judith “jack” halberstam on drag, gender and fashionable stupidity ...

Issue 9 | Spring 2005
JUDITH “JACK” HALBERSTAM
ON DRAG, GENDER AND
FASHIONABLE STUPIDITY
DIY FASHION
WHEN PEOPLE & PLACES
ARE TRENDS
PLUS: OPEN LETTER TO
GWEN STEFANI
Free and Priceless

Spring 2005
FOUNDING EDITOR................... Stephanie Abraham
CONSULTING EDITOR................ Daria Teruko Yudacufski
DESIGNER................................U-SU Graffix
DESIGNER CONSULTANT............Eve NaRanong
EDITOR IN CHIEF..................... Jessica Hoffmann
COPY EDITOR........................... Jennifer Ashley
ASSISTANT EDITORS................. Ruth Blandón
Irina Contreras
Christine Petit
WRC
ISSUE 9
The views expressed in LOUDmouth do not necessarily reflect those of California
State University, Los Angeles, the University-Student Union or their students, staff
or administrators. And, because feminism is not a monolithic ideology, there may
be as many viewpoints expressed here as there are feminists. Opinions are those of
their respective authors and are not necessarily those of LOUDmouth.
feminism: fem- -niz- m — n.
e e
a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and all oppression
On the Cover
8 love asians, (they’re) my bitch: an open letter to gwen stefani — daria teruko yudacufski
9 ANTIdogs ➪ noMAD[E]s ➪ noFASHIONrules: revolutionary craft experiments and feminist
fashion projects in europe — stephanie müller
15 interview: <strong>judith</strong> <strong>“jack”</strong> <strong>halberstam</strong> on drag, gender and fashionable stupidity — ruth blandón
25 when people and places are trends: on international tourism — mitra ebadolahi
2 from the heart of the editor
5 inspiring loudmouths: <strong>judith</strong> butler
know your feminist faculty: sansan kwan
6 dear joanna — a health column
the f-word — giuliana maresca
7 the loudmouth list
30 women’s resource center calendar of events
On the cover: Photo by Del LaGrace Volcano, The Drag King Book. Courtesy of the artist.
Back Cover: Photo courtesy of A Room of One’s Own, Vienna.
Designed by U-SU Graffix.
Special
3 clothing with a conscience: the garment worker center — frederick smith
the multifiber agreement — jennifer huei-fen lin
4 dress to kill fight to win — dean spade
11 the limited diaries — irina contreras
12 cottonpicking american apparel — lisa rosman
the truth behind american apparel: sweatshop-free or union buster? — behind the label
13 indebted to fashion? — lora paelicke
comic: most fashionable player — angela mccracken and sam combellick
14 ¿quién lleva los pantalones? female subversion and queerness in the mexican revolution — lucila chávez
19 more than mere clothes play: listening to the backstreet noize — edahrline salas
20 model vs. feminist: seeing beyond the binaries — stephanie abraham
21 loudmouths get dressed: first-person takes — crystal irby, ariana manov, anne peters, jess socket, et al.
23 fashionable neighborhoods: displacing the other in style on l.a.’s eastside — jessica hoffmann
26 a paradigm shift in progressive politics: the wsf — sarah h. cross and alice do valle
27 unworship at the altar of the ultimate status-icon: dismantling the car constant — jennifer ashley
29 fiction: unbuttoned — cheryl klein
In Every Issue
The Women’s Resource Center (WRC) is part of the Cross Cultural Centers at California State University, Los Angeles. Its mission
is to encourage student learning as well as foster an inclusive campus environment free of racism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms
of oppression. With a commitment to increasing cross-cultural awareness, we offer a wide variety of programs and services that explore
both the shared and unique experiences, histories and heritages of our diverse community. Please contact the WRC at: (323) 343-3370 or
University-Student Union, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, Calif., 90032.
Check out LOUDmouth on the web at
www.calstatela.edu/usu/loudmouth.

past
A note:
After publishing “I Want My RC” (Abraham, Issue 8), I discovered RC’s
“Gay Policy,” which posits that “participation in same-gender sex arises
only out of the individual having been hurt and left with a distress
pattern by that hurt” and states, “we in Re-evaluation Counseling
cannot compromise with any ‘identification’ of the person with a
pattern which pushes the individual towards participation in sex with
people of his or her own gender. We do not concur with any
identification of oneself as Gay, Lesbian, or bisexual [sic] as ultimately
‘rational.’” There’s more, but I think these quotes sufficiently support my
claim that this policy is vehemently heteronormative.* They also, in
their use of jargon, give a sense of the particularity of RC. Both these
issues cause me to regret having published the essay.
Had I known about RC’s Gay Policy before going to print, I
would not have printed anything about the organization in LOUDmouth
without, at the very least, including a critical discussion of this policy.
The fact that the organization professes to oppose oppression on the
basis of sexual identity does not mitigate the problematic and offensive
heteronormativity of the policy. If anything, it pathologizes nonnormative
sexuality in asking that people not
be discriminated against on the basis of
“irrational[ity]” (from what I can tell,
“irrational[ity]” is RC’s term for what those in
traditional mental-healthcare circles might call
“illness”). I should have done a more thorough
investigation of the organization while editing
this piece. I apologize to you, readers, for not
having done so.
I also regret not having requested
either a broader piece about alternative
mental-health/emotional-healing practices or a
more critical personal essay addressing some of
the aspects of the organization that are
problematic from a feminist perspective.
I’m sorry that I failed to adequately
investigate this organization at the editing
stage and, thus, let a page of LOUDmouth serve
as free PR for an institution I now know to be
actively heteronormative and in opposition to
the diverse feminist principles I aim to
represent in this magazine.
* The full text of the policy is available at http://www.rc.org/publications/
present_time/pt101/pt101_35_hj.html, about halfway down the page.
present
In the last issue, I mentioned how hard it seemed to be for folks not
personally dealing with serious health issues to get motivated to write
on the topic. Not so with the Fashion issue. I received an
unprecedented number of pitches and submissions for this issue. Even
the back-page question (this page normally takes weeks to fill, with
answers trickling in) elicited dozens of responses in the first 24 hours
after I sent it. Is this a matter of our mirroring cultural priorities — our
cultural fear of death and the body? Our socialization to be compelled
by surfaces over interiors?
But fashion is so not limited to surfaces. It’s about who
produces the stuff we wear, how it’s marketed and sold, what clothing
signifies and more. There’s also the question of how/whether we create
our own fashion cultures outside of and/or in response to dominant
fashions. Viewing “fashion” more broadly, there are fashions in
traveling and housing and theory and political ideology that are well
worth critical feminist attention. This issue of LOUDmouth aims to look
at all of that.
It’s rather syncretic in terms of subject matter and form/style,
but the connections between seemingly disparate pieces are there if
you look for them. And that’s a fashion statement I’m happy to make:
one marked by difference and relationship, a proliferation of subjects
and styles.
future
This kind of syncretic fashion statement reflects LOUDmouth’s goal of
being a community-based publication that presents diverse progressive
feminist voices, something we also aim to manifest in our internal
structure and processes. When I took on the editor-in-chief role last
spring, founding editor Stephanie Abraham and I discussed the value
of instituting a rotating editorship. Switching
editors annually allows the efficiency that
comes with having a single primary editor at
any given time while maintaining the powersharing
community spirit that guides this
project. This institutionalizes the continuous
development of new feminist-media leadership,
guards against LOUDmouth’s ever stagnating
and/or becoming any one person’s ego project
and promotes a freshness of perspective and
style.
And so, I’m excited to announce that
this is my last issue as editor in chief. For the
next four issues, Christine Petit will serve as
editor in chief and Irina Contreras as assistant
editor. Many of you have seen Christine’s work
in LOUDmouth — she’s contributed to every
issue thus far. She was also the program
coordinator for Cal State L.A.’s Women’s
Resource Center for several years. Irina is an
artist, arts educator and activist who’s been
doing zines since junior high. But I think our
mutual friend (and LOUDmouth contributor) Socket put it best: “Irina
is fierce.” Irina and Christine both are, and I have no doubt that this
new editorial duo will bring y’all grand things in the next year. Daria
Teruko Yudacufski, Stephanie Abraham and Jennifer Ashley will be
staying on in their current positions, and I’ll be moving to a new spot
on the masthead as a contributing editor, along with new contributing
editor Ruth Blandón, who has written several powerful features for
LOUDmouth, including this issue’s cover story. I don’t know about you,
but I can’t wait to see the future of this zine. It’s in great hands.
Signing off,
Editor in Chief
LOUDmouth 2

CLOTHING WITH A CONSCIENCE the garment worker center
By Frederick Smith
W
ould you give up the shirt on
your back to help another human
being?
This is a question the Garment Worker
Center would like all of us to consider. Why?
Because the clothes we buy and wear could be
contributing to the degradation of thousands
of people who produce our favorite fashions.
“We realize people
need to buy clothes,” says
Joann Lo, lead organizer for
the GWC. “But we feel people
need to keep themselves
informed and educated, and
put their energy together to
support manufacturers and
stores who support worker
rights.”
Los Angeles is a
fitting home for the GWC. L.A.
is known for being fashionforward,
hip and cuttingedge.
It also is home to the
largest garment industry in
the country, with over
100,000 workers and 5,000
contractors. However, less
than 1 percent of these 100,000 garment
workers are currently unionized.
What this means is that many
garment workers don’t have a larger
collective voice to speak up or speak out for
them(selves). And when there is no voice,
there can be high levels of exploitation of
workers by their employers.
Consider these facts:
• The overwhelming majority of garment
workers in the United States are
immigrant women.
LOUDmouth 3
• These workers typically work 60 to 80
hours a week, in front of machines, and
without minimum wage, overtime pay or
healthcare benefits.
• The U.S. Department of Labor estimates
that more than 50 percent of the sewing
shops in the United States violate
minimum wage and overtime laws.
• Government surveys also estimate that
75 percent of U.S. garment shops violate
safety and health laws with blocked fire
exits, unsanitary bathrooms, poor
ventilation, etc.
The center started as a place for garment
workers to organize, discuss their challenges
on the job and advocate for better workplace
conditions. In addition to doing advocacy
work, the center also works to educate
consumers about the fashion choices they
make and what they can do to support
garment-worker rights.
THE MULTIFIBER AGREEMENT
The GWC recently scored a huge win
in its campaign against retailer Forever 21.
In 2001, 33 workers represented by the Asian
Pacific American Legal Association filed suit
against Forever 21 for mistreatment including
denial of lawful wages and dangerous working
conditions. The GWC, along with Sweatshop
Watch, organized a national boycott of the
company — and it paid off.
Three years later, the
successful campaign resulted
in a settlement in which all
parties resolved to take
concrete steps to promote
worker protection in the
garment industry.
Among the GWC’s
current projects is coalition
work as part of the Multiethnic
Immigrant Workers
Organizing Network. MIWON
brings several organizations
together to educate
immigrant workers on their
rights and to organize for
improved living and working
conditions.
There are many ways to support the
GWC’s important work, from volunteering at
the center to being a conscious consumer.
“It doesn’t make sense to stop buying
clothes,” Lo says. “But it does make sense to
be aware of how your clothes are made.”
Fred loves clothes (when he can afford them) and
writing (when he has the time). Contact him:
www.fredericksmith.net.
For more information or to get involved, call
(888) 449-6115 or log on to
www.garmentworkercenter.org.
what is it? The Multifiber Agreement (MFA) was a quota system established in 1974, regulating import trade in the global textile and
clothing industry.
what happened to it? On Jan. 1, 1995, it was replaced by the WTO Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC), a transitional instrument
aimed at ultimately phasing out quotas. The ATC ended on Jan. 1, 2005.
what now? With the expiration of the MFA/ATC and other trade restrictions come changes in the lives of garment workers, particularly
in struggling countries that benefited socially and economically from the work secured through the quota system. Global economic turmoil
is expected. In February, 5,600 jobs were lost in the United States alone, according to the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition.
China is already flooding markets, driving out smaller countries that cannot compete. Many predict more profits for owners and tougher
competition amongst low-wage labor populations as a result of likely wage decreases and tossing of benefits. Additionally, there are no
organizations effectively regulating labor conditions. Workers in the industry face uncertainty and a degree of chaos as dynamics of the
global economy shift.
To read in depth about the MFA quota system and its phaseout, check out these sites:
SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (search for “multifiber”): www.somo.nl/index_eng.php
Sweatshop Watch: www.sweatshopwatch.org
—Jennifer Huei-Fen Lin

DRESS TO KILL FIGHT TO WINBy Dean
Spade
D
oes it matter what I’m wearing, what I look like,
how I wear my body? All our lives, we receive
conflicting commands to ignore appearances
and not judge books by covers and to work incessantly to
conform our appearances to rigid norms. The result, I
think, is that as we come to reject and unlearn the ways
we’ve been taught to view our bodies (fatphobia, racism,
sexism, gender rigidity, consumerism, ableism) we become
rightfully suspicious of appearance norms and fashions
and seek to form resistant practices. But what should
those resistant practices be?
I think sometimes being anti-fashion leads to a
false notion that we can be in bodies that aren’t modified,
and that any intentional modification or decoration of
your body is politically undesirable because it somehow
buys into the pitfalls of reliance on appearances. This
critique is true: Lots of times what we mean to be
resistant aesthetic practices become new regulatory
regimes. Certain aspects of activist, queer, punk fashions
have fallen victim to hierarchies of coolness that in the
end revolve around judging people based on what they
own, how their bodies are shaped, how they occupy a
narrow gender category, etc. Perhaps it is inevitable that
the systems in which we are so embroiled, which shape
our very existence, should rear parts of their ugly heads
even in our attempts at resistance. But does this mean we
should give up resistant aesthetics? Isn’t all activism
imperfect, constantly under revision, and isn’t that why
we continue doing it? In my view, there is no “outside” —
none of us can stand fully outside capitalism, racism,
sexism and see what is going on. Instead we stand within
and are constituted by these practices and forces, and we
form our resistance there, always having to struggle
against forces within ourselves, correcting our blindspots,
learning from one another. So of course, our aesthetic
resistance should do the same.
More importantly, when we appeal to some notion
of an unmodified or undecorated body, we participate in
the adoption of a false neutrality. We pretend, in those
moments, that there is a natural body or fashion, a way
of dressing or wearing yourself that is not a product of
culture. Norms always masquerade as non-choices, and
when we suggest that, for example, resisting sexism
means everyone should look androgynous, or resisting
racism means no one should modify the texture of their
hair, we foreclose people’s abilities to expose the workings
of fucked-up systems on their bodies as they see fit.
The example I’m always wrestling with is trans
surgery. Countless people who purportedly share my
feminist values have argued to me that rather than having
my body modified, the proper course of action would be
to come to view it differently, such that it was not in
contravention to my internal gender picture. Sometimes
folded into this argument is a notion that trans surgery is
a part of the capitalist construction of dichotomous
gender. Rigid binary gender serves capitalism by setting a
norm of extreme masculinity and femininity that none of
us can achieve, so that we must constantly try to buy our
way out of the gender dysphoria we all feel. In extreme
cases, the argument goes, trans people buy gendertransition
procedures in order to cure ourselves of the
fundamentally political condition of gender dysphoria,
and we therefore sell out our own resistance to the binary
gender system. I wholeheartedly agree with most of this
analysis, except for the part where trans people are selling
out everyone’s chances at gender resistance when we alter
our bodies.
What this argument misses is twofold. First, there
is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are
modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out
surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or
have engaged in processes of gender body modification
(diets, shaving, exercise regimens, clothing choices,
vitamins, birth control, etc.) that alter our bodies, just as
we’ve all been subjected to gender-related processes that
altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our
gender, being given or denied proper medical care
because of our gender, using dangerous products that are
on the market only because of their relationship to gender
norms, etc.). The isolating of only some of these
processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic
exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as
participating in and furthering binary gender, to put trans
people’s gender practices under a microscope while
maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional,
but no less active and important, gender practices of nontrans
people, is exactly what the transphobic medical
establishment has always done. This is why trans people
are required to go through years of bullshit proving and
documenting ourselves in order to get gender-related
procedures, while non-trans people can alter their gender
presentation through norm-abiding chest or genital
surgeries and hormones as quickly as they can hand over
a credit card.
The second blindspot here is in the assumption
that trans surgery has a single meaning. The harshness
and rigidity with which we view each other’s aesthetics of
resistance — the ways that we decide that these practices
have singular meanings — forecloses our abilities to truly
engage each other’s work. We have to constantly fight the
temptation to so narrowly view each other’s practices. Of
course, it must be true that some trans people are sexist,
some trans people believe strongly in and want to enforce
binary gender, just like some non-trans people. But to predetermine
that there is a singular (sexist) meaning of all
trans body modification, and to buy into what conservative
medical sources say these modifications mean, rather
than listening to trans people describing the resistant
gender-fucking, space-opening practices we engage in
with our bodies and words, is to participate in the
silencing of resistance that serves capitalism, gender
rigidity and sexism.
This process of foreclosing occurs all the time
between activists in various ways, where we tell one
another that whatever effort we’re making is predetermined
to mean something else, often failing to
realize that our rigid viewpoint serves to squelch the
reshaping and rewriting of meaning that we’re purportedly
fighting for. So a part of this fashioning we’re doing needs
to be about diversifying the set of aesthetic practices
we’re open to seeing and promoting a possibility of us all
looking very very different from one another while we
fight together for a new world. I want to be disturbed by
what you’re wearing. I want to be shocked and undone
and delighted by what you’re doing and how you’re living.
And I don’t want anyone to be afraid to put on their look,
their body, their clothes anymore. Resistance is what is
sexy, it’s what looks good and is hard to look at and what
sometimes requires explanation. Why would we want to do
things that don’t require explanation, that are obvious,
impervious to critique because no one even notices we’re
doing them?
Dean Spade is a staff attorney at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project
(www.srlp.org). He is also one of the creators of Make
(www.makezine.org), where an early version of this essay appeared.
This piece is reprinted with permission from LTTR #1 (www.lttr.org).
LOUDmouth 4

