The Black Girl Project Documentary

I'm on the advisory board for The Black Girl Project and value and love this project and organization with every part of my body, soul and spirit. Please join us for this film screening! Purchase tickets today.

Read more about filmmaker Aiesha Turman.

(repost) Call for Submissions!!! Women of Color & Sexuality

There is STILL time to submit!

I've partnered with an amazing media maker and radical educator: SuperHussy to help her find, edit, and publish an anthology focusing on women of Color, sex and sexuality! Here's the Call for Submissions:

Alright ya’ll, it’s time to expand the reach of Super Hussy Media. You know there;s the blog, and the film projects in the works, but wait, here it comes…our first call for submissions for our annual publication, The Compendium.

Our first issue, The Talk, focuses on self-identified women of Color and how they learned about S-E-X. Here are the details:

The Talk: Women of Color On Sex is an exploration of how self-identified women across the Diaspora came to learn about sex and what it meant to have a sexual relationship. Did your mom, aunty or tia sit you down? Were your homegirls or hermanas responsible for giving you the blow by blow? Was Cinemax After Dark, Youtube or a telenovela your sex ed instructor?

Super Hussy Media seeks fresh and daring writers who can coax the reader into an intimate understanding of not only how they learned about sex, but how that knowledge impacted their sexual exploration. We want submissions that are funny, sad, enraging, and transformational.

The Talk is ultimately about our testimonies regarding how we were taught or chose to learn about our sexuality. How we are continuing to learn, lessons we wish we could share with other women of Color, introspective activities of reflection. This is all about us.

Submission Requirements

• Deadline: July 1, 2010

• No more than 2 previously unpublished short stories per submission

• Simultaneous submissions okay, but notify if your work is accepted elsewhere

• 4,000 words or less

• Double spaced

• Poetry and non-English submissions accepted as long as they are accompanied by an English translation

All contributors will receive a copy of the anthology.

Submissions

All submissions must be sent electronically using .doc or .pdf to submissions@superhussy.com.

Title of submission should be placed in the subject line. Please include your name, email address, mailing address, phone number, and short bio with your submission.

Superhussy Media publishes work that celebrates girls and women of color everywhere!

We look forward to reading your submissions.

Ricky Martin Has a Window Seat

Cross posted from my Media Justice Column

I really can’t continue where I said I would about open relationships when two artists of Color have created media in ways that are producing so many reactions! This weekend, as I moved my life into a new apartment friends on twitter and facebook encouraged others to check out the new video by Erykah Badu for her upcoming album New Amerykah Part II: Return Of The Ankh, which was released on Tuesday March 30, 2010.

I took a 20-minute break from moving boxes and watched the video. Here’s the one I saw:



As you can imagine there have been many responses regarding this video. My homegirl Sylvia shared with me another video that was created for this song here:



What I find is missing from these discussions are the conversations, ideas, thoughts, impressions, and critique from all of YOU. There are a lot of older folks (think over 25) who are talking about this video and it’s representations and meanings. Yet, I want to hear you all talk about what this video may mean and represent for you. So share your thoughts! For those of you who don’t know the video was shot at the same location as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Here’s an article discussing how/why Badu and company did not get arrested.

EDITED: My homegirl SuperHussy has begun to transcribe interviews with her daughter TinyHussy about various pop culture phenomena and this video was one area of discussion among them. Read what a 5 year-old has to say about the video here.

As my Monday afternoon began I had convinced myself to take a well-deserved nap! (Nesting is hard work!) Yet that was not what happened when I read a tweet from many friends that Puerto Rican artist Ricky Martin had “come out” as a gay man on his blog.

It’s kind of a big deal for me, a Puerto Rican woman, because I know that in Puerto Rico people are murdered for being anything besides heterosexual; especially gay Puerto Rican males. There’s also the fact that Ricky Martin is staying on the island to live and raise his children (for the most part). This is HUGE as many of the Puerto Rican narratives we have come from a migratory experience as people who “come out” have chosen to remove themselves from the mainland of Puerto Rico and move to the states because of homophobia, issues of safety, and support systems. You can read more about this in the amazing book by Larry La Fountain-Stokes Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities In The Diaspora.

EDITED
Here's a video of Larry La Fountain-Stokes talking about his book (Spanish video first English after)

Queer Culture Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

Queer Culture Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts? There’s a lot going on for the week just beginning!