Debbie says: At WisCon this year, I moderated a panel (suggested by and including the brilliant s.e. smith) called “When ‘Love Your Body’ Is Not Enough.” The concept was to explore how the “love your body” message can be empowering to some subset of people, and can also be perceived as a trap, or a [...]

Laurie says: I’ve watched my  daughter Cid working intensely on this dance collaboration for the last year.   The article I’m quoting from SFArts is a superb conversation about Your Body is Not a Shark, disability, art and the way limits can lead to brilliant work.  Read the whole piece. (Article is on the red bar [...]

Laurie says: My daughter Cid has been working in collaboration with the composer and musician Joan Jeanrenaud and the poet Denise Leto on a major work.  It’s called Your Body Is Not A Shark.  I saw the first section last month at Looking Left in Santa Cruz and it really knocked me out. I’m always [...]

Debbie says: This little video completely captured my imagination. Starting with an infant, it quickly shows you a wide variety of people, each one year older than the last. Once you get past the one-year-old, each one says their age (often not in English). It was filmed in Amsterdam, and here’s what the film-maker says [...]

Debbie says: I’d like to believe that a “retirement community” would be one of the few places in the Western world where we could age however we age, and not worry too much about how we look, or how changes in what we need affect how we are treated. But the Harbor’s Edge retirement community [...]

Debbie says: Lidia Yuknavitch has a marvelous post on The Rumpus on the decision she and her female publisher made to put a woman’s breast on the cover of her new book, The Chronology of Water. (cover photograph by Andy Mingo) It’s a boob. With full frontal nip. What happened next of course is that [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: At My Modern Met, Eugene is blogging about this marvelous series of grandma-superhero photographs. A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and [...]

Lynne Murray says: The documentary Catfish set me to thinking about how people represent themselves on the Internet and also about how differently art work is received depending on the persona behind the art. Peter Steiner’s 1993 New Yorker cartoon has inspired dialog and homage (or possibly updating) I hope I’m not spoiling the fascinating [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We were going to write our usual single-topic post today, but we kept sending each other too many interesting options. So here are a bunch of body image articles that we hope will interest you as much as they interest us: Sins Invalid is a performance project on disability and sexuality. [...]

cross-posted at Fukshot Marlene says: Between my actual age and the fact that this year also marks sixteen years since I started hormones, I’ve been thinking for a while about my place in the trans community. I realized some time last year that I’ve crossed the line to some sort of semi-elder status within the [...]