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

By the Righteous Mothers


Knock it off, or we'll take it off...

Thanks to Beth Owl's Daughter for sharing this gem. :D

If they can count $624 billion for war
Why can't they count our votes?
If they can count thousands of bombs and still be buying more
Why can't they count our votes?
We're not done, We're not tired
We won't stop until, Dick Cheney
YOU'RE FIRED!

If they can make cash machines that register each sale
Why can't they count our votes?
But they made voting machines that leave no paper trail and
Why can't they count our votes?
We're not done, We're not tired
We won't stop until, Michael Mukasey
YOU'RE FIRED!

Counting money, that one's easy
Corporate donations to their elections
Counting interest in the name of business
Credit cards to the maxes
You know they're gonna count your taxes

When they claimed they'd bring fair elections to Iraq
We said "Why can't you count OUR votes?!"
In Ohio we had lines that stretched around for blocks
Why can't you count our votes?
We're not done, We're not tired
We won't stop until, George Bush
YOU'RE FIRED!

Why can't they count our votes?
We're gonna count all the votes!

http://www.emmasrevolution.com/

(This is so very right on. Thank you, Chumbawamba.)


Up behind the bus stop in the toilets of the street
There are traces of a killing on the floor beneath your feet
Mixed in with the piss and beer are bloodstains on the floor
From the boy who got his head kicked in a night or two before

No! Homophobia--the worst disease
Love how you want to love and love who you please
No! Homophobia--the worst disease
Love how you want to love and love who you please

In the pubs and clubs and burger bars, breeding pens for pigs
Alcohol, testosterone, and ignorance and fists
Packs of hunting animals roam across the town
And they find an easy victim and they punch him to the ground

No! Homophobia--the worst disease
Love how you want to love and love who you please
No! Homophobia--the worst disease
Love how you want to love and love who you please

The siren of the ambulance, the deadpan of the cops
Chalk to mark the outline where the boy first dropped
Beware the holy trinity: church and state and law
For every death the virus gets more deadly than before

No! Homophobia--the worst disease
Love how you want to love and love who you please
No! Homophobia--the worst disease
Love how you want to love and love who you please

The other night, I began attending a women's self-defense class in DC, given by Defend Yourself. I registered for this class through WEAVE (Women Empowered Against Violence). I am so glad I'm doing this!

The women in the class were all having a great time learning to smash an attacker's balls with our knees while shouting "NO!" We were all really getting into it; you could tell how each woman had enough reasons in her life to make that a satisfyingly cathartic exercise. It went really well. There was one Arab woman in the class; I really really felt glad to see an Arab sister learning this. Lauren, the instructor, is a veteran of the original Take Back the Night movement in the '70s. She was wearing a "Stop Rape" t-shirt which on the front had a diagram of a man's body and marked in red were all the places to hit him where it hurts the most. On the back was a statement that 2 out of 3 rape attacks on women were stopped by the women resisting. Attackers and harassers expect us to be passive and not resist. When we do resist, they're caught off guard and can't deal with that.




It was all about how to handle harassment and physical attacks. We practiced going at each other and saying "STOP" "BACK OFF" "GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME" etc. How to be in control of the situation. How to shout in the right tone of voice, in a commanding steady pitch and not shrieking. I have a definite tendency to shriek, so I learned not to when being attacked. We learned various sorts of ways to hit and places to hit where it hurts. How to jab fingers into eyes, how to break a nose, how to slam the side of someone's head one-two with elbows going both ways, how to stomp on toes, and--the unanimous popular favorite--knee into the balls. One woman pointed out how men are automatically guarding their balls all the time, so that can't be the first hit-- rather, hit them in the face first and their hands will go up there, then go for the balls, and do it a bit sideways so that you won't be hit by their heads moving forward when they crumple. How to stand, how to call for help, how to run after disabling the attacker, how to be assertive and say "NO."

I feel so much more confident having done this. I will feel safer on the street now. The proportion of women who get harassed is something like 98%, I read that on Feministing. This class was seriously hands on, we were hitting hard. The instructor brought a large padded shield so we could really hit, not just pretend.

I just wanted to express how deeply delighted I feel to see women helping women to defend ourselves. It was a beautiful, energizing, even spiritual experience.

