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SUMMARY:reVisions: Decoding Technological Bias
DESCRIPTION:Join City Lights\, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco\, and Gray Area for reVisions\, a week-long festival exploring how technological bias shapes our cultural realities. \nOur trust in mediated experiences has never been lower. Governed by algorithms that perpetuate the biases and weaknesses of their developers\, our cultural consumption is increasingly shaped by undetectable forces that determine our reality. Images play an important role here: fake photos and videos created with deep neural networks threaten privacy\, democracy\, and national security. Vision recognition systems skew gender\, race\, and class differences and become vehicles of discrimination. Underdeveloped AI models misrepresent the health disparities faced by minority populations. \nHow can we illuminate the algorithmic bias embedded within technology and counter the perpetuation of bias? What innovative approaches can we develop to strengthen inclusion\, diversity\, and sustainability in technology? \nThis festival brings a network of luminaries together to share new perspectives and rewrite new visions advocating for justice and reclaiming power. \nThe festival is part of the project IMAGE + BIAS that critically engages with the cultural realities being increasingly determined by imperceptible technologies. \nSpeakers: \n• Jillian York\n• Maureen Webb\n• Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski\n• Ryan Milner and Whitney Phillips\n• Jer Thorp and Romi Ron Morrison \n\nWorkshops: \n• Understanding AI Data Bias Workshop\n• BYOW Workshop: Build Your Own Words to Resist Algorithmic Censorship\n• Meme Tactics Workshop \nAll events are free but require registration. Links are posted below each event description. \n\n  \nSPEAKER SCHEDULE \n  \nThursday June 10\, 2021 \nSession 1 \n12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern \nAgainst Technosolutionism! Why We Can’t Regulate Our Way Out Of This Mess \nwith Jillian York \n   \nThe same radical technologies that helped give rise the social and political movements of 2010-12 later enabled a rise in disinformation\, propaganda\, and the promotion of other harms. Today\, our societies are grappling to find solutions\, but looking in all the wrong places. \nJillian C. York is International Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation\, EFF. She is also a founding member of the feminist collective\, Deep Lab. She has been covering questions of  surveillance and freedom since the 2000s. She was named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 intellectuals on social media. She has written for the Guardian\, Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy. Verso Books recently released her new book Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism. She is based in Berlin. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nFriday\, June 11\, 2021 \nSession 2 \n12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern \nCoding Democracy – How Hackers Are Disrupting Power\, Surveillance\, and Authoritarianism \nwith Maureen Webb \n   \nHackers have a bad reputation\, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. Maureen Webb would like to offer another view. Hackers\, she argues\, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice\, an ethos\, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed\, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power\, mass surveillance\, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology\, the hacking movement is trying to “build out” democracy into cyberspace. \nMaureen Webb is a human rights lawyer and activist. She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues\, most recently testifying before the House and Senate Committees reviewing the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act. In 2001\, Webb was a Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University in New York. A litigator for some of the first constitutional cases heard under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms\, including the landmark freedom of association case\, “Lavigne\, “and a case challenging the powers of Canada’s newly instituted spy agency\, CSIS\, she sits as co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. She is also the Coordinator for Security and Human Rights issues for Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada. She is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World published by City Lights Books and has taught national security law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nSession 3 \n3:00 pm Pacific / 6:00 pm Eastern \nSurrogate Futures: Technology\, Race\, and the Human \nwith Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski \n     \nIn this talk\, Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski consider how the surrogate effect of technology within technoliberalism\, as they describe it in their book\, Surrogate Humanity: Race\, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019)\, comes to bear on recent discussions around technological bias. Assessing how technological design is central to envisioning and shaping different potential futures\, they emphasize the importance of thinking beyond bias if we are to understand how racial capitalism undergirds technological design. They also explore radical design politics that disrupt more mainstream uses and visions of