Defending & De-centering Women/Women Identified Asian Bodies

June 10, 2016, 7-10pm
Please support our presenters and their work!
This is a donation based event, $5-10 (no one will be turned away from lack of funds)

A creative and interactive panel discussion & workshop (with Q&A).

This event’s objective is to challenge, investigate and dismantle the sexual binaries and injuries placed on women and women identified Asian bodies. Too many times has these bodies been objectified and reduced, racialized to what? Subordinate lover, infantilized-erotic property, loyal domestic, object and accessory for exhibition or sale. How is complete embodiment and ownership possible when factors such as culture and visual media have expressed otherwise? And yet, what about her/their rights to sexual pleasure, autonomy and subjectivity?

“Sex radicals emphasized sexuality as a fraught site for female subjects, a space where pleasure and danger bleed into each other in messy ways” (Jennifer Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography ). We will re-texturize what Nash calls a “language of choice,” a creative language in which we feel possess the capability to traverses into elements of alchemy, where bodies can morph, switch or reinvent themselves, making more room and staking claim for agency and wider diversity. In Barbara Jane Reyes’ newest poetry collection, To Love as Aswang, the speaker who embodies a woman-mythological beast and citizen of a third world nation utters, “Woman take up the smallest space / I am here! / She pushes the edges, she prays— / I am! Hear me. / I am! Hear me.”

presenters & panelists:

Edxie Betts
is a Queer, Black, PinXy, Siksika(Black Foot), trans femme, Gender Non *Conforming, Anti-Authoritarian, political cultural worker and liberation artist. Through direct actions they hope to center the most marginalized parts of themselves while strengthening the collective connections between all those oppressed by cultures and prelogics of domination.

Melissa Sipin-Gabon
is a writer from Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review’s Flash Fiction Prize. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology on Philippine myths (Carayan Press 2014), and her work is in Guernica, PEN/Guernica Flash Series,VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Eleven Eleven, and Amazon’s literary journal Day One, among others. Cofounder of TAYO Literary Magazine, her fiction has won scholarships and fellowships from Poets & Writers Inc., Kundiman, VONA/Voices Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and was shortlisted for the David Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. She is represented by Sarah Levitt at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in New York City.

Muriel Leung
is from Queens, NY. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, Ghost Proposal, Jellyfish Magazine, inter|rupture,and others. She is a recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and is a regular contributor to The Blood-Jet Writing Hour poetry podcast. She is also a Co-Poetry Editor forApogee Journal. She is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. Her first book Bone Confetti is forthcoming from Noemi Press in October 2016.

Angela Peñaredondo (moderator)
Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx poet and artist (on other days, she identifies as a usual ghost, subdued comet or part-time animal). Her full-length book, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, is the winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. She is the author of a chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publications). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AAWW’s The Margins, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She is a also VONA/Voices of our Nations Art fellow.

Maria T. Vallarta
Raised in Los Angeles, Maria T. Vallarta is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research is on Filipina/American sexuality, literature, and visual culture. She is also a poet on occasion, and enjoys writing about desire, intimacy, and the body. She also serves as the Secretary General of Anakbayan Inland Empire, a youth and student organization dedicated to organizing and raising awareness about social, political, and economic issues in the Philippines.