Archives for July 2009

Flesh is tricky

never staying in the same shape or place

our bodies are solid

yet fluid in their ability to be interpreted in a myriad of ways.

We wrestle with our flesh,

forcing it into spandex contraptions designed to morph unruly flesh into the image of hourglass perfection,

it eludes captivity. 

Flesh spills gleefully

over the elastic confines of the corset, the shaper, the bra.

  Flesh reminds us

we can’t be anything we want to be. 

Our attempts to perform thinness

model-esque physical perfection as defined by an airbrush fail as our bodies wiggle and jiggle in merry display.

  We wound our bodies

angry and swollen red lines attest to our attempts to confine the flesh. 

Even the devices we inflict upon our body revolt at its captivity-

Runs in panty hose reveal pale flesh not suntan brown, toe reinforcement be damned

From South Dakota, USA to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

“I was 16 when it happened. Not planned at all, and then I was angry afterward because I thought it was his fault like ugh, you didn’t even ask or anything like that, so… it wasn’t a good first experience. And um, I think I was kind of in shock because, of course, I did not want that to happen, and some of my other friends had that happen, and, um, I don’t know, I felt dirty, and not – that wasn’t me I guess. Like I didn’t have time to think about whether I wanted it to happen or not, especially since we’d never talked about it also, it just happened.”

~Missy 21, South Dakota

The quote above came from research I did for my MA thesis, which looked at the contradictions that exist between the political and religious ideologies and actual sexual practices and lives of young South Dakota women. What did I find? In a nutshell, sex “just happens” and in most cases, it happens unsafely accompanied by fear and shame.

So What Am I Doing in Brazil, You Ask?

As we all know, unsafe and unhealthy sexual...

From our friends at Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice:

Have you ever wondered how communities of color can be more deeply engaged in the fight for comprehensive sexuality education?

Have you been interested in how a reproductive justice approach to sexuality education justice can broaden the movement for comprehensive sexuality education?

Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) is excited to release our brand new toolkit:  Transforming API Communities: Tools for Sexuality Education.  While numerous toolkits provide the nuts and bolts of developing and implementing local comprehensive sexuality education campaigns, what’s lacking are resources aimed at getting parents and caregivers in communities of color and immigrant communities to a place where they feel inspired and prepared to engage in campaigns.  In our work at ACRJ, we’ve found that API parents are especially in need of useful and concrete tools to transform their beliefs about the benefits of comprehensive sexuality education into action for change.  By meeting API parents where...

Our work on sexuality, as researchers, educators, therapists, and advocates, has everything to do with race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, age, spirituality, and nationality.  If NSRC's most recent summer institute, Race, Gender, and Sexuality, wasn't evidence enough, the continued inequalities in sexual and reproductive health should be.  See, for example, Michelle Chen's recent post on RaceWire: http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/07/culture_wars_killing_reproduct.html 

For those who are hip to black feminism, womanism, third world feminism, and/or other strands of feminism that emerged to challenge the exclusive, narrow focus of white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists of the West, I am not suggesting anything new.  Audre Lorde and other feminist scholars have argued that all forms of oppression intersect, and thus efforts to eradicate one form of oppression must seek to eradicate them all.  Sexuality, certainly, is included in this; homophobia, heterosexism, sexual violence, human trafficking, and sexual inequality generally all intersect with racism, xenophobia, nationalism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, ageism, religious intolerance, and classism.

Throughout the year I served as the chair of the Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy at Indiana University,...

When I decided on the theme of Race, Gender, and Sexuality for the 2009 NSRC Summer Institute, I was basing my decision on feedback from recent and past participants in the Institute, suggestions from current graduate students, and advice from my colleagues at San Francisco State University and the NSRC.  And of course, there were cultural and political events that contributed to what I perceived as a real need to select this theme and consequently the classes and faculty to address these issues.  However, I do not think that I knew the intensity with which I, my staff, the faculty, and the participants would have such an authentic experience including real conversations about race, gender, and sexuality over the past four or five weeks.  Upon reflection, I feel as though I am continuing from this journey with many more questions than answers while also having a much deeper understanding of myself and a greater desire to interpret my experiences in the positions that I hold and the spaces that I occupy throughout my life. 