technological value. \nNeda Atanasoski is Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California\, Santa Cruz\, and author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity. \nKalindi Vora is Professor of Gender\, Sexuality\, and Women’s Studies at the University of California\, Davis\, and author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nSaturday\, June 12\, 2021 \nSession 4 \n12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern \nYou Are Here: A Field Guide \nwith Ryan Milner and Whitney Phillips \n     \nOur media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire\, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here\, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors\, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we\, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map. \nWhitney Phillips is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press). \nRyan M. Milner is Associate Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston and author of The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (MIT Press). \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nSession 5 \n3:00 pm Pacific / 6:00 p.m. \nLiving in Data \nwith Jer Thorp and Romi Ron Morrison \n     \nTo live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from\, classified and categorized\, statisti-fied\, sold\, and surveilled. Data—our data—is mined and processed for profit\, power\, and political gain. In Living in Data\, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data\, and instead become active citizens of it? \nJer Thorp is an artist\, a writer\, and a teacher. He was the first data artist in residence at The New York Times\, he is a National Geographic Explorer\, and he served as the innovator in residence at the Library of Congress in 2017 and 2018. He lives under the Manhattan Bridge with his family and his awesome dog\, Trapper John\, MD. Living in Data is his first book. \nRomi Ron Morrison is a Black queer non-binary artist\, researcher\, and educator. Their work investigates the personal\, political\, ideological\, and spatial boundaries of race\, ethics\, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps\, data\, sound\, performance\, and video\, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property\, people into digits\, and knowledge into data. \nClick the (RSVP LINK) on the Gray Area website to reserve your place in the virtual hall. \n  \nWorkshop Schedule \n  \nWednesday\, June 16\, 2021\, 10am – 1pm Pacific / 1pm – 4pm Eastern \nUnderstanding AI Data Bias \nInstructors: Paul Bethge\, Ralph Eger\, Yannick Hofmann\, & Jana Müller \nIn this workshop\, participants will be introduced to the basics of Deep Learning and explore the topic of data bias. Together\, the implications of this technology will be explored using generative neural networks in the visual media domain. \nCoordinated by The Intelligent Museum \n \nThe Intelligent Museum is a practice-based research and development project at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the German Museum\, with the aim of connecting the museum with current AI technologies\, making it a place of experience and experimentation\, a social space where art\, science\, technology and public discourse come together. \n  \nThursday\, June 17\, 2021\, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Pacific / 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern \nBYOW Workshop: Build Your Own Words to Resist Algorithmic Censorship \nInstructors: Xiaowei Wang\, Qianqian Ye \n   \nTo enroll click the (ENROLLMENT LINK) on the Gray Area website. \nOur capacity for change is shaped by our capacity for language: new phrases\, words\, revolution are created by our ability to imagine new worlds and vocabularies. From hashtags and political slogans\, words serve as reminders and provocations of where we’ve been and where we are headed. \nYet online\, words are not just expressions — words are now a form of data. “The systemic manipulation and monetization of digitized language is a threat to the security and stability of modern society. The very words we use to communicate\, learn\, debate\, and critique have become compromised by opaque algorithmic organisation and optimisation\, and the market-driven profits of private companies such as Google. We might therefore ask ourselves\, just how resilient and secure is language in the digital age?” writes researcher Pip Thornton. Whether in the US\, in China\, globally\, language online has become the medium in which activism arises. Language has also become a form of data\, ready to be co-opted\, used to create machine learning systems for profit\, such as words for training data that form AI models that can “write”. Words have also become an arena for automated censorship and moderation. In China\, automated censorship has led to a surge of creativity as online netizens scramble to “fool the machine”\, through creative use of homophones to images and new characters that bypass OCR (optical character recognition). \nWriting has long been a form of dissent and provocation. Words can destroy worlds or create new worlds. Our new languages will be prismatic in nature\, subject to the multiple\, relational and transnational ways of expression. \nIn this workshop\, we’ll use the Hanzimaker and other parts of the Algorithmic Censorship Toolkit by Future of Memory to experiment with creating new words\, phrases and vocabularies to document the past and think through the future. These new hybrid characters\, a mash of multiple languages\, just as diasporic as their creators will escape classification and recognition by automated systems. We see these characters as a form of visual poetry.