Laurie says:

I’m here at BlogHer and it’s once again being wonderful. I’ve met bloggers from Israel,Germany and England, in addition to seeing people from my home neighborhood who I don’t get to see enough, like Sarah Dopp and Liz Henry.

The conference is on the Navy Pier, which means that I get intermittent views of the lake. I’m pretty jet lagged and underslept but I feel great. And it’s not hot here in Chicago in July.

The Our Bodies,Our Blogs panel was passionate and intense.

Jenny Lauck, Wendy McClure, and Yvonne Marie were really good to be on a panel with. Together, we clearly created a safe space for women to tell their stories, ranging from “how I worked sucessfully to love my fat body” to “I feel like a failure every time I gain weight” and everything in between. There were lots of stories from women being body positive, as well as many hard stories that deeply touched me.

I passed Women En Large and Familiar Men around and I expect I’ll be hearing more about people’s reactions to the photos during the conference. I talked about the political context for how we feel about our bodies and the multibillion dollar diet and beauty industry that teaches people to hate themselves. Wendy talked among other things about using “fat abuse” as a way to attack women in the blogosphere. And Yvonne Marie spoke very movingly about how hard it is for her to feel good about her body. And Jenny moderated all of this beautifully.

There are lots of moms here, so I made sure that I talked about how hard it is for children and expecially fat children in the present fat-hating environment.

As you know, I’d hoped that we would be talking about the broader issues of body image. While we certainly did get to talk about them some, it was clear that what was important to people was to share their stories and and to support each other.

It all went really well; hopefully next year we’ll have a chance to have the larger discussion and also to hear more stories.

feminism, BlogHer07, body image, Body Impolitic

Laurie Says:

I’m off to BlogHer tomorrow. Really looking forward to the “Our Bodies, Our Blogs” panel. I’ll be blogging about the panel and the conference from there. For folks who are involved in Second Life, the conference will be there as well.

And I’m going to back to Japan. I’ll be in Japan for the exhibition of 38 of the Women of Japan photographs (with bilingual texts) at the Pacifico Convention Center Convention in Yokohama, as an exhibit of Nippon 2007 (the World Science Fiction Convention). The exhibition runs from Aug 31 to Sep 2. This is the first exhibit of all of the photographs. It will be open to the public during the day. And there is one life size image!

I’m really thrilled about the exhibition and delighted to be back in Japan.

There will be a panel where I and models Mari Kotani, Manami Tachibana, Rebecca Jennison and Junko Fukazawa talk about Women of Japan. I’ll also be conducting an artist’s tour of the exhibition. I’ll be in Japan then for about three weeks working and talking about the project.

I’ll be in Tokyo, Yokohama (for the convention), Kyoto and Osaka and at the end of the trip I get to go back to Okinawa.

As folks who read the blog know, I’ve been working on the digital images for quite a while. Well they’re done and the exhibition went in to FedEx today. I did a small happy dance in the FedEx store (and nobody laughted). It felt really great have it finished.

Here are a couple of images from the project that are up for the first time. These are of Naomi Shimazaki and Hatumi Komatsuda. The last solo image is of Hiroko Kawakami.

Shimazaki-san was kind enough to have me stay at her home in Hokkaido where I shot these photos. All of the women are activists on issues of Ainu rights and culture. Their hospitality was marvelous.

I’ll be in touch from BlogHer.

feminism, Women of Japan, art, BlogHer, Ainu, body image, feminism, Body Impolitic