AREA ACTIVISTS TO CONFRONT AND DISRUPT RACIST AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE

March on Nazi Conference this Saturday, February 23, at 10am!!!

Washington, D.C.--On February 23 prominent neo-nazis and other white supremacists from the US and across the world will gather at the Crowne Plaza Dulles Airport Hotel in Herndon, VA (2200 Centreville Road) to vent their hatred and spew their racist venom towards communities of color.

Area anti-fascists will march from Chandon Park (352 Juniper Ct., Herndon, VA) to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. We will then converge at the hotel to protest, confront and disrupt the racist hate spouted by the AmRen National Conference.

The AmRen conference organizers call for a white supremacist society and political order. American Renaissance (AmRen) editor Jared Taylor states: "If whites permit themselves to be displaced, it is not just the high culture of the West that could disappear but such things as representative government, rule of law and freedom of speech, which whites usually get right and everyone else usually gets wrong." Among past and present participants in this gathering are Klan member David Duke, Don Black, the operator of the white supremacist website Stormfront.org, former NY state prosecutor Michael Regan and Nick Griffin of the neo-fascist British National Party.

American Renaissance is a monthly magazine promoting an agenda of white supremacy through eugenics, faux science, and what they call “race realism.” In attempts to appeal to the middle and educated classes of white America, AmRen seeks to establish scientific “truths” such as eugenics by creating non-existent links between race and IQ, and by creating even more non- existent links between race and the predisposition to “negative social behaviors”. AmRen advances the racist beliefs of “Racial differences in IQ”, the “costs of diversity,” and the “challenges of non-white immigration.” One quick glance at their website reveals articles with titles like: “A Defense of White Racial Consciousness”; “The Biological Realities of Race”; “Multiculturalism and the War Against White America”; and “The Color of Crime.”

“We will not allowed these racists to promote their hate mongering and terror in our communities without a challange,” said Marco Del Fuego, of Resistance and Solidarity, a DC-based anti-racist group. “ We will do our most to inform the hotel and demand that they cancel this gathering immediately. We also want the public to know that this event is not welcome here because this organization supports criminal policies and violence towards blacks, Latin American immigrants and other minorities in the region and the country,” he said.

Getting There:
To get to Chandon Park using public transportation, take the Orange Line metro to the West Falls Church station. Then, take the Fairfax Connector Bus #950 towards Reston Town Center. Get off at Elden St and Herndon Parkway and walk left for about a quarter of a mile. The park will be on your right. The bus leaves West Falls Church Metro every half hour starting at 8am (8am, 8:31am, 9:03am, 9:33am, 10:01am, 10:25am, 11:01am...) and takes approximately 30minutes.

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 )

Central Asian women's poetry series #8

Meena (1956-1987), one of my feminist heroes, founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan in 1977. Her name means 'love' in the Pashto language.



She was murdered by the Soviet-occupied Afghan regime. One of her poems in Dari Persian about her struggle has become famous and often quoted. The refrain from it gives me profound truth, inspiration, and strength for my personal "jihad" (i.e. effort) as an out queer woman facing antagonism.

من زنم كه دیگر بیدار گشته ام
راه خود را یافته ام و هرگز بر نمیگردم

man zanam kih digar bidar gashtah am
rah-e khod ra yaftah am wa hargiz bar na me gardam

I'm the woman who has awoken
I have found my path and I will never return

I think the verb at the end of the second line is better translated "I will never go back" or "I will never turn back," but I've quoted it in the translation that RAWA uses. I have a RAWA t-shirt with Meena's portrait and these lines from her poem. The full translation of the poem goes:

I'm the woman who has awoken
I've arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt children
I've arisen from the rivulets of my brother's blood
My nation's wrath has empowered me
My ruined and burnt villages fill me with hatred against the enemy,
I'm the woman who has awoken,
I've found my path and will never return.
I've opened closed doors of ignorance
I've said farewell to all golden bracelets
Oh compatriot, I'm not what I was
I'm the woman who has awoken
I've found my path and will never return.
I've seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children
I've seen henna-handed brides with mourning clothes
I've seen giant walls of the prisons swallow freedom in their ravenous stomach
I've been reborn amidst epics of resistance and courage
I've learned the song of freedom in the last breaths, in the waves of blood and in victory
Oh compatriot, oh brother, no longer regard me as weak and incapable
With all my strength I'm with you on the path of my land's liberation.
My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women
My fists are clenched with the fists of thousands of compatriots
Along with you I've stepped up to the path of my nation,
To break all these sufferings, all these fetters of slavery,
Oh compatriot, oh brother, I'm not what I was
I'm the woman who has awoken
I've found my path and will never return.

