feminist blogs

Karl Rove is resigning.

We’ll see what that means, in the more complicated long run, later, I expect.  Still.  I can’t help but feel a shadow passing.

Last week I had the opportunity to look at incredible installation of Black Panther Party art at Cornelia Bell’s Black Bottom Gallery in Oakland, CA.  The range of work in the exhibition is impressive:  Marcel Diallo’s use of decades-old political prints remixed and re-interpreted to carry on their revolutionary message ranges from the deeply inspiring to the deeply disturbing, and take center stage in the front rooms.  Eesuu Orindide, who I got the chance to speak to, has a number of truly beautiful paintings up; you could just feel the power in them, and his use of color is amazing.  There’s also a range of sculptures made of found materials from abandoned and destroyed houses in the neighborhood, which brings the setting into sharp relief.

The Gallery itself is housed in a converted residence, a small house with its floors and appliances stripped, making a perfect home both for the work and its message and bringing home the notion of the art’s relevance to the immediate community.

It’s right at home, there in a house, with none of the sterility or pretension of many other galleries–it’s clearly a place where people work and move about, where you don’t feel guilty for moving.  The invitation to inhabit the space is irresistible.  I could have stayed a lot longer, and continued to get something out of it with each new moment.

This is an exhibition worth seeing, and I don’t know how much longer it will be there.  If you’re in the Bay Area, you should check it out.  I’d link to more of it, but most of the links are on Myspace and hard to get to; you’ll have to see it for yourself.  That and support your local art scene.

Right. Here’s a left turn; some of it’s remixed, and some of it’s not.

I’m queer as hell. I think we’ve established this. The other thing I am, though–and it’s a big part of my identity, much as I’ve kicked at it–is small-town.

Neither of those is going away. The thing I’ve discovered, though, is that it’s not just my rural-ness that makes my queer-ness problematic; the trouble and pressure and nonsense go both ways.

I come from a pretty good-sized place in the middle of nowhere–three hours drive, in the good directions, to the nearest population center–with everything from the corner soda fountain to split-rail fences to tumbleweeds. It’s grown since I’ve left, of course; so have I. It was an awful place to grow up queer, let me tell you.

This is the sort of place where “gay” is used as an insult, but so are “Mexican” and “Jew”–where, when the city went to add orientation as a protected status to its hate-crimes legislation, the Chamber of Commerce moved to block it–where a neoconservative megachurch practically runs both local government and public schools. It’s a place where my high school Gay-Straight Alliance had to ally with the rest of the tri-county area, and then the ten of us would meet, at night, in the locked back room of the Planned Parenthood. “Feminist” and “Liberal” are dirty, dirty words.

It may surprise you to hear that I kind of miss it.

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Let’s take a break for a second.

No better place than the kitchen table, right?

Take a break from the mess and exhaustion and day-to-day, and where do a lot of us end up? Right there, at the kitchen table, if we’ve got anything like a kitchen. When I think of the home I want to make someday, I think of the smell of the kitchen–garlic and coffee and yeast and dried peppers–at the heart of it. And when things are rough, I go, like many of us, to comfort food. Hot and sour soup, nursed carefully with a big spoon. Meatloaf with a good old-fashioned Midwestern ketchup glaze. All sorts of stuff probably bad for me but that makes things better, somehow. The kitchen table, no matter where I live, warm in winter, usually with a teapot close to hand, sometimes with a glass of something stiffer, is the center of the home and its warmth.

Food isn’t just a feminist issue when it’s a problem, after all. It’s not just the many of us not getting enough nutrition, not getting access to fresh and nourishing foods; it’s not just the many of us afflicted with eating disorders; it’s not just the messed-up cultural messages we all get about what we put in our bodies. Food is also a vitally important way to look at our connections to each other, to our ideas of family, to our traditions. Look at the way many people identify so elementally with the staple their ancestors have eaten: rice, maize, wheat, potatoes, taro, olives. Look at the way we’re constantly told the myth of the family meal as a binder of loved ones in troubled times. We’re made of the foods we consume, from the very beginning. Pathologized or not, the food matters.

So have a seat.

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I’m a street medic.

That bears some explaining, for a lot of people, even in activist circles.

The street medic or action medic movement dates back to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, giving support to political-action struggles throughout the United States, but it took on new patterns, techniques, and scale much more recently. As it currently stands, street medicine developed in response to the Seattle WTO riots of 1999. During the mess and smoke and smashing of things that occurred there, it occurred to a number of people on the street that not only could people get hurt, but they were likely to stay hurt, for a couple of reasons: in a riot situation, paramedics and ambulance crews are generally not allowed in until the area is safe, so that they can stay responders and not become patients; people judged as political dissidents are often not likely to get aid from police in highly-charged political protests or situations where combat between police and civilians is occurring; due to the crowds, casualties can simply be lost in the crush; and so on. The story includes an account of a protester having a heart attack and nobody noticing he had died, because he was propped up by the mass of the crowd and it was too chaotic to hear or see that he needed medical attention.

This, obviously, is not an okay state of affairs. So people started organizing, taking earlier decades’ work and linking it together into more widespread, coordinated way. They got together folks with medical training–paramedics, first aid volunteers, Wilderness First Responders, nurses–and pooled knowledge to try to come up with a volunteer force of first aid providers who could, without professional sanction, enter riot and protest situations in small, guerrilla-style teams and provide care for the injured until such time as actual ambulances could get in. They tested methods of combating the effects of chemical agents like pepper spray and shared results. Along with individual actors, groups have sprung up around the country: Portland’s Black Cross Health Collective, Boston Area Liberation Medics, the Bay Area Radical Health Collective, Medical Activists of New York, and so on in the U.S., and worldwide on a more limited basis. Street medics are frequently politically aligned–among them many anarchists and socialists, as well as “affinity group” medics embedded in various political organizations–and do their work to support a cause or keep safe members of a particular movement. (I myself do not do street medicine in alignment with any political movement. More on that, later.) In larger cities like New York, London, and Washington, D.C., street medics have put together entire field clinics to treat the injured; in smaller cities like Portland, we are more likely to be distributed loosely in pairs and threes, with only limited cell phone and radio contact between us to keep coordinated. In recent years street medics have organized to help provide first aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, and many street medics travel the world doing their work wherever large protest actions are happening. They risk arrest and violence, often enough.

There’s the history lesson. Now to the point.

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