As we sat in our classes (and the bars, cafes, restaurants, dorms, and apartments after) discussing the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, we also watched and sometimes (usually) commented on events unfolding on the national stage regarding many of these same issues.  We observed a dark-skinned president with an odd sounding name who just happens to be multi-racial (or mixed race if you prefer) struggle...

for context visit www.mickeefaust.com

My dissertation is concerned with performance and space.  How do people perform their identity and how does the presence of a stage signify a body is acceptable?  How does the performance of identities not welcome on traditional stages challenge our ideas of beauty and who gets to be looked upon?  How is physicality and knowledge of what constitutes a theatrical body challenged not only by those who can’t physically perform in standard theater, but deliberate decisions to use non-normative bodies- the fifty year old woman who plays a sorority sister, the fat graduate student who plays a lesbian hottie, the elderly man in a wheelchair who plays an army general.

in this  self professed weird theater for the weird community I feel at home…a freak among freaks.  a young rat among the old rat divas I love to sit and listen to stories about the company…tales that attest to the weirdness of this space.  The time deaf performer Terry Galloway missed her cues as the cast raced around the back of the stage trying to find her…calling her name in a panic…forgetting she couldn’t hear them.  Discovering her blissfully unaware, slowly putting on her Mickee Faust rat persona.  The story of a well respected professor in a Madonna sketch, dressed in leather crawling across stage to lap from a bowl of milk.  The days when the company operated out of a...

She laughs as she tells me she almost died five years ago.  She put her affairs in order and had a custom coffin made, after all they don’t make coffins big enough for her fat body.  She grins as she tells me her beautiful coffin is now sitting in a garage, gathering dust.  She wanted to use it as a trunk in her nursing home, but it wouldn’t fit.  I want to talk about sexuality, how the fat power movement she started has changed over the years.  She wants to talk about the medical industry.  Today I yield to her wishes and think seriously about health, what it means and how I struggle to locate myself within its discourse.

Health in not about healthy bodies.  It is an industry turning a five billion dollar profit a year- producing pills and shakes in an effort to create superhuman bodies.  Bodies without defect.  Bodies that might glow in the dark they are so artificial- articficially healthy and vitamined out.  Bodies that are so morphed they might survive nuclear fallout.

Health is a store full of color coordinated jogging suites- tight on the body and made for people who are already in shape…who would wear all that spandex on their saggy baggy body?  Health is narrow running shoes designed by Nike…cute but not made to support over 150 pounds of woman.  Health is a gym full of mirrors because who wouldn’t want to watch themselves push their bodies. ...

Shitting.  We all do it.  Not shitting out words onto paper or lies into the atmosphere…but asses on toilets crapping out a reproduction of our dietary intake.  Yet I meet so many people with hangups about their shit.  The girl next to me laughs as she read her friend’s away message…”on the fourth floor”.  She informs me her friend refuses to poop in her office so she heads to the fourth floor.  I had a professor who refused to poop in public bathrooms.  If forced to do so, he would have to leave his office, drive home, and shower.  After a few missed appointments, I told him to lay off the fiber .

Shitting.  I have shat in a stall next to some of the biggest names in my field…and smelled the ripeness of shit from these academic monsters.  In the shared stench of a crowded conference bathroom I am reminded we are all human…we all shit.

It is a revelation any child could share with me.  When my nephew was little he was afraid to poop.  We would find him in a corner, red faced, trying to pretend he didn’t just take a giant shit in his pants.  But we knew.  We bought him a book called Everybody Poops.  The premise was simple…mommy poops, daddy poops….we taught him to be proud of his poop. 

Later, my poop-phobic nephew had a little brother.  At his christening my family looked wonderful- sober and...

I am thinking about fucking.

how fucking has become a political word…how I, who have never been fucked, use this word.Every day when I leave my house with my breasts out and my clothes tight…I say fuck you to this fat phobic culture.  When I demand to be heard I say fuck you to those who silence me because I am fat, female, poor.

Fuck is political like Obama…divorced from an actual body, so much larger than an individual….a movement.

Lilly allen wrote a song about it…fuck you….not about fucking at all….about giving the finger to politicians against gay marriage.

I talk about how fucked up the world is daily…but I rarely talk about fucking people.Perhaps these words are incompatible in my fat existence.  In my work as a fat activist I constantly hear about size discrimination, hatred…I experience hatred on a daily basis because of my body.  Putting on my fuck you armor is work.  It is a daily process of hardening myself…reminding myself my body is fabulous and the world around me is miserable and, most likely, starving after a breakfast of jogging and Starbucks.  In fighting to be treated as human I often lose sight of my sexuality.  My life becomes me against the world.  Us fatties against the skinny bitches.  A fat phobic world against fat me. 

I love my body.  I won’t stand for...

I spent a year of my life dieting, telling my students I loved my body, telling my housemates it was for my health- gleefully watching my body disappear in a mirror, celebrating each night I went to bed with stomach pains, knowing I would wake up and be rewarded for my denial by another pound lost on the scale.  The scale- my own personal numeric demon as I obsessively weighed myself after a night of indulging on a slice of pizza…no weight gain!  As I excitedly weighed after a day of eating nothing but salad…I gained a pound?!  Weighing became a ritual…take clothes off…use the restroom so there is nothing left in your body…

3,000 dollars…30 pounds.

It has been four months and I finally gathered the courage to throw the diet food, and the evil scale, out!