This page http://www.rawa.org/ill.htm links to the original Persian and translations in several languages, plus an mp3 of a song composed to this poem and sung in English.

I just want to give a shout out to Meena who has given us a beautiful example of how a really STRONG Muslim woman faces adversity. May we all find strength and inspiration in her example.

Support RAWA in their struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.

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!

This is just a look at current relations without going back over the whole history of my experience with Christianity.

By choosing a focus on interfaith work (why not--I'm a one-woman interfaith group myself) in the USA, obviously I have chosen to get involved with Christians a lot. We may have had our differences, but the level of dialogue and cooperation I'm engaging in through the Network of Spritual Progressives precludes any adversarial attitudes between us. Which is a relief because I don't like fighting over this stuff.

As an Italian feminist Pagan with a penchant for ancient history, two incidents stand out for me from the time when Christianity consolidated its power over the Roman Empire and violently crushed out the heritage of Paganism all over the Mediterranean.

391 - The Theodosian edict which resulted in the abolition of Cybele's religion, the massacres of Her transsexual priestesses the Gallae and forced conversions of their followers, the conversion of their home into the Vatican City, the devotion for the Mother Goddess shifted to Mary--resulting in the eternal question of how do you subordinate a Mother Goddess when Her religion is encapsulated within a patriarchal system ("hyperdulia" and such), when the Church Fathers want Her subordinate but She continues to hold first place in the people's hearts. If you know Sicilians, you know what I mean. All of Cybele's temples were destroyed, with orders that they should never be built upon (in contrast to the usual practice of converting non-Christian religious sites). The religion of Cybele was targeted in particular for obliteration, it had been the principal religion of Rome with Her temple right on the Palatine Hill (the most prestigious real estate in all Rome)--but who remembers nowadays the central importance She once held?

415 - The murder of Hypatia in Alexandria.

That said, when I get together to dialogue and cooperate with Christians today in a civilized way, for the purpose of helping our nation's politics to care more for people, more for the environment-- one thing becomes immediately obvious: We all have far more in common with each other than any of us has with those ancient people.

The progressive Christians who I work with today are nothing like Bishops Ambrose of Milan and Cyril of Alexandria who instigated pogroms against the Pagans of their day to seize power over the Roman Empire. Not by a long stretch! They're the heirs of the German Protestants who made the Declaration of Barmen in a heroic act of resistance to Fascism. For that matter, honestly, I scarcely resemble ancient pagans. Witches today don't even sacrifice chickens let alone humans. (There's more human sacrifice to be found in Christianity, heh, just teasing you guys.) Witches I admire like Starhawk and T. Thorn Coyle (yezida), in their resistance to the Fascist developments of our day, are just as much the spiritual heirs of Barmen. When I blog against theocracy, guess who's right alongside me--a church pastor.

When I look around at Christians and me in dialogue, all I see is people of Modern Western Civilization. And what is that? The result of synthesizing both Pagan and Christian sources into one thing. My people (the Italians) invented this too, in the Renaissance. Let's face it, folks, today's American Christians and American Pagans are born joined at the hip, so let's get hip to one another.

Arab lesbians hold rare public meeting in Haifa, defying Islamist ban
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

HAIFA, Israel: Arab lesbians gathered in the northern Israeli city of Haifa at a rare public event, quietly defying protests from Islamists and a taboo in their own society.

So strong is the antipathy toward homosexuality in their communities that only few of the Arab women in the crowd of about 250 at the Wednesday meeting were gay — a sign of how much Arab women feared being identified as lesbians, said Samira, 31, a conference organizer, who came with her Jewish Israeli girlfriend.

"We'd like all women to come out of the closet — that's our role. We work for them," said Samira, who battled her own family when they found out she was a lesbian.

Israel's Jewish majority is generally tolerant of homosexuality, and the country's secular metropolis, Tel Aviv, is home to a thriving gay community. On the other hand, Jerusalem, with its large proportion of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, is strongly anti-gay.

