CLPP’s annual Conference April 10-12 2015: From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom!

 

It’s that time of year again—time to submit a proposal to present your work at CLPP’s annual conference, From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom!

For over 30 years, CLPP has been working to realize a world in which all people have the economic, social, and political power necessary to make healthy decisions about our bodies, families, sexuality, and reproduction. Our annual conference brings together activists and academics from across the U.S. and the world to share ideas and information, inspiring and supporting thought, reflection, growth, and collaboration across communities and generations. We know that you are engaged in amazing organizing, movement building, scholarship, and activism around reproductive justice in your community and we want to hear about it!

I hope you’ll check out our Call for Proposals and think about sharing your work with us this April 10-12 in Amherst, MA. Is there a training or conversation about reproductive justice that you want to lead? Are you involved in media-making for social change that you want to share? Do you want to share strategies for grassroots organizing? Let us know about your current activism, your expertise and experiences, and what you can contribute to the conference!

Join us in our planning process by submitting a proposal for a presentation, interactive workshop, or strategic action session. The deadline for proposals is September 26th.

We can’t wait to hear about your reproductive justice activism, organizing, and research. Please tell your friends and fellow activists about the call, and save the date for next year’s conference:

From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom
29th annual conference for student and community activists
April 10-12, 2015
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Lucy Trainor
Assistant Director

 

Support Our Work. Donate Now.

Register for The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute’s Six-Week Group for Eating and Body Image Problems. BEGINS SEP 23

212-721-7005  /  wtcinyc@mac.comwww.wtci-nyc.org

NEW 6 week group for the public begins September 23
Registration is currently available for The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute’s September, 2014

Six-Week Group for Eating and Body Image Problems.  

Beginning on Tuesday, September 24th, sessions will be held from 7:30pm to 9:00pm at Fifth Avenue and 11th Street. Christina Clark, LCSW, will facilitate this group. The fee for all six sessions is $275.

The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute (WTCI) is renowned 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 of working with the full range of eating problems, explicated in Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model (1994). We have found that our unique six-week groups can be a powerful tool for women as they journey toward a place of peace in their relationship with food and their bodies. (Please read below for a more detailed description of the group model.)

Groups are facilitated regularly in various locations in and around New York City throughout the year.

To obtain further information about our groups please visit our website www.wtci-nyc.org, or call Joanne Messina, LCSW at (212) 501-6033. To register, click HERE. We encourage early registration, as groups can fill up quickly!

Six-Week Groups for

Eating and Body Image Problems

 

In a therapist-led supportive environment, participants in our six-week groups are introduced to the process of relating more comfortably to food and one’s body. The diet culture has caused most women to become disconnected from their innate ability to feed themselves in accordance with bodily appetite and in a way that is emotionally nourishing, as well as physiologically and psychologically organizing and sustainable. Our six-week groups help women rediscover this lost relationship with their bodies and needs. Because we regard all eating problems as expressive of the emotional and social struggles women experience, these groups are designed to work effectively with the continuum of problematic eating, from compulsive and binge eating, to anorexia, bulimia, and chronic dieting. Our groups are open to women of all colors, sizes, sexual orientations and identities. Our only requirement for participation is an interest in developing a more harmonious relationship with food and one’s body.

Our six-week groups combine psychoeducational and psychodynamic elements to give women the tools and insights they will need to begin to understand, heal, and transform their relationship with food and their bodies. Exploration, fantasy exercises, and homework assignments are utilized in each phase of the group to encourage participants to personalize and internalize the group experience.

The group begins with an introduction to our “self-attuned” model of eating, which is anti-diet and mindfulness based. Participants are helped to use this model to eat with their hunger and to stop at fullness, while examining why they might feel compelled to eat at times when they are not physically hungry and/or to restrict their eating during times when they are. The group also attends to the complex emotional experience of satiety/fullness and how one can begin to register satisfaction and bodily limits in the eating experience with increased ease and security. The self-attuned model introduces curiosity and compassion as alternatives to the punitive and restrictive methods women typically employ in their efforts to change their relationships with food and their bodies.

Next, the group focuses on legalizing all foods and eliminating dichotomous thinking about food, such as good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, or permitted and forbidden food groups. Finally, the group addresses issues of body image and embodiment, including the symbolic meaning of fat and thin and how one’s ideas about and experiences of one’s body function  psychologically, interpersonally, and culturally.

