Τό γυναικεῖον τῆς Ὑπατίας - An Áit Bhanda na Hypatia - Hypatia's Gynaeceum

Disparaging or even hostile attitudes toward femmes and femininity I've often heard from both cis women and trans women invite a look at a hatred that I've found to be very prevalent and yet hardly ever acknowledged, let alone analyzed. We need to call it out for what it is, another form of misogyny.

I suppose in response to comments I've encountered like "feminine trans women are hard to take" or "feminine cis women get on my nerves," it would be fair to say that I find femmephobia hard to take, and it gets on my nerves too. Then we'd be even. But it wouldn't advance understanding or dialogue. That'll take some work and caring and thoughtfulness.

I get that being female and non-femme in a society that on the whole demands femininity of females gets really oppressive, and builds resentment. I totally get that. And I support non-femme women's right to defy these conventional gender expectations and live according to their true non-femme selves. Anytime an ironclad gender role or gender expression is imposed across the board, it's going to leave some persons marginalized and cause oppression. Maybe we could agree on the problem being not femininity or masculinity in themselves, but in the oppressive way they're enforced on people whether it suits them or not.

I believe with all my heart that diversity in openness makes for a beautiful world.

The funny part is that while the macro society demands femininity, once you get within the feminist and queer communities, femmes are often placed very much at a disadvantage. As if we get to be the scapegoats for the gender injustices of the macro society. Or whipping girls, in Julia Serano's phrase. Is it hard to see past one's particular oppression to acknowledge that other individuals can be oppressed in different ways?

If non-feminine females naturally exist in the macro society, and suffer oppression because of who they are, is it hard to see that naturally feminine women in feminist and queer communities are likewise made to suffer for who they are? You can argue that that's just tough, because the big oppressor is the patriarchy, and any other oppression becomes small and insignificant in comparison to that.

But femmes don't exactly find shelter or comfort in the patriarchy when we're queer and feminist. We experience it as monstrously oppressive too because we see what it does to women and queer people who we identify with. We need the queer and feminist communities as our haven and solidarity to be able to defend ourselves from the patriarchy too. So it's kind of painful and tragic when the other queers and feminists who we need to be our family turn around and reject us.

You might argue that being femme is inherently taking the side of the patriarchal oppressor. We queer feminist femmes would disagree because our femininity, despite what they say about us, is not a capitulation to the oppressor. On the contrary, we use it subversively. Because if you're queer in sexuality or feminist in belief, there is no way the patriarchy is your friend. We have more consciousness than you might give us credit for. All I'm saying is think twice before starting the femme-bashing. You might be hurting someone who's on your side.

I believe that in feminism and in queer theory, and especially in feminist queer theory, intersectionality is key. Intersectionality allows us to focus in on ending the oppression itself and lay off of each other.

Mother, return us to your breast: Toward a thealogy of Islam
Johanna-Hypatia Cybeleia

What happened in the encounter between Islam and Goddess religion?
( long essay )

Copper Stewart is a remarkable Witch of old West Virginia working-class stock who has been exploring ways for patriotic Americans to reclaim the Pagan heritage of our democracy, through our relation to spirits of the land and the Goddess of Liberty. See his blog: http://www.isiskosmos.org/libertyblog/ Great work, Copper.

I followed his link to the audio of the "Liberty Tree" song by Thomas Paine--which begins by invoking the Goddess of Liberty--and transcribed the 18-century music, ready to revive its performance. Who knew this patriotic Pagan American song from the Revolution existed? We need to revive this spirit in the present day to confront the tyranny of King George that threatens our democracy. Thanks, Copper!

Pakistani Woman Flees Imprisonment by Family

By Sharon Boase
The Hamilton Spectator
June 15, 2007

Asra has learned the value of freedom as few of us have, by having it stripped away by parents and siblings who insist they know what's best for her.

The 24-year-old Pakistani woman, who moved to Canada with her family at 19, said she was held under virtual house arrest for a year in Mississauga and another year in Karachi, Pakistan, before fleeing to Steeltown in an escape worthy of a spy caper.

"For the past three years, I've lived in freedom and there is so much happiness that comes with that," Asra told the Second Closet Conference yesterday, a gathering that explored abuse within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

"Dressing the way I want to, loving who I want to, eating what I want and watching what I like to ... I think people here can take that for granted."

