Academic Roundup

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer






Here is some information which may be of interest to students, academics and researchers in fields relating to feminism and other anti-oppression work.

Wanted: Bisexual-identified women to participate in research

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer






Sarah Robinson at Huddersfield University is researching bisexual women's identities and is looking for research participants. She says:

Overall, the research aims to develop our understanding of women who define their sexuality as ‘bisexual’. More specifically it aims to:

1 Explore the ways in which bisexual women narrate their identity in the 21st Century.

2 Explore the extent to which bisexual women experience ‘biphobia’ or discrimination.

3 Explore how identifying as a bisexual woman impacts on her lived experience.

I am looking also at how women maintain their bisexual identity when engaged in a monogamous relationship. The women I require don’t necessarily have to be in a monogamous relationship – just be able to speak about the difficulties/or not associated with it.

Participants will be asked to keep a diary for four weeks. They will be asked to include details of specific events that they feel are related to some aspect of their sexual identity. This will be the first stage in developing an understanding of the everyday lives of the participants.

Following on from this I hope to conduct an interview which will seek to explore any issues that may have arisen out of the participants’ diaries.

Following the life story interview participants will be supplied with a disposable camera and asked to take photographs of people, places and objects that are meaningful in relation to their sexual identity. Participants will be requested to take at least 12 photographs within a week of receiving the camera. They will be supplied with a stamp addressed envelope to return the camera after they have completed the task. When the photographs have been developed the participants will take part in a photo-assisted interview.

If you are interested please email Sarah at s.robinson at hud.ac.uk

Getting Dressed

Posted by Annalytica

The transcript for this video is under the description on YouTube.



I wrote the sketch “Getting Dressed” to highlight one of the many ways that our culture invites women to feel bad about ourselves: namely, the social acceptability of commenting on a woman’s choice of clothing, in a way which can be really quite vicious. In this post I want to explore this issue further. Comments about clothing are obviously related to comments about women’s appearance in general, and there are other issues about the pressure on women to change not only our clothes but our very bodies. I don’t want to play down in any way the importance of body image issues, and I hope that they will be discussed elsewhere on this blog by others. For me personally however, clothing is a source of more anxiety than body image, so that’s what I’m going to focus on here.

Job opportunity: Researching LGBT youth self-harm

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer






Lashers in academia may be interested to know that the University of York are advertising a part-time, 18 week post for someone with a PhD or equivalent experience in social sciences. The research associate will work with qualitative methods to investigate how self harm is represented in online LGBT youth forums.

Further details are available here:
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/spsw/research/jobs.html

Links roundup

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer

Below are some websites we thought you might enjoy. Some of these sites are not suitable for work and may contain triggers: this should be clear from the descriptions. In fact, even the titles and descriptions of some are NSFW, so they are beneath the cut.

If you have found any interesting sites you would like to share with Lashers, please put a brief description and a link in the comments. As always, please warn for triggers if appropriate.

Dates for your diary

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer






Below are some events that may be of interest to Lashers. Please note that we are not responsible for these events: we are just passing on the information. Please contact the organisers of each event to find out more. The @ symbol in organisers' email addresses has been replaced with "at" to avoid attracting spambots.


Toward new forms of queer belonging?

What: A day of workshops which will challenge the ways in which gay rights are increasingly being used in nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric and ask what possibilities there are for an effective queer solidarity.

When: Friday Feb 25th, 11am -7pm

Where: Manchester, various venues

Contact: racerevolt at riseup.net

Find out more: Race Revolt



Oxford International Women's Festival

What: Two weeks of events on the theme of women and wellbeing

When: February 28th - March 13th

Where: Oxford - various venues


Find out more: Oxford International Women's Festival


One of the many events which are part of this festival is......

Red Box, featuring Lashings

What: Regular women only social night. This month is a special performance night to celebrate International Women's Day

When: Tue 8th March, from 8pm

Where: Baby Simple, Cowley Road, Oxford

Contact: admin at redboxoxford.co.uk

Find out more: Facebook page



Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism, featuring Lashings

What: Part festival, part conference, bringing together feminist artists, performers, activists and academics to explore the question: Can feminist art change the world?
Featuring Lashings of Ginger Beer! (We are very excited about this!)

When: Thu 3rd - Sat 5th March 2011. Lashings are performing at 2:45pm on Saturday.

Where: York University

Contact: carnival at feminist-cultural-activism.net

Find out more: http://www.feminist-cultural-activism.net/index.html



Oxford LGBT Book Club

What: Monthly book club reading books with an LGBT theme. This month they are reading "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham

When: Mon March 7th, 7pm

Where: The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street

Contact: oxlgbtbooks at gmail.com

Find out more: Facebook link

For info: Oxford Pride seeks artists

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer






Oxford Pride is Oxford's premier GLBTIQ festival which runs for ten days
and hosts a range of events, exhibitions and celebrations.

They are looking for Artists of all disciplines who are interested in
participating in its 2011 programme during June.

All artistic mediums are welcome to submit: painters, sculptors,
drawers, performance artists, video artists and everything in between.

Please submit a brief Artist statement, C.V and up to five jpegs (of no
more than 1MB per image) to: marcus@oxford-pride.org.uk

Deadline: Monday 28th of February 2011

On Identity And Choice

Posted by Sally Outen

This post begins, as so many things do, with a Google search. This might not have been the case a decade ago; it might not be the case for somebody lacking the situational privileges that I enjoy - but an estimate of the percentage of my life I spend using Google these days would probably bring me out in a cold sweat. The thing is, Google is so very helpful. It can find over 15,000 images of "cute little naked mole rats". It can give me all the heady thrills of traversing the streets of Swindon, from the comfort of my own home (that's one £5 train ticket I'll never need to buy). It can even present me with a helpful drop-down list of predicted search terms when I start typing a standard search, just in case I wasn't sure what I was looking for in the first place.

That drop-down list does occasionally make for a fascinating (if entirely unscientific) survey of people's opinions. "My favourite animal is" yields "cat", "dog", "tiger", "rabbit", and, thanks to Fran Lebowitz, "steak". Now let's try "Being gay is a". Depressingly, the four suggestions provided are, in order, "choice", "sin", "mental illness", and "disease". OK, so the wording I used was always likely to reveal more of the usual hate and misconceptions than anything else. The point I'd like to run with is that "choice" was at the top of the list.

In this post, I'll make a quick examination of the concept of choice as it applies to sexual and gender identities; then I'll explain why I feel that such attempts at analysis are ultimately futile; then I'll explain why that shouldn't be a problem.

Safe Space Comments Policy, AKA, the Lashings sandbox

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer

Please read this comments policy before posting comments on any post. The policy is intended to keep this blog a safe space for the discussion of sensitive issues. If the moderators feel that a comment contravenes safe space policy, they may delete it.