And among Israel's Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of the country's population, homosexuality is taboo to most.

Homosexuality is strictly forbidden by Islam, and a statement issued by a large Muslim group in Israel described it as a "cancer" in the Arab community.

Driven deep underground for the most part, only 10 to 20 Arab lesbians attended the conference, organizers said, and most blended in with their Israeli counterparts and Arab backers without making their presence known.

Poetry readings, music and Arab women rappers entertained the conference, called "Home and Exile in Queer Experience," organized by Aswat, an organization for Arab lesbians, with members in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"We are here to say they (Arab lesbians) are not alone," said Rawda Morcos, Aswat's spokeswoman, one of a tiny minority of Arab women who are openly gay.

Some related painful experiences.

Samira, who has a dozen brothers and sisters, said she told a sibling she was gay two years ago. The news quickly spread among the family, and her 70-year-old mother fell into a depression, begging her daughter to change her ways.

But she eventually accepted her daughter's homosexuality "in her own way," by packing large boxes of food for Samira whenever she came to visit.

"My mother said, 'take the food, for you and your girlfriend'," Samira recalled, agreeing to be identified only by her first name for fear of reprisals.

Some of her family never came around. A pregnant sister told Samira she would "never touch her children."

Morcos said she had her car smashed up regularly for months and received threatening phone calls at her family home when her village in northern Israel found out she was a lesbian.

Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population.

"This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it's our country ... but it's not being held in Nazareth or Umm el-Fahm (two large Israeli Arab towns)," said Yussef Abu Warda, a playwright.

Outside the conference hall, 20 women protesters in headscarves and long, loose robes held up signs reading, "God, we ask you to guide these lesbians to the true path." Khadijeh Daher, 35, described lesbianism as a "sickness."

Security was tight. Attendance was by invitation only, and reporters were not allowed to take photographs, use tape recorders or identify people.

Even rapper Nahwa Abdul Aal, who performed for the gathering, didn't support the gays. "Being at this conference hasn't changed my mind," she said. "I still think it's wrong."

___

On the Web:

http://www.aswatgroup.org/english/

Only 10 to 20 Arab lesbians attended? That ought to give some idea of how hard a struggle this is. But the injustice that queer Arabs and Muslims have to face is so heavy that revolution is inevitable. Same for women. Queer and feminist issues in the Middle East are both badly in need of a gender revolution. Just keep asking exactly whose interests does this oppression serve?

"This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it's our country."

And the title of it was Home and Exile...

The logo for this blogswarm shows a red slash-circle symbol over the statue of Liberty holding up a cross instead of a torch.

As an attempt at online solidarity, a "blog swarm' is happening this weekend to protest against the theocratic agenda of the evangelical right (aka 'Dominionists'). Since this issue has been described so well in so many places, I recommend you visit these four sites:

http://www.theocracywatch.org

Americans United for Separation of Church and State- http://www.au.org/

First Freedom First - http://www.firstfreedomfirst.org/

http://community.livejournal.com/dark_christian/

Also check out more emblems for this -
Blog Against Theocracy banners and logos

Let's keep religion out of the government and keep the government out of religion. Both function so much better when they are kept separate.

Pass it along.

Personal note - Last year I read a book about developments among the extreme Christian political right and the Dominionist plans for our nation - Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg. I found it seriously disturbing. One evening I had been reading the chapter about the anti-queer campaigns and how they incite fear and loathing of us to gain political power. This is exactly what Fascism did. I set down the book, stood up, turned around, and violently vomited my dinner. I'm not kidding. It just happened like that.

I took the name of Hypatia of Alexandria because she was a strong, intellectual woman who resisted the takeover of her country by hardline Christian political forces. She paid with her life. You know the saying, "I am Spartacus," well just like that, I am Hypatia. Fight the power.

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.

from pinknews.co.uk
Israel urged to secure gay Palestinian meeting
27th March 2007 15:49
Amy Bourke

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) has called on political and religious leaders in Israel to ensure safety for participants in the ASWAT conference in Haifa.

ASWAT is the only lesbian Palestinian organisation in Israel, and tomorrow it plans to celebrate its 5th anniversary in Haifa.