INSPIRING
loudmouths:
<strong>judith</strong> butler
By Tessa Bishop
J
udith Butler (born 1956 in
Cleveland) is the Maxine Elliot
Professor in the Departments of
Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at
the University of California, Berkeley.
She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate
School. Butler uses Foucault, Althusser, Lacan and Hegel, among
others, to make provocative claims about our status as political and
sexual subjects.
Butler is most widely known for her book Gender Trouble, in
which she claims that gender, rather than being an essential category
of being, is a constructed identity based on the repetition of culturally
recognizable gendered acts. In other words, Butler claims that she is a
woman not because she has female genitals, but because, among
myriad other acts, she merely calls herself a woman. In this way, gender
is always drag — always a costume that we change and rethink and
parade.
This claim has serious repercussions on the feminist movement,
which long relied on essentialist notions of gender to inform its politics.
Butler has drawn the ire of the second-wave feminist movement, as well
as important criticism from that other formidable darling of the
academy, Martha Nussbaum. (For one specific attack on Butler, see
http://www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaum022299.html.)
Nussbaum is concerned primarily with another of Butler’s highly
provoking claims, namely that the subject is not a unified whole, and
in this way cannot be a political being as we know it. Rather, the only
option we have for effective political formation is through collective
group action, which will almost always involve strange and undesirable
bedfellows. (Speaking of Butler’s enemies, there are also some
unsubstantiated rumors that Condoleeza Rice really has it in for Butler
and other queer theorists. So, if you don’t dig Butler’s ideas, you’re in,
um, powerful company.)
Butler is not only one of the most influential contemporary
thinkers, she also belongs to a very small group of academics who are
widely known outside of academia. (This group also includes Michel
Foucault, Judith Halberstam, Karl Marx, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky.
See the delightful site http://www.theorycards.org.uk/card02.htm for
more.) She enjoys a cult following of sorts, as a review on Salon.com
makes clear: “Back in the late ‘90s, Butler appeared as the embodiment
of postmodern thought to both conservative and liberal critics alike.
The immense success of Gender Trouble and the appeal of her analysis
among college students (there was even a fanzine, Judy!, printed in her
honor) made her a favorite target in the media and among fellow
academics, who may or may not have envied her popularity.” She even
has a Friendster profile.
While Butler’s writing is often dense and highly complex —
Camille Paglia did give her an award for the Worst Academic Writer one
year, after all — she consistently challenges commonplace notions of
gender and politics in transformative ways. She is an out lesbian, a fully
tenured professor in one of the most elite departments in the United
States and a concerned and sincere participant in the goings-on of the
country. Check her out.
For a complete list of Butler’s reviews and works, see
http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/butler/.
LOUDmouth 5
KNOW YOUR
Feminist
FACULTY
sansan kwan
By Cleopatra Michel
F
eminism is “ ... a way of life but also an epistemology — a way
of thinking — and an ontology — a way of being,” says
SanSan Kwan, the newest professor in Cal State L.A.’s
department of theatre arts and dance. “I come from a long line of
feminists,” she notes, explaining that her first models of feminism were
the women in her family. Her mother was one of six daughters who
migrated to the United States from China in the 1950s. All six women
went through either law or medical school “when it was not only a
difficult time to be Asian in America but being an Asian woman in
America.”
Kwan entered the field of performance studies while working as
a professional dancer in New York. She found that “it was the perfect
marriage of my interest in performance and my interest in humanities
and cultural analysis.” Before moving to New York, she had earned her
bachelor’s degree in English at UC Berkeley. She later enrolled in NYU,
completing a Ph.D. in performance studies in 2003.
Kwan sees fashion as very much connected to the performance
of gender, race and ethnicity. “What we wear and what we are expected
to wear through media, through the fashion industry, through our peer
groups, really does a lot to construct what we understand to be
feminine and masculine.” Kwan also explores the complex role of
fashion in constructing ethnic identity in an early article titled “Made
by Chinese: Shanghai Tang and the Development of Contemporary
Chinese Couture.” The piece is about the dynamics of Shanghai Tang, a
retail store in New York (there are other locations in Shanghai, Hong
Kong, London and Paris) that sells traditional Chinese objects and
clothing. She was interested in how this store was “representative of a
kind of Orientalism,” in that it catered to a privileged, western
clientele. But at the same time it offered an “ironic commentary,”
providing the possibility for Asian and Asian American empowerment.
Kwan brings her experiences as well as a knowledge of and
passion for performance and dance studies, ethnic studies and urban
and global studies to Cal State L.A. She teaches courses on movement
analysis, performance and social change and a graduate seminar in
poststructural theory, just to name a few. She hopes to enhance the
curriculum by offering a new course on performing race in
contemporary theatre.
“We live in a society where the phallogocentric is privileged,”
she notes, where language is associated with power and masculinity. As
a feminist scholar, Kwan works to move beyond the phallogocentric,
using dance and performance to create new meanings that are “outside
of the verbal realm.”

Joanna E. Gaspar, M.S., M.P.H.
Questions for Joanna? Send them
to dearjoanna@wildmail.com.
HEALTH Dear Joanna
Q: Botox seems to be all the rage right now. I’m curious about
trying it, but I wonder about side effects. I’m especially
curious about the long-term side effects. Your thoughts?
A
: Let’s start with a little background information. Frown lines
are caused, in part, by the contraction of muscles lying
underneath the skin of our face. When used as medically
indicated, Botox, which contains the botulinum toxin that causes food
poisoning, prevents the contraction of these muscles, causing frown
lines between the eyes to be smoothed out.
Keep in mind that as a “cosmetic” product, Botox has been FDAapproved
for use only to relieve frown lines between the eyes. Although
some physicians will treat other wrinkles with Botox, the FDA has not
evaluated the effectiveness and safety of this practice.
Side effects vary from person to person. Common side effects
include headache, respiratory infection, nausea and mild bruising. Less
commonly, facial pain, redness and muscle weakness occur. Rarely,
droopy eyelids or brows may occur if too much Botox is used. Side
effects can last for several months.
If you’re considering Botox, here are a few things to think
about: Consult with a healthcare professional; make sure that the
doctor doing the treatment is trained and qualified in cosmetic skin
surgery of the face; ask questions and get a second opinion if
necessary; choose a medical setting where sterile techniques are used.
Also, it’s important that you inform your physician of any
disease you have that affects nerves and muscles, all medications you
use and if you are breastfeeding or planning to become pregnant soon.
You shouldn’t use Botox if you have an infection at the injection site,
are allergic to any Botox components or are pregnant or think you
might be pregnant.
Please be aware that there are non-licensed, non-physicians offering
Botox treatments. If you decide to get the treatment, make sure to
thoroughly research your service provider. –Eds.
The Student Health Center is located on the main walkway across from Biological
Sciences and adjacent to the Center for Career Planning and Placement. For more
information, call (323) 343-3300 or go online to www.calstatela.edu/univ/hlth_ctr/.
Services for women and men include diagnostic, treatment and referral services
for a wide range of health conditions; family-planning counseling and prescribing;
STD testing and treatment; HIV testing; and chiropractic, dental and optometry
clinics. Pap smears for cancer screening are available for women. Outpatient care
is available Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., and Friday, 8:30 a.m.
to 12:15 p.m.
THE F-WORD
what feminism means to me
By Giuliana Maresca
“The F-Word” is a regular LOUDmouth column in which Angelenos of all
stripes weigh in on what “feminism” means to them.
I
am a feminist in love with fashion. To
me, fashion is a way of clothing
yourself that is propelled by culture,
art and music. I use it as a code to signify
who I am and how I feel. It’s more than just
the clothes I wear; it’s how I behave and
think. I need fashion in my life. It
captivates, inspires and makes me who I am.
My fascination with fashion has led
me to create my own handbags and clothing.
This is an art form I acquired from my late
grandmother, who was one of the most fashionably conscious and
creative persons I have ever known. Her strength and independence
inspired the creative feminist inside of me because she loved fabric,
design, taking risks and celebrating the female form.
Fashion is a great way to express my independence, either as a
means to be confrontational or as a way to transform myself and others.
For instance, when I make a vinyl bag using the Colombian flag,
camouflage, and grommets representing bullet holes, I am invoking the
struggle of a country — so exquisite and yet so repressed by violence.
Wearing it is an expression of affection for Colombia. Fashion is thus a
way to represent social relationships.
Fashion also helps me to define my female identity. We all have
our own fashion sense. That is what makes each of us unique, and this
is one of the best things about fashion. While it is partially decided by
our economic, cultural and social status, it can be totally revolutionized
by our own experiences and creativity. For example, I’ve transformed
myself by engaging and grappling with different social barriers. Growing
up, I was enthralled by all types of music. For me, fashion and music
always went hand in hand. So, whether I went to a hip hop, house or
rock club, I dressed the part and took what I could from all of it.
Through this growing-up process, I delved into the different aspects of
culture that helped mold me into who I am today. My identity is
reflected through my work, and fashion has become the tool that I use
to confront the world around me.
Obviously, fashion encourages both positive and negative
behaviors, but at its best it provides a sense of liberation: We can delve
into it and sort it out for ourselves, take it for what it is, dissect it,
improve it, or just plain spit at it and move on.
I love when magazines present women of all flavors, shapes and
sizes, representing a look of their own or that of a designer of integrity.
To me, an artist with integrity is someone who is open to different
aspects of culture, challenges authority and boldly takes chances that
defy conformity. Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and Christian
Joy are designers I would put into this category. Their work is unique
and remarkable, following no particular trend. Their DIY attitude has
always impressed me and helped me realize that taking risks and being
passionate about my work is a commitment to myself.
The relationship between fashion and feminism hasn’t always
been positive. I’ve met and read feminists who see the word “fashion”
and immediately think “evil.” That I can understand, but I choose to
view it differently. I seek respect, honesty and individuality in all
things palpable. In everything we do, we take risks and hope that
someone will get it and appreciate it. It’s a state of mind. Hence, it is
my revolution.
Giuliana designs under the name Tripetta Cartel. Her vegan bags are sold at
Frequencia Modulada on Melrose Avenue. E-mail her: tripetta13@hotmail.com.
LOUDmouth 6

Otsu (www.veganmart.com)
A San Francisco boutique with an online shopping site, Otsu is
dedicated to eliminating the consumption of animal products. They
sell hard-to-find, high-quality and fairly made vegan accessories as
well as cookbooks, comix, zines, music and more. (DTY)
She Made This (www.shemadethis.com)
It’s all about DIY at this website filled with great ideas for
fashionable projects, from ’80s-inspired earrings to disco balls made
from unwanted AOL CDs. (DTY)
Sparkle Craft (www.sparklecraft.com)
Find handmade accessories including belts, vegan guitar straps and
wristbands. All of the items are earth- and animal-friendly. The site
is run by a girl named Tina who designs and custom-makes
everything in order to suit your sassy style. (DTY)
Buy Olympia (www.buyolympia.com)
I sure heart my “Reading Is Sexy” tee by Sarah Utter, which I got,
along with some stuff by Nikki McClure, at Buy Olympia — a onestop
shop for clothes, bags, art, zines and more by a whole slew of
progressive, independent designers and artists. (JH)
LOUDmouth 7
celebrating feminist fashion culture
FEMINISTS MAKE FASHION FEMINISTS MAKE ART ABOUT FASHION
CONSCIOUS COUTURE
Matrushka Construction,
4281 Fountain Ave., L.A.,
(323) 665-4513,
www.matrushka.com.
Walk into Matrushka Construction in
Silver Lake, and you’ll find one of the
owners, Beth Ann Whittaker or Laura
S. Howe, sewing one of their hip and
affordable designs. That’s because
they design and make virtually all of
the clothes they sell. Combining
vintage elements and contemporary
concepts, their clothes are unique,
mostly one-of-a-kind and reflect the
designers’ dedication to functionality
and creativity.
But beyond constructing
stylish clothes, Beth Ann and Laura
want to “build proliterate fashion.”
They create an environment where
“ideas and inspiration can converge.”
Special events include art openings
and T-shirt-construction nights,
where guests can design their own
tees. They encourage political
awareness and aren’t afraid of mixing
politics and fashion, offering
messages like “Stop Bush,” “Love
Somebody” and “Hug a Tree.” Soon
after they opened in 2003, I was
very happy to find a reconstructed
“No War” tee that was both stylish
and fit well, unlike a lot of activist
clothing I find.
So go on, support your local,
feminist-owned, DIY, politically
active store. And look good while
you’re doing it! (DTY)
The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue
by Josephine Meckseper et al. (Lukas & Sternberg, 2004) —
This catalogue of Meckseper’s recent exhibition IG Metall
and the Artificial Paradises of Politics at the Galerie Reinhard
Hauff in Stuttgart is printed on high-gloss paper and
designed to mimic the look of fashion magazines, with
artwork masquerading as ads. Essays by John Kelsey and
Andrew Ross explore art, aesthetic surfaces, class,
consumption and politics in an era marked by limited
consumer consciousness of garment-industry labor and a
resemblance between art galleries and boutiques, in both of
which curatorial priority is increasingly given to products
that can be shown and moved with ease. Available at
www.printedmatter.org. (JH)
FASHIONFASHION
by K8 Hardy (self-published, 2003) — This funny and smart
little zine is made mostly of photographs (there’s a bit of
text) that provocatively play with mainstream fashion mags’
(and, at least in my reading, some countercultural fashions’)
narrow presentations of gender, beauty and sartorial style.
(JH)
FEMINISTS MAKE SO MANY BOOKS ABOUT FASHION. INSTEAD OF AN
INEVITABLY UNCOMPREHENSIVE LIST, HOW ’BOUT WE HIGHLIGHT THIS ONE?
The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture
by Faegheh Shirazi (University Press of Florida, 2001) —
One veiled woman can be perceived in a hundred different
ways (pious, erotic, oppressed, etc.) depending upon the
understanding of the person who is looking at her. In this
stimulating and provocative book, Shirazi makes clear that
the semiotics of the veil are multifaceted. This heated
debate is nothing new, although 9/11 brought it center
stage as the United States justified war on Afghanistan and
Iraq partly in order to “free the veiled women.” It’s
important to remember that “To veil, or not to veil?” is not
the only question and often functions as a societal
distracter, de-emphasizing fundamental issues about
women’s rights and sovereignty.
Shirazi is an Iranian scholar who teaches at the
University of Texas, Austin. In this book she asks, “What
cultural context makes it possible for a physical object to
acquire metaphysical proportions?” Religion, sex, politics — she hits
the span of where and how the veil is used and understood. She
critically analyzes veiled images in advertising and in American
erotica and the position of the veil in cinematics. She has chapters
on the role of the hijab in Iranian politics and the militarization of
Middle Eastern women. Shirazi concludes with a look at the literary
dynamics of the veil. Presenting complex ideas in simple language,
Shirazi dares the reader to no longer accept current clichés or
homogenizing representations of the veil. This work challenges the
current debate, shedding light on the possibilities of taking it
higher. (SA)

Dear Gwen,
Congratulations on your new record! 1 I know it’s been a challenge for
you to go solo, and as a woman in a male-dominated industry, you’ve
had to overcome a lot. But Gwen, I gotta ask you, what’s up with all
the Japanese girls? They’re on your album cover art and in the lyrics
and videos for your first two singles, “What You Waiting For?” and
“Rich Girl.” You even have an entire song dedicated to them. 2 The girls
have also been your back-up (or should I say stage props?) in
interviews and performances.
Actually, I get it. You’ve made it pretty clear in interviews and
the “What You Waiting For?” video that you were scared. As an MTV
News-online headline reads, “Gwen Stefani’s Debut Solo LP Inspired by
Insecurity and Japan” (Nov. 10, 2004). So you needed inspiration. And
a security blanket — something to make you feel safer, more
confident, powerful. You found what you were looking for in these
girls. You’re certainly not the first person to feel empowered via Asian
women.
As an avid and conscious media consumer, I’m pretty sensitive
to the representation of Asian Americans in popular music. For the
most part, Asians are invisible. Sure, you can come up with token
examples — believe me, I know them all. From Tony Kanal, your exboyfriend/bass
player from your band, No Doubt, to Harley, the whereis-he-now
winner of the reality-TV show Fame. Or Jasmine, the Icoulda-been-a-contender
kicked off American Idol, and the nobodyknows-my-name
guy from the Neptunes. But the main role of Asians in
music and music videos is as accessory. And you’ve sure been sportin’
the Asian-girl accessory in your new solo-artist and designer roles. I
like to accessorize as much as the next fashion-forward girl, although
I prefer shoes, earrings, a bag, etc. But for you, it’s all about Harajuku
girls. And you don’t have just one. You need four girls to dress up your
latest look!
I’m deeply troubled by this admitted fascination you have with
Japan and the girls of Harajuku. Your obsession is known as Yellow
Fever — a fetish for Asian women. The phenomenon is nothing new.
There are many (often white) men who are attracted to Asian women
because of the stereotype that Asian girls are exotic, subservient and
really good in bed. There are also gay men, a.k.a. “Rice Queens,” who
have the same fetish for Asian guys. You may think to yourself, “I’m
1 No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani released her first solo album, Love, Angel, Music,
Baby in November 2004. The album title also refers to Gwen’s clothing line, L.A.M.B.
2 The song is “Harajuku Girls” and refers to the popular shopping and entertainment
district in Tokyo, known for the wild and trendy, mix-and-match street fashion worn
by many of the Japanese teens who hang out there.
not fetishizing them. I think their style is wicked. I’m their biggest
fan,” as you note in your lyrics. Well, fetishes are often marked by
adoration and desire as well as power and dominance.
For example, in “Harajuku Girls” you talk about how much you
admire the Harajuku style. In the intro to an online performance of the
song on AOL Sessions, you are seated in a throne with your crown and
wand, surrounded by your silent, doll-like Asian girls. And I say “your
girls” because you talk and act as if you own them. The performance
opens with you standing in the center and the four girls bowing down
to you. With your platinum-blonde hair and super-fair skin, you’re a
vision of whiteness, towering over and commanding these girls.
So you’ve got the Harajuku girls as your new entourage, at least
until you get bored with it and decide to appropriate something else.
No one knows the girls’ real names, because you have labeled each of
them according to the name of your album and clothing line — Love,
Angel, Music and Baby. In addition to being your back-up dancers, they
follow you everywhere you go, including photo shoots, public
appearances, award shows and interviews. They play up the usual
stereotypes of Asian women — they’re either shy and docile or hypersexualized.
Their job is to be silent, look cool and market your products
(your music and your clothes — they also model your Harajuku Lovers
accessories line). And what’s even more fucked up is that you have
mandated their silence. As reported by British Vogue as well as VH1 VJ
Bradford How (during the Top 20 Countdown, Feb. 26, 2005), although
the girls speak fluent English, they are allowed to speak only Japanese
in your presence. If they speak English, it’s a breach of contract, and
they could lose their jobs. So go ahead, steal their culture, their style
and their voice, why don’t you?!
I realize that you’ve had a long, complex relationship with the
Other, that is, those who have been marginalized on the basis of
ethnicity, gender, class, etc. There was your Rude-Girl Two-Tone phase
in the early No Doubt days, which was about black and white coming
together in music, fashion and people. You dabbled in other “ethnic”
trends, like wearing the Hindu bindi or co-opting “ghetto” style in
order to prove you were more than just a white rocker girl. In
constructing your own image, you’ve exploited others, thereby
perpetuating and participating in systems of oppression.
Over the past 10 years, you’ve enjoyed a lot of success and
have been a big influence on kids in the United States. They admire
your tough-girl style and image. So, please, at least try to acknowledge
sexism and racism, and stop exploiting and objectifying others in the
process.
—Daria Teruko Yudacufski
LOUDmouth 8

