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gender
Yes! Women are Funny!It’s one of the first warm nights of spring, and the venerable queer venue is shaking with laughter at a stand-up comedy show headlined by young women comedians. Avery Edison strolls onstage, with her small round glasses and short red Sinead O’Connor-style hair, and the mixed-gender, mostly 20-something audience welcomes the young British comic with the same polite applause it gave to the five young women who performed before her. Not long into her set, Edison comes out to the crowd as transgender and, seeking to prove it, starts to unbutton her black jeans.
The Lure of Bonnie MarinAt 6 a.m., Bonnie Marin begins another day cooking over a hot grill. Breakfast orders pour in, but as always her mind is elsewhere. She daydreams of giant storks standing on wet floors.
The Women of Casa Xochiquetzal
Xochiquetzal (pronounced So-chi-ke-chal) is an Aztec goddess whose name means flower-feather. She represents the divine and spiritual side of the pleasures of the flesh. Xochiquetzal was adored by the ahuianime, the pre- Hispanic prostitutes.
Gender OutlawsIn the 15 years since Kate Bornstein’s groundbreaking
Filmmaker Tracey DeerTiffany Deer is giggling uncontrollably. Her sister, filmmaker Tracey Deer, is holding the camera and laughing along. The laughter is contagious, the intimacy compelling. This is the opening sequence from Club Native, which, during its 78-minute running time, entertains viewers even as it educates and often challenges them.
Rhymes With Cubic PearBack in its heyday, I performed in a local production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. I performed the monologue called “Hair,” in which a woman tells her story of being pressured by her husband to shave her pubic hair. After shaving, she feels “puffy and exposed and like a little girl.” Her husband is turned on. After she refuses to keep shaving, he is unfaithful, they attend couples’ therapy and ultimately, they divorce.
Shock DocNaomi Klein has a remedy for the injustices of neo-liberal policies. Read her new book and call your member of parliament in the morning. It’s not easy talking about the excesses of capitalism, even when you’ve got an army of facts to back you up and a reputation for having inspired an entire generation to take up activism against global capital’s greedy excesses.
Are Women Human?Over the past 25 years, Catharine MacKinnon has changed the face of feminist legal theory. A law professor at the University of Michigan, she is, as one reviewer notes, “a famously polarizing figure.” She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, and her belief that pornography violates women’s civil rights influenced Canada’s redefinition of obscenity law from sexual explicitness to a harm-based approach a decade ago.
Pump up the Volume: Tanya Tagaq Adds New Sound to a Centuries-Old Women’s Cultural TraditionThroat singing isn’t a sound that’s easy to describe, even for Tanya Tagaq, so she relies on comparisons. “It’s breath, it’s rhythm. To be very, well, pompous about it, it’s like the sushi of sound.” She shakes her head, laughing. “When you hear it, you either love it or you hate it.”
A Complicated Kind of AuthorHerizons: I’m so delighted to be able to chat with you about A Complicated Kindness. I imagine this book took a lot of courage to write. Can you talk about that a bit? 
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