Laurie and Debbie say:

In 1870, not long after the end of the horrifyingly bloody and destructive U.S. Civil War, anti-war activist Julia Ward Howe called for an international Mother’s Day holiday. In her declaration, she said:

We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. and

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Although Howe failed to get this international day off the ground, the holiday we celebrate today can be traced to her initial efforts through the public work of Anna Jarvis and her mother (also Anna Jarvis).

Howe’s declaration is as apt today as it was 138 years ago. When a theoretically democratic country is engaged in a bloody, senseless, and extremely expensive war that more than 70% of its population opposes, Ward’s idea of “solemnly [taking] counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace…” deserves attention and remembrance.

***

NBC’s America’s Favorite Mom campaign looks a great deal more like Hallmark than it does like Julia Ward Howe. But we’d be happy to just let it go if it didn’t have a category called “The Non-mom Mom.” (”Grandparent, stepmom, or mom to adopted children, each one raising and loving a child. A priceless gift for everybody.”)

Hello, these women are not non-moms … they’re mothers. Anyone who mothers a child is a mother. And any child lucky enough to have someone loving mothering them will know that they have a mom, not a “non-mom.” Get a clue, NBC!

***

Finally, Laurie will be moderating a panel at BlogHer on moms, children, and body issues, called “Mirrors: Ours, The Media’s, Our Culture’s, and Our Kids’. She wrote about her thoughts on the topic here. Mother’s Day is an excellent time to reflect on how moms (and dads and aunts and uncles and teachers and whoever) model body image for the kids in our lives.

Often we’re trying to deal with the negative stuff [our kids] bring home. “You’re ugly, you’re too fat, your eyes are wrong, your color is icky” etc. We want to help our kids to feel good about themselves.

Sometimes it’s really hard to do if we don’t feel good about our own bodies. Sometimes they’ll pick up the wrong messages from us. And it doesn’t help that we live in a world that markets the “super model” look to 9 year old girls.

Children of all races, sizes, ages, and body types deserve to feel good about themselves: how they look, and how their bodies feel.

Thanks to Carol Kennedy, mom, for the NBC link.

Debbie says:

I saw this article a few days ago, and I’m still thinking about it. The premise is that (married) men are showing less interest in sex:

Relate, which provides counselling, sex therapy and relationship education, said there had been a 40 per cent increase in male clients admitting that, despite being physically able to have sex, they can’t be bothered.

‘Men used to come to us with impotence - now known as erectile insufficiency - but Viagra has sorted some of that problem,’ said Peter Bell, Relate’s head of practice. ‘What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the Fifties: “I can have sex, but I don’t want to. It’s not rewarding”.’

Unsurprisiingly, the article itself engages in a combination of thinly-veiled evolutionary psychology (”men are turned on by the thrill of the chase”) and thinly-veiled blaming of women:

Bell said the problem is ‘partly because women are more aware of what they want sexually and are prepared to ask for it’. He added: ‘I think it’s also that men and women are more sexually similar than they like to think. It is traditionally believed that, while women only enjoyed sex if it happened in the context of a positive and nurturing relationship, men could always be turned on by visual cues alone. But what we’re seeing is that, once the thrill of the chase has disappeared and the sex is happening in a committed relationship, the libido of both men and women is affected by the quality of the relationship they are in.’

Oursin, who pointed at this article, suggests that this situation may always have been true and now be coming to light, which I also find plausible.

But I keep thinking about yet another explanation. Before I clicked Oursin’s link, I was already thinking about the role of Viagra, and was pleased to see that the article mentioned it up front.

Another unaddressed question is what else these married men are doing. Do they have mistresses? Are they seeing prostitutes? Are they jerking off?

Then there’s the piece I find particularly interesting. In a purely physical sense, human women are effectively always “ready” for sex. For tens of thousands of years, it has been physically possible to have penetrative sex with a woman regardless of her emotional or mental state or willingness to participate. Historically, (most) men have needed a wide variety of special circumstances and preparations to get hard. Viagra and its brothers have changed all that; a man can be physically ready at the crush of a small blue pill.

