‘What are you thinking about gender right now?’
By Jess McCabe | 12 November 2008, 03:34
As I’m in San Francisco at the moment, so I got a chance to meet up with charming Sarah Dopp. Sarah has about a million exciting projects on the go, but one of those is the photoblog Genderfork.com. It’s one of those simple but brilliant ideas - a photo a day, exploring gender ambiguity - recent gems include butch tap, curls and flatgrass.
Recently Sarah added an anonymous confessional to Genderfork - a sort of Post Secret for gender.
Asking the simple, open-ended question “What are you thinking about gender right now?” has produced some interesting results so far.
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Cat said:
I'm so jealous of you being in San Francisco! It's such a beautiful place and it's also linked to my current thoughts about gender.
San Francisco has some amazing violence against women organisations:
SAGE who, amongst other things, train women who have exited prostitution to provide support to other women.
SFWAR who are absolutely at the heart of the community, getting them on board in the fight against rape with fundraising through initiatives like 'Dine for Change', in which restaurants across the city donate a percentage of their profit on every meal for a night.
There are also thriving women's groups and much, much lower levels of street harassment.
We have so much to learn from these organisations, maybe blogs are one way we can start.
Posted on 13 November 2008 at 11:00 AM
Laurel Dearing said:
hey, im going to san fran in february. are there any specific places that i should see to do with feminism do you think? we are mainly looking at animation companies and such so...
Posted on 13 November 2008 at 9:26 PM
Sara said:
How odd - what drew me to the site was that I was thinking about gender!
To be honest, as a teacher, I think about it a lot. What with gender gaps, boy-friendly texts and so on, I'm surprised that in education girls aren't removed from the equation entirely. Most texts we cover are male, or male centered - if we consider a female author we are asked 'won't it put the boys off?' (in my experience, not really).
What really prompted me to be thinking about gender and feminism was a conversation with some Y9 girls regarding language. They informed me that, according to them, no one minds being called 'b**ches' or 'hos'. I was really shocked and let them know that actually this woman did mind. Unfortunately, this seems to be more and more common in the attitudes I'm seeing from the teenage girls I'm teaching - appeal to boys/men is the main priority for many.
Posted on 15 November 2008 at 5:27 PM
Cat said:
Hi Laurel,
Before I went I found a fantastic women's centre running lots of arts events and a cafe space, but I can't recall the name, sorry!
There's a women's community centre doing lots of legal work, classes and outreach in Mission district:
http://womensbuilding.org
Not sure about animation companies, but I might be able to put you in touch with one of the comic companies out there - they help artists publish their work but retain the intellectual copyright - really cool stuff!
Posted on 19 November 2008 at 11:59 AM