Open Calls for The 2015 ________ Monologues!

ASUW Women’s Action Commission presents
AN OPEN CALL FOR STORIES, TRUTHS AND VOICES
as a part of the production previously known the Vagina Monologues

Sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/opencalls2015

Background:
Prior to 2012, the UW Vagina Monologues have been a powerful experience for many cast members and audiences in creating a space for stories to be shared and heard. While the monologues have historically done some work in shaking fundamental notions of “woman”, feminist, anti-racist, and queer critiques have challenged the monologues’ presentation of stories, diversity of voices, and handling of identity representations.

In an effort to use these critiques productively and open up space for narratives stretch the production to a new potential, WAC decided to switch the script in 2012. Continuing on with the new tradition, this year’s production will again be entirely student written and performed. We are excited to announce the third production of The __________ Monologues. And we want you to take part!

This production is hoping to center the experiences of women, trans*, gender non-conforming and genderqueer folks. Students of all races, classes, sexual orientations, minds, bodies, ages and religions are encouraged to audition. The Monologues will occur on February 12th, 13th, and 14th.

NOTE: The survey will close on November 17th, at 11:45pm.

About the process

1) Fill out the catalyst survey to inform WAC of your availability for the open call sessions.

2) At the Open Call sessions, facilitators will lead participants in a few open ended writing exercises and group discussions. These exercises and discussion questions are intended to get a sense of what topics folks would want to explore in their monologues, if they were a part of the cast. We encourage participants to be as personal and/or political as they feel.  Be sassy. Be hopeful. Be angry. Be passionate. Be real – in whatever way that feels best for you. We want Open Calls to be an opportunity to learn about your reasons for being involved and the experiences you hope to explore and share as a part of the production. Paper and pens will be provided for these activities.

Since the production will be comprised of student written pieces, some of our collective process will be spent writing and workshopping the selected cast member’s individual monologues. That said, we encourage potential participants to begin thinking about and writing on their monologue topic before the Open Call. Also, if you’re interested in writing but not performing OR performing but not writing, we also welcome your participation and will coordinate with you individually.

3) From there, cast decisions will be made by the facilitators based upon participants’ answers to the Catalyst survey, the writing exercises and participation in group discussions at the Open Call.

4) Those who are selected to be a cast member:
The commitment of a cast member will include weekly writing/performance meetings with the entire cast (to be decided based upon chosen members’ availabilities), as well as supplementary rehearsals as the production draws closer. 

NOTE: If you are wondering more about what we mean by “monologue”…
Monologues should be written on any topic that you believe should be part of the conversation that the Monologues is intended to spark. Topics encouraged include gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, bodies, minds, activism, relationships, families. Write the truths that need be shared to discuss and deconstruct the identity of “woman”. Monologues should be written as first-person accounts, preferably centered around a specific experience that might relate to the larger theme of the Monologues. The length of a finished monologue will most likely be 5 – 10 minutes (when read aloud at an even pace).

Thank you for reading. We are excited to read your survey and meet you at one of the Open Call sessions.

If you have any questions, comments, critiques or concerns, please email asuwomn@uw.edu.

Sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/opencalls2015

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Looking for Interns for the 2014-2015 school year!

Hello, folks! I hope this first week of school has been treating you well. If you’re interested in becoming more involved with Women’s Action Commission, apply to be an intern!

Apply here: tinyurl.com/wacintern

Applications closes October 17th at 11 pm. 

If you have any questions, please email asuwomn@uw.edu.

Posted by asuwomn

The _____________ Monologues 2014!!!

THE V MON-03

The ASUW Women’s Action Commission presents the production of

The ___________ Monologues
previously known as The Vagina Monologues

The ___________ Monologues is an entirely student written and organized production featuring eleven UW students. Cast members will share personal stories of survival, identity, and resistance through a range of performances. As a challenge to the widely-known Vagina Monologues, The ___________ Monologues asserts that people can tell their own stories in their own voices. Please join us for a powerful evening of truth telling.

WHERE: Husky Union Building (HUB) Lyceum
4001 NE Stevens Way Seattle, WA 98195

WHEN: Doors @ 6:30pm, Show @ 7pm
Thursday, February 13th
Friday, February 14th
Saturday, February 15th

TICKETS: $5 w/ UW ID
$8 General Public
(There is an additional $2 service charge)

http://thehubtix.universitytickets.com/user_pages/event_listings.asp

You can buy tickets online at the link above or at the HUB!

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***For any folks unable to pay, free tickets are available, email asuwomn@uw.edu to reserve one. No questions, no class shaming, and no proof required. ♥

Co-sponsored by: The Q Center and The Women’s Center

Directions and detailed accessibility info here: http://women.asuw.org/monologues/.

**The HUB’s front entrance is wheelchair accessible and the Lyceum is on the first floor, to the right of the main desk, at the end of the hallway.

**We ask that you do not wear scented/fragranced products (e.g. perfume, hair products) or essential oils the day of the event in order to make the event accessible to those with chemical injury or multiple chemical sensitivity.

Posted by asuwomn

Empower Hour!

Join us for our second Empower Hour! January 21st @ 3pm. Location TBD.

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Check Your Boobies Party!

Who: You!

What: CYB Party!

When: November 19th @ 5pm

Where: HUB 145

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Posted by asuwomn

First Meeting of the Year!

Join us tomorrow for our first WAC meeting of the year! We will be meeting from 12-1pm on Wednesdays in the ASUW + Hallway!

Hope to see you there 🙂

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Internship Applications!