So maybe part of the story is, as Peter Bell would have it, that “men and women are more sexually similar than they think.” Maybe when married men are as readily “available” to their wives as wives have historically been to their husbands, the power dynamic shifts. Maybe it’s not so much that wives know how to ask for what they want as that husbands are in unmapped territory. Before, their penises told them whether or not they were “ready” for sex at any given time; now, it’s much more complicated.

Debbie says:

A common progressive lament in these times is “But what can I do?” The problems seem huge and it’s easy to get caught in choice paralysis. Years ago, Laurie and I wrote what is still one of my favorites of everything we’ve written: “Wholesale Problems: Retail Changes.” So here are a few roads to retail change that I especially like, or that caught my eye recently.

I was delighted to get an email from CODEPINK, the radical antiwar activist group, with information on how to donate directly to Iraqi refugee women and children. The specific campaign is based around Mother’s Day, and encourages you to donate in your mother’s name. Obviously, that’s not right for anywhere near everyone, but it is right for me. And my mother, if she was alive, would appreciate having her name on my donation. A chance to give a little bit back from what my government continues to take away.

Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his microloan program through Grameen Bank. Anyone with a little money they don’t have to spend right away can participate in microlending through Kiva, a site that lets you choose your own microloan recipient. As she (almost all borrowers are women) pays it back, you get update emails, and when the full loan is repaid (without interest), you can take the money out or loan it to someone else. The repayment rate is 99.7%, so the risk is, to say the least, minimal. I’m a participant in the group loan to Esther Oziengbe in Nigeria, who used the money to build her provisions and foodstuffs business. She has repaid 75% of her loan.

Donors Choose is designed rather like Kiva, though it takes donations, rather than loans. The focus is U.S. school projects, most of which would have been funded by tax money before the Reagan era. Again, you can pick your project.

Finally, I’m just dipping my toes into Nabuur, a site for those who want to donate time and experience rather than money. You can pick a third-world project and act as researcher, or project manager, or technical lead. I’m hoping to share a project management task with a good friend, and to start soon. (If anyone knows of a similar site for the U.S., I’d love to know about it. Think globally, act locally, at least sometimes, I say.)

Thanks to Liz Henry for showing me Nabuur.

Laurie and Debbie say:

We are deeply saddened by the apparent suicide of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “D.C. madam,” earlier this week. Palfrey seems to have killed herself rather than go back to jail. Susie Bright, who interviewed Palfrey last year, says:

I know you swore to me that you’d never serve another term in prison for prostitution, or anything else. You almost lost your eyesight the first time. I’m sure you asked your lawyers if there was any hope for your sentencing, and I guess it must have looked bleak.

I know how pissed you were. This was an act of revenge, and I know who you’re determined to haunt.

You were righteously furious at all the men who “walked away.”

I’m sure that goes quite a ways back, but it certainly includes the esteemed gents on your client list: Louisiana fundamentalist, Senator David Vitter; Abstinence Ambassador Randall Tobias, who squashed AIDS funds all over the world; “Shock and Awe” war profiteer, Harlan Ullman.

And that was just the expendable layer. None of them were charged with anything; all are living quite comfortably, in particular because they have no conscience whatsoever.

Palfrey isn’t the only reason these “esteemed gents” should be feeling ghosts breathing down their necks. As the news article linked above points out:

[Palfrey] was the second suicide related to the case. One of Palfrey’s call girls, Brandy Britton, a former University of Maryland professor, killed herself in January before she could go on trial for prostitution.

Since Susie made our first point so well, let’s just add one thing. Tens of thousands (or more) women and children in this country, and millions around the world, are enslaved as prostitutes, kept in wretched conditions, and treated like slime. Their cases almost never come to light except when a suicide is found. Yet the brothelkeepers who get prosecuted are the Deborah Jeane Palfreys and the Heidi Fleisses: the women who treat their girls (and their clients) with respect and care, as opposed to the (mostly) men who do just the opposite.

But what we really want to write about is the language of sex work. Gina DeVries, blogging at The Bilerico Project, says:

I asked my mother what prostitution was, why someone would do that. She told me that sometimes people need to make money and that prostitution is a reliable way to make it, that prostitution was the “world’s oldest profession.” She told me that my great-grandmother, Francesca, hung out with prostitutes, and had one hooker friend in particular named Maria. My Nana confirmed this fact about her mother very matter-of-factly. “Yeah, Ma would have the whore over,” she said to me, not a trace of malice in her voice.