\nAs Audre Lorde wrote\, “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change\, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” \nWhat words will we be left with to describe the past? What words will build our future? What is the new vocabulary we need for different kinds of revolution? \nXiaowei Wang is an artist\, coder and a writer. The creative director at Logic magazine\, their work encompasses community-based projects on technology\, ecology\, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Design Awards and featured by the New York Times\, the BBC\, CNN\, VICE\, and elsewhere. \nQianqian Ye is an artist\, educator and organizer based in Los Angeles. She currently teaches at USC Media Arts + Practice and works as a p5.js co-lead at Processing Foundation. She was born and raised in China and moved to the US in 2012. Trained as an architect\, she explores the complex interaction between digital\, architectural\, and social spaces. \n  \nFriday\, June 18\, 2021\, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm Pacific / 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm Eastern \nMeme Tactics Workshop \nInstructors: Josue Chavez\, Kira Simon-Kennedy \n   \nTo enroll click the (ENROLLMENT LINK) on the Gray Area website. \nMemes make us laugh\, and make a message catch on. Best of all\, people can remix them and pass them on. We need all the tools we can get to negotiate power and assert presence. Meme Tactics is a session to share strategies to harness the humorous power of memes for movements. We’ll share examples of dances\, symbols\, zines and patches from Nicaragua\, India\, mainland China\, and beyond. You’ll leave with a set of tactics specific to amplify your own messages. \nJosue Chavez researches media\, translation and labor in China and Central America. He is the co-curator of Meme Tactics\, and his critical writing has been featured in Ada: A Journal of Gender\, New Media and Technology. He is a Ph.D. student in the Hispanic Studies department at Penn. \nKira Simon-Kennedy helps creative people do impactful and interesting things as the co-founder & director of China Residencies\, a co-founder of Rivet\, and an independent film producer. She likes writing guides\, redistributing resources\, and curating meme tactics. \n\n\nSponsored by the City Lights Foundation
URL:https://litseen.com/event/revisions-decoding-technological-bias/
LOCATION:CA
CATEGORIES:Virtual
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DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T190000
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SUMMARY:David & Margaret Talbot: By the Light of Burning Dreams
DESCRIPTION:KPFA Radio 94.1 FM presents a unique Zoom Event: \nDavid & Margaret Talbot \nBy the Light of Burning Dreams:  The Second American Revolution \nHosted by Greg Bridges \nNew York Times bestselling author David Talbot and New Yorker journalist Margaret Talbot illuminate “America’s second revolutionary generation” in this gripping history of one of the most dynamic eras of the twentieth century- brought to life through seven radical episodes that offer urgent lessons for today. \nThe political landscape of the 1960’s and ’70’s was probably the most tumultuous in this country’s history: the fight for civil rights\, women’s liberation\, Black Power\, and the struggle to end the Vietnam War. In many ways\, this second American revolution was a belated fulfillment of the betrayed promises of the first — working to extend the full protections of the Bill of Rights to non-white\, non-male\, non-elite Americans excluded by the nation’s founders. \nBased on exclusive interviews\, original documents\, and archival research\, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the twentieth century radical movement: Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers; Heather Booth and the Jane Collective\, the first underground feminist abortion clinic\, Vietnam peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda\, Cesar Chavez\, Dolores Huerta\, and the United Farm Workers; Craig Rodwell and the gay pride movement; Dennis Banks\, Madonna Thunder Hawk\, Russel Means and the warriors of Wounded Knee; and more.  Margaret and David Talbot reveal the dramatic epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements across race\, class and gender divides. \nDAVID TALBOT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books. \nMARGARET TALBOT has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2004. \nGREG BRIDGES is a radio dj who can be heard over KCSM and KPFA. \nSuggested Donation $5-$20. \nhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/david-talbot-margaret-talbot-by-the-light-of-burning-bridges-tickets-151915694933
URL:https://litseen.com/event/david-margaret-talbot-by-the-light-of-burning-dreams/
LOCATION:Virtual
CATEGORIES:East Bay,Virtual
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T190000
DTSTAMP:20260502T000123
CREATED:20210613T022810Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210613T022810Z
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SUMMARY:Virtual Event: Krys Malcolm Belc and Alex McElroy
