the team at WAM!Central. We are nothing without our rockstar local leaders that make our grassroots dreams possible! Still got questions? Send us an email at wam@womenactionmedia.org.
Category: Blog /
Feminist Campus’ National Young Feminist Leadership Conference
Sponsored by the Feminist Majority Foundation, the 2016 National Young Feminist Leadership Conference will provide young activists with the opportunity to network, grow their knowledge on pertinent domestic and global feminist issues, and fine-tune their organizing methodology. Join young feminist activists from around the nation as we discuss issues including (but definitely not limited to) reproductive justice, eco-feminism, intersectionality and identity-based activism, campus organizing tactics and methods, violence against women, ballot measures and political organizing, social media and web-based activism, and global women’s rights and health. Registration
Individuals can now register for $37.50, and groups of 5 or more can register altogether or pay separately for $30 per person. For more information on how to register in groups, email nyflc@feminist.org.
Registration of all kinds will end at 6 PM on February 29th. Folks can register on-site but are not guaranteed to receive all conference materials.
If you’re interested in being part of our Exhibition Fair, sponsoring the NYFLC, or advertising with us, email nyflc@feminist.org!
Category: Blog /
Scholar & Feminist Conference at Barnard College
The Scholar & Feminist XL: Action on Education
A conference
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2015
BARNARD COLLEGE
Barnard was founded 125 years ago with the feminist mission of providing education to those who were excluded from major avenues of education. In honor of this legacy and the 40th anniversary of BCRW’s signature Scholar & Feminist Conference, this year’s conference builds a feminist framework for understanding the institutional, social, and pedagogical facets of teaching, learning, and schooling. Scholars, activists, educators, and artists explore the K-12 landscape and investigate who can attain post-secondary education, under what circumstances, and at what cost. They discuss diverse feminist approaches to such topics as the Common Core standards, educational alternatives, the school-to-prison pipeline, adjunct labor, sexual violence on campus, and continuing racial and economic segregation within educational spaces. Speakers include Nuala Cabral, Natalia Cecire, Kandice Chu, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Rod Ferguson, Che Gossett, Ileana Jiménez, Liz Losh, Jen Nash, and many more!
Schedule & Information
bcrw.barnard.edu
Category: Blog /
One Billion Rising 2016: The Revolution Escalates
One Billion Rising 2016: The Revolution Escalates:
Focus on Most Marginalized Women & Girls To Bring About Deep Structural Change
Activists Globally Call For System Change And Revolution Through Art; Rising for Workers, Refugees, Indigenous Peoples and Migrant Workers, and Rising to End to Sex Trafficking, Sexual Slavery and Exploitation, & All Forms of Violence Against Women & Girls
Eve Ensler & Monique Wilson Tour Bangladesh, The Philippines, Hong Kong, Mexico, & UK
For the fourth year, globally One Billion Rising activists are planning their rising events, artistic uprisings, panel discussions, press conference, town halls, movies, articles, gatherings, poetry, art, posters, actions, and protests to take place on and about Feb 14th. With the theme – ONE BILLION RISING: Rise for REVOLUTION 2016, this year’s campaign will escalate the collective actions of activists worldwide, and amplify their call for systemic changes towards ending violence against women and girls once and for all.
Rising events will continue to focus on highlighting and creating bold artistic initiatives that reflect the actions taking place in communities. The theme Rise for Revolution allows creative and artistic expressions, multi-sectoral involvement, and provides a unique space to engage people from all walks of life. It allows the use of imagination, art and political actions – and allows everyone the freedom to localise their campaigns. REVOLUTION can bring everyone from the personal to the political – from the “I” to the “We”. It harnesses collective energy because it is hopeful and envisions possibilities and a future.
Full Press Release
Contact: Susan Celia Swan/Colleen Carroll, media@vday.org; 917-865-6603 (c)
Category: Blog /
The Women’s Therapy Centre Inst.- Post Grad Clinical Training Program Open House
Two Year Post Graduate Clinical Training Program
MINDING THE BODY:
DISRUPTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
EATING, SEX, SURGERY, SUBVERSION,
AND CREATIVITY
The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute is known for its pioneering work on women’s relationship to food, feeding, and their bodies. Since the publication of Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist Issue (1978), the faculty of The WTCI has further developed a theory and practice explicated in Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model (1994), a widely used text for psychotherapists.