One of Alicia Framis’s Anti-Dog designs. Courtesy of Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp, Belgium.
LOUDmouth 9
Please place an X next to any of the following statements that apply to
your fashion choices:
Spread a message to the public
Support sociopolitically conscious labels
Look good
By Stephanie Müller
T
hat’s where I placed my X’s on a questionnaire about the
clothing choices of radical thinkers conducted by Alison Rasch,
a London-based activist working on a project about warriors
and outlaws. Answering Alison’s questions made me think about how
activists’ clothing choices and fashion projects can challenge the
uniform dictate of the fashion industry.
Feeling connected to the long, non-official history of ladies and
their cool little workaday inventions, and running my own DIY fashion
label, rag_treasure, in Munich, it’s been interesting for me to see the
world of “craft” collide with radical political, arts and feminist circles
all around Europe.
Props to the Italian DIY-fashion project Klava for doing without
mass-produced accuracy and for regarding its handmade fabrics as “le
detail qui tue” that is out of tune, that screeches — like when you are
listening to a record and you accidentally hit the stylus — something
unique and slightly imperfect that can’t be replicated.
Countercultural uniqueness is also the recipe for Cloed
Baumgartner’s revolutionary shop concept, Boutique Gegenalltag,
based in Vienna. The architecture of the boutique, a foldaway tent, is
used as a mobile service station for young designers and can be put up
for performances in uncommon public locations.
The idea of intervening in public space also plays a crucial role
for the feminist arts platform A Room of One’s Own. For their flexible
installation, “Feminist Demands Are Fitting,” Juma Hauser and more
than a dozen other female activists from Vienna use the skirt, a
clothing article worn by both women and men throughout history, as a
metaphor for gender bending. Each skirt is printed with statements or
questions such as “What I am needs no excuses” and “How political is
fashion?” taken from interviews with female artists and theorists.
Because of their simple rectangular cut, these skirts can be easily
transformed into banners carrying feminist discourse into everyday life.
Questions of gender identity and the everyday struggle with
aging are usually repressed in our society. Ines Doujak’s
interdisciplinary project, “Dirty Old Women,” aims to make elderly
women visible. In June 2004, she organized two workshops, one in
Spain and another in Austria, which invited female participants to
collectively reflect on age as well as to produce their own images. On
the first day of both workshops, the participants worked in pairs. One
told the other how she felt or feels at ages 15, 40 and 70 while her
counterpart acted as a mirror image that could be shaped or that acted
out the narrative. The actors were photographed onto slides in front of
a white background. On the second day, these slides were projected
onto altering arrangements of white boxes, thereby producing
fragmented body images, and also onto the bodies of the women, who
themselves decided on the positioning and details of the images.
Again, these projections were photographed. Paper bags printed with
the images and costumes pinned from top to bottom with buttons
showing the faces of extraordinary aging femininities will be presented
in a fashion performance in spring 2005 at the Salzburger Kunstverein.

While engagement with sociopolitical
issues is a given in feminist arts and DIYcraft
projects, it is still unusual in the
design business. Few professional
labels propagate a critical attitude
toward fashion. Wally Salner and
Johannes Schweiger take on this
challenge. Positioned within an
international network of electronic
music and fine arts, their Viennese
label, _fabrics interseason, combines
practical clothing with a profound
analysis of social phenomena and
feminist dress codes. Their last
summer collection dealt with the
brand philosophy of Tupperware.
The outfits were conceived as
modules representing the simple and
uniform principle of order provided by
the standardizing packaging system of
Tupperware’s stackable plastic boxes.
Adopting the typical colors of these boxes,
each outfit acts as a colorful skin or
surface that generates a sort of vacuum
around the body. The women wearing these
dresses remind you of Stepford wives, remote-controlled chicks on
Prosecco hypnotized by the ritual character of the Tupperparty.
With a collection made of Twaron (aramid polymer), a material
that is resistant to bullets, flames and dog bites, the dark-skinned
Spanish artist Alicia Framis directly responded to the xenophobia she
was confronted with during her six-month residency in Berlin. Her
label, Anti-Dog, was launched at the Paris Fashion Week in 2002 and
has lived on as a fashionable way of making women
— especially women of color — feel protected in
dangerous neighborhoods inhabited by skinheads
and their dogs.
ANTIdogs, craftGRRLS or noMAD[E]s: As
Alison says, “The greatest thing about clothing
is the range of communication it offers —
clothing can serve any purpose you like at
any volume. Fashion is a unique
medium that reflects and creates
culture. I think it has equal
validity and potential as an
agent of social change, pure
entertainment or any variation
in between.” Alison hits the
mark: There are noFASHIONrules
Stephanie Müller, “An Estranged Green-
Collar Worker.” Courtesy of the artist.
in the world of revolutionary
craft experiments and feminist
clothing projects!
Stephanie recently received an M.A. in sociology, psychology and communications
at the Institute for Social Studies, University of Munich, Germany. She wrote
her master’s thesis on “Grrrl Zines as Speaking Tubes for Marginalized Voices.”
Her work has recently been presented at Domagk Days 2004, Munich’s biggest
DIY-arts exhibition, and at Ladyfest Stuttgart/Esslingen.
Contact or learn more about the artists mentioned in this piece:
Alison Rasch: alirasch@netscape.net
Anti-Dog: Browse for Alicia Framis at www.the-artists.org
A Room of One’s Own: www.aroomofonesown.at
Boutique Gegenalltag: www.gegenalltag.at
“Dirty Old Women”/Ines Doujak: doujak@netway.at
_fabrics interseason: www.fabrics.at
Klava: www.acdshelabel.com
rag_treasure: www.ragtreasure.de
Metal holster from Alison Rasch’s
Warriors and Outlaws project.
Courtesy of the artist.
TRASH-RECYCLED
R
ag_treasure is my own form of protest against
mass-produced uniformity. Fed up with crowds
of fashion victims dressed in greyish sell-out
replicas, I’ve decided to set a counterpoint to my
surroundings by reconstructing almost everything that is
usually considered “unwearable”: broken guitar strings,
membranes of scrapped hi-fi speakers or paper bags for used
tampons. By combining different kinds of recycled materials, I
alienate them from their original context and give them a
completely new meaning. When worn, my dress-collages act as
moveable images intended to raise consciousness in consumerists’
minds.
One of my first rag_treasures presented in public space was a
broken window-display puppet wearing nothing except for a little
“safety” purse reconstructed from children’s water wings. Creating such
a piece of trash-recycled fashion art is easy and takes only about 10 to
15 minutes. Here is a little guide of how to do it yourself:
Supplies
Zipper
Needle and thread
Hole-puncher and scissors
Towline or any other kind of rope
Water wings [floaties] or any other
kind of protective material*
Step One
Take a water wing (or other
protective material) and cut off both
air chambers with your scissors. For a
handmade “safety” purse you need
only one air chamber. Slit it at the
top and set the other one aside for a
future fashion experiment.
Fashion Art
a diy guide to your personal
rag_treasure
Stephanie Müller’s water wings purse.
Courtesy of the artist.
Step Two
Take the zipper and attach it with needle and thread to the opening
you’ve just sliced into the water wing’s air chamber. If you are not so
familiar with sewing, you could also staple or safety-pin the zipper to
the opening.
Step Three
Punch two little holes into your re-constructed water wing — one on
the left and another one on the right side at the top of the air chamber.
Step Four
Take a towline or any other kind of rope you’d like to use as a shoulder
strap and pull it through each hole. Tie up the endings of the rope, and
your water-repellent “safety” purse is finally finished.
*Alternative Solution:
In case you can’t find any water wings in a trash pile or at a flea market
nearby, you could also use brightly colored washrags, discarded tetra
packs or plastic bags to create a trash-recycled purse. But if you
especially like the idea of “safety,” you should look for any other kind
of protective material such as worn-out grill gloves or an old rain
slicker.
LOUDmouth 10

THE LIMITED
Text and photos by Irina Contreras
Training, Dec. 18, 2003
2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
I come in and of course have to wait for the
unprepared-yet-fashionable to get their shit
together. Kristen leads me through a series of
videos pertaining to the “Express Experience”
and another one called In the Eye of the
Shoplifter. She also tells me about the
difference between some of the items. For
example, a “smart tee” is not the same as the
“prima tee.” … Kristen dutifully reminds me
that it is not smart to make something out of
100 percent cotton, and that is how I will
remember to market it to customers. Besides
this, we discuss the five steps to the Express
Experience, look through The Limited’s own
fashion magazine, Launch, and the Limitedbrand
magazine, which displays the “hot
items” predicted to sell at rocket speed.
Kristen turns to me at some point. “Do you
see any items you like?” I wait a few seconds
too long, caught in her beetle-like green
eyeshadow swept from eyebrow to outer
creases.
Dec. 27, 2003
12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
I am a denim expert. I am thrown around like
all the low-rise, low-angle, flared, hipsterflared
jeans because, I am assuming, no one
knows what to do with my cracked-fingernailpolished,
un-aerobicized ass. Standing under
the blaring fluorescent lights is a new
customer. She is heavyset, with acne, and is
rosy in every place that the “five steps” tell
you not be. And she is sweating profusely,
because she is nervous. She is wearing
bifocals and has super-duper dirty and stringy
hair. Her fleshy arms are clutching a thick pile
of literally every low-flared/hipster-flared
jean in every size imaginable. I immediately
feel torn between my “prank/performance”
and what I should say to this girl. I hear
someone with my voice chime, “Well it takes
some, like, getting used to the whole low-rise
thing, but, like, ya know, it’s sooo good to
have more than, like, one kind of denim in
your wardrobe!”
The door is open, yet she stands there
looking at me. Pushing her glasses up her oily
nose, she replies, “Well, um, yes, but I do
think I like my jeans super baggy and you
seem to have none of those.” I nod
enthusiastically because I cannot comment
again. Kristen rolls her eyes and squishes her
nose in a “P-U!” as I walk backward to help
LOUDmouth 11
DIARIES *
another customer. It’s my perfect springboard
to start a revolution inside Express. Or just
get pissed and knock shit around until they
have me arrested. Walking toward our
mountainous sweater displays, I see her
standing in her long purple satin shirt
without any pants on. Her socks are crusted,
and her legs bulge in a million different
twisted-bread-like directions, infecting the
Express Experience. “You can see my
underwear in these pants. … Perhaps you
can grab me some black panties, please?”
“Um … sure,” I say in amazement.
These girls sitting on a couch next to her are
red-faced and uncontrollably giggling. I
cannot handle it, so I search for another way.
“Perhaps you should grab some on your way
out while you are going up to the register.
We have cotton briefs and thongs.” A gasp.
The head pokes out again along with some
pantless legs. “I have never worn a thong,”
she says as though it is much more of a
question. Kristen’s face breaks into a huge
grimace when she looks at the pile of
stretched-out jeans laying on the floor.
Kristen does not say anything, but I can
sense what she is thinking. I have given the
wrong person the Express Experience, and she
is keeping a list of whom I give “it” to.
Jan. 2, 2003
8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The effects of working at Express have clearly
had their way with me in a most unsettling
manner. On the way to work today in a
groggy-eyed zombie walk through the
Promenade, I spot them: Angle-flare.
Precision cut. Camel-colored. I shudder and
recoil in defeat. I crawl into Express to fold
jeans like the denim expert I am. I wonder
how many jeans I fold each day. Open
zip/button fly-button, top-fold in half, bring
cuff up to back pocket, fold and, finally, make
certain sticker on right leg is showing.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat like an expert.
Repeat until an expert. Repeat. I imagine
that I can create an Express mantra to keep
myself from getting any more crazy than I
already am. Sometimes the recipe calls for
lyrics to Los Crudos songs. Other times I am a
graceful and unpissed-off yoga extraordinaire
lifting jeans up an evil empire with a single
pinky or big toe. Other times, I arrange for
every lady to come in there. Everyone marks
and rips up stuff. They scream for me to
leave, and as the police are coming in, Kim
Gordon and bell hooks (who knew they were
comrades?!) swing in on some Versace
bamboo and take me away with them. I take
the longest break ever. No one notices. I
purposely open up dressing rooms with
customers inside. No one notices. No one
notices as I mix up clothing and mark it
wrong. No one notices when I mis-wire my
headset with the bizarre electronic devices
on the fur coats designed to catch thieves.
And finally, no one notices when I leave early
without clocking out.
*This is part of Irina’s larger, tentatively titled
“Bad-Job Project,” in which she is exploring and
deconstructing the realities of being a female
worker. The project entails the collection of
“training” goods and clothing that must be worn
as an employee, keeping diaries and on-location
performances (the work itself). Any collaborations
or comments are welcome: poopstarr@yahoo.com.

COTTONPICKING
AMERICAN APPAREL
By Lisa Rosman
B
ack in the ’90s, I worked at what was then called the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. (These days,
having gone the way of all unions, it’s collapsed with
Amalgamated Textile Workers’ Union to become UNITE.) It was a
smash-up first job, overall. Not only did I meet friend-for-life Amy and
shake Bill Clinton’s pretty hand, but I was able to say at the end of
most days that I’d done something, however indirectly, to improve
rather than further complicate the lives of a great deal of immigrant
women.
One funny result of working there, however, was that I really
did feel compelled to look
for the union label. Even
back then it was proving
increasingly elusive. Truth
be told, it was impossible to
spend all day scribing angry
propaganda against Nike or
the Gap, and then slap on a
pair of swooshy trainers
produced by sweatshop
workers earning 2 cents a
day. Shopping was a
nightmare: For years, I could
only either buy clothing at
stores like Benetton, as I
knew the Italians to be too
prickly to use anything but
organized labor, or fool
helplessly with the sewing machine my grandmother left me. Over the
years, as I befriended more and more Brooklyn and downtown girly
designers, I started to look the other way when it came to pinpointing
who exactly manufactured their too-cute-for-school gear. Only when
the D train crossing the Manhattan bridge afforded me a full-screen
glimpse of the Chinatown sweatshops did I confront the women toiling
at least in part on the little shifts my friends and I were sporting.
Which is why I’ve been clinging to American Apparel like an
ideological life preserver. Sure, Dov Charney, the mustached man
behind the screen, has proved himself (in the slick pages of feministlite
mag Jane, no less) to be a chronic public masturbator and allround
abject objectifier (in a bad way). But the ropa is clever,
accessible, simple cotton, eminently affordable and sweatshop-free.
Facts impressive enough that a church-state separation has seemed
warranted in the case of Feminism v. Labor Politics.
A Behind the Label release, however, suggests that, as usual,
the separation ain’t possible. Dirty sexual politics and dirty labor
practices are, in fact, the real name of the game. O ye wearing the
sweet hoodies, polo shirts and sexy camp-counselor shorts, I must
announce that Charney is as ugly an owner as he is a sexual prospect.
Ugly, of course, in the most spiritual of senses. What to do? Maybe we
should start growing cotton ourselves.
This piece was originally posted on Lisa’s blog, The Broad View
(http://lisarosman.blogspot.com/). Lisa has worked for a garment workers’
union, as an assistant for Elmo at Sesame Street, as a reporter for a spa
magazine and most recently as the film editor for The Brooklyn Rail and
flavorpill.net. She is currently at work on a nonfiction novel.
THE TRUTH BEHIND AMERICAN APPAREL:
sweatshop-free or union buster?
By Behind the Label
A
merican Apparel is a leading T-shirt and apparel manufacturer
and one of the fastest-growing apparel companies in the
United States. The company has aggressively promoted itself
as a socially responsible company and purported that its products are
manufactured “sweatshop free.” However, for the over 2,000 American
Apparel employees, the workplace is not without significant problems.
In September 2003, workers at the factory began organizing a
union with UNITE (now UNITE HERE) to address their concerns and to
gain a voice on the job. Issues such as no paid time off, lack of
affordable healthcare, production
methods and treatment by
supervisors were the main issues
of workers trying to organize.
The workers’ efforts to
organize and gain the right to
collective bargaining were
immediately met with serious
resistance from the company.
Owner Dov Charney and his
management team immediately
launched an anti-union campaign,
even though Charney had
publicly stated that he would
never interfere with employee
organizing and would remain
neutral in the process. Through
intimidation, interrogation and
threats of closing the facility,
American Apparel created an atmosphere of fear that quickly chilled
the workers’ attempts to organize.
The company’s activities included holding captive meetings
with employees, interrogating employees about their union activities
and sympathies, soliciting employees to ask the union to return their
union-authorization cards, distributing anti-union arm bands and Tshirts
and requiring all employees to attend an anti-union rally. The
company’s most devastating tactic, though, was threatening to shut
down the plant if the workers organized.
One worker reported that a supervisor told him and others “if
the union came into the employer[’s facilities], it was possible that the
employer would have to shut down and move locations. He said that
where unions enter companies, problems are created and companies
choose to move locations.” The worker also reported that he was told
that his support for the union “would put 1,200 jobs in danger.”
The workers and the union filed charges with the National
Labor Relations Board for the company’s violations of federal labor law.
The company settled the charges by agreeing to post in the facility a
document stating that it would not engage in anti-union activity.
However, the company’s previous behavior and threats had already
succeeded in preventing workers from organizing.
Rather than truly commit to the principles of being “sweatshop
free” and respecting the workers’ freedom of association and the right
to form unions, American Apparel denies its workers the right to
collective bargaining and the ability to have a voice on the job. Many
workers still believe they would greatly benefit from union
representation and collective bargaining, but are waiting for an
atmosphere free of harassment and intimidation that would fairly allow
them to exercise their right to decide on union representation.
This article is reprinted with permission from www.behindthelabel.org.
LOUDmouth 12