DESCRIPTION:Join us on Thursday\, June 17 at 6pm PT when Krys Malcolm Belc discusses his book\, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood\, with Alex McElroy on Zoom!\n\nZoom Login Info\nPlease click the link below to join the webinar:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/87079245281\n\nPraise for The Natural Mother of the Child\n“A formally daring queer memoir about parenthood and inheritance and the way our bodies resist the binaries of the state; The Natural Mother of the Child is brilliant.“ —Carmen Maria Machado\, author of In the Dream House\n\n“All memoirs offer a study of a body through time\, but my favorites make this fact transparent\, refuse to separate the self from its tangible form. This memoir is an embodied story—of non-binary parenthood\, of true partnership and the challenge of navigating systems which were not designed with us in mind\, but on which our most intimate decisions sometimes depend. Above all\, this is a love story\, one which tracks the evolution of self through the relationships that define it. I loved this portrait of a queer family’s making\, its proof that the ways we love and are loved create us.“ —Melissa Febos\, author of Abandon Me & Girlhood\n\n“This is a gorgeous memoir about families\, raising children\, and figuring out how to live in a world where intimate matters are both inscribed by individual history and entangled with the workings of the State. A work of solace and communion\, this book is destined to be a major addition to the literature of parenthood and selfhood\, one that will be read for years to come.” —Lydia Kiesling\, author of The Golden State\n\n“Krys Malcolm Belc’s lyrical memoir brings much-needed nuance to all these old conversations about baby-making\, families\, parenting\, and gender. Belc’s narrative of his conscious creation of self and family is generous\, resonant\, and powerful—I will be pressing this lovely book into the hands of all the parents and parents-to-be I know!” —Andrea Lawlor\, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl\n\nAbout The Natural Mother of the Child\nKrys Malcolm Belc’s visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving\, birthing\, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity.\n\nKrys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary\, transmasculine parent\, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet\, when his partner\, Anna\, adopted Samson\, the legal documents listed Belc as “the natural mother of the child.”\n\nBy considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of “motherhood” don’t fully align with Belc’s own experience\, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays\, Belc has created a new kind of life record\, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one’s life—childhood photos\, birth certificates—and addresses his deep ambivalence about the “before” and “after” so prevalent in trans stories\, which feels apart from his own experience.\n\nThe Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative\, with prose that delights in the intimate dailyness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-event-krys-malcolm-belc-and-alex-mcelroy-2/
LOCATION:online\, CA\, United States
CATEGORIES:Free,San Francisco,Virtual
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T200000
DTSTAMP:20260502T000123
CREATED:20210410T212630Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210410T212630Z
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SUMMARY:Laura Raicovich
DESCRIPTION:Laura Raicovich discusses her new book \nCULTURE STRIKE: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest \npublished by Verso Books \nA leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm and how they can be reimagined. \n———- \n\nThis is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before\, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom. \n———- \nEvent is free\, but registration is required \n———- \n(CLICK HERE) to register. (link to be posted soon!) \n———– \n(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon!) \n————- \nIn an age of protest\, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests against museum funding (like the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (such as the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders)—to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks—have roiled cultural institutions across the world\, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. Meanwhile never have there been more calls for museums to work for social change. \nIn this book\, Laura Raicovich shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better\, public ends. \nLaura Raicovich was President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum. During her tenure\, she was a champion of socially engaged art practices that address the most pressing social\, political\, and ecological issues of our times. She has defined her career with artist-driven projects and programs. She is also the author of At the Lightning Field and A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties. \n  \nSponsored by the City Lights Foundation
URL:https://litseen.com/event/laura-raicovich/
LOCATION:CA
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T200000
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CREATED:20210528T152840Z
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SUMMARY:VIRTUAL: Booksmith and Mother Jones present: Rainesford Stauffer with Becca Andrews / An Ordinary Age