The event, named "Home and Exile," will include a book launch to call attention to the needs of the lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

The book launch has drawn threats from Islamic leaders that could threaten the safety of attendees, whose numbers are expected to reach 150.

IGLHRC has asked Israeli leaders to speak out for freedom of expression, but none have done so yet.

Religious leaders have called for the event to be cancelled.

They have described ASWAT as a "fatal cancer that should be forbidden from spreading out within the Arab society and from eliminating the Arab culture."

The association devotes itself to combating discrimination and increasing awareness for gay women's rights, in an area where homosexuality is still very much a taboo subject.

In 2006 IGLHRC awarded the leader of ASWAT, Rauda Morcos, with the Felipa de Souza award for courage, leadership, and accomplishment as a voice for human rights.

Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of IGLHRC said: "Open discussion and dialogue are essential to the guarantees of human rights for all who are targeted for discrimination and stigma.

"The venomous nature of these threats serve not only to threaten free expression but to condone violence against ASWAT participants."

The IGLHRC is supporting ASWATs appeal for increased awareness and international participation in tomorrow's conference.

J.Hy sez: More power to those brave women taking their freedom today. Freedoms aren't given, they're taken.

The need for security given the threat of assault by Islamic fundamentalists is serious here. Once I was at a queer Muslim conference where we had strict security procedures, but a verbal assault by a fundamentalist took place, an inside job, and it was traumatic for some of our members the way it caught us suddenly. It could have been with semiautomatic weapons rather than words for all we knew to expect.

In Iraq, Islamist death squads like the Badr army have been making lists of queer Iraqis and murdering them in the street like dogs. Is this to be our future? Fuck no.

Support Aswat and other queer Arab groups, the Middle East desperately needs a gender revolution. The oppression of Abrahamic religions over queer people must end. We are fighting back. My love and prayers are with my sisters in Palestine.

Aswat – Palestinian Gay Women are Happy to Invite You to:
"Home and Exile in Queer Identity"
Conference
On the 28th of March 2007

Aswat (which means 'voices') is also publishing the first Arabic book about being lesbian - الوطن والمنفى في تجربة المتحررات جنسيا al-Watan wa-al-manfa fi tajribat al-mutaharrirat jinsiyan. The English version of this title on their website is "Home and Exile in Queer Identity." Literally, the Arabic reads 'Home and exile in the experience of those (women) who liberate themselves sexually'. The word used to translate 'queer' is in the feminine plural, indicating queer women specifically. The Arabic word watan can be translated either 'home' or 'nation', and forms the basis for wataniyah 'nationalism'. To be Palestinian means being unable to think of home or identity without the question of nationalism, and Aswat is known for their politics extending beyond queer liberation to Palestinian nationalism as well. Their use of the word watan in the conference title cannot be separated from its political overtones, given the context. And as if that wasn't complexed enough, the word jinsiyah means both 'nationality' and 'sexuality'.

I really like how they chose the name Aswat for their group, since as marginalized peoples go, Arab women had no voice at all for many centuries, let alone queer Arab women, so to come out now and name themselves Voices speaks volumes. In Israel their status as queer women is freer than in any Arab country, although being Palestinian is used systemically to deny legitimacy to their voices, making them a voice of resistance just for speaking out at all. I hear their voices cutting right through the complex layers of identities overlaid on them from different directions to muffle them.

Notice that the conference announcement has no mention of the location. That was a deliberate omission for security purposes. I went to the 2005 gathering of al-Fatiha, and likewise the location was not given to me until after I'd registered. Nonetheless, one of the hotel employees was an Islamic fundamentalist who burst in and verbally assaulted al-Fatiha members, which was a traumatic experience for one of my close friends, since our security had been breached. The homophobic employee was fired and a cop was posted there for the remainder of the conference.

So one of the Islamist fundies in the Israeli Knesset has been attacking Aswat for putting on their conference. The May/hem blog has reported on not only this controversy but the articles in support of Aswat as well. I loved this comment--"but as one Palestinian member of the communist party responded, who feels sorry for the fall of empires?" Thanks to the blogger, whoever she is ("a 22-year-old Palestinian-Canadian woman"), for relaying the information to North America, where all I can do is give Aswat a shout out from afar in the form of a lusty zagharît.