Asra has made her home in Hamilton since 2004. She endured emotional abuse and physical beatings by her father, mother and two brothers before finding the courage to escape.

She spent a year in Oakville, and then Mississauga, studying journalism at Sheridan College, making friends and discovering herself. Then she announced she had a part-time job at a juice bar. Her father was furious. Why was his daughter not content to be supported by him until she was married? After an unsuccessful bid to run away, Asra was yanked out of college and made a virtual prisoner in her home without phone or Internet.

In response to her apparent depression, her father announced a year later he was taking the family for a vacation to Pakistan. In Karachi, Asra's passport was taken from her under the pretext they would be making a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia requiring visas.

This time she became a prisoner in a country where the police would not help her. Despondent, she called her lover back in Canada.

"She was just the ultimate superhero," Asra said. "She was like superwoman in getting the ball rolling."

With help from Canadian Foreign Affairs, Asra began planning her escape. Family documents were kept in a locked cupboard. Her father kept the key in his pocket. During a five-minute period one evening when her father hung up his jacket while he used the washroom, Asra used Plasticine to get an impression of the key.

As her family said evening prayers, Asra snuck out to give the Plasticine to Pakistani-born Foreign Affairs workers. A day later, they brought her a key. But it wouldn't work.

Shortly after, her mother and the brother who acted as her bodyguard announced they were returning to Mississauga to sell the family home. Asra took a hammer and screwdriver to the cupboard, only her passport wasn't there. Asra distracted her younger brother and told her grandmother she was wanted on the telephone before racing out of the family home.

She spent three tense days in Karachi, wearing a burka and avoiding crowds, as Foreign Affairs got her a ticket to Canada. She arrived in Hamilton Sept. 15, 2004. She recently called her parents after finding she misses them. "They're still in the same space and I'm just this brand-new Asra."

Lesbian Palestinians Break Social Taboos

By Brenda Gazzar - WeNews correspondent

HAIFA, Israel (WOMENSENEWS)--Rauda Morcos didn't intend to reveal her
sexual preference but she acknowledged she was lesbian to a newspaper
reporter writing about her poetry.

Although Morcos, a Palestinian Arab in Israel, lost her job working with
at-risk youth shortly afterward, she has no regrets.

"When I came out in 2003, I thought I might be killed or displaced from the
community," she says, acknowledging she received anonymous telephone
threats and that her car was damaged after word got out. "I'm still alive
and I'm not displaced."

Morcos is the general coordinator and a co-founder of Aswat: Palestinian
Gay Women. Aswat means "voices" in Arabic, and is the first and only group
of Palestinian lesbians in the region. On March 28, it held in Haifa its
first public conference.

The meeting, which Morcos said was attended by as many as 350 people,
marked five years of the organization's existence and the publication of a
new book in Arabic about lesbian and gay identity.

"It was empowering. It was exciting," said Samira, who heads the Aswat
board and asked that her last name not be used. "It was a big opportunity
for us to estimate and value the things we have done in the last five years."

The conference was successful and problem-free, Samira said, despite
opposition that mounted in the weeks preceding the conference and a high
level of anxiety among the group's leadership that the event or even
attendees could be in jeopardy.

The Islamic Movement in Israel--a religious, political and cultural
movement of Arab Muslims in Israel--publicly criticized the Aswat meeting,
calling for the conference to be canceled and urging its community "to
stand against the campaign to market sexual deviance among our daughters
and our women."

Up to 30 people from the Islamic Movement protested outside the conference
hall during the event.

"We do not oppose their personal choice but we oppose their intent to bring
this issue to the open air," Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsur, an Arab member of
Knesset and head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, told Women's eNews a
few days before the conference. "The consensus of our community does not
tolerate this kind of behavior. The consensus feels it is kind of a disease
that must be healed and must be healed in a peaceful way."

Palestinian Arabs in Israel make up nearly 20 percent of the country's
population. In addition, about 3.9 million Palestinians live in the
occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Setting a Precedent

Before Aswat was formed, Palestinian Arab women rarely organized, publicly
protested traditional beliefs or had a place to deal with women's sexuality
and lesbianism.

Members of the group, which started out as a virtual forum on the Internet,
are changing that in a number of ways.