DESCRIPTION:Booksmith and Mother Jones present an evening of conversation between Rainesford Stauffer\, author of the debut An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional\, and Mother Jones reporter Becca Andrews. \nThis event is free and all ages\, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers. \nYou can order An Ordinary Age here. We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all\, don’t hesitate to contact us at events@booksmith.com. \nAbout the book\nFeatured on Good Morning America \nEsquire‘s Book Club Pick \n“A meticulous cartography of how outer forces shape young people’s inner lives.” —Esquire\, Best Books of Spring 2021 \nIn conversation with young adults and experts alike\, journalist Rainesford Stauffer explores how the incessant pursuit of a “best life” has put extraordinary pressure on young adults today\, across our personal and professional lives—and how ordinary\, meaningful experiences may instead be the foundation of a fulfilled and contented life. \nYoung adulthood: the time of our lives when\, theoretically\, anything can happen\, and the pressure is on to make sure everything does. Social media has long been the scapegoat for a generation of unhappy young people\, but perhaps the forces working beneath us—wage stagnation\, student debt\, perfectionism\, and inflated costs of living—have a larger\, more detrimental impact on the world we post to our feeds. \nAn Ordinary Age puts young adults at the center as Rainesford Stauffer examines our obsessive need to live and post our #bestlife\, and the culture that has defined that life on narrow\, and often unattainable\, terms. From the now required slate of (often unpaid) internships\, to the loneliness epidemic\, to the stress of “finding yourself” through school\, work\, and hobbies—the world is demanding more of young people these days than ever before. And worse\, it’s leaving little room for our generation to ask the big questions about who they want to be\, and what makes a life feel meaningful. \nPerhaps we’re losing sight of the things that fulfill us: strong relationships\, real roots in a community\, and the ability to question how we want our lives to look and feel\, even when that’s different from what we see on the ‘Gram. Stauffer makes the case that many of our most formative young adult moments are the ordinary ones: finding our people and sticking with them\, learning to care for ourselves on our own terms\, and figuring out who we are when the other stuff—the GPAs\, job titles\, the filters—fall away. \nAbout the authors\nRainesford Stauffer is a freelance writer\, Kentuckian\, and author of An Ordinary Age\, published May 2021 from Harper Perennial. You can find her on Twitter: @Rainesford. \nBecca Andrews is a reporter at Mother Jones. A Southerner\, she most often writes about the Southeast\, gender\, and culture. Before joining Mother Jones as an editorial fellow\, she wrote for newspapers in Tennessee. Her work has also appeared in Slate\, Marie Claire UK\, and USA Today. Her first book\, No Choice\, on the dwindling access to abortion in the United States\, is forthcoming from Hachette’s Public Affairs imprint. \nThis event is free and all ages\, but RSVP is required.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-booksmith-and-mother-jones-present-rainesford-stauffer-with-becca-andrews-an-ordinary-age/
LOCATION:CA
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T200000
DTSTAMP:20260502T000123
CREATED:20210604T163939Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210604T163939Z
UID:64235-1623952800-1623960000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Event: Krys Malcolm Belc and Alex McElroy
DESCRIPTION:JOIN US ON THURSDAY\, JUNE 17 AT 6PM PT WHEN KRYS MALCOLM BELC DISCUSSES HIS BOOK\, THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD\, WITH ALEX MCELROY ON ZOOM!\nZoom Login Info\nPlease click the link below to join the webinar:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/87079245281\nOr One tap mobile :\nUS: +16699009128\,\,87079245281#  or +13462487799\,\,87079245281#\nInternational numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcNQA6b476 \nPraise for The Natural Mother of the Child\n”A formally daring queer memoir about parenthood and inheritance and the way our bodies resist the binaries of the state; The Natural Mother of the Child is brilliant.“ —Carmen Maria Machado\, author of In the Dream House \n”All memoirs offer a study of a body through time\, but my favorites make this fact transparent\, refuse to separate the self from its tangible form. This memoir is an embodied story—of non-binary parenthood\, of true partnership and the challenge of navigating systems which were not designed with us in mind\, but on which our most intimate decisions sometimes depend. Above all\, this is a love story\, one which tracks the evolution of self through the relationships that define it. I loved this portrait of a queer family’s making\, its proof that the ways we love and are loved create us.“ —Melissa Febos\, author of Abandon Me & Girlhood \n”This is a gorgeous memoir about families\, raising children\, and figuring out how to live in a world where intimate matters are both inscribed by individual history and entangled with the workings of the State. A work of solace and communion\, this book is destined to be a major addition to the literature of parenthood and selfhood\, one that will be read for years to come.