Ones I have read in bold.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran القرآن - in the original Arabic, no kidding
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce - on my shelf but I still have to get to it
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - my favorite
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
#111 Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
#112 Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
#113 Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
#114 Forever by Judy Blume
#115 Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
#116 My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
#117 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
#118 The Giver by Lois Lowry
#119 It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
#120 Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
#121 Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel Yep, the whole series.
#122 The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
#123 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
#124 Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
#125 Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
#126 In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
#127 The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
#128 The Witches by Roald Dahl
#129 The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
#130 We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
#131 Final Exit by Derek Humphry
#132 What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
#133 Beloved by Toni Morrison
#134 A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
#135 Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure
#136 Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
#137 Cujo by Stephen King
#138 The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
#139 What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
#140 Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
#141 Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
#142 Fade by Robert Cormier
#143 Guess What? by Mem Fox
#144 The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende - on my shelf, still have to get to it
#145 The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
#146 Carrie by Stephen King
#147 Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
#148 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
#149 Private Parts by Howard Stern
#150 Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
#151 Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
#152 How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
#153 Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

I'm so embarrassed listing all the great books I should have read by now but haven't! (I got 50 out of 153, that's 33%, but who's counting?) And there are a few crap books on this list I have read, oh well. (That detracts from the usefulness of this as a reading list. A reading list drawn from this would include the good reads minus the crap.) You wouldn't believe how many of these were my assigned reading in high school. Outside of classes, when I was a teenager I was a big Judy Blume fan. I really respect her for writing banned books for teenagers!

You Are a White Rose

You represent youthfulness and purity. Your vibe: Sweet and heavenly Falling in love with you: is like falling in love for the first time

Aww...

I went with this because I have such respect for the White Rose movement. They were a German resistance movement against the Nazis, they paid for it with their lives, they were led by a woman - Sophie Scholl - so it's an honor.

I read this novel quite a few years ago, and it has stayed in a special place in my memory ever since. It sure has earned its own review by now.

Woman on the Edge of Time is one of the early feminist SF novels following the pioneering work of Ursula K. Le Guin, appearing in the same year that Joanna Russ published The Female Man. Like in The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, Piercy juxtaposed her peaceful feminist utopia with a violent patriarchal dystopia, to heighten the political message by pointing up the contrast between the two. Like in The Female Man by Joanna Russ, the author shifts between alternative future visions to examine feminist issues from different angles. While Starhawk's two nations occupied northern and southern California, Piercy's future utopia in North America is reached by time travel from the 1970s. The dystopia is reached by a similar, though different channel, and the heroine is presented with the two as alternative possibilities, two diverging lines of causality, depending on choices made in the present.

The heroine is a Chicana living in New York, who is getting beaten up by abusive guys, along with getting screwed by the legal and psychiatric systems. A time traveler from the future appears and takes her to an America with small communities using appropriate non-polluting technology, who raise their children to be free of gender oppression. Her guide to the future looks like an American Indian in a black leather jacket, so she calls him a cholo.

Then they go skinny dipping and she sees the guy has a woman's body, which perplexes her greatly until she realizes that one's body doesn't have to determine one's gender presentation. Meanwhile over in childcare a hungry baby is crying. So the burly bearded childcare guy unbuttons his lumberjack shirt to breastfeed the baby. They explain to the visitor from the 1970s that all gender divisions have been abolished, so now men take hormones so they can breastfeed and share equally in child care.

This sets up a debate on transgender with issues that were being debated by feminists in the 1970s. At first the feminist from 1975 objects: Men have taken everything away from us, now they'll take our womanhood for themselves too? But the future feminists persuade her that the only way to end patriarchal oppression of women is to dismantle all gender boundaries. So I think Piercy should get credit as a feminist thinker 30 years ahead of her time!

The dystopia is sketched with a cartoonish lack of subtlety. Men are hyper-masculine and violent. Women are hyper-slutty and held prisoner in high-rise apartments that have to be dozens of stories high to get above the totally polluted environment.

All this said, the novel is not mainly about feminism and gender; its main purpose in being written was to support the antipsychiatric movement. The ending is a bit of a shocker, but the reader can easily see how the whole course of the novel led up to it and still sympathize with the heroine. The speculative future was used to examine issues that women faced in the present day, including male chauvinism and oppressive psychiatry. The antipsychiatric theme is developed mainly toward the end of the novel. Piercy included an afterword with further information about the movement. I would never have expected that a novel written to advance an explicitly political agenda could also impress me as good literature. But it is! Marge Piercy is a damn good writer, she draws women's lives in vivid, realistic colors, and she tells an absorbing tale.

