Roe v. Wade Anniversary Rally in Bloomington

Event: Roe v. Wade Anniversary Rally
“Celebrating 36 years of reproductive choice!”
What: Rally
Host: Roe supporters
Start Time: Thursday, January 22 at 2:00pm
End Time: Thursday, January 22 at 3:30pm
Where: IU Sample Gates

To see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=71448004688

The Sex Workers’ Art Show TourThe Sex Workers’ Art Show Tour @ Whittenberger Auditorium. 7p. free. 18+

The Sex Workers’ Art Show Tour is coming to Indiana University,
Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 7 pm at the Whittenberger Auditorium,
Indiana Memorial Union. This event is FREE and open to the public
(18+, please)!

The show is an eye-popping evening of visual and performance art
created by people who work in the sex industry to dispel the myth that
they are anything short of artists, innovators, and geniuses!

The wildly successful cabaret-style show is hitting the road again,
bringing audiences a blend of spoken word, music, drag, burlesque, and
multimedia performance art. Intelligent and hot, disturbing and
hilarious, the performances offer a wide range of perspectives on sex
work, from celebration of prostitutes’ rights and sex-positivity to
views from the darker sides of the industry.

The show includes people from all areas of the sex industry:
strippers, prostitutes, dommes, film stars, phone sex operators,
internet models, etc. It smashes traditional stereotypes and moves
beyond “positive” and “negative” into a fuller articulation of the
complicated ways sex workers experience their jobs and their lives.
The Sex Workers’ Art Show entertains, arouses, and amazes while
simultaneously offering scathing and insightful commentary on notions
of class, race, gender, labor and sexuality!

For more information, visit http://www.sexworkersartshow.com or email
cps@indiana.edu

Sponsored by: Office for Women’s Affairs, Commission on Multicultural
Understanding, GLBT Student Support Services, Kinsey Institute, Gender
Studies Department, Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, CommUNITY
Education Program, OUT, Crossroads, Keshet, Women’s Students
Association, Feminist Law Forum, Feminist Majority Leadership
Alliance, Friends of Middle Way House, Sigma Lambda Gamma, Progressive
Librarians Guild, PFLAG of Spencer, IN, bloomingOUT, Boxcar Books

they don’t make em’ like they used to

I watched the film Girls Town last night.  I thought it was really good.  It dealt with topics like domestic violence, rape, motherhood, and suicide in a way that was both empowering but not naively triumphant.  I liked that the fact that the group of friends that the movie’s story followed were coming from different ethnic backgrounds and differences in class, even in the worn, urban setting of the film, were definitely eluded to, but weren’t exploded into the cliches that one finds in a lot of films about urban youth.  The film’s soundtrack also reminded me of the song U.N.I.T.Y. by Queen Latifah which is awesome and it made me sad that the standards seem to have been lowered so that it is seen as important when there are women MCs, period, even if people in mainstream music aren’t talking about challenging things in a direct, personal way like Latifah and other artists did in the 90s.

On a side note, I found this review of the film on IMDB really endearing:

I’m a 62-year-old white male in Northern Michigan, and I liked this film. Rightly or wrongly, I felt that I was getting a good inside look at a culture that I have never brushed shoulders with. Lili Taylor, for a 30-year-old gal from Illinois, seems to have captured the spirit of Patti in a very convincing way, and her body language showed that she really had rapport with her friends. Under ordinary circumstances, I would not choose to watch a film about the subject of school kids in Brooklyn or Hackensack or wherever, but I liked these kids. It’s a nice piece for older people to watch, and be entertained by people telling you things you probably didn’t know. Rightly or wrongly. I’m not in a position to judge the authenticity of the cultural overview that the film presents. Warning to old fuddie-duddies: The F-word uccurs 31 times in a 51-second scene (Is this a new record?) so don’t watch if the grand-kids are around!