More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Pratibha Parmar’s 2022 film about Andrea Dworkin brought both pushback and praise within feminist and queer communities. In this Q&A, Parmar shares her thoughts on reactions to the film but also about her interest in Dworkin.
“There is an arc between generations of female artists’ protesting violence against women. And I want Andrea’s voice to be part of the conversation on its own terms and in its complexity.”
There has never been a queer leader like Urvashi Vaid. Until her death of metastatic breast cancer on May 14 at age 63, she spent the better part of five decades fighting injustice. Principle drove Urvashi in almost everything she did. She exploded onto the scene with a dynamism that has never been equaled since.
“The lesbian agenda is the reconstruction of families … the reimagining of power … the reorganization of the economic system … the reinforcement of civil rights and dignity for all people … the end of the oppression of women, the end of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia … the reestablishment of a proper relationship to our environment. … When I list this laundry list of oppression, it does not overwhelm me; it tells me how far I have to go in my struggle; it tells me who my allies are.”
Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh solo album, offers a much different vibe and one that also represents an intergenerational inheritance engulfed in the pleasures of Black dance music vibrating across the various subcultures of Black communities around the world.
Black women—across genders, sexualities and communities—have been the blueprint, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance proves that.
When filmmaker Jennie Livingston stumbled upon drag ball culture in the late 1980s, they had no idea how much the resulting film would resonate. Released in 1990, Livingston’s first documentary Paris Is Burning showcases drag balls during the late 1980s in Harlem, New York City, and features interviews with numerous queer and trans Black and Latinx performers who comprised the various “houses” in competition at the balls. Decades later, the film continues to resonate.
Barbara Cameron was an extraordinary woman. A Hunkpapa Lakota, lesbian, Two-Spirit leader, AIDS activist, and pioneer social organizer in San Francisco’s Native American community. Cameron embraced the term Two-Spirit to make Two-Spirit people visible to all Americans. Although it has only been 20 years since her passing, pioneering figures like Cameron are largely forgotten.
The catastrophic destruction triggered by the Russian invasion has rapidly escalated the risk of HIV infection and concomitant violence for women in Ukraine.
“I believe in us. I believe in you. I believe in myself. While, I don’t know how, and I don’t know when; I know—just like my ancestors knew—that we will find a way through: as long as we remember who we are and what we are capable of.”
We can do what we can today to mitigate this crisis—but unless we continue to address the deep inequalities in our country, the groundwork for the next epidemic, and the one after, has already been laid.
An HIV/AIDS-reduction program saving the lives of women and girls worldwide is at risk under Trump’s Global Gag Rule—and serves as a testament to the ground we can lose when data doesn’t drive drive policymaking.
“We hope the members of Congress who have the power to affect healthcare reform will engage with us and other advocates in a way that the Trump Administration apparently will not.”