The WTCI’s intensive Two Year Training Program understands eating and body image problems as the way people speak about what is dissociated and unspeakable. We see these symptoms as an expression of the confluence of self, interpersonal, and cultural experience. The prejudices of our culture regarding race, class, gender, and sexual identities are contained in the contemporary idealized body: racialized Euro-American, ultra-thin, hard, toned, young, heterosexual, hypersexual, and affluent. We analyze why and how women internalize this Ideal.
OPEN HOUSE
Sunday, April 10
For time and location RSVP wtcinyc@mac.com
or 212-721-7005
Category: Blog /
Onward
We’re currently developing upcoming programming & new projects. If you’d like to partner/cross-market or submit ideas for events including but not limited to screenings, discussions, concerts, and parties- email Meredith Villano, Founder/Director.
See what we’ve created since 2007- pics and the event list featuring leaders in feminist thought, that range from artists and academics to filmmakers and policy activists. Join us on Facebook, Twitter @PShiftNYC, and Meetup.
We’re a non-profit organization and 100% community funded. Your contribution will help us provide the most innovative, thought-provoking, diverse, and empowering events possible. Your donation of any size will directly fund the cost of event programming, and would be very much appreciated!
We have and will continue to inspire each other…onward.
Getting out of the Groove: The Feminist Art Project at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY
As part of this year’s College Art Association conference in New York, the Museum of Arts and Design hosted the Feminist Art Project (Rutgers University) on February 14 for a series of panels entitled Collective Creativity: Collaboration and Collectives in Feminist Art Practice.
The event helped me get out of a funk I’d been in since I read Ashton Cooper’s “The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument for Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion” the previous month. He critiques the art world—namely the publishing industry and the gallery system—for perpetuating the safe, tired, and harmful notion of the female artist who is “‘overlooked,’ ‘forgotten,’ and/or ‘rediscovered’” (¶2). I grappled with advice like his encouragement to consider a woman’s productivity in “the period where she was toiling away in obscurity” (¶26) because that would necessarily mean labeling her as obscure. Every time I risked reinforcing these tropes in the modern art class I teach, I felt like a deer in headlights. Although I touch on systemic art world biases in lectures, these tangents can’t take over the class, and to make these tangents, I need to be able to address the problem before addressing the source of the problem.
Cooper’s overall advice was echoed by one of the panelists, but in a way that felt more like a challenge than a reprimand, which helped me to reconcile this situation. In one of my personal highlights from the TFAP panels, poet Dawn Lundy Martin opted to share her presentation in an unconventional format, by playing a recording from her phone into the microphone of her ruminations while commuting on the Long Island Expressway. In this “elliptical utterance,” which she described as being “like standing alongside myself,” she asked, “How do you tell stories that need to be told that don’t deepen the groove of the already told?” One of her closing thoughts, after putting her phone aside and confirming that she was “no longer split,” was, “The desire for narrative is a false narrative.” Admittedly, I want to provide a neat and tidy story that is easy for students to digest, contemplate, remember, and challenge. Maybe, though, I should take the advice of panelist Sheila Pepe, an artist who observed (in reference to communities of otherness) that chaos and messiness are “very tolerable.”
There are many ways of expressing “resistance to a singularity,” as Lundy put it: counternarrative (A.L. Steiner, Ridykelous), monologue versus polylogue (Dr. Maura Reilly, University of Sydney), and monologue versus dialogue (Sydette Harry, Body Ecology Performance Ensemble) come to mind. Tactics range from avoiding censorship (as in the reader surveys for M/E/A/N/I/N/G, published from 1986 to 1996) to collaborating. Musician Salome Chasnoff describes collaboration as the “purposeful projection of the self into the other” and an “attempt to absorb each other…we’re trying to merge and it’s impossible.” There’s possibility in the impossible.
Jorge Daniel Veneciano, (El Museo del Barrio) believes that feminism “is not even an optional concept” and Lauren Denitzio notes, “It’s not enough to merely call oneself a feminist.” But what, asked artist Kara Rooney, does it mean to be a 4th Wave feminist (or a progressive 2nd or 3rd Wave feminist, as the case may be)? If feminism is a “critique of power,” as defined by both Mira Schor (Parsons, The New School) and artist A.K. Burns, then it must consider multiple power dynamics. Based on the discussions throughout the day, being a feminist in the arts means embracing a pluralistic definition of feminism that accounts for cultural producers in diverse places, of multiple races and cultural backgrounds, of all genders, and with various sexual orientations. This definition lacks the panache of Martin’s poetry, hardly rolling off the tongue, but maybe that’s a sign of getting out of the groove.
Category: Arts & Culture, Heather Saunders /