“ —Lydia Kiesling\, author of The Golden State \n”Krys Malcolm Belc’s lyrical memoir brings much-needed nuance to all these old conversations about baby-making\, families\, parenting\, and gender. Belc’s narrative of his conscious creation of self and family is generous\, resonant\, and powerful—I will be pressing this lovely book into the hands of all the parents and parents-to-be I know!“ —Andrea Lawlor\, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl \nAbout The Natural Mother of the Child\nKrys Malcolm Belc’s visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving\, birthing\, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity. \nKrys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary\, transmasculine parent\, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet\, when his partner\, Anna\, adopted Samson\, the legal documents listed Belc as “the natural mother of the child.” \nBy considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of “motherhood” don’t fully align with Belc’s own experience\, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays\, Belc has created a new kind of life record\, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one’s life—childhood photos\, birth certificates—and addresses his deep ambivalence about the “before” and “after” so prevalent in trans stories\, which feels apart from his own experience. \nThe Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative\, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-event-krys-malcolm-belc-and-alex-mcelroy/
LOCATION:CA
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/the-natural-mother-of-the-child.png
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T200000
DTSTAMP:20260502T000123
CREATED:20210601T001020Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210601T001020Z
UID:64136-1623956400-1623960000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Sarah Schulman in conversation with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
DESCRIPTION:Sarah Schulman discusses her new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York\, 1987-1993.  Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members\, Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism. In just six years\, ACT UP\, New York\, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races\, genders\, sexualities and backgrounds\, changed the world. Their activism\, in its complex and intersectional power\, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them. Let the Record Show can be purchased from Dog Eared Books Castro at this link: https://www.shopdogearedbookscastro.com/book/9780374185138.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/sarah-schulman-in-conversation-with-mattilda-bernstein-sycamore/
LOCATION:San Francisco Public Library – Virtual Library
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Schulman-Facebook-event.png
ORGANIZER;CN="San Francisco Public Library - Virtual Library":MAILTO:anissa.malady@sfpl.org
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T200000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210617T220000
DTSTAMP:20260502T000123
CREATED:20210425T002728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210425T002728Z
UID:63700-1623960000-1623967200@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic #36
DESCRIPTION:A Latinx poetry reading series y open mic entering into our 3rd consecutive year that happens every third Thursday of the month en el Zoom mundo. Curated y hosted by Josiahluis Alderete.\nSign up for the 10-slot virtual open mic by filling out this form:\nhttps://forms.gle/aHgoJxdUFXZXHjgQA\nThis month’s features: TBA\nIf you enjoy spaces like these\, please support Nomadic Press by donating via:\n1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;\n2) donating or buying a “ticket” at Eventrbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/nomadic-press-monthly… OR\n3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate\nWe will be posting the features’ Venmo handles during the event.\nZoom Joining Info\nTopic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Speaking Axolotl\nTime: Jan 21\, 2021 08:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)\nEvery month on the Third Thu\, 12 occurrence(s)\nJan 21\, 2021 08:00 PM\nFeb 18\, 2021 08:00 PM\nMar 18\, 2021 08:00 PM\nApr 15\, 2021 08:00 PM\nMay 20\, 2021 08:00 PM\nJun 17\, 2021 08:00 PM\nJul 15\, 2021 08:00 PM\nAug 19\, 2021 08:00 PM\nSep 16\, 2021 08:00 PM\nOct 21\, 2021 08:00 PM\nNov 18\, 2021 08:00 PM\nDec 16\, 2021 08:00 PM\nPlease download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.\nMonthly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZYtd…/ics…\nJoin Zoom Meeting\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/82006774895\nMeeting ID: 820 0677 4895\nOne tap mobile\n+16699006833\,\,82006774895# US (San Jose)\n+13462487799\,\,82006774895# US (Houston)\nDial by your location\n+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)\n+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)\n+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)\n+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)\n+1 929 205 6099 US (New York)\n+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington D.C)\nMeeting ID: 820 0677 4895\nFind your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/koTOCjKqF
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-speaking-axolotl-reading-and-open-mic-36/
LOCATION:online\, CA\, United States
CATEGORIES:East Bay,Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/speaking-axolotl.jpg
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