W
hen I was in high school I could
wear a different outfit every day
for three weeks. I had a parttime
job at a bakery and also made money
babysitting. My father was adamant about my
putting a large percentage of my salary in a
savings account, which I did, but the other
part I spent at the mall. Buying cute outfits
made me feel good and look good. Or did
they?
After moving out to live on my own,
things sure changed. I did not have the
money to spend on clothes, but like many
Americans, I got out the good old credit card
and dove deep into debt. Consumerism is in
full force in our country — we want
everything bigger, better, faster. This is even
more common in L.A., where people who
don’t make very much money lease BMWs, but
have no net worth, financial investments or
retirement funds.
Women spend much more money on
fashion than men do. We also tend to have
fewer financial investments, stocks, IRAs and
long-term financial plans. According to the
National Women’s Law Center, women are the
fastest-growing and largest group declaring
bankruptcy in the United States.
Is fashion a gendered form of
consumerist pressure that keeps women from
being financially responsible and that forces
us to depend on a man or to live in debt?
Women should be reading The Economist instead
of Vogue, because financial independence can
LOUDmouth 13
mean power and freedom.
There are lots of places your money
could go if you cut your clothes budget even
a little:
Planning for the future: 401(k), 403(b) or
IRA retirement accounts. If your company
has a retirement plan and matches your
contribution, put in the maximum they will
match. This money is put into your retirement
account before taxes are withheld and
therefore lowers your taxable year-end
income. If you have no 401(k) or 403(b),
open up an IRA at your bank.
Donations to non-profits. These days, I’d
rather give my money to Planned Parenthood
than to Prada.
Time. Money I don’t spend on clothes equals
time I don’t have to spend earning money. I
can dedicate the time I’ve freed up to
community service, yoga, hiking and
spending time with family.
Lora studies nutritional science at CSULA. She has
volunteered for NOW and NARAL and has
participated in clinic-defense efforts.
To learn more about saving, investing and financial
planning, visit one of these sites:
www.downtoearthfinance.com
www.msmoney.com
By Lora Paelicke
Amount the average U.S.
household spent on men’s
clothing in 2003: $335.15
Amount the average U.S.
household spent on women’s
clothing that year: $562.21
Average amount a man who
earned under $10,000 that
year spent on clothes:
$177.70
Average amount spent on
clothes by a woman in that
income bracket: $291.07
Average amount spent by U.S.
men on underwear in 2000:
$2.93
Average amount spent by U.S.
women on underwear that
year: $75.00
—IC
Sources: Household Spending Statistics
based on the Bureau of Labor
Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure
Reports; Best Customers 2000 (New
Strategists Publications).
Text by Angela McCracken. Art by Sam Combellick.

¿QUIEN LLEVA LOS
PANTALONES
T
he day I was born my father swore
that I would never wear pants. For
the first six years of my life I wore
frilly dresses with matching socks, crinolinas
and zapatos de charol a la mexicana. Not for
parties, not for pictures only, but every
single day. I, however, thanks to a pair of
jeans passed down by a cousin, stopped
wearing such gear. Since then, I have
developed an obsession with jeans and
images of females who have traded dresses
for pants and the behaviors associated with
such.
I was first introduced to crossdresser
female revolutionaries in Elizabeth
Salas’ Soldaderas in the Mexican Military.
These images immediately made me think
about the absences that exist within
Mexican Revolution historiography. The
majority of Mexican Revolution published
narratives and images have either omitted
or distorted the female participants in the
military. In the rare instances when they
have been included, they have been
portrayed as passive, secondary, sexualized,
highly “feminine” and always in relation to
men. The most popular female image
associated with the multiple military
factions of the revolution is that of las
soldaderas (camp followers). The photographs
of these soldaderas generally portray
females in dresses, skirts and rebozos. The
Course of Mexican History (Meyer, Sherman
and Deeds) describes the role assumed by
soldaderas in the revolution: “They provided
feminine companionship, they foraged for
food, cooked, washed, and, in the absence
of more competent medical service, nursed
the wounded and buried the dead.” These
photographs and narratives have erased the
diversity of roles that soldaderas performed,
regional and class differences and their
membership in revolutionary and counterrevolutionary
factions. In addition to the
absence of diversity amongst soldaderas
through such interpretations, females other
than soldaderas such as soldadas (soldiers),
generalas (generals) and coronelas (coronels)
have been completely omitted.
In the 1980s there was an
emergence of feminist interpretations of
female military participants in the Mexican
Revolution. Some of these books were the
aforementioned Soldaderas in the Mexican
?
female subversion and queerness in the mexican revolution
By Lucila Chávez
Valentina Ramirez Sinaloa photographed by Augustin
Casasola, circa 1910 (reprinted in Elena Poniatowska’s
Las Soldaderas).
Military, Emergence of the Modern Mexican
Woman by Shirlene Soto and Against All
Odds by Anna Macías. These interpretations
were critical in that they began the process
of creating an archive of females in the
military history of Mexico. They portrayed
females as central and active characters and
examined female networks for the first time.
In addition, the diverse roles that females
played in the multiple military factions
became visible through such works. For
instance, an important class and race
analysis emerged from these interpretations
in which the majority of soldaderas and
some soldadas were identified as “lower
class” indigenous women, mestizas and
mulattas, while those in positions of power
such as coronelas and generalas tended to
be middle to upper class and lighterskinned.
While these initial feminist
interpretations introduced the images of
cross-dresser female revolutionaries, they
did so through a heteronormative lens in
which females were automatically assumed
to identify as women and as heterosexual.
These initial feminist narratives failed to
look at the possibility of queerness amongst
cross-dresser soldadas, coronelas and generalas.
The photographs generally portray armed
females in pants and military uniforms.
Queerness is often defined as the
desire and/or love between individuals of
the same sex, but is also representative of
the act of subverting or queering gender.
The grand majority of cross-dresser female
revolutionaries often participated in creating
war strategies, participating in combat and
leading other military participants. These
characteristics have traditionally been
considered masculine, while masculinity has
been intricately connected with maleness.
While the Mexican Revolution represented
the questioning of race and class ideals, for
the cross-dresser female revolutionaries
that subverted or queered gender, the
revolution also represented the questioning
of gender and sexuality ideals. María
Herrera-Sobek, in her book The Mexican
Corrido, writes that Petra Ruiz, also known
as Pedro Ruiz and a Carranzista lieutenant,
“Dressed so perfectly with male attire and
with her hair cut short, nobody suspected
her sex; and her thirst for adventure was so
great, that she would fight over the love of
women with her comrades.” This example
demonstrates the existence of female-tofemale
desire and love, as well the queering
of Petra’s assigned gender. There is also the
example of Amelia Robles, also known as
Amelio Robles and a Zapatistas coronel, who
was famous not only for his fighting
abilities, but also for his continued crossdressing
after the revolution and his lifelong
relationship with a woman.
In identifying female masculinity
amongst cross-dresser revolutionary females
it becomes necessary to ask, Did the
questioning of ideals during the Mexican
Revolution provide greater access to the
expression of female masculinity as in the cases
of Petra Herrera/Pedro Herrera, Encarnación
Mares and Angela Jiménez/Angel Jiménez?
And did such masculinity provide access to
positions of power? Why look at the
possibility of queerness amongst crossdresser
revolutionary females in the Mexican
Revolution? It is critical to question not
only the absence of queer and cross-dresser
revolutionary females in history, but to
begin the process of creating an archive of
queer Mexicanas/Chicanas and to offer an
alternative historical eye.
Lucila is a Lotería addict from Boyle Heights.
Challenge her to a game: lcchavez@hotmail.com.
She is working on a larger research project on this
topic.
LOUDmouth 14

DRAG, GENDER & FASHIONABLE STUPIDITY
an interview with <strong>judith</strong> <strong>“jack”</strong> <strong>halberstam</strong>
LOUDmouth 15
By Ruth Blandón

DRAG, GENDER & FASHIONABLE STUPIDITY continued
J
udith “Jack” Halberstam is a professor
of English and director of the Center
for Feminist Research at USC. She is
the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and
the Technology of Monsters (1995), Female
Masculinity (1998), The Drag King Book
(1999, with Del LaGrace Volcano) and In a
Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives (2004). Ruth Blandón
recently sat down with her to talk about
drag, gender performance, language and
trends in gender studies, queer studies,
education, democracy and more.
RB: What is drag?
JH: Drag is a form of cabaret theater that
involves something that can be vaguely
represented as cross-dressing. In its most
common form, we see men dressing up in
outrageous ways as women and performing in
a kind of comic theater that could be called
“camp.” In its less conventional form, drag in
recent years has been women dressing as
men and creating a very different kind of
meaning and theatricality and performance.
Those are the theatrical definitions of drag.
There’s also just the basic definition of drag,
as in one person dressed in what is believed
to be the costume of the other gender. But in
an age where gender has a different kind of
flexibility to it, drag becomes less and less
clear as a cross-dress.
What do you make of Judith Butler’s
suggestion that all gender is drag?
That’s not exactly what Butler says. What
Butler is saying is that as subjects — as
people who are subject to different kinds of
disciplinary regimes — we don’t pick and
choose the forms in which subjectivity
comes. We inhabit forms that are already in
existence as ideological structures. So for
that reason she’s saying that whether you are
a man being a man, a woman being a woman,
or a woman performing in ways that are
believed to be masculine or a man performing
in ways that are believed to be feminine, all
of those kinds of gender modes are previously
scripted. Are they all drag? Well, they’re all
part of the same ideological system. You’re
not doing something unique when you enter
into that system.
Why did you decide to research and write
about drag kings?
I was writing Female Masculinity in the mid-
’90s. [That book is] a cultural history of
expressions of masculinity by female bodies
and the way in which they’ve impacted our
understanding of masculinity more generally.
I was living in New York City and there was a
sort of sudden emergence of a drag-king
scene, and I decided that what was going on
in drag-king scenes — especially because
they seem counterintuitive because we’ve
already, as a culture, decided that drag is
something that men do in women’s clothing,
not vice versa — [represented] a great
opportunity to seek out a particular kind of
knowledge about female masculinity in a
subcultural practice that I was really close to,
and happened to be in the right time and the
right place to witness, participate in and
make sense of.
That’s interesting that there was an
emergence at this moment —
Yes, what do we make of that? There wasn’t a
long history of drag-king performance, even
though there are instances of it throughout
the 20th century. If there isn’t a set role for
the drag king in lesbian culture, why would
this scene suddenly have sprung up
overnight? The answer has to do with a lot of
different things about queer or lesbian
culture in public space.
The way that I thematize it is that in
the early ’90s a lot of gay-male establishments
went bust because of the AIDS crisis. So
many men had died, and many men were no
longer going out in the way that they had to
pick each other up in bars. So, a lot of the
places — particularly in a place like San
Francisco — that had been gay men’s bars
became gay women’s spaces, and these public
spaces were available really for the first time
since the 1950s to women as gay bars.
The funny truth about lesbian culture
is that it has a kind of subterranean quality
to it because women don’t have money in the
same way that men do, and don’t have bar
cultures in the same way that men do. So this
was one of the few ways in which we could
have seen an explosion in lesbian public
culture, was that gay-male spaces get
converted to lesbian spaces, because lesbians
generally don’t own a lot of property in bars.
… And so it’s about public space, it’s about
the places that people go to socialize with
each other. If you do have an abundance of
public space, all kinds of things can happen
with it. That’s one strand.
The other part of it had to do with
the fact that during early phases of white
lesbian feminism there’d been a very vocal
disapproval of masculine women as being
part of the patriarchy. That faded as lesbian
feminism was sort of replaced by a much
more flexible postmodern feminism, and as
female-to-male transsexuals became much
more a part of queer communities in big
cities. The taboo on masculinity in lesbians
faded away.
In Female Masculinity, you mark the
difference between a drag king, who may
or may not identify as a lesbian, and the
drag butch, “a masculine woman who
wears male attire as part of her quotidian
gender expression.” What’s the political
function of each?
The drag king is a person who may or may not
be butch, who has gone to the club
specifically to perform the spectacle of
somebody who seems, at least nominally, to
be female behaving in ways that we expect
men to behave. It’s a theatrical performance.
The drag butch is a person who was born into
a female body that has basically a masculine
gender role, and who cultivates this gender
role as part of her innermost identity. It’s not
something she’s going to put on and take off
at the end of the evening. What is the
political distinction? It means everything.
It’s like, female masculinity versus the
theater of drag. One is theatrical; one is
about embodiment, a sort of cultural identity.
In Female Masculinity you write that
there’s a “continued refusal in Western
society to admit ambiguously gendered
bodies into functional social relations
(evidenced, for example, by our continued
use of either/or bathrooms ...)” You
reference the bathroom incident in Stone
Butch Blues. Why do you believe the
ambiguous body threatens? And to whom
LOUDmouth 16

is it most disturbing?
People are going to be disturbed for different
reasons. In the instance of the bathroom, a
woman is disturbed by ambiguous gender
because a femininely gendered woman needs
to be very aware of who’s in certain spaces in
order to feel safe. A man in a woman’s
bathroom indicates danger. So if she’s
threatened, it’s often coming from a place of
a concern for safety. The point that Leslie
Feinberg makes in Stone Butch Blues, when
Jess says that “they would never have made
fun of a guy like that,” is that those women
know that she’s not a guy, and so it’s more of
a malicious policing of her gender than it is
a real concern for safety. Where women have
concern for their safety, one feels complete
empathy with the policing of gender in the
bathroom. Where it’s simply about, “Eww,
you look like a guy, I don’t like that,” that’s
the kind of policing that women do.
The kind of policing that men
often do takes the form of physical
violence and humiliation. So if you are a
masculine woman and you decide, I can’t
go in the women’s room, I’ll go in the
men’s room, the danger you’re running is
not ridicule but violence, because men
are socialized to respond to things that
threaten them with a physical defense.
So men and women respond in different
ways.
The threat of the ambiguously
gendered body, however, is a threat to the
entire system of gender, because the gender
system presumes that there are two and only
two genders, and the gender system
presumes that we always know which body is
which, and the gender system presumes
heterosexuality and it presumes stability. The
ambiguously gendered person — of whom
there are many, in many different ways —
threatens the integrity of that entire system.
Because the gender system is something that
is instantiated at a very early age and
because it is so bound to structures like
normativity, heterosexuality, the family and
therefore the nation, and so on, and because
it seems, in its ideological form, to have
some connection to the natural and the
organic, for it to be destabilized and
threatened is to basically expose something
that people experience as simply life as
ideology. And the exposure of that is
threatening to people who want to believe
that we do things the way that we do
because it’s the right way to do them, rather
than because we’ve been conditioned and
programmed and because it’s convenient for
particular narratives of home and nation for
us to do things that way.
One example of the possibility of physical
violence for those who threaten the
gender system is the experience of
Brandon Teena as represented in Boys
Don’t Cry. You attribute the danger to
violation of the cardinal rule of gender:
“one must be readable at a glance.” What
LOUDmouth 17
does the drag-king performance do with
the concept of readability?
Drag-king performance makes readability
obvious as an act of interpretation. When I
say the cardinal rule of gender is that one
must be readable at a glance, I’m borrowing
that from Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna’s
book Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach,
where they produce this set of terms by which
we determine gender in any given social
instance, though we presume that gender is
definite, that you can assign it quickly and
easily, that there are only two genders and so
on.
What a drag king does is highlight the
way that, particularly in subcultural
communities, lots of people are deliberately
not readable at a glance, and when you’re not
readable at a glance, what you do is you mess
up the gender ideology that absolutely
depends upon the idea that gender is natural,
and that because it’s natural and organic, it’s
going to be obvious to the human eye. When
we make it unreadable, we basically make it
clear to people that gender is a cultural
construct, not a natural order of things.
How do you describe the pleasure of
passing?
The pleasure in the drag-king performance in
particular is that male masculinity has long
been depicted as something that is not
reproducible. Without the penis, without the
male body, without all of the cultural
privileges and attributes that come with male
socialization, the narrative goes, you cannot
credibly present as male. The drag-king show
completely upends that assumption and says,
Not only can you pass as male, it’s incredibly
easy to pass as male. Again, this throws into
doubt some sort of organic and inevitable
relationship between maleness and masculinity.
You’ve written that some performers at
drag-king shows seem to have no idea how
to perform as drag kings and fail to
perform —
It’s not that they fail to perform, it’s that
masculinity in the dominant culture, until
very recently, didn’t sell itself as performative.
It was basically our understanding that
masculinity was unspoken: You’re silent,
you’re strong, you don’t have to do anything
because the authority is vested in you
through a series of social and political
structures, not through your deliberate
enacting of that privilege. So because
privilege is routed through you, as long as
you stand still in the right place as a white
guy, being performative doesn’t help you.
What it does is it undermines your authority.
The white gay man who’s very flamboyant is
undermining the authority that accrues to
him as a white male. So it’s not that the drag
kings fail, it’s that they reveal the fact that
dominant masculinity performs itself this
way. In those instances where drag kings get
up there and they don’t really know what to
do because masculinity doesn’t seem to have
a set of performances that go with it, they
are giving us information about dominant
masculinity. That’s why it’s such an
interesting moment.
What would you say to those feminist
critics who accuse drag kings or masculine
women of imitating men pathologically —
that they want to be men, that they have
“penis envy” and celebrate men while
dismissing women?
What I say to those folks is that they are not
really understanding the basic tenets of
feminism. Feminism is the ideology that
gender is not natural, anatomy is not destiny,
femininity is not female, masculinity is not
male. As long as that’s the logic of feminism
as it has been developed since the turn of the
[last] century, then you cannot say that
masculinity is male any more than you say
that femininity is the appropriate idealized
natural expression of women. Therefore, if
there are women who are expressing things
that we have either read or misread as
masculine, then that masculinity is theirs as
much as, if they were expressing something
that we recognize as feminine, it would be
theirs. My point in critiquing that [argument]
is to take feminism back, rather than to allow
feminism to be articulated always as a
critique of masculinity. If that’s our
understanding of feminism, then feminism
might as well be over.
Feminism has got to be something
more than a critique of masculinity,
particularly since for many men, masculinity
is not a source of power. For men of color,
masculinity does not guarantee them
anything. It just guarantees them a different
kind of treatment from the state and the
police. To the extent that feminism
understands itself as simply anti-masculine,
where masculinity is some sort of cultural
expression of patriarchy, then you’re stuck in
a very limited mode of feminism.
Women who are read as masculine are
contributing to the cultural construction of
masculinity. They’re not imitating somebody
else’s masculinity, because — going along
with Butler — masculinity is not the property
of anybody. It doesn’t emerge in an original
and authentic way from a male body. The
male body performs a form of gendering that
already exists in the culture. He doesn’t
originate his masculinity. He in fact learns it,
the same way that if a woman is performing
masculinity, she learns it. So how is it more
his than hers?
I’m wondering if it’s a crisis of language.
To be feminine, or feminized, is never a
good thing. For a country to be feminized
… to be penetrated … Does your notion of
the masculine female rupture the
constraints of what is assumed to be the
female experience?
First of all, I think that it’s not exactly
accurate that any time something is
feminized, it’s a negative. It is true that