Written by Arab and non-Arabs, the group's new book aims to help build
bridges between the minority lesbian community and the larger Arab world.
"Home and Exile in Queer Experience" is a collection of articles on topics
ranging from Aswat and its aims, to the struggle for gays and lesbians in
the Arab world and conflict regions, to a well-known essay by American poet
Adrienne Rich that argues that lesbianism is an extension of feminism.

Arabic literature lacks material about homosexuality, Morcos says, and the
group assumes the responsibility to change that. "We have to work in order
for them to accept us," she says. "If we don't have material in Arabic, how
will people know about sexuality?"

In the last year, Aswat has published five newsletters in Arabic dealing
with various issues concerning gays and lesbians that target both
Palestinian lesbians and the Palestinian and Arab community. It also
published an Arabic glossary that explains basic terms of sexual identity.

Members of the group meet once a month or so to socialize, discuss issues
of mutual interest and plan events and programs. The group, which includes
women from the West Bank and Gaza, has nearly 30 active members and about
50 women who participate in the e-mail list, Morcos said.

The organization will soon launch a virtual forum on its Web site for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex individuals of Arab
origin around the world.

The vast majority of Aswat members keep their lesbian identities secret in
a society their Web site says "has no mercy for sexual diversity."

Way to Break the Taboo

"It's known that the issue of lesbian women and homosexuality is not dealt
with in public in our society and there is a total denial of it," says Aida
Touma Suliman, general director of the Arab organization Women Against
Violence in Nazareth. "The fact they organized themselves, are raising the
issue, writing about it and raising awareness, that's the way they break
the taboo."

A group in Lebanon is the only other similar organization for lesbians in
the Arab world.

Salwa--who asked that her real name not be used to protect family members
and is currently studying abroad--says Aswat has been a great system of
support and is one of the reasons the 24-year-old plans to return to her
homeland.

While Salwa's mother and brother know she is lesbian, her mother asked her
to keep it secret from the rest of the family. Even after living abroad and
being surrounded by an openly queer community, Salwa says that being able
to live her life out of the closet is not her foremost concern.

"Palestine is my home. I lived here 21 years," says Salwa, who was raised
in Nazareth in Northern Israel and is one of the founders of the group.
"It's my everything, especially when I talk about a queer community and can
go back and be with them . . . It's very important to have this group and
to know you can go back and have a home."

Taking Concrete Steps for Change

Samira, 31, says Aswat has given her the opportunity to actualize herself,
her agenda and to take concrete steps for social change in her community.

A few months ago, the Tel Aviv resident was invited to represent the group
by passing out information about it at a teacher's college in the north of
Israel.

Although most of her large nuclear family knows she is lesbian, her
extended family--also from the North--does not know. Although Samira was
very nervous at first about doing the leafleting, she felt she was ready to
put herself out there and risk a potential encounter with relatives.

"It was an important step for Aswat, and for me, for my own development,"
she said recently from a Tel Aviv coffee shop.

As she approached other Palestinian Arab women to hand out brochures and
talk to them, some in the college encouraged her, a few started arguing
with her on religious grounds, but no one threw away the information in
plain sight or became violent, she said.

"This is what Aswat has given me, the opportunity to be a part of history,"
Samira said. "But the main thing is the opportunity to meet other women, to
be there with them and for them."

Brenda Gazzar is a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org .

For more information:

Aswat: Palestinian Gay Women: - http://www.Aswatgroup.org/english/ -
http://www.Aswatgroup.org/arabic/

"Lesbian Clergy Recount Their Paths to Jerusalem": -
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2827/

"Playing Fields Attract Lesbian Athletes": -
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2851/

I went a few nights ago, this is what I was about to do when I unexpectedly hurt my back, but went ahead and had a nice time anyway and saved the owies for afterward.

There had been an accident and traffic jam on the George Washington Parkway (it's the favorite road of insane drivers, ever notice that?), so I reached there too late for the dinner, which was fine, I wasn't hungry anyway. I contented myself with a bottle of water poured into a stemmed wineglass. I walked up to a table with three elderly news women and asked if I might sit with them, so they invited me to join them and asked if I was a member of the club. I said no, I was just a guest interested in this book, Love in a Torn Land: Joanna of Kurdistan: The True Story of a Freedom Fighter's Escape from Iraqi Vengeance. (I am a news woman in a sense, I write for and edit a newsletter.) And I told them the story of how I'd been researching while writing the Wikipedia article on the name Joanna, looked in the Library of Congress database, and found the bibliographic record for Jean Sasson's book-- a good six months before it was actually published. So I preordered the book-- I only got it the week before this author event, and started reading right away. I liked it. While waiting for it to be published, I had linked to the book announcement from my Wikipedia article.