All phases of the group’s work are informed by a psychodynamic perspective and by the conscious and explicitly articulated awareness that we live in a culture that encourages women to live in disharmony with their bodies and that, for most, an embodied life requires an active choice to resist cultural norms.

To obtain further information about our groups visit our website, or call Joanne Messina, LCSW at (212) 501-6033. To register, click HERE 

 

Registration is very limited for our groups and workshops, and an event will be closed if over-enrolled and canceled if under-enrolled; please register early.

May 13: V-Day Congo Director & Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler Deschryver, in conversation with Eve Ensler

On Tuesday, May 13, V-Day and ABC Home are so proud to present a new RISE4JUSTICE event with V-Day Congo Director & Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler Deschryver, in conversation with Eve Ensler.Join us as we discuss the City of Joy, including new programing, the V-World Farm, and an update about the fifth graduating class! Hear directly from Christine about what is happening in the DRC, the issue of violence against women in the region, and what women and men on the ground are doing to end it.

V-DAY HAS A SELECT AMOUNT OF $10 ACTIVIST TICKETS AVAILABLE!
Simply email RSVP@VDAY.ORG with your name and number of tickets you require.

WHAT: V-Day Congo Director & Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler Deschryver, in conversation with Eve Ensler
WHEN: Doors at 6pm, event from 6:30pm – 8:30pm
WHERE: Deepak Homebase at ABC Carpet & Home
888 Broadway at East 19th Street, NYC
TICKETS: $10 Activist Tickets – email rsvp@vday.org

100% of proceeds will go to the City of Joy in Bukavu, DRC

‘Maison des Reves’ at Planet Connections Festivity

In 1909 Samara, Russia, Alexe Popova confessed to killing over 300 men to ‘liberate’ the women of her community from their abusive husbands.  She fought the War on Women in her own way, with a little lethal poison!  Based on this true story, Talie Melnyk’s solo show, ‘Maison des Reves’ plays at Paradise Factory in this year’s Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, New York City’s eco friendly/socially conscious not-for-profit festival.

 

Wednesday, 5/21 @ 7pm

Friday, 5/23 @ 7pm

Saturday, 5/24 @ 4pm

 

Paradise Factory

Downstairs Theatre

64 E 4th St. (b Bowery & 2nd Ave.)

New York, NY  10003

 

For tix visit: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/933526

 

For more info:

www.planetconnections.org

www.taliemelnyk.com

twitter @MTalie

tweet #MaisondesReves

 

What’s Developing in a World in Crisis? Holzman/Salit @ NYU

What’s Developing in a World in Crisis? 

Meet Some of the Innovators 
on the Front Lines of Development

A conversation with Lois Holzman & Jacqueline Salit

Friday, June 6, 7:00-8:30 p.m. 

NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, Classroom 220

40 Washington Square S. (betw. Macdougal & Sullivan Sts.)

Fee: $45; $25 Retired/Student/Unemployed

(Early registration $40; Retired/Student/Low Income $20)

Amidst the global culture of revolution and counterrevolution, ethnic and religious battles, natural disasters, poverty and growing disparities in wealth that impact us all, nations and communities face pressing human development challenges. Many are trying to identify and meet these needs, some with old and tired tools and some with new and innovative ones. Don’t miss this conversation with Lois Holzman, director of the East Side Institute and founder of Performing the World, and Jacqueline S. Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org, as they introduce and discuss the work of an array of performance activists and play revolutionaries from Japan to Uganda – who are experimenting with cultural-performatory approaches to human development.
Their presentation will include documentary video reports from these “developmentalists” sharing the on-the-ground struggles, joys, disappointments and discoveries that come with supporting people to transform.
   Lois Holzman, Ph.D., is the Institute’s director and a co-founder. She is well known for her pioneering work in exploring the human capacity to perform and its fundamentality in learning how to learn. As a leading proponent of a cultural approach to human learning and development, she has made the writings of Lev Vygotsky relevant to the fields of psychotherapy, education and organizational and community development. She is particularly respected as an activist scholar who builds bridges between university-based and community-based practices, bringing the traditions and innovations of each to the other. Holzman has written and edited seven books and over sixty articles on human development, psychology, education and social therapy – among them: Vygotsky at Work and Play; Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind; and with Fred Newman, The End of Knowing and Unscientific Psychology. 
   Jacqueline Salit is a cutting-edge democracy strategist.  She is a political  independent, community organizer and one of America’s leading proponents of nonpartisan politics.  She is President of Independentvoting.org, the country’s largest and most innovative strategy and organizing center for independent voters, and the co-founder of EndPartisanship.org, an innovative legal and coalition-building tactic designed to challenge the taxpayer funding of partisan activity.  Her efforts to bring nonpartisan political reform to every state in the country include work on the successful passage of nonpartisan primaries in California; a 12-year effort with former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg to bring nonpartisan elections and governance to New York City; strategizing of Lenora Fulani’s historic 1988 independent presidential run. Salit’s book Independents Rising (Palgrave, 2012) is considered by many to be the most comprehensive look yet at the contemporary independent movement.
For more information or to register contact Melissa Meyer at mmeyer@eastsideinsitute.org, 212-941-8906, ext 304.