Apparently, whenever Maria was over, Francesca would call to her children (in Italian), “The whore is over for dinner, set an extra place.”

I’ve always loved that. Francesca called the butcher the butcher and the barber the barber and the baker the baker; it makes sense that she would call the whore the whore. It makes me understand where my grandmother got her no-nonsense attitude.

Maybe Francesca’s friend the whore got called nastier names, or “whore” in a nastier tone of voice, in other parts of her life, but at least there was somewhere where she was just like the butcher or the baker.

We make complicated distinctions: we have whores and hookers, sex workers and call girls. And more and more we have the umbrella term “ho,” which anyone can use to put down, or just to describe any woman at any time. It’s a little like “cunt” that way (and just try to ask a presidential candidate if he called his wife a cunt).

As “ho” settles deeper into the language, it reflects the assumption that men are essentially buyers and women are essentially sellers. (This is one reason that “faggot” is the ultimate male insult, because faggots are seen as potential sellers, and thus less than men.) What’s worse, once you’ve bought from a whore, she knows what you like, how you like it, and how you treat her. She knows your secrets.

Brandy Britton died of the “crime” of selling what men wanted to buy. Deborah Jeane died of the twin crimes of selling what men wanted to buy, and of giving away men’s secrets to buy herself time and–she hoped–freedom. If Vitter and Tobias and Ullman are sleeping well these days, they shouldn’t be.

Laurie says:

As folks who read the blog know, I’m taking this year to think about photography and the possibilities of what I’ll do next. Recently I was looking at the field of Forget-me-nots that I’ve cultivated in my garden. They are absolutely beautiful, and when I was looking at them they had no subtext, no complex meaning and only the context of the plum trees overhead. It was, and is, a totally satisfying aesthetic moment for me.

It started me thinking abut my work. Beauty has never been enough for me. In the almost 20 years I’ve been a photographer, all my work has been about beauty in composition and in subject. But it’s been mostly in a very strong social change context. And the projects have never been about the individual photos but always the entire project. I’ve almost never printed a photo that wasn’t part of a larger body of work.

I’ve shot a lot of landscapes over the first 10 years. They were simply beautiful, but the only ones that were printed and exhibited were collaborations with Ctein that had a significant context and meaning beyond the individual works.

It started on a photography trip.

“We got out of the car and both started focusing on the same distant mountains … from literally the same square meter of ground. We were in the middle of kilometers of flat plains, but we had to take turns occupying the spot we both wanted to photograph from … .

“That happened to us repeatedly, which is unusual, especially since we don’t “see” in remotely the same way. We have wholly distinct artistic visions, our printing styles are altogether different, and Ctein prefers medium-format color and Laurie 35mm B/W. Yet we find ourselves spontaneously drawn to the same subjects and vantage points.

“We were photographing in the Portland Rose Garden in 1990, doing this same tripping-over-each-other routine, when Laurie suggested it might be interesting to put our prints side-by-side and see if they said anything to each other. We tried it and have found that “interesting” is an extreme understatement. The resulting pieces really work! The combination of our pictures not only looks gorgeous, but makes some very powerful and rather profound comments on each of the individual prints and the subject. In particular, our photos strikingly deconstruct the semiotics of photography and each other: they make explicit all the usually-hidden, implicit choices a photographer makes in deciding how to photograph and print an image. The conjunction of our prints winds up having substantially deeper meaning than either of the works alone.” (The quotes are part of a longer essay on Ctein’s website. They also became a monograph book.)

This is the picture from the Portland rose garden. It was our first collaboration.

My individual black and white images where shot and printed thinking only about the aesthetics. It’s when the images are put together that the complexity of meanings happen. This is actually the closest I’ve ever gotten to working with beauty alone.

I think I need to do some work this year that will let me explore all of this further. Deliberately setting out to do individual prints that are about aesthetics alone. It’s not about where I end up but rather about changing how I see.

Laurie says:

Deb and I consider the essays and texts that accompany my photos to be vital to our work. We spend lots of time doing outreach, lectures, workshops etc., and working with the communities of people who are photographed in order to get the right texts. We listen a lot. We never have an exhibition without texts. So when I saw this story on Muzzlewatch, the Jewish Voice for Peace news blog, I was really struck by it.