when we talk about a nation as being
feminized, there is both a misogynist and a
homophobic understanding of “feminine”
written into that idiom within which to be
feminine is to be penetrated, to be weak, to
be subordinate. But that reading of
feminization depends upon the gender
hierarchy being in place. If that gender
hierarchy shifts, then to say something is
feminized might mean to say that it’s
completely dominant.
It doesn’t just naturally mean — and
to be passive sexually does not naturally,
either — it’s not naturally associated with
the female body or something bad. In any
given sexual interaction, one party will be
more passive than the other. The only reason
that we read that as a bad thing is because
we have a gender hierarchy. So, your
question, then, is — when women express
masculinity, they’re sort of getting in on the
good stuff, is that it?
It is. Why aren’t these traits or these
actions that are seen as masculine not just
seen as part of the wider female
experience?
Because then you’re still stuck in a mode
where you say anatomy is destiny, where
you’re still saying, “If a woman does it, it’s
feminine.” Why? Why are we stuck on
anatomy-is-destiny when we absolutely
flagellate Freud for saying that — which he
didn’t. What I’m saying to certain versions of
feminism is you cannot have it both ways.
You cannot say anatomy is not destiny and
say anything that women do is feminine.
Femininity cannot mean simply every single
cultural expression that comes from a female
body. If the female body is playing football,
wearing shoulder pads, chewing tobacco,
committing violence against somebody else
— these are not feminine things. They are
not recognized as feminine. It isn’t a
question of language. It isn’t a question of
simply taking one term and applying it to
behaviors that it isn’t usually applied to. It
just doesn’t mean that. It means
“masculine,” and if you read it as feminine,
you are saying, “No matter what you do from
that body, it’s feminine.” So what’s the
meaning of “feminine” then? It doesn’t mean
anything. It simply means everything that
women do. Well, then what if a man’s doing
it? If a man’s doing it, it’s masculine? So
everything that men do, whether it’s wearing
a dress, putting on makeup or hitting a
baseball, is masculine? I think that’s an
unsophisticated reading of gender. It’s not
post-structuralist. It doesn’t append to what
seem to be the building blocks of feminism,
which has to do with disassociating
biological sex from social roles.
In Female Masculinity you write, “…the
excessive conventional femininity often
associated with female heterosexuality
can be bad for your health. Scholars have
long pointed out that femininity tends to
Duke University Press, 1998.
be associated with passivity and inactivity,
with various forms of unhealthy body
manipulations from anorexia to highheeled
shoes. It seems to me that at least
early on in life, girls should avoid
femininity. Perhaps femininity and its
accessories should be chosen later on, like
a sex toy or a hairstyle.” Would you talk
about this notion of femininity as a style
that should be chosen, not compulsory or
even encouraged in girls?
[I say this] only because in the gender
hierarchy, masculinity, for children, is a much
freer zone. If social gendering — at least, the
conservative excuse for it — is that men and
women have to find each other for the
purposes of reproduction, then a little girl
does not need to be feminine.
When you look around and you see
the really harmful effects of very early
socialization of the child as feminine — the
Jon Benet kind of phenomenon — then you
realize that because of the way in which we
culturally construct femininity and read it
and the associations we make with it, it’s a
very dangerous thing for a little girl to be
enacting.
Are you seeing any new trends in
feminist/gender/queer theory?
Queer studies has changed and is much more
about young folks working on race and
ethnicity who are bringing that kind of
analysis to the table when they’re doing their
work on sexuality. José Muñoz, David Eng and
I recently compiled a special issue of Social
Text on sexuality and race that showcases
some of this work.
In gender studies, the white women
who set up gender studies programs in a way
are going to have to give way to new waves
of very complex, very sophisticated
scholarship — again often coming from
young women working on race and ethnicity.
There’s a bit of a standoff between
white queer scholars and up-and-coming
scholars who are trained not necessarily in
psychoanalysis but in ethnic studies and
American studies. In gender studies, there’s a
standoff between an older generation of
white women who seem to have dug in to
these programs and are really blocking a very
brilliant wave of scholarship that they should
be welcoming.
Is this always the case?
Well, you can’t say, “Is this always the case?”
because some of these things are like first
waves. This is the first generation of queer
scholars coming out of graduate courses
[taught by] tenured queer professors. In
women’s studies, yes, there are always
generational kinds of conflicts and they’re
really dull and oedipal and stupid. But this
one is quite particular and both those things
relate to deeper crises in the humanities in
general.
Are there any trends in the larger culture
that are particularly interesting to you as
a feminist/queer/gender theorist?
That’s too general. What I’m working on is
this book, Dude, Where’s My Theory? The
Politics of Knowledge in the Age of Stupidity.
I’m interested in the downsizing of education
in an age of militarism, the increasing
numbers of uneducated people in the U.S.
that is coinciding with a new moment in
democratic rule within which democracy can
be separated from all sides, whether it’s the
judiciary, the executive level or the level of
the House — that you can have almost total
rule by one party within which the other
party has to look a lot like the ruling party in
order to even compete. At that moment you
have to start asking whether you’re still in
something called democracy. I think that’s
where we’re at right now, with all of the
various abuses of civil rights and the taking
away of various kinds of access and the
imprisonment of large populations in
Guantanamo Bay and the drafting of poor
people into an army to fight a war that is
unethical, immoral and so on.
At this moment, we have a dire need
for a very active public intellectual culture
within which intellectuals can speak out and
say things that they know because of their
very privileged place in university, that other
people may not know because they just don’t
have time to either collect that information
or put it together or theorize it. Those are
the trends that I’m concerned about —
what’s happened to intellectual critique in
this moment of political crisis, and how do
we make intellectual work make a difference
at this particular historical moment?
Ruth is currently at USC and writing her
dissertation on Trans-American modernisms. She
tries to fight the good fight. Send her a note:
blandon@usc.edu.
LOUDmouth 18

MORETHAN
MERECLOTHESPLAY
By Edahrline Salas
I
’ve always looked at drag queens with feral fascination. Having
been a bit of a tomboy growing up, I was plenty amused by the
way they played with their hair, clothes, make-up and
mannerisms. I wasn’t jealous of their mastery of feminine behaviors
but more in awe. I marveled at their wicked savoir faire and gender reconstruction
skills to manipulate what I myself, though biologically a
female, found so very difficult to carry off. True, they were funny and
fun, but they also represented a joyful performance of what’s not
natural to anyone, least of all women. They were in a sense breaking
the narrative of authentic femininity, and who better to de-nature
long-held beliefs about gender roles than the opposite sex? I thought,
“If clothes make the man, then these men are not quite.”
It wasn’t until about two years ago after a Christmas present of
Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet was hand-delivered to me that I
considered issues related to gender play and the possibilities of
ambivalence more thoughtfully — but this time with drag kings. I read
about the lives of the main characters — stage male impersonators —
with great self-interest, since I noted that I have been a bit of a
“masher” myself. In Waters’ Victorian phraseology, “mashing”
(denotatively the charming of women) is male impersonation. I
thought about how often and how daily a practice it is for me to excise
certain female behaviors and avoid the trendy, “girlie” Forever 21
fashion, not to appeal to my own sex, but to win a bit of power and
avoid being thought of as frivolous.
Perhaps my own “real-life” performance of downplaying my
femininity became habitual and unstudied, but very recently I had the
opportunity to interview Ely Moreno of Backstreet Noize, a troupe of
male impersonators, about what it’s like to act out and be selfconscious
of their male performances. In other words, I asked what it
means to ritualize in spectacle the very basis of my ever-growing
fascination with gender play.
ES: Describe the group. What do you guys do and where? What’s
your audience like?
EM: Backstreet Noize is an all-female, queers-of-color drag group.
Currently, Backstreet Noize consists of four members — Danny (Belen
Herrera), Joey (Gloria Cruz), Tony (Monica Delgado) and Eddie (Ely
Moreno) — all of whom impersonate male artists. The group’s dance
performances are choreographed by the collaboration of all of the
members. More than impersonate, we love to entertain our audience.
Generally, our performances have been at gay fundraising events where
proceeds are donated to HIV awareness and prevention and other gay
community needs. Our audiences have always been fairly mixed, but
there is a female-of-color predominance.
Typically our audiences are reluctant about us because drag
kings aren’t as popular as drag queens, but at the end of our
performances there isn’t an unsatisfied member in the audience.
Because of the Latino predominance in our audience, we try to modify
our performances to target such groups. Therefore, we perform mainly
merengue, salsa, mambo, hip hop and R&B. We try to do our research
beforehand to customize our performances to our audience.
LOUDmouth 19
listening to the backstreet noize
Backstreet Noize at Latina/o Pride. Photo by Ely Moreno.
What kinds of storylines do you guys work on, and what kinds of
masculinity do you impersonate (e.g., Casanova-ish, machochauvinistic,
etc.)?
Our storylines revolve around the admiration of women. We never like
to degrade women or come across as some kind of chauvinistic pigs.
We try to make our performance as sexy as possible with the main goal
of catching every woman in the audience’s eye and at the same time
making them feel like our attention is solely on them. Kind of like a
Frank Sinatra/Luis Miguel effect. We have impersonated artists like
Café Tacuba, Beastie Boys, Eminem and Menudo.
Are your impersonations parodies or performance pieces that
speak of your admiration for masculinity?
It’s never been a parody. We hate to disrespect anyone, because we do
acknowledge the fact that our audience is mixed and not solely
women. I think that we’re very different than other groups because we
don’t emphasize the male persona as much as other groups, but rather
the effect that we can produce in the audience. However, we do make
sure that we’re as masculine as possible.
Is it all entertainment? Is it political? Or both?
Our purpose has never been political. We mainly do it for fun and
because we enjoy entertaining.
What role do you think clothing/fashion plays in gender
construction and performance?
Clothing and fashion play a very important role in gender construction
and performance. Personally, I know I act and carry myself differently
when I am dressed in feminine clothing. I think that femininity
requires and demands more from a person than masculinity. With
masculine clothes, I tend to be laid back, not really caring about
posture and the way I walk or carry myself. It’s like playing a part in
a play; you dress according to your character.
Is drag all about clothes, or is it more than that?
Drag is more than clothes; it’s about character and how you manipulate
it. Anyone can cross-dress but it takes some skill to make everyone
believe you.
How do you think drag challenges contemporary notions of gender?
Drag challenges contemporary notions of gender because according to
such notions, only one sex fits a certain profile. Most people are
amazed on how accurate one sex can get to both genders, and that’s
what makes drag so interesting and entertaining.
Edahrline is an imaginary-cat lover, occasional traveler, pediatric nurse, knickknack
enthusiast, writing instructor and aspiring botanist.
To find out about upcoming shows, contact Backstreet Noize at
backstnoize@yahoo.com.

By Stephanie Abraham
I. Oppression vs. Freedom
I
have thought about the decade that I
worked as a fashion model — from age
12 until 22 — as if it took place in a
different lifetime. I’ve compared “then” and
“now” in my own mind as if they were two
different elements on a categorical chart,
“then” being the objectified-victim column
and “now,” the liberated-feminist one. Yet,
lately I’ve become uncomfortable with this
way of seeing. It is true that now I
understand systemic oppression and
liberation movements. Before I had only an
individualist framework through which to
interpret the world, so I do feel more
empowered now. Still, model vs. feminist is a
stereotypical juxtaposition that no longer
works for me, as I’ve realized that remnants
of my model-past run up, down and all
around my feminist-present.
I earn a living as a substitute
teacher. Whereas I’m on my fourth year in
this job, many people do not last one. This is
because of the difficulties of teaching, and
the struggles with kids, yes, but also because
of the financial instability and the we-needyou-here-right-away
calls that come between
6 and 7 a.m. This is familiar territory for a
model — models rarely have stable
employment and must respond in a flash to a
casting or booking. Having begun that kind
of life as a pre-teen, I know the routine.
However, now I make $27 an hour, whereas in
the past I made up to $4,000 in one day. I
can’t help but think of A Room of One’s Own
and Woolf’s suggestion that a woman can
find freedom in economic independence.
Framed in this way, I was “freer” back then.
Yet, many would say that being paid
for my corporal “beauty” was inherently
oppressive and that I was oppressing other
women by imposing an impossible beauty
standard. Yet, is working with children in
public schools non-exploitive? One could
argue that as a teacher in public schools I
serve as an agent of state repression. Mumia
Abu Jamal, a political prisoner who has been
on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for over 20
years, suggests that freedom is found in the
mind. Each year I seem to agree with him
more. Perhaps freedom and oppression are
not the cookie-cutter concepts we perceive
them to be. Aren’t they more multidimensional
than the simplistic categories
we try and make of them?
II. Perfectionism vs. Self-Acceptance
I spent several years after retiring from
modeling attempting to rid myself of my
seeing beyond the binaries
mannequin training. Of course, try as I may,
there are times when my body will not let me
forget. Recently, I was studying late on
campus. When I took a break and walked
down the hall, I noticed that the building
was nearly empty, so I focused on staying
alert for safety reasons. However, when I
came around the corner I stopped in my
tracks and forgot about everything but what
lay in front of me — a long, sleek hallway,
Feminist on the runway.
brightly lit, just like the runway. Before I
could think, my hips took the lead, my stride
became more determined, my right hand
slipped into my pocket, my left one flowed
back and forth at my side. I remembered the
adrenaline, how my heartbeat would mesh
with the rhythm of the music. At the end of
the ramp I would turn ever so slightly, stop
and pose, then turn and pose again, giving
the photographers another chance to get the
ideal shot. All I could see was the flash of the
cameras. I spent hours in front of those
instruments in hopes that they would work
their magic, capture a moment of perfection
and render me flawless.
Perfection is a dangling carrot chased
by many people — especially those in
competitive environments, especially models.
Most women — models or not — bombard
themselves with impossible demands.
Growing up in a patriarchy does that to you.
For me, it has to do with growing up in the
United States (where the demand is to “be
the best”), in the Catholic Church (where
“dirty” and “sinner” are often mapped onto
women) and in an Arab Irish household (both
cultures emphasize fitting in, passing and
succeeding).
I thought I had left the brutal
expectations behind me when I left the
modeling industry. Fed up and ready to move
on, I called my agent and told him I no
longer had it in me. Then I tucked my
portfolio and headshots in the bottom drawer
of my dresser and tried not to look back.
Shortly afterward I discovered feminist
theory and activism. I raised my fist in the
air, renounced the beauty myth and
demanded self-acceptance for all women.
Recently I was re-reminded that [my]
life does not change as quickly as I think it
does. I broke down. Something had happened
between a colleague and me that I thought
was impossible to work out, and of course I
took the blame. I dug my face into my
partner’s shoulder and wept. Unperturbed by
my tears, he lifted my chin and said, “The
problem is not you — it’s the person who
invented the word ‘perfect.’ Perfection does
not exist. I wouldn’t want you any other way,
and I don’t think she, or anyone else in your
life, would either.”
Up until then I hadn’t noticed that I
was still on that hamster wheel hoping to
outrun that which is inherent to humans —
making mistakes. He had narrowed in on
what I was really up against, and it was
something I hadn’t even considered. I
realized then that it’s not that “once I
[model-self] was lost and now I [feministself]
am found.” Instead, I’m me, still trying
to figure it out.
I once heard that life is a spiral
offering us the same lessons over and over,
and that at each interval we hit them on a
different level. People’s lives can’t be
plugged into the boxes we use to categorize
the world. They are infinitely more complex
than that. “Fashion-model-turned-feminist”
implies a false dichotomy as well as a falsely
linear life narrative. I am a model, a feminist,
an X, a Y and a Z — all at once. These are
different aspects of my complex identity that
are visible at different moments. What are
yours?
Stephanie was once told that her mouth was her
best attribute. She thought, Yeah, because it's nice
and LOUD. Get loud with her:
lamuallim@sbcglobal.net.
LOUDmouth 20

