Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Stina Söderling

Today I’m going to blog a bit about my best friend Stina Söderling. I’m really proud of Stina- she’s a professor and PhD student in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers and is involved in some really cutting-edge research in the burgeoning field of rural queer studies. She’s my friend of five years and my neighbor of five minutes (away), and I’m really delighted to be able to share some of her accomplishments with the readers of my humble blog.

Last week, Stina presented at the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference at Georgia State University. This year the conference was titled Structural Adjustments: Queering Privatization, Framing Disaster, and according to the conference’s program, the theme  “explores the means by which discourses of “natural” disaster overlook the realities of systemic inequalities and justify increased privatization, with its gendered, sexualized, raced, and classed dimensions.”

Stina was part of a panel called Place-making in the American South. The paper she presented is called In the Crevices of Global Capitalism: A Genealogy of a Rural Queer Community, and is based upon her own fascinating research at a queer arts community. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she submits it to a journal!) She joins academics such as Scott Herring and Mary L. Gray in the important project of documenting the experiences and histories of queers living in locations outside of urban areas.

I interviewed Stina on her research last month and am aiming to publish the interview transcript in a zine on communities this spring. She’s also one of the people featured in my forthcoming zine, My Feminist Friends. Stina has previously presented at the North American Anarchist Studies Network conference on AIDS and its connection to rural queer land movements and at CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) on lesbian separatist spaces in the 1970s. I was lucky to be able to attend both of these events, and will be sure to blog about events she’s involved in in the future!

Thanks for everything, Stina!!

Elvis Bakaitis

In the next month or so I will (finally) be releasing a zine called My Feminist Friends, which will feature interviews with and artwork by some of my wonderful friends. Ever since I began preparations for this zine I knew that I wanted my buddy Elvis Bakaitis to make the cover art.

An awesome cartoonist, activist, and friend, Elvis has a really cool blog called Like Whoa, which I highly encourage you to check out. Over the years they have posted a wide variety of politically and socially astute drawings- some of which are truly hilarious, such as Pick-up lines in the [Park Slope] Co-op.

A longtime volunteer at Bluestockings, Elvis currently runs the monthly Feminist Book Club (which will be meeting next on April 3rd to discuss the book Sex at Dawn.) Additionally, Elvis has spent many an hour volunteering their skills and time at Brooklyn’s own Lesbian Herstory Archives, and presented at January’s Pop-Up Museum of Queer History.

Elvis’s boundless enthusiasm, energy, and joy is simply delightful, and is very much reflected in their artwork and community activism. Once my zine is released I will be sure to post photos of the glorious cover Elvis created!

Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Kate Wadkins

This is only the second time I’ve written a post for this particular category, but it’s about time that I write more, as I’m lucky to be surrounded by many people deserving recognition for their accomplishments.

Today I want to write about a person with whom I share a name, neighborhood, college, and favorite band- Kate Wadkins. I met Kate last summer through Kathleen Hanna, as we both worked for her on various projects at different times. Over time Kate has become my research collaborator, close friend, and feminist inspiration.

What particularly impresses me about Kate is her unbelievable array of involvements in diverse community/activist projects, as well as her tireless commitment in promoting the work of local artists/musicians/you name it. Presently, Kate is the gallery manager of STOREFRONT, an art gallery in Bushwick that specializes in the work of Bushwick artists. Just over a week ago I attended the opening of BRAIN WAVES, a collection of zines and prints curated by Kate. The opening was a big success, and was written up in the Greenpoint Gazette. I just bought one of the zines featured in the collection, Habits of Being, and am really excited to read it.

This Thursday I’m thrilled to be co-leading a zine workshop for teens with Kate at the Westport (CT) Public Library, located fifteen minutes from my hometown. The event falls shortly before the release of International Girl Gang Underground, a zine edited by Kate and Stacy Konkiel. Kate has organized a zine release party at Death by Audio in Brooklyn on March 12th.

Kate is involved with way too many projects for me to cover in total, but I encourage you to check out Very Okay, the band for which she’s a bassist, and RE/VISIONIST, Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History journal, of which she is a co-founder.

Kate: thanks for everything, and there’s nobody else I’d rather sit with in the rain while screaming Bikini Kill lyrics.

Giving Credit Where It’s Due, Part 1

The topic of this post is going to differ somewhat from my usual content. I am lucky to have so many inspirational library mentors and colleagues, and it’s really important to me to recognize these people for what I see as their amazing contributions to both the field and my life. Thus, every once in awhile I’m going to write a little bit about a librarian whose work I really admire.

Today I really want to recognize the accomplishments of a librarian who works about four feet away from me- my coworker, Charlotte Price. Presently a humanities reference librarian, Charlotte has a rich and diverse background in the profession. She also has experience in cataloging, rare books, and systems, and is always happy to share insight she’s gained during years of working in libraries.

Her commitment to our patrons is unwavering and she will always go out of her way to help anyone, whether it’s a student or a colleague. I learn from her every day and together we work in feminist solidarity to develop better services and close gaps in information access.

Charlotte and I have recently started a project together which I’m very excited about- we’re both really interested in fat-positive feminism and together are working to “convey the medicalization and discrimination of the fat body by standard library classification, as well as call for a more widespread acceptance of the inclusion of fat-positive feminist alternative literature into academia.” We’ll be presenting our research at next year’s Women’s History Month Conference.

Thank you!!!