“After only 2 days, in response to complaints (which have not been made public), Stanford University removed photographs on April 9 by Lisa Nessan, a young Jewish photographer and peace activist who has spent a great deal of time in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories…”

And then a day later -

“Actually, it was the captions and the title of the photo exhibit. The Stanford administration approved photos of Palestinians taken by photographer Lisa Nessan for an exhibit called “Hope Under Siege.” But when the sponsoring student group, Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI), changed the title to “Life Under Israeli Apartheid” and others on campus complained, the administration pulled down the exhibit after just two days. Students say the captions all include information from human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Nonetheless, Stanford offered to reinstate the entire show without the title or captions. Student organizers wisely said NO, and held a protest instead. The campus group Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI) writes that it was “part of their “Women Under Fire” series that highlighted Jewish resistance to Israeli apartheid.”

Four of the photos without the original captions are on Flickr.

People always say that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but sometimes words are powerful. All too often without context photographs that have strong social change aspects become depoliticized art that can be appreciated only aesthetically.

When we worked on publishing Women en Large, we turned down publication offers from two otherwise excellent feminist presses because they would only publish it if we pulled the text. We were told it was “too polemic”.

I’ve been told numerous times by people who saw Women En Large in galleries that without the text they wouldn’t have appreciated the social change meaning of the work. Words are powerful.

I really respect SCAI’s decision not to allow the exhibition with the captions censored.

Thanks to Jean Pauline from Bay Area Women in Black for sending me this.

Lynne Murray says:

Remember those 1950-60s sci fi movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Night of the Living Dead where everyone you know turned into an alien or a zombie? I just had that experience last Sunday night when 60 Minutes, a news show I have respected for years, broadcast essentially an infomercial for weight loss surgery.

The story suggested that gastric bypass surgery would “cure” diabetes and “reduce the incidence of some cancers.”

I am still angry about this because I believe in investigative journalism, and 60 Minutes usually digs way deeper than simply broadcasting one side of an issue. They didn’t bother to talk to anyone with any negative effects from the surgery or to any experts who contradicted the surgeons who are pushing the operation.

If the 60 Minutes researchers had done more than a cursory examination of outcomes for gastric bypass surgery they would have been able to find disturbing information that this is far from a “cure” for diabetes.

Amy Tenderich at Diabetes Mine, a blog about diabetes, shares reports from some victims of the “gastric bypass “cure” for diabetes:

Mary Lou Gerstle shared her experience: “The real reason I had the gastric bypass done was to improve my diabetes. My diabetes has not gotten better. It’s been no help for glucose control! I’m even more out of control now than I was before. Now I know that there’s no real clinical evidence that this surgery helps diabetes. In fact, right now I am considering an insulin pump.”

There is a kind of “reporting” that consists of turning a press release into an article without even bothering to check the facts. Then there is the kind of journalism that wins Pulitzer Prizes because the reporters actually investigate. Washington Post reporters, Woodward and Bernstein were encouraged to “follow the money” during the Watergate investigation–to find out who is profiting from a given situation, trace the roots of corruption and expose crimes and deceptions. Sixty Minutes often does that, but when it comes to weight loss issues, they might as well be taking kickbacks from Jenny Craig.

I should have seen which way the wind was blowing when Lesley Stahl did a report that was essentially a valentine to Hoodia, an African plant used as an appetite suppressant.

Stahl’s eyes lit up when she heard that this miracle substance might allow a person to not eat for a day or more. No one questioned her remark as bizarre or unhealthy.

In what universe is it considered healthy and desirable not to eat for a day or more? Oh, wait a minute. I sometimes forget (believe me I’ve worked hard to forget) that in our deranged collective world view food deprivation, whether enforced by drugs or surgery is always considered to be “good for us.” In fact, anything that may lead to weight loss, no matter how small or temporary, is also considered to be healthful

I am not saying that Stahl has an eating disorder. I’m saying OUR ENTIRE CULTURE has an eating disorder, which Stahl and 60 Minutes are now servicing with uncritical, infomercials in the guise of news reports.

Whether or not there is a direct profit motive for 60 Minutes, there certainly is a contempt shown by the producers. What does it matter if they get it right when any reporting on the subject of fat is a “women’s issue” or an issue concerning sick, fat people? Unlike thin people who get sick, fat people are assumed to have brought it upon themselves, presumably by consorting with the Devil of their baser urges for the Bad Foods in Large Quantities.