I
was 9 years old when I bought my
first album, Pat Benatar’s Crimes of
Passion. I fervently sang along to
“Treat Me Right” and “Hell Is for
Children,” a song about child abuse. I
was filled with the energy that infused
“Hit Me with Your Best Shot” and “You
Better Run.” I loved her music, her
message and her clothes. Although I was
Pat Benatar a little too young to pull off the look, I did
my best to sport the sequin-studded leotard
that said “tough but feminine” and the new-waveinspired
striped shirts, belts and headbands.
My love for women who rock and their kick-ass style continued.
Next came Joan Jett with “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.” She was in charge of
her band and her sexuality. Thanks to my older sister, I discovered her
earlier group, the Runaways. At age 10, I sat alone in my living room
and listened to their song, “Dead End Justice.” With my ear to the
speaker, I pretended to be Joan Jett breaking out of juvie with her
fellow Runaway Cherie Curie. Joan was my favorite with her jet-black
hair, heavy eye makeup and all-black get-ups. A few years later, I
decided that “G” was for “goth,” and Siouxsie Sioux became (and still
remains) one of my biggest idols.
I was a young Asian American girl in Monterey, Calif., a small,
predominantly white, coastal town. I lived with my dad, who is 40
years older than me. My mom passed away when I was 7, and my sister
moved out when I was 9, so female role models were hard to come by.
I looked for myself within pop culture and was drawn to these strong
brunettes with their super-cool style. Although I wouldn’t emulate
their looks completely, it was through them that I learned much about
life and the power of clothes. I have to say that I worry about the kids
today who are learning about life and style from so-called punk-rock
girls like Ashlee Simpson and Avril Lavigne. I think the world would be
a better place if it was Le Tigre, Ladytron or Karen O of the Yeah Yeah
Yeahs inspiring them instead.
While my sense of fashion has progressed (slightly) from my
teen years, I continue to love it. For me, fashion is about identity, selfexpression,
politics, creativity and humor. While I may experience a
fashion crisis from time to time, that frustration stems from love.
Thank goodness for fashion. I don’t know what I’d be without it.
—Daria Teruko Yudacufski
T
oday was one of those days when I started out feeling irritable
because I’ve gained a couple pounds and now weigh five
pounds more than I want to. I feel disgustingly fat. Regardless
of how good my life is, how I feel about my body will dictate how I
feel in general. I loathe the value I place on my looks.
Although I wouldn’t have plastic surgery, I’ve researched the
pros and cons of breast implants. I’ve wondered how bad Botox really
is. My intellect knows surgically altering myself is utter nonsense,
while my emotions tell me otherwise. It amazes me that I’ve actually
entertained thoughts of mutilating myself with the 21st-century
version of footbinding.
LOUDmouth 21
first-person takes on fashion
I do not want to be a fashion-follower, a lemming led by
advertising. In the extreme, I view my body as a fashion prop,
something to be revised to match the current trend. In subtle ways, I
succumb. I plop down $130 to put highlights in my hair. I hand over
$20 for mascara. I pay $50 for jeans that make my thighs look smaller
and my butt firmer. Why do I do this when I know I am objectifying
my body, something I admonish men for doing?
I do this because my sexual appeal equals power in the
patriarchal world. And, what is deemed sexy is dictated by the
advertising world. It is an illusion, a lie to enslave me. The truth is my
power lies in my mind. I break the chains of this slavery when I refuse
to participate in the game. Yet despite this fact, a part of me craves
that special power my sexuality gives me in the midst of men.
I have been indoctrinated my entire life to be a sexual object.
So to survive, I have tried to make it work for my benefit. I have used
it as a way to manipulate the male-dominated system. It’s one way I
have felt powerful. I do not relinquish this easily. I wish my physical
appearance didn’t matter. I wish I felt fabulous without make-up or
highlights or a lean body to look good in low-slung jeans. But since I
have not arrived at that point, I continue to remind myself that my
looks are not the source of my strength, it is my mind and my spirit.
It is expressed in my words. And it comes alive through my actions.
—Anne Peters
A
s someone who for the past five years has embraced
androgyny as a comfort zone, I at one time thought all good
fashion would be lost on me. Also, as part of moving away
from mainstream consumer-death culture, I thought I had to look
terrible. No more crazy outfits; “got to focus on the revolution, not get
distracted by bells and whistles.” But really, how can we focus on
personal, community and systemic change when uninspired by our
outfits? Then the mainstream, business-as-usual world is inviting
because it looks good. So, I became intrigued by cross messages, using
the power given to the fashion industry and gearing it towards
liberation of self from stuffy gender roles and even stuffier (not to
mention itchy, stiff and uncomfortably drab) outfits.
Part of my story of re-embracing cute, do-it-yourself fashion,
way outside of the gender binary, happened in a community of radical
faeries, gender pirates and queers of all stripes and class backgrounds,
in a rural Tennessee homestead sanctuary. I wasn’t stuck in sweatpants
before moving to Tennessee, but what had been a once-in-a-while fun
jaunt has become a self-empowering lifestyle of drag, gender
expansionism, creativity and a belief in the power of a well-puttogether
ensemble. Now when I leave the house, I may sport a rubberstudded
and skull-encrusted cod-piece (made by a friend), oldfashioned
bow-ties, a fuzzy boa (can be used in various ways), a couple
hats to choose from (different styles), something — anything —
sparkly, black eyeliner, hair pomade and a lacy lingerie top to mix and
match with my current fashion mainstay, a look I like to call “farm
punk.” This look usually involves rolled-up jeans, a cute belt or
suspenders, a sleeveless black T-shirt (usually silk-screened) and a
plaid shirt, sleeves also removed. I adjust according to weather. Also,
living near the world’s largest free box — a room in the barn
affectionately called “the goat boutique” — with its many layers of
treasures, schlock, barn crud and piles and piles of clothes, has aided

in widening my fashion consciousness.
Five other elements are present in
this process for me. The first is the concept
of everything as drag. I came to the
sanctuary with the over-used RuPaul
quote as a mantra: “You’re born naked,
honey, and everything else is drag.” This
belief helps me expand my notions of
gender and embrace the camp-it-up, causeconfusion
and my-god-darling-be-hot-sexy-
Socket
glamorous-deviant-and-subversive-while-doingso
lifestyle. Tweaking concepts of hotness is next as an
important lesson in not adhering to mainstream concepts of fashion:
embracing our quirks and fetishes, sizes and desires, and not paying
heed to what is being marketed as sexy. A third lesson has been
learning from and keeping tabs on the mainstream fashion and queer
worlds. As part of a non-assimilationist queer movement, we respond
to mainstream queers by knowing what they’re doing and satirizing it,
hopefully with an astute and devastatingly witty analysis. Next is
having a political analysis around power dynamics and the exploitation
of people and animals, patriarchy, racism and what is culturally
inappropriate or just plain rude. To me, taking fashion like a bindi from
Hindu culture, or a Mohawk hairstyle from Native American culture, and
using these signifiers out of context while not contemplating their
origins or our misuse of these symbols is culturally inappropriate.
However, on the subject of appropriateness, I am all about people
breaking out of socially appropriate roles via fashion. For example, fat,
voluptuous folks wearing skin-tight and body-revealing outfits is
breaking unspoken fashion rules, and I am all for it. Finally, creativity
and do-it-yourself panache help in this personal journey. Not being
afraid to use whatever, sew with dental floss and foil, and not be an
expert help with creating amazing fabulosity.
I am grateful for these spaces and opportunities to re-gain
some snappiness in my dress and continue this ongoing journey of
expanding social norms and constructs, bridging good fashion with
self-embracing radical politics.
—Jess Socket
It’s Not What You Wear, It’s That You’re There
L
ooksism. Obsession with appearances. Dress codes (dictated or
de facto). They all work so impressively, they might as well be
part of a deliberately engineered patriarchal conspiracy to keep
us sidelined, feeling like misfits and convinced that we’re not OK the
way we are and that we need to be washed, shined, buffed and
meticulously outfitted and made up in order to be fit to be seen in
public. A conspiracy to scramble our priorities, divert our resources and
lower our self-esteem to the point we’re so busy questioning ourselves
that we don’t have the energy to question authority.
It’s taken me most of my time on Earth (and I’m pushing 60
hard) to say this: While costuming can be fun (I’ve entered many a
room conjuring my inner diva), I’m now more willing to let go of my
illusions of control over what people think of my appearance. I’ll leave
them to ponder whether or not how I physically present myself
provides any real clues as to my racial/ethnic, social, gender, sexual,
class, artistic or political persuasions or proclivities. I’ll leave them to
wonder whether I’m demonstrating respect for, acquiescence to or
rebellion against the moment’s fashions.
Allow me to propose a feminist resolution: Be it resolved that
we pledge to put at least 10 times as much energy into readying our
minds and our spirits as we do our bodies.
What if preparing to go out meant listening to community
radio; reading an indie magazine; watching cartoons; doing a random
act of kindness; spending the afternoon with someone of a different
generation; praying; casting a spell; napping; cooking something
delicious; masturbating; celebrating the growth of a child, a garden or
a spirit; committing a political act; trying to figure out just what
doesn’t qualify as a “political act”; or getting some exercise? Exercise
choice! (And if that means dressing up, go for it!)
How much deeper would our interactions go if we
complimented each other’s ideas, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, passion
or humor instead of our wardrobes and haircuts?
I’m teaching my approval-seeking inner child not to need to
hear “you’re way cute.” Nor does my would-be-sultry temptress self
need to listen with hungry ears for “you look hot.” Instead, my secure
self, who knows we’re all in this together, yearns to be greeted with,
“Ariana, we’re so glad you’re here. Come join our conversation!”
—Ariana Manov
A
s an African American woman, I was born into a world that
does not value my kind of beauty. Growing up, I heard all
about “good” and “nappy” hair, light and dark skin. From
head to toe, in this culture African American women find little security
or self-worth in our appearance. Our deep-rooted internalized racism
manifests itself in particular in relation to African American female
hair. Why hair? Because it is the easiest physical feature to change
with the most dramatic effect.
When I was 18, I cut my hair short to release myself from the
notion that I needed long hair to be beautiful. After about four more
years of obsessing about my hair, I decided to take it out of my beauty
equation completely. When I learned about the roots of wrapping hair
(African women wear headwraps for spiritual reasons, vanity, to protect
their hair from the sun and/or to provide a cushion between their
heads and baskets used to transport all types of things), I decided to
do it and never looked back. Though I’ve received an interesting array
of responses from others about it, I feel more secure about myself this
way and spend more time working on my inner self.
—Crystal Irby
V
ive le glam! Yes, I’ve shouted it
unabashedly, shamelessly and most
markedly, joyfully. Why do I now
feel that I must defend my love of fashion
and the joy I extract from acts of glamour?
Perhaps because both fashion and glamour
have been vilified — and unfairly so.
I sense that the objections against
fashion and glamour are based on the
Ruth
notion that fashion is essentially anti-female.
Many a scholar has linked fashion with
sadomasochism (e.g., Edmund Bergler in Fashion and
the Unconscious). Let me rebuke all scholars and non-scholars who
confuse fashion/glamour with the fashion industry, however.
One definition of fashion is to “give shape or form, to
contrive.” Glamour is defined as “a magical spell or charm,” and to
glamorize is to “make something seem more interesting, romantic or
glamorous than it really is.” The definitions indicate action, and
through these definitions I state my case: The objections against
fashion wallow in the confusion between fashion and the fashion
machine, between crafted expressions and herd-like mentalities. My
exclamation, however, is that fashion and glamour are about verbs.
They are about action, invention, expression, knowledge, creativity,
artistry, art, craftsmanship and inevitably about agency.
Alison Lurie’s comparison of language to fashion (The Language
of Clothes, 2000) is helpful here. Language can be subversive, simple
and bold, stark or opulent. I can quote, be ironic, even employ
moments of silence. But facility with language and conveying intent
takes practice and, most importantly, confidence. In other words, say
what you mean and mean what you say — not what others would have
you say. Mindlessly following the dictates of the fashion machine is
neither fashionable nor glamorous; it’s cowardly, passive and has little
to do with self-knowledge. May glamour and fashion help us pepper our
lives with verbs rather than be muffled.
—Ruth Blandón
LOUDmouth 22

LOUDmouth 23
is no simple definition of
[gentrification] … any definition must
“There
have some emphasis on the class
dimensions of urban change.” 1
At a baby group in “a perfectly decorated, mid-centurymodern
hilltop house in Silver Lake,” host Julie
Hermelin, “a film director who’s married to Mitchell
Frank, owner of the popular Spaceland rock club,” said of
herself and sister group members: “We want to find a
balance between the society we know and something
different, but we’re not ready to throw out the baby with
the bathwater.” 2
January 2002:
Kicked out of our Vernon loft with seven days’ notice, my
partner and I rush around town, looking at available
rentals; we pack between appointments. We realize
quickly that anything bigger than a single will mean a
rent increase we’re not sure we can afford (both
freelancers with unsteady incomes). Because we both work
from home, we believe we need at least two bedrooms
for artistic/economic/relationship sustainability. We find
a small two-bedroom house in Echo Park. It’s $400/mo.
more than our loft, which worries me, but which is cheaper
than every other two-bedroom we’ve seen. We take it. 3
“The demographics of Eastside neighborhoods are
shifting, thanks to classic architecture and housing
prices that — for a while, at least — were within artists’
budgets. And not just in Silver Lake and Los Feliz. Eagle
Rock, the latest ‘it’ neighborhood, is also changing ...” 4
Least affordable U.S. state for rental housing, 2004:
California
Hourly wage a person working 40 hours a week, 52
weeks a year, would need to afford a two-bedroom home
in Los Angeles County at the “fair market rate”
determined by HUD: $21.62 5
“Is it our priority to protect the people who live here
temporarily, or is it to protect the people who have
chosen Echo Park as their home?” 6
Total number of households in Los Angeles County:
3,133,774
Number of those that are renter households: 1,634,080
(52 percent) 7
March 2002:
A neighbor informs us that our house has been put up
for sale. Lo and behold, we look out the window and
discover a brand-new for-sale sign in the yard. We’re on
a month-to-month lease.
“‘Our generation just wants to feel like they’re
individuals, so I kind of cater to that,’ said Lyvonne Hill,
owner of Grometville in Silver Lake, a kids’ boutique
stocked with Ganesh lunchboxes, hot-pink hip slings …
and onesies that say ‘I can’t read’ and ‘Keep on truckin’.
… Two years ago, pregnant with her daughter India and
faced with the unappealing prospect of going back to
long hours working as a post-production coordinator,
[Hill] traded in … job security ... for risky retail. ‘I
didn’t want someone else to raise my daughter … I
really just wanted to be a progressive parent and do
something different.’” 8
“I am at a loss to explain the depth of amnesia and
ignorance that runs throughout white America. …
Somehow [user name] is under the erroneous impression
that renters — who, let's face it, are overwhelmingly
Latino and Asian — are not vested in Echo Park. So, I
guess the reasoning goes that only those that can afford
[it] should have a voice in the issues confronting EP.” 9
NEIGHBORHOODS
the other in style on l. a.’ S eastside
By Jessica Hoffmann
1
Tom Slater, on his Gentrification Web
(http://members.lycos.co.uk/gentrification/whatisgent.html).
2
Quoted text from “Moms and babes: The counter culture meets
kid culture, and the Eastside will never be the same,” Susan
Carpenter, Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2004.
3
Vernon is a commercial/industrial city southeast of downtown
L.A. For decades, artists lived in scattered, officially non-
Does responsibility lie with the individual homebuyer? If
residential lofts there. My partner and I had been there for four I was that concerned about it, I wouldn’t live where I
years at the time the city decided to crack down on artists
live. I live here because I like the diversity. I hate
illegally live/working there.
gentrification because it will swallow difference and spit
4
“Moms and babes.” This is the only — and entire — reference to back sameness. I am not entitled to buy a home, then,
Eastside “demographics” and housing prices in the article.
if the only way I can afford one is to displace someone
5
“Out of Reach 2004,” a report of the National Low Income
7
Housing Coalition (available online at www.nlihc.org).
“Out of Reach 2004.”
6 8
Comment posted in the “Gentrification” thread of an Echo Park “Moms and babes.”
9
Net message board, June 18, 2001.
Reply to “Is it our priority” post on Echo Park Net
(http://p199.ezboard.com/fechoparknetfrm1.showMessage?topicID “Gentrification” thread, July 2, 2001. Elsewhere in the post, this FASHIONABLEdisplacing
=8.topic)
user refers to Echo Park as “my barrio.”