New Feminist Internships, Fellowships, and Volunteer Opportunities Available

 

Weekly Feminist Jobs Digest: 4/18/2014

The Weekly Feminist Jobs Digest is a service of the Feminist Majority Foundation, made possible through the support of individuals like you. Your contribution is vital to the continued success of our empowering work.

Donate Today!


New Feminist Jobs


Medical Sales Representative
Teleflex (Southeast)

Internal Audit Manager
Teleflex (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1g9RAB0

Development Associate
WV FREE (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1ruqGWq

Director: Business Development
Teleflex (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzYzHX

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
McKesson (Nationwide)
http://bit.ly/1pzYyn6

Finance Manager
McKesson (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1ruqFli

Senior Product Analyst: Strategic Accounts
McKesson (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1ruqGWs

Business Development Manager
McKesson (Nationwide)
http://bit.ly/1ruqGWu

Warehouse Worker
Mobius Industries USA, Inc. (Northwest)
http://bit.ly/1pzYzHZ

SQL Software Engineer
McKesson (Southeast)
http://bit.ly/1ruqFlk

Customer Service Account Manager
Mobius Industries USA, Inc. (Southwest)
http://bit.ly/1ruqFlm

Sr. Accounting Manager: International Accounting Group
McKesson (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzYzYf

Architect
CannonDesign (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1ruqKp8

Architect/Campus Planner
CannonDesign (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1fThZmA

Architect
CannonDesign (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1ruqMgD

Architect/Project Manager
CannonDesign (Midwest)
http://bit.ly/1ruqMgC

Environmental Graphic Designer
CannonDesign (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1pzYJyP

Interior Designer
CannonDesign (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1cCciSb

Paralegal: National Prison Project
ACLU (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1ruqKpa

Marketing Coordinator
CannonDesign (Midwest)
http://bit.ly/1pzYJyR

Architect
CannonDesign (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzYHHa

Structural Engineer
CannonDesign (Midwest)
http://bit.ly/1ruqKpc

Legislative Advocate
National Nurses United (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1pzYHHb

Digital Design Associate
American Bridge 21st Century (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1ruqKpe

Medical Sales Representative
Teleflex (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1fkeZ28

Architect
CannonDesign (Midwest)
http://bit.ly/1pzZ7gO

Case Manager
Haven Hills (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1c15iOc

Writer and Editor
Center for Reproductive Rights (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzZdoM

Senior Clinical Marketing Specialist: Vascular Access
Teleflex (Northeast)
http://bit.ly/1pzZgRA

Operations Manager
Mobius Industries (Southwest)
http://bit.ly/1pzZkR3

Senior Electrical Engineer
Mobius Industries (Northwest)
http://bit.ly/1rurjPN

Workplace Strategist
CannonDesign (Midwest)
http://bit.ly/1rurxpZ

Architect & Project Manager
CannonDesign (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1rurydH

Telecom & Technology Engineer
CannonDesign (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1rurzhK

Anesthesia Sales Specialist (Remote)
Teleflex (International)
http://bit.ly/1pzZCHT

Grade III Senior Organizer: Higher Education Campaign
SEIU (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1rurFWA

Legal Director
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1fGtltP

Braiding Technician
Teleflex (Midwest)
http://bit.ly/1rurIBR

Financial Analyst
Teleflex (International)
http://bit.ly/1pzZNmz

Director of Field Services: Committee of Interns and Residents
SEIU (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzZRT5

Senior Project Manager, Team Lead
NetCentrics Corporation (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1pzZTuk

Director of Communications Support
Progressive Change Campaign Committee (Nationwide)
http://bit.ly/1rurTwS