It is a typical story.  One I hear repeated constantly by women I meet everyday.  I know the statistics on weight and dieting.  Almost 90 percent of women are effectively on a permanent diet.  My size 2 students who spend every day running nowhere on a treadmill and counting calories attest to this.  The women I work with in community theater who share experiences of thirty to forty years of dieting…one who cheerfully admits she would have snorted cheetos if she could have gotten them into her body fast enough are reminders of a diet and body obsessed culture.  I spent five years secure in my decision to...

The imagery of Cirque Du Soleil is globally recognized for its aesthetic beauty, the grace of fluid bodies performing defying acts.

Not often are these descriptions given to the disabled...until now.

Sins Invalid's work is a vibrant necessity in this age of bland complacency. They take the medical and societal parameters that have historically relegated the disabled citizen to a less than second class position and they throw it aside.

The art that is presented brings the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and ability and throws it in your face, forcing the viewer to come to terms with how these realities are not so different and yet so different for those with disabilities. And this is beautifully done with the erotic and the body.

Feminists are quite familiar with the politics of the body. How familiar are feminists with the issues that surround persons with disabilities?

The medical model, as often brought to the forefront with reproductive rights,...

Last week at The Fellowship Conference in Atlanta, I discovered that radical inclusivity and sexual literacy have way more in common than I ever could have imagined.

As hundreds of mostly African American LGBT faith leaders from all over the nation convened to celebrate the radically inclusive love of Jesus Christ, I witnessed the emergence of a movement that is already dealing a powerful blow to the “church as usual” mentality which fractures people and communities.

I saw more clearly than ever that those who have hijacked religion and God himself by being exclusionary of lgbt people and others are seriously mistaken. And their mistakes are doing exactly what Jesus warned about—promoting the false idea that God’s love is only for the deserving…..constructing in so doing the category of “those who are not deserving”….and there are many of us, perhaps more than the alleged “deserving” themselves. 

Presenting certain experiences to the world at large (http://www.phem.org/) within my trip and antics in San Francisco bridges the gap between this academic utopia we are sharing right now and the reality of conservatism and complacency I am facing when I return.

Why did it take 34 years and thousands of miles for disability to be presented in an erotic framework? Why isn't there the freedom to piss on stage in a performance to illustrate father/trans son bonding? What can I hold onto to bring me the courage to shake things up?

I face the realistic fear that I will be immersed in the complacent quagmire that breathes in the water in Virginia. I want to shake the roots, I want to stir the nerves and show the way sexuality can be. I want the bravery to stand amongst the naysayers and allow my vagina to scream her happiness, to show Vag-Power while touting the rights for humankind to be human. Whether gender variant, gay in many forms or any other colorful human variety, there isn't the normalcy that is falsely prescribed. We are human...that is our tie.

There are those that have shared this journey that I will lean upon to breathe fire when they try to douse the flames. And I will look upon the work that is going to flourish from this to inspire me to do the same.

And we shall become the change we want to see.

In my time in San Francisco, I’ve noticed the academic parts of my life creeping into the personal. Or vice versa.

Several days ago, I found myself explaining Queer Theory to a friend over brunch. Without trotting out Butler and Foucault, I offered my friend the idea that “people like other people” – a simplification for sure, but an immediately useful one. Lisa Diamond’s presentation on Dialectical Systems Theory was helpful for explaining how the labels one uses to identify sexual identity change over time, and can depend on one’s surroundings. “We expect everyone else to stay the same, while we’re constantly changing,” I said between bites. Using theory to add context, to help make sense of individual experiences, makes sense to me. A position paper is less likely to change someone’s lived experience.

With all of the terms flying around academia like overstuffed turkeys – literacy, reification, performance, dialogue, discourse -   pining even one of them down for public consumption seems a small success. It’s not that these terms aren’t useful; rather, their meaning becomes useful to few when understanding is so closely guarded.

Some of the most interesting terms I’ve learned came from asking friends. A whole evening was spent discussing the differences between bears and...

Earlier this week, Megan Rauscher reported the findings of a recent study on race/ethnicity among MSMs, or men who have sex with men, in San Francisco: http://in.reuters.com/article/health/idINTRE5654MK20090706  In the study, published in the June 2009 issue of AIDS Behavior, a scholarly journal devoted to research on AIDS, researchers Raymond and McFarland seek to explore a paradox found in recent research on AIDS among MSMs: HIV/AIDS rates are much higher among Black men who have sex with men, but they are no more likely to engage in “risky” sexual practices (e.g., sex without condoms, sex under the influence of drugs and alcohol). 

Like previous research, they found that Black MSMs are more likely to have partners of the same race.  It’s the rest of the research that turns this seemingly innocent same-race preference into something much more disgusting: among their Asian, Latino, and white participants, Black men were consistently rated as the least desirable among these four racial/ethnic groups and perceived as the greatest risk for HIV/AIDS infection.  Even among their Black participants, they found that Black men were not their top...