I just got back from Northwestern University. I had a brilliant time at the conference, the organizer Barbara Newman is such a cool lady (and she wears the most fantastic caftans). Starhawk not only gave the keynote address, she drummed and led a Spiral Dance afterward. How cool is that! I spent a whole day and parts of two other days immersed in constant spiritual intellectual discourse and activity with other Goddess people comparing many different traditions. I found it easy to make friends there, all the people there were so cool.

Carol Christ gave a talk on feminist thealogy and death. She was talking about the understanding of death and afterlife as one of the main differences between Goddess religion and patriarchal theology. Her research was based on not only studying Minoan Goddess culture but also living in Greece and participating in traditional rituals with Greek village women, figuring the basics wouldn't have changed over the years even if the name changed to Christianity. Carol said the Christian formula "do ut des" (I give so that you may give) does not work in Goddess culture. The tradition she traced back to Minoan religion is "I give back in gratitude because you always keep giving."

It was a small conference, about 100 people, and the attendees were over 90% women. I wanted to say a shout out to the handful of men there, men who were cool with sitting in a room full of women talking about girly stuff. More power-from-within to them! :)

I heard a lot of scholars and students talking about Islam, but mostly how they don't know much about it. I don't know why hardly anyone so far has done anything to build bridges between Paganism and Islam. One Witch who has done that is yezida. She was doing it years before I started it independently of her, and when I started saying it, Witches told me "Thorn is doing that." I was pleased to learn that she and sista S.R. were doing it too. In fact, S.R. and I started it going for each other when we first met. Several people at the conference spoke up and asked about Islam, so I began to speak out about what I've been finding there. Carol Christ thanked me for telling her about it. It was the fulfillment of a dream I've long had: attending such a conference, sharing my thoughts on this with scholars in the field, and being well received. I really want to do this some more.

On the subject of Islam-Witchcraft relations: One woman in the audience at Starhawk's lecture said that the burning times came about as a direct result of repressive changes in laws made as a result of threat and fear to Christendom from Islam. First they made repressive laws to get the Muslims, then they turned around and used this repression on the Witches. She drew a parallel between that sequence of events and the Patriot Act in present-day America. It's enough to make a Witch feel uneasy.

In discussions the conference kept touching on subjects I'd long thought about, and it was good to know others were thinking about these things too--for example, what are Goddess religion and feminine divine spirituality doing as the predominant faith in some patriarchal social orders? Some scholars who have published books on this are Alf Hiltebeitel, Is the Goddess a Feminist? and Sarah Caldwell's work on Kali. At the conference they discussed a dualistic model: The feminine divine can be either a model to empower women-- the Goddess does this so you can too-- or "compensatory"-- only Goddesses can do this, so you can't. Do what? Be powerful, independent, fierce, respected beings. Like Kali. Also during the conference a third model to answer this question came out, which some called "subversive." ;) Another very popular theme at the conference, which came up in several papers and discussions, was gender fluidity. They loved that concept. Wait till I tell them about the gender fluidity of Allah...

Chün-Fang Yu spoke on Kwan Yin and told an anecdote from her childhood during World War II in China. Her maternal grandmother was a very devout Buddhist and prayed to Kwan Yin early every morning. Her mother was a modern intellectual. One day they were about to board a river ferry. Suddenly Professor Yu's grandmother had a vision of Kwan Yin dressed in white, standing in the river gesturing to her to go back, to get away. So her grandmother refused to board the boat. Her mother was not persuaded by the vision and argued that they should go ahead and get on. They kept arguing for a long time, and finally her mother gave in. Then when the boat pulled away into the river, it struck a mine that had been left by the retreating Japanese, which exploded and killed everyone on the boat. "So if we hadn't heeded Kwan Yin's warning, I wouldn't be talking to you today." Naturally, this audience loves nothing better than women telling such cool anecdotes of their grandmothers.