more economically vulnerable than I am. I want to own a home. I used
to be anti-private-property. The only response is sustained property
destruction. It’s really about race: Can you think of any poor white
areas in L.A.? 10
June 2002:
Rental prices have jumped in the six months since we last had to move.
Unable to afford anything large enough for separate home offices in
L.A., we move to a loft in downtown Long Beach, knowing nothing
about the neighborhood. It’s quickly apparent that we’re among a
(new) few white folks in the neighborhood, and that we’re not
particularly welcome. My partner is mugged by teen boys as we carry
our boxes in from the alley. We realize fast that the neighborhood is
overwhelmed by gangs. I feel unsafe walking from my car to our
building alone at night. We learn what it’s like to live as the other, and
to live with constant fear for personal safety. I am very aware that:
many people around the world have experienced this; my previous lack
of daily experience with this is mostly a function of white privilege;
unlike most of my neighbors, I have the financial privilege to get out
of this neighborhood. And I do, once my lease is up (I don’t quite have
the money to handle the consequences of breaking a lease).
“Los Feliz is ripe,” said Ling Chan, a 35-year-old mother of two [and
proprietor of a Vermont Avenue] “baby lifestyle boutique” that sells
“baby clothes with a twist, like Paper denim and C&C tees.” 11
Is “entitled” behavior by self-identified progressive/countercultural
people a willful act of not seeing the other? Not using their expensive
educations to trace out their lifestyles’ causes and consequences?
“… You have to understand that virtually all of the rental housing
stock is owned by private investors. This is not a communist country
where the government owns all the real estate. Each rental property
must show a profit to the owner. For the property to be in good
condition and well maintained, the rent levels must be high enough to
cover mortgage payments, taxes, insurance, maintenance, capitol [sic]
improvements, utilities, salaries, bookkeeping, and still show a profit.
This is very difficult under rent-control situations because many of
these costs rise much faster than the allowed yearly rent increases. …
Landlords cannot afford to properly maintain their units when people
are paying … 1/2 to 1/3 the market rate. … There is no free ride.
Someone has to pay the actual cost of housing in L.A. for every
apartment. … Does it really make sense to ask people to subsidize
people to live in an area that has become too expensive for them?” 12
In 2004, there was not “a single jurisdiction in the [United States]
where a person working full-time earning the prevailing minimum wage
could afford a two-bedroom rental home. … There [were] only four
counties in the country [three in Illinois, one in Florida] where a
person or household working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, at the
prevailing minimum wage [could] afford even a one-bedroom
apartment.” 13
June 2003:
Lease up, we leave Long Beach and move to East Hollywood, blocks
from LACC (a.k.a. just west of Silver Lake, just south of Los Feliz). Our
two-bedroom in a Spanish-style triplex is charming, spacious and (at
$1350, a lot to me) costs less than every other two-bedroom we’ve
seen. The owner strikes us as anomalously ungreedy when she says,
“Just a half-month’s rent for security. I want it to be affordable.” Over
the next year-and-a-half, we live through a series of “capital
improvements”: the building is repainted, landscaped, fumigated, replumbed,
etc.
10
Spoken and/or heard in various informal conversations with 20- and 30something
friends, all renters, all students and/or artists and/or activists, of
various income levels, races, genders and sexual identities, late 2004 to early 2005.
11
“Moms and babes.”
12
Post to Echo Park Net “Gentrification” thread, July 9, 2001.
Italics mine.
13
“Out of Reach 2004.”
November 2004–January 2005:
We receive the maximum legal rent increase of 3 percent. The tenants
in the other two units of the triplex, both single women who have lived
here for years, one Asian American, one white, are evicted so that the
landlord can move in “a family member.” 14 The owner’s sister moves
into one of the empty units for a few weeks, then disappears and is
replaced by a series of painters, construction workers, plumbers, etc.,
one of whom tells me, “Oh no. The sister’s not coming back. I’m fixing
the place up so they can rent it for $1,700.”
That’s why poor white students and artists can be the bridge to make
a place “safe” for gentrification, because they — we — look safe and
familiar. Who lived there before you? Who lived there before them? So
what’s the solution? There’s nowhere affordable left for art/ists to go.
Where are these people supposed to live? I’m scared we may lose our
space. We lost our space. Where are we supposed to go? Where are
those people supposed to go? 15
February 2005:
The neighbors across the way mention that they’ve received an
informal letter from their landlord offering relocation money if they
agree to move “without lawyers.” They are: A married couple and their
two teenage children. Latino. Immigrants. The mother tells me in the
courtyard one evening that they moved here so her kids could attend
LACC without having to worry about transportation, because everyone
in the household works and shares two cars. She is researching her
rights. She is worried about whether they can find another affordable
neighborhood where her son will be relatively safe from gang activity.
“You know? I have a boy,” she says.
“There’s always two sides to a story. I also want to show how the
changes will improve the area. I want to show this to the people on
the other side of gentrification and have them pay attention to the
tenants, to the residents of Echo Park, and not make them feel
unwelcome.” 16
14 Family-member move-in is one of very few reasons a landlord can legally evict a
tenant under L.A. rent control. Eligible family members are parents, children and
spouses (i.e., not siblings).
15 See note 10.
16 Stephanie Cisneros, a high-school junior and longtime Echo Park resident, on the
documentary she’s making. “Turning a lens homeward: A high-school student
chronicles the effects of gentrification on her neighborhood,” Daniel Hernandez, Los
Angeles Times, Jan. 24, 2005.
This piece is a study for a larger work in progress; check for updates at
www.jessicahoffmann.com.
LOUDmouth 24

WHEN PEOPLE AND PLACES ARE TRENDS
By Mitra Ebadolahi
I
nternational tourism is one of the
world’s largest industries. Tourism
presently accounts for an estimated 11
percent of total global gross domestic
product, according to the International
Institute for Environment and Development.
The scale, pace and intensity of international
tourism development over the last 60 years
have been unparalleled — and have wreaked
havoc on many tourism destinations,
particularly those in developing countries.
While the World Tourism Organization
acknowledges that a mere 3.5 percent of the
planet’s population has the financial means
and free time necessary to travel abroad,
today’s tourists are no longer confined to
megaplex resorts on gentrified enclave
beaches. International tourism is increasingly
susceptible to fluctuating trends, as new
tourism types and destinations become
fashionable among the globe-trotting elite.
International tourism boomed in the
post-World War II era, when commercial
airplanes extended the “pleasure periphery”
into new, uncharted destinations. The
Second World War had militarized the entire
world, scattering a plethora of bases and
airfields throughout relatively remote
locations — particularly small island states.
As tourism scholars Louis Turner and John
Ash explain, tourists could suddenly visit a
wide range of destinations that had been
previously inaccessible. Post-war affluence in
industrialized nations also meant that larger
numbers of travelers could take a holiday
each year.
In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. tourists
began to venture beyond Mexico and the
Caribbean to Western European and
Mediterranean destinations, while Europeans
began to visit the Bahamas and the United
States, including Hawaii. Australian and
Japanese travelers fanned out across
Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East.
The sudden expansion of international
tourism not only reflected political and
socio-economic changes in touristgenerating
countries, but also caused a great
deal of change in destination nations. The
rhetoric of “development” and “modernization”
spread to developing countries around the
world, which suddenly faced the daunting
task of rapidly industrializing through
tourism and other enterprises to “catch up”
with the developed nations of the so-called
First World.
In those early decades, mass tourism —
characterized by large-scale resort complexes
centered on “sun, sand, sea and sex” — was
the most common form of international
travel. But by the early 1970s, choosy
travelers began to seek more “authentic”
travel experiences, away from the hordes of
their photo-snapping peers. Writing in 1976,
sociologist Dean MacCannell explained that
residents of “modern” (industrialized)
LOUDmouth 25
societies suffered from acute alienation and
traveled to “pre-modern” places in search of
the meaningful, real-life experiences they
had been denied in their home societies.
Consequently, while various types of mass
tourism persisted (including package tours
and cruises), new forms of tourism also
emerged or gained popularity, such as
rainforest-based “cannibal tours” and desert
safaris.
In the 1980s, new trends in
globalization and a shift away from massproduced
and -consumed products heralded
an era of “new tourisms.” Massive political
changes swept the globe, reconfiguring the
list of tourism “hot spots.” China welcomed
foreign visitors for the first time in the
1980s, while the collapse of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Cold War opened up
Berlin, Prague, Moscow, Havana and Ho Chi
Minh City to international travelers in the
early 1990s.
Meanwhile, as Martin Mowforth and
Ian Munt point out, the end of the Cold War
made way for a new cause célèbre for the
international community: the global
environment and “sustainable development”
initiatives. In response to new environmental
discourses, trend-conscious tourists
scrambled to experience “ecotourism” from
the late 1980s on. Unlike mass, resort-based
tourism, ecotourism ostensibly encouraged a
respect for the environment and deeper
consciousness about how tourism affected
destination locales. However, sudden influxes
of large numbers of trekkers and other
ecotourists led to erosion and pollution in
some of the world’s most fragile
environments, from Patagonia to Tibet to the
Antarctic.
Since the mid-1980s, trendy “new
tourisms” have also provided middle-class
Western consumers with an opportunity to
increase their social and cultural capital.
Unlike “old tourists,” new tourists represent
themselves as more adventurous, open-minded
and culturally sensitive than their arrogant,
resort-based, sun-oriented predecessors. Yet
new tourists, like old tourists, seek new
places and cultures to consume, search for
“authentic” experiences and retain a level of
wealth matched by few people on the planet.
Now more than ever, international tourism is
viewed as an opportunity to amass social
capital and exemplify marketable personal
qualities like adaptability and
resourcefulness.
Forms of travel that emphasize
individualism and “worldliness” have become
increasingly popular in recent years. Claiming
to be travelers rather than tourists, “new
tourists” visit “dangerous” developing
countries and regions ravaged by political
violence and poverty in order to establish
certain reputations and distance themselves
from other tourists. These trends have led to
on international tourism
a surge in popularity for certain destinations,
including El Salvador, South Africa and India.
S. McClarence illuminates the attitude of one
such “new tourist,” a 28-year-old New York
businessman who traveled to Calcutta to find
real, “swollen-bellied poverty” in the city’s
slums. Snapping photos of the destitute is,
for some travelers, a very fashionable thing
to do.
Even when international tourists do
not explicitly “zooify” local residents, they
often objectify and commodify them. More
often than not, the victims of such tourist
commodification are local women, particularly
women who live in popular sex-tourism
destinations. Sex tourism remains a major
sub-sector of the international tourism
industry and has recently become entrenched
in countries like Cuba, Thailand and Russia.
As cash-crop economies have crumbled due
to international price wars, driving agricultural
producers to bankruptcy, poor rural women in
developing countries have come to
constitute the majority of the workforce in
the free-trade zones legalized by political
globalization. Those women who do not have
access to low-paid maquiladora-style jobs are
typically forced to eke out a meager
existence on the fringes of society, surviving
on sporadic informal sector work, including
sex work. Sex tourism is not always
denounced by international tourism
companies. Than Dam Truong explains: “For
the international tourism conglomerates, the
availability of sexual services as an exotic
commodity functions as a source of tourist
attraction and helps to fill airplane seats and
hotel rooms.”
As a result of the gendered division
of labor, the tourism industry has provided
women in developing countries with otherwise
scarce jobs. Yet the international tourism
industry’s susceptibility to travel trends has
led to boom-and-bust cycles of tourist
activity, which have dire consequences for
developing economies and impoverished
tourism employees, particularly women.
International tourism embodies an
uneven distribution of wealth and power,
which is often overlooked in pop-culture
representations of this important and
complex industry. Travel trends continue to
fluctuate constantly; in the last five years,
international tourism has been shaped by
health scares about SARS and HIV/AIDS and
new outbreaks of political violence and war
in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. What
this means for residents in tourist destinations
remains to be seen.
In 2002, Mitra conducted field research on tourism
in Havana, Cuba. Last year she completed an M.Sc.
in Politics of the World Economy on a Fulbright
Scholarship at the London School of Economics.
Please send comments and requests for related
reading lists to mightymousemitra@yahoo.com.

A PARADIGM SHIFT IN PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
the world social forum
By Sarah H. Cross and Alice do Valle
W
e are standing on the corner of
Rua Fernando Machado and
Avenida Borges. Two hundred
thousand people are passing by. In the
building across from us, we notice an older
man in a third-floor window striking a
saucepan with a wooden spoon, adding his
own beat to the bright samba sounds from
groups of musicians and enthusiastic chants
from the crowd. A group of drummers stops in
front of his window; they start playing and
calling up to him, raising their hands in the
air and laughing. It is a parade. It is a march
of the most tremendous diversity and loud
excitement we have ever seen. A group of
indigenous men chant and shake rattles.
Japanese youngsters wear Palestinian
headscarves. A young woman walks by. Her Tshirt
reads, “My bush would make a better
president.”
Avenida Borges is a main street in
Porto Alegre, Brazil. It leads from the
downtown center to a collection of
warehouses along Guaiba Bay, where this
incredible mass of people from all over the
globe — 155,000 official registrants — have
convened for the fifth annual World Social
Forum. People are here from India, Uganda
and Uzbekistan, Thailand, New Zealand,
Brazil and Belgium — almost every country
in the world. They are people who believe
“Another World is Possible” and want to find
solutions to our most pressing problems —
poverty, hunger, violence, environmental
destruction, sexism, homophobia, racism,
corporate exploitation. For six days, thinkers
and doers come together to connect and
strategize. Their ideas and practices are
communicated through workshops and
panels, theater and installations, films,
speeches and concerts.
If you are a progressive or a radical,
this is the place to be. The Forum symbolizes
a global trend, indeed, a paradigm shift in
progressive politics. All over the world,
people are engaged in similar struggles.
Water privatization is eliminating millions of
people’s access to water, whether in India or
Bolivia. At an afternoon panel, activists from
Africa, Europe and Latin America emphasized
the necessity of immediate debt relief.
Countries everywhere in the Global South are
obligated to pay their debt to international
financial institutions and are thus, for
example, unable to provide education or
healthcare. The Forum is a new and important
space to connect these struggles: Activists
meet, educate each other and share resources
and strategies.
At the Forum, as we deepen our
understanding of the new habits of global
capital and its effects at the local level, we
develop cutting-edge responses to fight those
effects. We gain strength by witnessing the
parallel struggles of others. Meeting other
strong and dedicated women and men
addressing injustice is an incredible lift and
motivation. Perhaps most importantly, the
alliances we create here are critical in order to
transform the world we live in. We cannot do
this in isolation.
Despite people’s passion for building a
more just world, the Forum still exists in the
world we live in and contains all its
contradictions. In and of itself, the Forum
illustrates and reproduces the system and
dynamics it is trying to change. At a panel
titled “Feminism and the Anti-Globalization
Movement,” there was agreement that
oppressive international practices impact
women disproportionately. There was also
agreement that there are significant obstacles
to women’s leadership and participation both
within the anti-globalization movement itself
and its most public spaces such as the World
Social Forum and regional forums that take
place each year. Panelists raised vital
questions that apply to the Forum and other
international organizing spaces: How can
women make alliances with other sectors and
movements without diluting the most
subversive components of feminism? Even
here, especially here, they warned, we must
maintain a constant vigilance and continuous
struggle against sexism. Their discussion
about sexism reminds us to maintain a similar
vigilance against interlocking forms of
oppression.
Still, despite the challenges, we must
continue to make those alliances. The Forum
provides a crucial space, the first of its kind
in size and scope, for activists from
intersecting movements to create shared
values by consent, to strengthen the
conversation about global interdependence
and to articulate an agenda for global justice
that responds to the unjust power structure
with the urgency our current situation
demands. We must now be global activists,
both fueled by and adding to international
solidarity.
At its worst moments, the mood
among progressives in the United States —
after the election, after Iraq, after something
in this morning’s headlines — can be somber
and bewildered, and many of us can succumb
to political disillusionment and apolitical
irony. We are isolated and uncertain about
how to respond to our domestic and global
crises. This global trend is an alternative. It
presents an opportunity to connect with the
excitement and hopefulness fiercely
manifested at the Forum. Here, passion and
commitment are welcomed and reinforced.
Here there are other leaders, creatives and
visionaries who risk imagining a better world.
The feminists at the panel reminded
us that the fashion now, the trend to
broaden, is not elaborating a utopian vision
for the future — though we always imagine
what attributes a just society might have —
but practicing it passionately in the present.
Sarah H. Cross is a U.S.-born writer and producer
who documents the strategies and visions of
activists and artists. Alice do Valle, a Brazilian
living in California, directs the campaign work for
Justice Now, a human-rights organization that
works with women in prison. They both attended
and presented at the 2005 World Social Forum.
Find out more about the Forum and learn about
how to attend future WSFs at
www.forumsocialmundial.org.br.
T-shirts spotted at the Forum:
“Stop the War”
“Jews for Peace”
(Ubiquitous) Che Guevara images
“Associación de las Madres de Plazo de
Mayo”
“Não ao capitalismo” (photo: young boy with
slingshot)
(front) “Pacifistas sin Fronteras” (back)
“Déjeme en Paz, Não Ma Perturbe”
[Pacifists Without Borders: Leave Me in
Peace, Don’t Bother Me]
“Lugar de Mulher é na Política” [A Woman’s
Place Is in Politics]
“Dalits will Make Another World Possible”
“Emancipación Ya!” [Emancipation Now!]
LOUDmouth 26

f
ashion>cars>steel couture>you are
what you drive, and what you drive is
sexxxy
Men the world over can be like a rock,
moms can love what their Toyota does for
them, 20-somethings can zoom zoom and
white collars, when they hand over their
$30,995 to $90,000, are paying for not just a
Jaguar, but for a/n [s]experience. The more
straightforward among us might simply opt
for the Ultimate Driving/Orgasm Machine.
Just as processed-food marketers
have heavily contributed to an epidemicturning-pandemic
of obesity, automobile
marketers have fostered a culture of car
dependence that is spreading as quickly as
economies will allow. Both industries
achieved their goals in part by presenting the
consumption of their products as a
replacement for sex (something that the
body says should be constant, but isn’t
always) and by building a customer base so
steady that their products have become a
bona fide part of everyday life.
If you missed the commercials, here’s
how the message works: Log onto the Ford
Motor Vehicles website (www.ford.com).
Though you might be the most vehement of
car opponents, the site is so slick and so
craftily designed that it will excite you.
Choose a brand. Choose a car. Notice your
physical reaction (accelerated heart rate,
dilated pupils, etc.) as you view the flock of
shiny beasts. View a web commercial for the
2005 Mustang. Learn that it is 4.8 inches
longer, 2.3 inches taller and nearly an inch
wider than its predecessor. Peep at its “forward
thrust, communicating motion even when at
rest.” Visitors/potential customers/you can
also “paint your vehicle,” and, in so doing,
receive a sense of both premature ownership/
possession and control.
LOUDmouth 27
Face it: Whether it’s a soccer-mom
white Dodge Astrovan; 8-foot-high-spoilered,
chrome-rimmed, LID-headlighted/HEDtaillighted,
tricked-out, drag-racing Civic;
neo-hippie, peace-loving, stylish-and-sensible
“people’s car”; or a concrete-jungle-masterwith-money-to-burn,
city-roading Range
Rover, the marketers telling you what’s cool
about their car know their shit. If you’re
going to affirm your good taste/good
sense/regard for the environment/sexual
prowess, demand your right to move at high
speeds, shift community space to private
space, inefficiently use up natural resources
and pollute, you might as well do it in
accordance with your image.
Car culture, as we currently know it,
breeds insecurity. It is dependence. It is not
a solution. It is inefficient. It is, in four
words, fanaticism at its fiercest.
Or perhaps: Hey, I shouldn’t be so
hard on you! Drivers aren’t inherently evil.
Cars can be used for good purposes. And
some car consumers do put forth an effort to
make relatively socially/environmentally
conscious purchases. But as a polygamous
philosopher once espoused to a naysayer,
Don’t hate the playa. Hate the game.
fashion>driving>all revved up with nowhere
to go>personal box and god/ford-given right
to move
When I was about 10 years old and
riding in the back seat of my mother’s car, my
sister, two years my senior and quirky as hell,
looked at me from her “shotgun” perch and
said, “Aren’t cars weird: boxes that people sit
in and transport themselves in!?” Having
been L.A.-born and raised, I had simply
taken cars for granted as a fact of life as
constant as the horizon’s existence.
Presented with this new line of thought, I
By Jennifer Ashley
peered out the window at the five lanes of
freeway traffic whizzing by. It did, indeed,
look weird. People, I knew from the
speedometer on my mother’s dashboard, were
traveling at around 80 MPH yet sitting
completely stationary in their boxes-onwheels.
Furthermore, some were doing tasks
probably best completed in the casual (and
immobile) comforts of their bedrooms —
brushing their hair, applying their make up,
fumbling with who knows what. Had it been
about five years later, I no doubt would have
spotted some talking on the phone as well.
About five seconds later, however, my train
of thought was disrupted by another and
remained derailed for another eight years.
The mass consumption of the
personal automobile, championed by Ford
Motor Company, changed the way the world’s
wealthiest societies thought. The motor
vehicle, a luxury previously viewed as only
affordable to the upper class, suddenly
became available to the average consumer.
Elitism and affordability met halfway down
the road and gave rise to a high demand for
these personal boxes, and the supply-anddemand
cycle continued on its merry way.
And then the cities had to be
restructured to make way for the cars, which
meant any possibility for feasible masstransit
systems disappeared. The automobile,
oil and insurance industries, quickly seeing
the more profitable of the two systems —
highways or railroads — supported their
choice, and Los Angeles became the world’s
most famous massive city-turned-ten-lanefreeway-turned-parking-lot.
But that was
long ago, and people today say, with firm
conviction, that they drive simply because
“L.A.’s too big.”
While the first wave of mass car
consumers viewed their cars as a symbol of