On Monday, June 22 the National Sexuality Resource Center sponsored a panel discussion of the film Still Black:A Portrait of Black Transmen after the film’s Frameline debut as a part of the NSRC’s Summer Institute on Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Panelists included JayR Rosemon from Dimensions Clinic; Zion Johnson founding member of the Lou Sullivan Society; Shawn Demmons, an MPH Candidate San Francisco State University and a Point Foundation Scholar; and Amy Sueyoshi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.

Amy Sueyoshi agreed to share her comments from that panel in my blog. Her comments are a valuable resource for sexuality educators interested using Still Black in the classroom as a tool for teaching about sexuality, gender, and race.

This week I have the great pleasure of heading to Atlanta to represent NSRC’s Faith and Sexual Literacy Initiative for the 2009 Annual Fellowship Conference and Convocation. The Fellowship was founded in the year 2000 by NSRC Board Member, Rev. Dr. Yvette Flunder (Senior Pastor of City of Refuge in San Francisco and Presiding Bishop over The Fellowship) and can be described as follows:

“The Fellowship is a trans-denominational fellowship of primarily African American Christian leaders and laity representing churches and faith-based organizations from all parts of the country ranging from ultra-conservative backgrounds to more liberal, independent churches; from upstart, developing to very large, established; from economically challenged to very affluent. The overriding purpose of The Fellowship is to support religious leaders and laity in moving towards a theology of radical inclusivity which, by its very...

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Puerto Vallarta in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, for a site visit in planning the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality's (SSSS - or quad S for the unitiated) Annual Conference. Having never been to Mexico other than to the border towns of Juarez and Matamoros, I was excited for the new experience, particularly in a city that has a strong reputation for being gay-friendly, having large numbers of hotels, restaurants, and bars that cater to gays, and plenty of beautiful beaches for soaking up sun and margaritas.  Oh yeah, and to spend some time working with my colleagues to create an unforgettable program for this year's conference.

I love the feeling, especially when flying from a cooler clime to a warmer one, of stepping off the plane and feeling the heat in the jet bridge, and when deplaning my Alaskan Airline flight from San Francisco I was not disappointed by the feeling of moist warmth that provided a hint at how hot it would feel to step out of the airport into tropical heat of Puerto Vallarta.  I quickly made my way through immigration and customs, stopping to have my temperature taken by some type of thermal camera (ensuring that I didn't have swine flu) and proceeded into a hallway of uniformed people asking me to step up to the counter.  I had been warned...

The location of the Institute on Sexuality in San Francisco lends a circular experience to the academic progress. Within the program, this past week gave me my A-HA moment as I listened to Lisa Diamond. Her work resonated in my quest to figure out my next step once I graduate undergrad. Aside from learning all I can in sexuality studies, my journey to NSRC was in hopes to shed light towards my next direction and make connections. I found both in classmates willing to share their journey to assist in deciding mine.

As I pursue my quest, the people within the program that I approach with questions, no matter how miniscule, have been gracious in opening up to my inquiry. I have a greater understanding of the many directions I can go, discover in greater detail the specific topics I gravitate towards, and the support available out there to amazing people nationwide. There exists within the program a vast amount of people whose work has already changed the world. I am recharged to continue fighting the fight that needs to happen in Virginia with the examples I see everyday.

Outside of the classroom, I've found a city full of people with vast knowledge and experience. The Radical Women ladies we met in Dolores park exchanged problem solving in activism work. The housesitting opportunity I had opened me up to the inner ideas of a sex worker activist as well as meeting a queer activist on his way to becoming a physician. A civil rights lawyer showed the way to...

This summer, as well as this Summer Institute, is flying by. It seems only yesterday I was teaching my last class in Everett, MA and packing for San Francisco. As a community health educator, I seek to bridge the space between research and practice.

Inevitably when meeting someone, I am asked, “what do you do?” and often my condensed answer is “I teach sex ed.” The range of responses I’ve received have been from the bewildered – “How can you do THAT?” – to joyous – “I’m so glad YOU’RE the one teaching them” and everywhere in between. Sexuality, as well as the teaching of anything sex-related, evokes a strong emotional response. I wonder, if chefs receive the same questioning: “How many years of ‘training’ – wink wink – did you have to get?” and “Do you teach Kindergarteners how to put on condoms?” Food, like sex, is a natural, human need. Studying sexuality, in my mind, is similar to studying food or sleep. Yet unlike our sociocultural relationship to food, sex has become taboo, almost a fetish.Explaining my role to people working on sexual and reproductive health involves some jargon: “I direct a DPH-funded, evidence-based, school-based, teen pregnancy prevention program combining class discussions with service learning.” What does this mean? To parse that sentence: I’m the only one working on this...