Anyone seen as willfully sick (like fat people) are either in league with the Evil One, or in the case of diabetics, like the victims of witches in the old Salem Witch Trials, have they succumbed to temptation. If the flesh can be mortified through the scalpel they can be healed, cured and redeemed.

A book I’ve been reading, Carol F. Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Witchcraft in Colonial New England, has a fascinating section about how beliefs in Europe about old women in particular became so accepted that there was no need to debate them (in fact, it was dangerous to question them):

“No colonist ever explicitly said why he saw witches as women, or particularly as older women….

Human societies relegate certain information to the category of self-evident truths. Ideas that are treated as self-evident, “as too true to warrant discussion,” constitute society’s implicit knowledge.” The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (pages 153-154)

The connection between overeating and fatness/sickness is seen as so “obvious” by our societies that no one, including most doctors bothers to question whether it is true. The assumption is that all fat people eat too much and drastically cutting their food intake through drugs or surgery will solve every physical problem they have. If they suffer because of the drugs or surgery–well, they brought it upon themselves.

Karlsen quotes anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson in calling witchcraft beliefs, “the standardized nightmare of the group…” The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (page 181)

Certainly fat, whether it be displayed on other people’s bodies, or creeping up to latch itself onto oneself, is the worst nightmare of the American public. The visceral equation of fat with sickness, weakness and sin is so strong that even medical professionals take it for granted, parroting junk science and never looking at the actual, scientific data.

In an afterword to the 1989 paperback edition of her book, Karlsen notes: “The links between the demonization of women and other difficult-to-subordinate groups…remain largely unexamined.” The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (page 261)

What could be more difficult-to-subordinate than fat? I’m not referring to fat people–we’re only start to stand up and demand equal treatment. But persistent, unbudgeable fatness, like a visible manifestation of the sin of greed, is a specter that haunts Americans in particular. In preying on these anxieties rather than drilling down to factual results 60 Minutes is demonstrating how far they have fallen from journalistic adequacy.

Note to 60 Minutes–I used to love you, but it’s all over now.

Laurie says:

As I’ve talked about, I am moderating a panel at BlogHer on Kids and Body Image. It’s started my thinking about a piece of my own youth.

From the time I was little, I got high praise for not looking like who I was. In my 1950’s Jewish world of NYC, “You don’t look Jewish” coming from Jews was a compliment. I have a small straight nose. My mother, who was a stunningly beautiful woman, and knew it, was beaming at my nose from the time I was small. I remember lots of comments on my nose and don’t recall any about my other features til I was in my teens. The message was that you look wonderful because you don’t look like me.

It certainly felt like praise but it was also confusing. There was also a strong element of class in this, because looking like a gentile was perceived as looking like a “better” class of person.

In my neighborhood of mostly Jewish intelligentsia who were (mostly) proud of being Jewish, my style of looks were often too appreciated. “You don’t look like us” shouldn’t feel like a compliment from one’s people, but when you’re a kid it does.

And in my high school lots of girls I knew got “nose jobs” as a graduation present. It really bothered me. When I think about it, my objection to people’s “correcting” their looks may have some beginnings there.

As soon as I left NY “you don’t look Jewish” stopped feeling like a compliment. It was coming from people who knew that Jews had kinky black hair and big noses and olive skin. Not to mention the silver horns we kept in the box under the bed. So of course I heard a lot more anti-Semitism, since no one was watching their mouth.

It gave me a lot of unearned privilege (above and beyond the primary privilege of whiteness) and I was aware of it. Although at 20 I didn’t have the language to discuss it clearly. It made me feel like my outsides and my insides didn’t match. It’s a different experience of internalized anti-Semitism if it comes from praise and not criticism.

I tended to introduce my Jewishness early in the conversation. Even though the next remark was frequently “Really, you don’t look like one.”

It certainly didn’t seem like a big thing then, in part because I had some modest sense of how privileged I was. And partly because I lived in a world where assimilatory anti-Semitism was like air. And the existentialism that was my lens for viewing the world at that time was useless.