prestige, most 16-year-olds today can’t wait
to get a driver’s license because it’s their
ticket to freedom. And, in a society where
individualism is prized over the common
good, it’s no wonder that this freedom is
more highly valued than, say, the resources
— not just “natural resources,” but physical,
psychological, spatial, etc. — that a car
culture undermines. It’s so much more highly
valued, in fact, that the rest is all but
ignored: To most, cars=freedom=good. Period.
Yet, as “Capitalism, Fascism, Car
Culture,” published in Carbusters Issue 3
(author unnamed), argues “… rather than
being an instrument of democracy, mass
motoring gives and supports in everyone the
illusion that each individual can seek his or
her own benefit at the expense of everyone
else. Take the cruel and aggressive
selfishness of the driver who at any moment
is figuratively killing the ‘others,’ who appear
merely as physical obstacles to his or her own
speed. … [D]river behaviour acts out the
idea that the strong dominate and the weak
should be crushed.” 1
And what about those who truly
cannot afford to drive in a car-dominated
society? “Crush them!” is the attitude often
demonstrated by the overall apathy toward
removing the driving mandate. During L.A.’s
most recent bus strike in November 2003
(three years after its predecessor — right on
schedule), public-transit users were left, in
mild cases, walking long distances and
waiting long hours for transportation and, in
the most extreme cases, rideless and
eventually jobless. The 32-day-long ordeal
gave opportunists the chance to offer
overpriced, illegal and unsafe “taxi” rides in
their private vehicles to those desperate
enough to take them, and public pressure
and media coverage were far from
satisfactory. Queries sent to Los Angeles city
councilmembers were replied to with bland
auto-responses ensuring their recipients that
everything was being done to reach an
agreement, but in the end, those who could
not drive fared the worst, while those who
could were neither affected nor concerned.
Moreover, the compulsion to drive
barricades our interaction as a community
not only by continuing to encourage such
animus attitudes, but also by fostering
divisions in our space. The personal box, our
freeform bedrooms cruising down the road,
the road that takes away real living space.
Living space that’s also being compromised
by other vehicle-accommodation structures
— garages, parking lots, driveways, paved
roads, highways, freeways, etc. Psychologically,
society is compromised, in that the space
required for these constructs could be used
as genuine community spaces such as parks
or neighborhood-friendly front yards. Lastly,
put in temporal terms, we’ve lost quite a bit
of space: Shorten the time it takes to travel
between two points, and that distance is
effectively shortened — removing yet more
1 http://www.carbusters.org/magazine/no3.php#feature4.
valuable space. By making the world a
“smaller place,” we’re doing literally that —
but in all the wrong ways. Size, it seems,
matters after all.
fashion>speed>cruise controlled>driving as
an addict
As any pedestrian in a car-happy
town such as Los Angeles will attest to, being
enshrouded in a 1,000-pound metal box
seems to give people the delusion — and
arrogance — of invincibility. In fact, in
“Hooked on Cars,” Sina Arnold and Domenica
Settle argue that driving is an addiction
comparable to any substance addiction,
complete with physical reactions: “Humans
experience a rush of power and lust flowing
through them every time they drive, every
time they are in control of a large technical
machine like a car. The car thus takes on a
different meaning, no longer just a means of
travel, but a surrogate satisfaction.” 2
Whatever kicks drivers get out of
driving and reasons they won’t quit aside,
sometimes there is simply “no” feasible
alternative: In the suburbs, which oftentimes
are lacking in the public-transit department,
the distances between points of
interest/necessity are so great that walking
or biking as a main means of transportation
is, with contemporary society’s expectations,
nearly impossible. And, in many car-lovin’
cities where public transportation is available
but still takes the backseat to cars in terms
of popularity, both the image and the reality
of a non-driver leaves something to be
desired because, after all, bikes are for
children, and walking is for exercise. Not
driving=not cool, man!
As a pedestrian in various areas of Los
Angeles, both affluent and not, I’ve had passing
drivers yell, throw things and obscenely gesture
at me as well as collide and nearly collide
with me. One non-driving male acquaintance
recently confided that women who have
seemed interested in dating him are all but
repulsed when his automotive deficiencies
are revealed. Car=provider=“manliness.”
fashion>car culture>worldwide>china, the
world’s next parking lot
While the world’s wealthy nations
have embraced car culture for nearly a
century, many developing countries have yet
to become tied to the automobile as their
economies simply haven’t allowed it. But
with the world’s most rapidly developing
economy, China is one country on the brink of
embracing car culture — wholeheartedly. For
the first time, a generation of Chinese has
been raised with enough money to be
comfortable and now earn enough money to
make many of the same purchases as their
western counterparts. The most important —
one could say, the ultimate purchase — of
these is, of course, a personal automobile.
Why? For the same reasons everybody else
has: speed, prestige, freedom and, as one
2 http://www.carbusters.org/magazine/no7.php#feature2.
Shanghai resident puts it, the “love [of] the
feeling of holding the wheel.” 3
According to Chinese-infrastructure
experts, the nation is not prepared to handle
the explosive influx of four-wheeled motor
vehicles that is predicted to hit the streets
over the next decade. The nation’s two major
metropolises, Beijing and Shanghai, are
infamous for streets that are already surging
with too many pedestrians, bicycles and
motor vehicles. One figure, published on
MSNBC.com’s “Will China Choke on Its Car
Culture?” by Miguel Llanos, puts the daily
addition to the number of cars on Beijing’s
streets at 1,000. By 2020, the article states,
China expects to have 150 million motor
vehicles on the road nationwide — a figure
that is triple that of today’s.
But, in a country where Häagen-Dazs
has its own upscale, sit-down restaurants
charging upwards of USD 10 for a plate of ice
cream to serve patrons for whom presenting
the image of wealth is king, it’s little wonder
that people are still clamoring to get their
hands on the proverbial wheel. The
burgeoning middle class, for whom the
acquisition of wealth, the concept of “face”
and the suggestion of prestige are priority,
firmly assumes that car ownership is part of
the future.
fashion>car culture>worldwide>fashion forward
>carfree cities
Perhaps the most famous of all
carfree cities is Venice, Italy, a city of 70,000
residents who commute entirely by foot or by
the city’s trademark waterways. China’s
20,000-strong Gulang Island, in the
southeastern city of Xiamen, is also nearly
completely devoid of motor vehicles.
Residents walk and use handcarts to
transport cargo.
While the push for carfree cities is
blossoming mostly in Europe, on every
continent there exists at least a handful of
cities or districts that boast either a dramatic
limit to the number of cars or a scheduled
plan for becoming carfree.
Wikipedia’s comprehensive list of
“carfree” cities is available at http://en.wiki
pedia.org/wiki/List_of_carfree_places.
3
“In China: A Romantic Car Culture” by Anna Wong and
Linda Ding. Full text at
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~banana/Car%20Craze.htm.
Jennifer moved to China and upgraded to a set of
wheels — two of them. Ask her what tooling
around in a dedicated bike lane feels like:
voodikon@yahoo.com.
Information and support for the automotively
uninclined/repulsed and recovering driving addicts
in Los Angeles and elsewhere:
www.busridersunion.org
www.carbusters.org
www.carfree.net
www.bikesummer.org
www.critical-mass.org
LOUDmouth 28

LOUDmouth 29
J
osie catches a glimpse of bra:
dingy white. They are on a trolley
rumbling toward the ocean when
Ann reaches up and buttons two buttons
that have parted ways in front of her round
breasts. But more than that there is a
hunch as she pulls her shoulders toward
each other, making a “C” of her upper body
and becoming a living blush. There is a
flourish of fingers — neat, no need for nail
polish — as she reassembles, fumbling in
her haste.
Because the thing is, Ann does not
seem the type to need boobs at all. These
butch girls with their cropped hair and
thick black belts over jutting hip bones.
These girls Josie is fascinated by but
cannot talk to, in a different — but not
completely different — way than she
cannot talk to men.
And then: As if it were just a blink
or a glitch in the matrix, Ann is Ann again,
leaning into the street, shouting
something at someone as the trolley
shakes on its hot metal tracks. Selma
laughs at whatever it is Ann has just said.
Ann is Selma’s friend. Selma is Josie’s
girlfriend. Selma has two long orange
Unbuttoned
By Cheryl Klein
braids today and tells rambling, sparkling
stories. She is not one of those butch girls.
Josie loves her in all the ways she is not
mysterious, but she knows she can reach
out at any time and put her hand on
Selma’s freckled forearm and it will be
warm from the sun cutting through the
slats on the side of the trolley — and that
gesture will be exactly the size of itself.
Has anyone else noticed? Has
anyone else seen Ann’s not-having-sextoday
bra? Her quick save? And suddenly
Josie wants to protect her. She wants to
tell the middle-aged man with the baseball
cap who has been staring at all of them the
whole ride, “No, see, Ann ran way from
home when she was 17. Ann knows how to
shoot a gun and make calzone. Ann doesn’t
drink because she doesn’t see the point.”
She wants to tell him this, but the
buttons, the buttons she will keep for
herself.
Cheryl Klein’s fiction has appeared in Absinthe
Literary Review, CrossConnect and Tattoo
Highway. She also co-edits the online queerfiction
mag Blithe House Quarterly. E-mail her:
cheryl_e_klein@yahoo.com.

DOMESTICV
DOMESTIC
IOLENCESE
XUALASSAU
XUAL XUALASSAU
LTSTALKIN
GDOMESTIC
DOMESTIC
VIOLENCES
THE WOMEN’S RESOURCE CENTER AT CAL STATE L.A.
Calendar of Events
SPRING 2005
The Business of Fancydancing
Thursday, April 7 at 6 p.m.
Cross Cultural Center, King Hall D140
Sherman Alexie’s directorial debut about a successful
gay, Indian poet from Spokane is an award-winning
exploration of identity, culture and history. Directed
by Sherman Alexie, 2002, 103 minutes.
Forget Baghdad: A Screening and
Discussion with Ella Shohat
Monday, April 11 at 4 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom
Ella Shohat is a professor of cultural studies at NYU
and author of Israeli Cinema: East/West and the
Politics of Representation. She will screen and
discuss the new film Forget Baghdad, about Arab-
Jewish cultural relations.
Violence Awareness Day
Thursday, April 14 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Roybal Institute Conference Rooms
This event consists of a series of educational
workshops on dating and domestic violence, sexual
assault and stalking.
Soldier’s Girl
Thursday, April 14 at 6 p.m.
Cross Cultural Center, King Hall D140
Soldier’s Girl is the true story of an American soldier
who was killed after falling in love with a beautiful
transgender nightclub performer. Directed by Frank
Pierson, 2003, 112 minutes.
Take Back the Night
Tuesday, April 19 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Housing Services, Phase II Quad
This annual event is an important opportunity for
the community to come together to help stop rape,
sexual assault and domestic violence.
Playing Out: Lesbian and Gay Athletes
Challenging the Culture of the Closet
in Sport: A Lecture by Pat Griffin
Wednesday, April 20 at 6:30 p.m.
Physical Education 123
Pat Griffin is an Emerita Professor in Social Justice
Education at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst and author of Strong Women, Deep Closets:
Lesbians and Homophobia in Sports.
On May 19, 2005, the Center for the Study of Genders and
Sexualities and the Gender and Queer Alliance will proudly host
“Gender, Sexuality and Power,” a student-research conference, at
Cal State L.A. This event will recognize the research of Cal State L.A.
students in the areas of genders and sexualities. If you are interested
in being a part of the planning committee or participating in the
conference, please stop by the Center for the Study of Genders and
Sexualities at King Hall D4050 or call (323) 343-6549.
What’s Under Your Hood?
Tuesday, April 26 at 3:15 p.m.
Housing Services, Phase II Quad
Join us for this do-it-yourself workshop and find
out what’s really going on under your hood. Learn
the basics of car maintenance, including how to
change a tire, check your oil, work with mechanics
and more.
Soul Stories: An Evening with Vanessa
Williams
Thursday, April 28 at 7 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom
Vanessa Williams, star of the hit Showtime series
Soul Food, is also an author, filmmaker and
singer/songwriter. She will screen her short film,
Dense, as well as share her experience and writing.
Followed by a reception.
Chink-O-Rama: A Performance by Kate
Rigg and the Chink-O-Rama Dancers
Saturday, May 14 at 8 p.m.
Luckman Theatre
Kate Rigg’s Chink-O-Rama deconstructs and
explodes images of Asian America found in pop
culture. Combining sketch, musical numbers and
fly-girl dancing, it’s a comedy-music revue in the
style of In Living Color, but with a decidedly Asian
slant. For ticket information, call (323) 343-6600.
7th Annual Distinguished Women
Awards
Tuesday, May 17 from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom
Join us for the seventh annual celebration
honoring the achievements of women faculty, staff
and administrators at Cal State L.A.
Night Girl
Thursday, May 26 at 6 p.m.
Cross Cultural Center, King Hall D140
Night Girl is a compelling documentary about Han
Lin, a 17-year old made to enter the Beijing
workforce as a go-go dancer in order to support her
family. Directed by Yingli Ma, 2001, 45 minutes.
Unless otherwise noted, events are free and open to everyone. For more
information or assistance in accommodating a disability, please call
the Cross Cultural Center at (323) 343-5001.
with us!Get LOUD
LOUDmouth is always looking for new
writers, editors, illustrators, photographers
and other fine folk to join our team. Send
submissions and/or letters of interest to
loudmouthzine@wildmail.com.
LOUDmouth 30

What getting dressed
means to me …
Getting dressed means deciding to be tough with
your fake leather boots, sexy with your lilyflowered
bra, brave with your revoluciónary tees,
simple with your loose khaki pants, anti-mall with
your clothes from the segunda … and deciding to
live in freedom, feeling that whatever goes over
your body isn’t as important as what’s in your soul.
—Elisa, 34
The more intimidating the day ahead, the more
creative my outfit. —Julie, 24
It means putting on a facade of respectability
because, despite my many accomplishments, I
will continue to be judged not by my fine clothes,
but by the color of my beautiful brown Chicana
skin. My clothes cannot compensate me for the
poverty of my skin and by putting on clothes, I am
only reminded of my colonized state.
—Erika, 26
Getting dressed to me is being comfortable in my
own clothes and comfortable with myself.
—Norah, 21
Representin’! Well, maybe more like eventual
synchronization of my mood, wardrobe and the
last few minutes before I have to storm out of my
house. Gussying up for me is like getting all my
girls to do a Busby Berkeley poolside routine
without the nose clips!
—Edahrline, ageless
My clothes are a code to my mood; however, at all
times I am ready to take on the world.
—Jennifer, 20
Getting dressed means to me to be blessed by
the clothes God blessed me with. I dress up for
the Goddess!!! Ashe! —MilDred (formerly known
as DRED), ageless
www.calstatela.edu/usu/loudmouth
It means to get my inner thoughts out through a
bunch of clothes which express, by their colors,
size, arts, etc., what my body and my mind feel
like. Or to lock my thoughts in — not to let them
be visible from the outside — hiding them in the
closet of the same fucking bunch of clothes. I
suppose it depends on the day.
—lolagouine, 26
In my 30s, it means feeling beautiful all the time —
whether in jeans, sweats or the latest digs.
—Rita, 32
For me, getting dressed is more than protecting
my body from the elements or shielding the public
from my naked body. It’s about worshiping my
body by adorning it with carefully chosen pieces,
celebrating its existence through decoration.
From the style of earrings I select, to the type of
fabric I allow to be next to my skin, getting
dressed has become a cherished ritual.
—Kerith, ageless
Getting dressed means agonizing in the closet
about who to look like today.
—Leslie, 19
Getting dressed was always about being sexy,
which in my worlds equated power, but lately
getting dressed is about the texture of the fabric,
its feel on my skin, the tight or loose caress and
the splash of color. It is about wearing and being
my best, which I’ve found is far more sexy and
self-empowering than letting it all hang out.
—ariel, ageless
To me, getting dressed is a pain in the ass.
—Liz, 29
It means playtime/costume sometimes and other
times that I’m never as professional as others
want me to be.
—CocaColaChola, infinity
beyond
SPEAK UP
THE WORLD IS LISTENING