Right then it was time for Jean Sasson to begin speaking. She told the story of how she got involved in writing about Middle Eastern women. She included an anecdote about the first feminist she saw in Saudi Arabia; in the middle of this she paused to acknowledge the only two men in the room (from the Kurdistan regional government, I think) to reassure them that her feminist talk was nothing against men, she was glad they were there. Then she told how she met Joanna al-Askari Hussain-- the last Iraqi woman she had written about, Mayada, said you've got to meet my third cousin, who is a Kurdish peshmerga. The book is told in Joanna's first person voice, and the prose was crafted by Sasson out of many hours of interviews.

The remarkable thing about this evening was something I'd intuited but hadn't dared to hope-- Joanna herself was there as a surprise special guest. She was not looking as she did on the book cover, she was wearing a plain black top and black pants with thin little silver necklaces, and her expression was relaxed and friendly rather than fierce. But I always thought the book cover was such a great picture!

Have you ever seen anyone look so feminine and so tough at the same time?

She is a strikingly beautiful woman either way. She stood up next to Jean and they teased each other about their interviews, how they tried to describe the expression on the face of the mule that carried Joanna out of Iraq over narrow mountain trails with her perched on top of the mule's packs and the animal walking close to the edge of the mountain... She survived to laugh about it here, but at the time it was so scary. She survived a poison gas attack on her village, even though she hadn't prepared her gas mask. She was temporarily blinded but recovered. Jean teased her for that too.

One of the club women asked, since this was an audience of women, the book was promoted as a true love story, so what was Joanna's belief about love? She seemed surprised at the question but she said women know what it's like, maybe some men know too, when you fall in love when you're young and it seems like that's everything in the world for you... which is how she joined the peshmerga warriors, because she fell in love with one of them, and that was because of her passionate Kurdish nationalism. She was born and grew up in Baghdad, half-Arab on her father's side, but loved her summer vacations in the mountains of Kurdistan at her maternal grandmother's place. Her summer vacations were called the "happy times" because the rest of the year she felt discriminated against for being Kurdish in Baghdad.

Joanna also paid homage to the strong women she was in the struggle with, which is why the book was dedicated "To the brave wives of the Peshmerga."

When I told Jean how I'd learned of her book, she said she'd seen my Wikipedia article and liked it. She signed my copy "For another special Joanna" and then Joanna signed it "With love from Joanna Hussain al-Askari" reversing the order of her maiden name and married name--I don't know why, I was too shy to ask. She was so nice in person, and she was visibly pleased when I said I'd been reading the book already and found it so interesting, it was a real page-turner. Whereupon Jean spoke up and said to me "You know what they say, the easier it is for the reader, the harder work it was for the writer!" We all laughed.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Lifted from metabutch's journal.

This was a song of peasant resistance in the 16th century and was revived for anti-Nazi resistance. It was sung by the White Rose movement (teenagers who were executed for distributing anti-Nazi literature). I want to revive it now, after reading yezida's incisive critique of the lies used to maintain the violence and the violence used to maintain the lies at the highest levels of our government.

Big thanks to catskillmarina for reintroducing me to this song, which I heard once as a child and always wanted to find again.

Our Thoughts Are Free

Die Gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower,
Die Gedanken sind frei
My thoughts give me power.
No scholar can map them,
No hunter can trap them,
No man can deny:
Die Gedanken sind frei!

I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure,
My conscience decrees,
This right I must treasure;
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator,
No man can deny--
Die Gedanken sind frei!

And if tyrants take me
And throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst free,
Like blossoms in season.
Foundations will crumble,
The structure will tumble,
And free men will cry:
Die Gedanken sind frei!

Neither trouble or pain
Will ever touch me again.
No good comes of fretting,
My hope's in forgetting.
Within myself still
I can think as I will,
But I laugh, do not cry:
Die Gedanken sind frei!

German text and MIDI music at http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/free.html

At a minimum--even when it feels like the Man has us over a barrel--we can keep the struggle going by keeping our consciousness liberated from within.