Infrastructure Solution Manager
McKesson (Southeast)
http://bit.ly/1pA020W

SAP Application Director
McKesson (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1rurZEG


New Feminist Internships, Fellowships, and Volunteer Opportunities


Government Relations Intern
Center for Reproductive Rights (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1pzZs3a

Summer Program Fellow
Sexual Health Innovations (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzYJiz

Summer Design Intern
Sexual Health Innovations (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1pzYJyM

Summer Development Intern
Sexual Health Innovations (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1ruqM0m

Summer Intern
Alliance for Justice (DC Metro Region)
http://bit.ly/1pzYHqQ

Intern
Corporate Accountability International (East Coast)
http://bit.ly/1gk10tK

Internship with Ms. Magazine
Ms. Magazine (West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1eDSW0i

Internship at Feminist Majority Foundation
Feminist Majority Foundation (DC Metro Region and West Coast)
http://bit.ly/1eDSW0i

 

 

Thanks to Feminist Majority Foundation Career Center!

Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum and Environs – Apr 26

On Saturday, April 26, in celebration of the artist Judy Chicago’s 75th birthday, she will conduct a pyrotechnic performance called A Butterfly for Brooklyn. The event will take place at 7:30 in Prospect Park, at the north end of Long Meadow. For details, see www.prospectpark.org/calendars vent/butterfly-brooklyn

 

The butterfly has long been associated with Chicago. For instance, in The Dinner Party (1974-79), winged patterns are referenced with mirrored images on ceramic plates of the 39 place settings celebrating significant women throughout history. In this context, they function as symbols of liberation. Now permanently housed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, The Dinner Party was the subject of much controversy, to the extent that it was debated by the US House of Representatives for its apparent pornographic undertones. Clearly, not everyone appreciates the virtual miracle of it being on display at long last. On the week-end, I overheard a young woman enter the room and say in an exasperated tone, “We have to walk around. $&@#!”

 

Chicago is in good company in using pyrotechnics as an art form. Her contemporaries, Ana Mendieta (1948-85) and Marina Abramovic (1946-) have both created powerful works using fire outdoors. Archival photos of Chicago’s pyrotechnic works exploring colour through smoke on the West Coast are currently on display in the temporary exhibition, Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963-74, on the same floor as The Dinner Party.  The show follows her career up to The Dinner Party, even including colour tests on ceramic plates that informed the installation.

 

My first impression at the entrance of the show was surprise at how different her minimalist sculptures of repeated geometric shapes are from the vulvic images for which she is known. Elsewhere in the show, the artist reveals that she had to emphasize structure to get by in art school, because there was a lack of appreciation for symbolic imagery. Colour may be the one unifying element in her oeuvre. Looking through the negative space of the sculptures, the viewer can appreciate the consistent palette—a rainbow of pleasant colours suited to sorbet—by noting their repetition within various works.

 

Chicago saw herself as ‘one of the boys’ and became skilled in construction as a sculptor. This may seem like it would be par for the course, but in that era, there was a large contingent of artists who eschewed fabrication, reveling in the notion of using readymades like bricks in Duchampian fashion. Conceptual art was emerging, and with it the perspective that genius was a myth and that the idea behind a work was more important than who made it. Curiously, there was also emphasis on the labour of artists, seen in particular in the Art Workers Coalition, which promoted itself with images such as artists lugging sculptures as big as Chicago’s. Her practice was as much physical as it was conceptual, and she passed her technical skills onto female students at Fresno State College and later the California Institute of the Arts. Emphasizing this part of her practice, noteworthy though it is, is risky. The exhibition wall text, for example, notes that, “Chicago took a boat-building course to learn how to use fiberglass, another nontraditional medium with masculine associations.” Highlighting this fact could reduce her to her gender even while stressing that she acted outside of its confines.

 

Also deviating from the feminine is a recent recreation of a piece called Birth Hood (1965). On a car hood with rounded cut-outs where headlights would be, she painted biometric forms in the same colours as her minimalist sculptures. Created not long after her first husband died in an automobile accident, it reads as an unconventional memorial to him, and by virtue of the title, as an allusion to her survival in a new form–not unlike a butterfly. Although interpreting work in relation to autobiographical details is also risky, it seems appropriate for an artist who changed her family name to her hometown as a publicity stunt coinciding with a change in art dealers. Chicago is no stranger to autobiography, having written her memoirs in two parts. Personally, I have found them to be a case of TMI but her narrative texts are compelling in a series of drawings called Rejection Qunitet (1974) with secondary titles like How Does It Feel To Be Rejected? and Female Rejection Drawing. The majority of the paper is filled with undulating vulvic forms and the bottom has text written in pencil that resembles diary entries in content. One piece recounts the story of her attending a party at a collector’s house with her husband at the time. Upon leaving, she thanked the host for having them and he said, “I haven’t had you yet.” She then thanked him for ruining her evening.

