SELF & OTHER: Dear New Yorker Magazine...
Dear Editor(s),
My name is Cassie Peterson and I am a conceptual collaborator for Vanessa Anspaugh’s new dance piece, entitled Armed Guard Garden, which is premiering at New York Live Arts on February 15th. This morning, Vanessa and I noticed that in your brief preview of the show, you have…
"What is different about the same-sex kiss versus its counterpart is in the heterosexual narrative is that the former potentially functions to reveal a secret, not only about the nature of the relationship between the persons who kiss, but also about those persons themselves. In other words, due precisely to our culture’s governing presumption that everyone is heterosexual unless proven otherwise, the same-sex kiss speaks to identity in a much more highly charged way than does a kiss between a woman and a man.
~Philip Brian Harper
Cultural Critic"
(via planetdan)
One teachers approach to preventing gender bullying in a classroom
Alie arrived at our 1st-grade classroom wearing a sweatshirt with a hood. I asked her to take off her hood, and she refused. I thought she was just being difficult and ignored it. After breakfast we got in line for art, and I noticed that she still had not removed her hood. When we arrived at the art room, I said: “Allie, I’m not playing. It’s time for art. The rule is no hoods or hats in school.”
She looked up with tears in her eyes and I realized there was something wrong. Her classmates went into the art room and we moved to the art storage area so her classmates wouldn’t hear our conversation. I softened my tone and asked her if she’d like to tell me what was wrong.
“My ponytail,” she cried.
“Can I see?” I asked.
She nodded and pulled down her hood. Allie’s braids had come undone overnight and there hadn’t been time to redo them in the morning, so they had to be put back in a ponytail. It was high up on the back of her head like those of many girls in our class, but I could see that to Allie it just felt wrong. With Allie’s permission, I took the elastic out and re-braided her hair so it could hang down.
“How’s that?” I asked.
She smiled. “Good,” she said and skipped off to join her friends in art.
‘Why Do You Look Like a Boy?’
For serious, Leah has talked about wanting to do this for a while now. Looks like someone beat her to the punch…
the “Don’t exoticize bodies of color/Respectfully eroticize one another” lyric just gets me every time…
Main trailer for barrish, from our (pre)premiere at La MaMa Etc in May 2011. More @ http://theAOMC.org/menu
