Maria

GenderFest Athens Amos Mac Trans Queer

Original Plumbing by Amos Mac

Original Plumbing is a project by Amos Mac, launched in 2009.

Original Plumbing is a roughly-quarterly, theme-based photo-heavy magazine focusing on the diversity of the trans male community through photographic portraits with a trans lens. Influenced by the aesthetic of teen magazines and vintage physique pictorial rags, each issue is limited edition. 8″ x 10.5″ and with a page count of between 52 to 96 pages.

Besides being founding editor and creative director of this project, Amos Mac has photographed the majority of the spreads within Original Plumbing.

 

Source

Purchase Original Plumbing

Love Bites by Del LaGrace Volcano

LOVE BITES

Book cover

Della Grace
Gay Men’s Press, London 1991

Perhaps the first published photographic monograph of lesbian sexuality in the world made from an insider’s perspective. In the early 90’s ‘Love Bites’ generated a great deal of controversy and censorship in both the mainstream and lesbian/gay media. In the USA it was banned by Customs & Excise for two weeks. In Canada they cut the most ‘offensive’ photographs out of the book before selling it. In England it was sold by mainstream booksellers but not in lesbian or gay bookshops who protested they couldn’t take the risk or disagreed with the SM content. Although it has been out of print for over 10 years it is still considered a queer classic.

#Phase by Samania

PHASE is a two-pronged (film + poem) response to those who tell queer women ‘It’s just a phase.’

 

 

Artist/Scholar duo Samania (Samira Mahboub + Ania Catherine) release PHASE: A response to those who tell queer women ‘It’s just a phase‘. Samania, based on their experience as a couple and hearing comments such as ‘I don’t get it, I’m just worried about you, It’s just a phase’, decided to call out the less visible and seemingly innocent discourses around romantic love between women. ‘PHASE’ has two prongs: a Samania film strikingly shot/edited by LA-based creative Delaram Pourabdi and a poem by Ania Catherine.
‘It’s just a phase.’ Find a woman who hasn’t heard these words regarding her attraction to or relationship with another woman. ‘PHASE’ is a response. There has been a recent and drastic increase in the visibility of female-female relationships throughout media. As French intellectual Michel Foucault has written, ‘power’s success is proportiοnal to its ability to hide its own mechanisms’; ‘PHASE‘  highlights the less visible (and therefore underestimated) yet still powerful forms of heterosexism. Increased media presence should not be conflated with sexual equality. The social acceptability of such comments needs to be challenged, as these subtle forms of discrimination could be easily eliminated were people made more aware of their harm.

 

something is wrong
this is temporary
sweet but not serious
curious but not aware
ill but arousing
a beautiful phase
drowning in tears, not their own
fleeting, confused
oscillating between feeling and numbness

most depictions of confused women don’t reflect confused women
they reflect a confused gaze
a dirty lens
the dirt is invisible
it’s called discourse
a cocktail of history, stories, and science
accounts sans accountability

phase is your film, of which we wanted no part
what is seen through this frame is not reality
it is a view
a view that won’t define or lasso our experience
this gaze is not required
this gaze may seem loving
this gaze deceives you
what is a phase, is this gaze
not our experience
we politely exit
in our absence, your frame becomes visible
see you in the future

by Ania Catherine

απάντηση των samania dove ομορφια αξιζεις περισσοτερα

#ChooseWorthy: A response by Samania to Dove’s #ChooseBeautiful

 

#ChooseBeautiful: How Dove is still missing the point

 

A response to Dove’s #ChooseBeautiful campaign:

We take the position that expanding the scope of which women are considered ‘beautiful’ still reinforces the idea that women need to be ‘beautiful’ in order to have worth, and in turn downplays the perceived value of other qualities that could lead to greater fulfilment. Therefore, while it is certainly problematic that women who fall outside society’s notion of ‘beautiful’ don’t receive the benefits that this determination brings, this is an issue within a larger one: being ‘beautiful’ is still advertised as a necessary pre-condition for a woman’s legitimate existence, something to which all women should aspire. Feeling ‘beautiful’—in a campaign that claims to empower women—continues to be presented as a significant achievement, the point of actualisation in women’s lives. Would the brand really consider launching a parallel campaign claiming to empower men to #ChooseHandsome?

So you #ChooseBeautiful…does that make you worthy of something more than if you don’t? If the answer is yes, then we should not make every woman #ChooseBeautiful, we should instead challenge the society that makes only ‘beautiful’ women feel worthy. Why not skip the ‘beautiful’ part and go straight to the worth?

Dove, we appreciate your effort, but we would rather you encourage women to #ChooseWorthy.

by SAMANIA

2015