 

In another drawing, she asks, “How many women are willing to face rejection and rejection and rejection and rejection and rejection and rejection and rejection and still insist on exposing their femaleness?” To contextualize personal observations like this, the show displays an Artforum article from 1974 by Lucy Lippard in which the critic observes that Chicago’s work had not been written about in an article in spite of 11 years of exhibition experience. Since Chicago knew she wanted to be an artist from age 5, when she began art classes, the event on April 26 also marks an impressive 70 years.

 

To read other posts by Heather Saunders about Judy Chicago, see http://artistintransit.blogspot.ca/2013/03/from-feminist-library-becoming-judy.html and http://artistintransit.blogspot.ca/2012/07/legacy-of-judy-chicago.html

 

APRIL 6 OPEN HOUSE Minding the Body: An introduction to the WTCI Training Program on Eating, Sex, Surgery, Subversion, and Creativity

The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute

New York, NY

wtcinyc@mac.com  /  www.wtci-nyc.org  /  (212)721-7005

Post Graduate Training Program

Minding the Body: Disruptions and Possibilities

Eating, Sex, Surgery, Subversion, and Creativity

 

Our unique 18-month post graduate training program offers an integration of psychoanalytic, attachment, trauma, and social theories to study the spectrum of embodiment — from secure and cohesive to troubled and dissociated. Through a critical feminist lens, we analyze social hierarchies of race, class, sexual orientation, body size, gendered identities and expressions, and normative notions of health and illness.  We explore the internalization of family and culture in relation to body based symptoms and body modification practices, food and eating, trauma and sexual abuse, aging, reproduction and caregiving, and the indwelling of psyche in soma.  The WTCI model, individual supervision, and an experiential group enrich the clinician’s use of self, including attention to somatic countertransference and to the meeting of bodies/subjectivities in the therapeutic setting. Graduates have the opportunity to become part of a vibrant community of alumnae/i and faculty.

 For more information, click HERE

OPEN HOUSE

Minding the Body: An introduction to

The WTCI Training Program on Eating, Sex, Surgery, Subversion, and Creativity

 April 6, 2014      Noon to 1:30

Contact for location: wtcinyc@mac.com or (212)721-7005

THE FIRST ANNUAL FEMINIST BALL! TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

DSCC and DCCC 2014 Campaign Correspondence — Laurens R. Hunt

In 2004 John Kerry lost the chance to be elected our US President because of his statement “I voted for the Iraq War before I voted Against It”.

Republicans always supported a path to earned citizenship.   Now they call this amnesty.   They were for legal immigration before they were against it.

Republicans always supported tax credits and unemployment extensions for the unemployed and low income workers.  They now call these welfare and government handouts.  They were for this financial assistance before they were against it.

Republicans who opposed abortion always considered rape, incest, and the life of the mother as exceptions.  They now consider emergency contraception and birth control to be infanticide.  They supported these measures of health care and individual compassion before they were against them.

Republicans who opposed larger stimulus bills always supported spending on construction, manufacturing, state, and local governments.  Now they consider these appropriations that have led to stable job growth through all of American history to be runaway spending.  They supported funding that has always been proven to grow our economy before they were against it.

Republicans who support the 2nd Amendment always favored mandatory background checks.  They now say that this safety measure means denying the right to own a gun for law abiding citizens.   They were for this safety measure before they were against it.

Republicans need to explain how deporting immigrants who have arrived here legally and properly does not damage our image around the world and add to those who want to kill the American people.

Republicans need to explain how tax credits and unemployment extensions that are known to add to purchasing power for working families and individuals don’t improve economic growth and job creation.

Republicans need to explain to women how demonizing emergency contraception and birth control are a fight in favor of women rather than a war on women as the former Governor of AR Mike Huckabee is now telling them to do.

Republicans need to explain how deteriorated bridges, roads, and tunnels don’t hurt the growth of small businesses and corporations.

Republicans need to explain how background checks are not necessary for gun safety.

Now which party is unable to decide its positions on the issues?

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