I’m talking about things that happened between 60 and 40 years ago and I’ve dealt with them in lots of different ways over the years

I’m not sure what this brings up for the panel. Writing about “Not looking like one” is the first time I’ve considered this considered in quite a while. I’m not sure where this is going in terms of children and the panel. But I think I’ll probably have some concrete ideas about that by the conference in July.

Laurie and Debbie say:

First, Debbie is going out of town for ten days starting tomorrow, so Laurie will be blogging alone (and with guest bloggers) during that time.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled blog entry.

It’s easy to read this story as just another sad story about how kids treat each other and how adults so frequently fail to protect kids from bullying.

“There was a group of five girls … and they decided they didn’t want me sitting at their lunch table anymore,” said [14-year-old Sarah] VanEssendelft. To get her to leave, they all brought in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

A few days later, a boy in the back of her class opened up a peanut butter cup. The smell was enough to trigger VanEssendelft’s peanut allergy and send her to the emergency room with breathing problems.

“My throat felt tight and my lips were getting really swollen, really fast,” said VanEssendelft. “I looked like Angelina Jolie.”

On the one hand, mean tricks or sneaking candy looks like mild behavioral problems to school administrators. On the other hand, given VanEssendelft’s serious peanut allergy, those sandwiches might very well have been weapons.

And it sure sounds like bullying. (Public service announcement: we’re big fans of the “Can I Sit With You?” project, which provides imaginative resources for bullied and excluded kids, currently on its way to a live touring success in Seattle next weekend.

But that’s not what we want to talk about here. Laurie has a life-threatening allergy (to some insect stings) and both of us know people who live with life-threatening allergies. One thing we’ve learned is that these allergies will usually have a very profound effect on who a person is and how she experiences herself in the world.

Having a life-threatening allergy is a form of living with the knowledge that a seemingly trivial circumstance can kill you. The world is not only peopled with risks; it’s peopled with risks that have your name on them, and don’t seem to have other people’s names on them. Living with that knowledge every day changes who a person is and how she relates to the world.

If it’s a food allergy, it means that something which is nourishment and pleasure to others is, in the most literal sense, poison to you. And the people to whom your poisons are nourishment and pleasure generally have–at best–a hard time believing that something they eat without thinking twice is poisonous to anyone.

This is rough enough on adults; it’s far more difficult for children, and perhaps worst of all for teenagers–the group for not “fitting in” and “being different” can been scary. And for most allergies, medical science can do very little. While it’s all too common for people with severe allergies to experience themselves as “weak” or their allergies as a form of illness, in fact, allergies are simply part of your physical nature, like the color of your hair.

So we’re not just recommending believing people who say they have life-threatening allergies, and we’re not just advocating making sure that kids have as little opportunity as possible to endanger someone else. We’re not even focusing on teaching kids how and why not to be bullies, or how and why to protect themselves from bullying–though all these things matter.

What we haven’t seen anywhere is a conscious, positive context which supports people with allergies, by cleaning up the environments where possible, but also by accepting allergies as an intrinsic part of who people are.

Thanks to Rachel Edidin for the pointer.

Laurie says:

There are 2 very exciting dance events coming up soon.

I’ve written about my daughter Cid Pearlman’s work before, but I’m particularly impressed with her newest work “Firesale”. It’s part of the California Touring Project, appearing at CounterPULSE this week on Friday and Saturday night (April 25 and 26th) at 8PM. I saw Firesale when it played in Santa Cruz, and her take on gender, relationships and bodies is intense, original and deeply moving.

The other choreographers whose works are part of the California Touring Project are Liam Clancy and the Hybrid Authorship Project (Joe Alter, Eric Geiger, Marc Wittmann, Craig Wolf and D.J. Hopkins) of San Diego, and casebolt and smith of Los Angeles.

They “present a collection of dances that navigate the slippery nature of meaning, and gleefully fracture expectations on gender, friendship and collaboration”.

And in May, for Bay Area National Dance Week, Big Moves, the fat dance group, was one of only sixteen chosen out of over three hundred to be a Cornerstone Event. They’ll be teaching four classes on Saturday, May 3rd, belly dance, bollywood, lyric jazz and hip hop, open to folks of all sizes - and it’s free! And there’ll be an informal performance showcase featuring the Phat Fly Girls-West Coast and guests at the end of the day.

Check them out!