Throughout the brief conference, Barbara Newman got much applause and gratitude for bringing us together, and the applause for her and Starhawk included zagharît ululation. When the main form of cheering heard is ululation, you know you're at a feminist event. :)

There were only two other Reclaiming Witches who registered for the conference (yeah, I was hoping to see more of youz), two women of Chicago Reclaiming, including my dear friend Jennifer B. who is a brilliant ritualist--although more folks showed up to see Starhawk--her talk was free and well attended. At the reception afterward everybody there (with only a couple exceptions) joined in the Spiral Dance around a table full of food and floral arrangement which she suggested as an image to use. People who had never even heard of Starhawk or Spiral Dances before joined in. Not everybody got the concept of looking into everyone else's eyes, but I'm glad they got an experience of the dance. I was there representing SpiralHeart--that's what I had them put under my name--so lots of people who had never heard of Reclaiming asked me what SpiralHeart is, and I got to tell them.

Thanks to Goddess my ideas were well received, and I was personally well received. I feel very blessed at fitting in among them, because gatherings like this are my favorite things. You can intuit when people in a movement aren't sincere in what they're doing, when they're faking it or their heart isn't in it. At this conference I really did feel the spirit bringing people together in perfect love and perfect trust. I felt the participants truly were acting and speaking from their hearts. Goddess's blessing.

Mass Resistance is the Other Side of Large Scale Oppression:
The Reality of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Iran

A speech by Azar Majedi given at the International Women’s Rights Conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, 12-14 October, 2006

In describing women’s conditions in a particular country, one either refers to laws governing that country or statistics which measure women’s status. In this manner, one either exposes the extent of the oppression women suffer or admires their achievements. In regards to women living under the rule of Islam, the situation is pure discrimination and oppression, subjugation and state violence. If women are considered second class citizens in many countries, in countries stricken by political Islam, they are not even considered as citizens. They are only extensions of men. In fact, according to Islam, the concept of citizenry is non-existent. There is a relationship between God and the religious hierarchy and a collective of right-less, conscious-less men, with women as their slaves. As a matter of fact, this is true of any other religion. However, this is beside the point of today’s discussion.

You have heard a great deal about women under Islam, Islam a la Taliban, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, Somalia, Sudan, and in Iran under the Islamic Republic. The downtrodden situation of women, the sheer discrimination, gender apartheid, Islamic veil, forced marriages, officially recognized pedophilia, (setting the legal age of marriage at 9 for girls), honour killing, polygamy, stoning women to death for engaging in sex outside marriage, encouraging men to hit their wives for punishment. The list is long.

If once the issue of Islam and women was an unknown topic, nowadays, thanks to the rise of political Islam, Islamic states in Iran, Afghanistan, and now in Iraq, it has become a well-known topic. I am sure that you all have heard about the non-existence of women’s rights in Islam. However, some think it is not Islam’s fault, they blame the patriarchy. They maintain that it is not Islam, but patriarchal interpretations of Islam that is responsible for the conditions of women in countries under the rule of Islam. In other words, it is the ruling men’s fault not the ruling Islam. We will not get into the debate that Islam, as with all other religions, is the direct product of a patriarchal era. It could not have escaped being permeated by patriarchic values and outlooks. However, we must state one undeniable fact: which is that millions of women are violated daily by Islamic laws, customs, values and states. We must deal in an effective manner with this violation.

I am here on behalf of the Organization for Women’s Liberation. I am here to familiarize you with realities of Iranian society. You have heard about Iran. I do not mean the oil, or the nuclear project. I do not mean the mullahs or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I mean about the situation of women. Today, I want to talk to you about women’s resistance, rather than women’s oppression. You have heard long tales about women’s oppression. I would like to tell you that there is a mass resistance movement against this systematic oppression, this official misogynistic ideology. I would like to share the encouraging news with you that Iran is the birthplace of a very important historic moment in international women’s liberation, a movement more significant than the Suffrage movements, or as vast as the women’s liberation movement in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1930, or in the West during the 1960s and 1970s. This movement has great potential. If it materializes, it is capable of not only liberating women in Iran, but also opening up the door to freedom to all women of the Middle East. We must recognise this fact. I am here to ask for your solidarity and support.

The situation in Iran is different from that of Afghanistan, Iraq or the Sudan. There is mass discontent in these countries; there is resistance, but there is a lack of a mass movement in defense of women’s rights. Such a movement exists in Iran.
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