Internship applications are now available! Applications will close October 9th.

https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/asuwovop/214022

The ASUW Women’s Action Commission is one of eight diversity commissions founded by the Associated Students of the University of Washington. Each commission has a mandate to put on educational programs each quarter, as well as serve and advocate for its constituency within the student government and the administration. The WAC seeks a social justice framework that recognizes and affirms the multiple and intersecting identities held by woman-identified and/or female-identified-at-birth constituents. For our more detailed mission and vision statements, visit http://women.asuw.org/about/.

Students of all gender identities, races, classes, sexual orientations, minds and bodies are encouraged to apply.

For all intern positions, there will be a 2 – 5 hour weekly time commitment (hours will vary based upon need) that includes the weekly 1-hr WAC meeting. The commission will work to schedule around interns’ personal and academic availabilities. In addition to the tasks specified below, interns [and volunteers] will have the opportunity to provide critiques and feedback, plan and execute existing programming and initiate their own programs/projects.

The commission director will practice consistent communication and transparency with all interns and volunteers. Each weekly meeting will be a space where the director will report programming and advocacy updates.

Though these internships are unpaid, the WAC emphasizes the value of these internship positions. They will provide interns concrete skills, professional/organizing experience, networking and community building opportunities. Beyond these concrete benefits, the WAC aims to push their internship positions to be spaces of radical learning (and unlearning!), healing, and celebration.

If you have questions or comments about these positions, please email asuwomn@uw.edu 

Posted by asuwomn

darkmatterposterASUW Queer Student Commission and Women’s Action Commission and Queer Youth Space presents:

BECAUSE YOU’RE BROWN HONEY GURL: A QPOC INTERVENTION on MAY 17TH

 
1) “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” WORKSHOP @ 3:30 pm on May 17th at the UW Q Center  (info & accessibility below)
 
2) “BECAUSE YOU’RE BROWN HONEY GURL” PERFORMANCE @ 8:00 pm on May 17th at Queer Youth Space (info & accessibility below)
 
DARKMATTER POET BIOS:

 
Alok Vaid-Menon is a South Asian artivist who has performed & organized with queer movements around the world. They are committed to building radical queer movements and bodies that resist white supremacy and imperialism and like making art that thinks about these, and other what ifs. You can read some of their work at http://returnthegayze.tumblr.com/andhttp://queerlibido.tumblr.com/.Janani is a South Asian electron spinning around the Bay Area making art and scholarship. They like thinking about apocalypse, decolonizing the food system, and making space for quantum queers everywhere. You can read some of their poetry at http://queerdarkenergy.posterous.com/. They’re also assistant editor over at http://blackgirldangerous.org/.

For more information, see their website:
http://darkmatterrage.wix.com/darkmatter

–1) WORKSHOP: Protect Me From What I Want

MAY 17TH @ 3:30 – 5:30 PM
Q CENTER,
IN THE UW HUSKY UNION BUILDING (HUB) ROOM 315
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

This workshop is a space for us to gather and discuss how we desire and are desired in the context of violent power inequalities.

Some of us have chosen romantic separatism as a result of racist trauma, personal-political enactments, or both. Others of us find ourselves fetishized and mobilize that fetish as a site of power and subversion. Still others find ourselves falling always for the white queers or other bodies that possess dominant power, wishing we could have more agency in the process, be more intentional about who we desire and how.

We begin with art: performances of two spoken word pieces on the mental gymnastics of anti-racist queer POCs attempting to politicize our desires. We continue with collective storytelling, and challenge ourselves and each other to explore the difficult questions. We are invested in generating a politics of sexuality that compels us to interrogate beauty as privilege and constructed by systems of white supremacy, ableism, capitalism, and heteronormativity. Awareness is not sufficient — we will focus on strategies we can implement to protect ourselves from what we want and envision our individual desires as part of a collective project of liberation.

Into what kind of relationships are we willing to extend our politics? What does it mean for each of us to politicize our desires? Is it possible to enact allyship in the bedroom or is intimacy designed to bring out unequal power? What are the boundaries we are each always negotiating? How do we desire in ways that are both authentic and nourishing to our psyches and bodies?

Both QPOC and white folks are encouraged to participate. We will break into POC and White caucus groups for a part of the workshop to unpack some of our specific experiences of racialized desire. This will be an intentional, anti-racist, and feminist space.

ACCESSIBILITY
**The HUB’s front entrance is ADA wheelchair accessible. The Q Center is on the third floor, accessible by elevators right beside the front entrance.

**The HUB is not scent free but we are asking people to refrain from wearing fragrances or essential oils the day of the event. We ask that everyone do this so that folks with MCS and chemical injury are able to attend the event. Smokers should wash their hands and mouths with baking soda before the event. We will provide baking soda and scent free soap on site. We will ask attendees to wash off with baking soda before entering the space.

To learn more:
http://www.peggymunson.com/mcs/fragrancefree.html
http://www.brownstargirl.org/1/post/2012/03/fragrance-free-femme-of-colour-realness-draft-15.html
http://billierain.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/MCS-ACCESSIBILITY-BASICS.pdf

**The third floor of the HUB has ADA accessible gendered stalled bathrooms as well as a single stall all-genders bathroom.

**The HUB is located on the UW campus, near Stevens Way and Benton Lane. To view it on a campus map: http://www.washington.edu/maps/?hub
For a list of buses that serve the U-District, go here: http://metro.kingcounty.gov/tops/bus/neighborhoods/university_district.html
To plan your trip to campus on King County Metro, go here: http://tripplanner.kingcounty.gov/cgi-bin/itin_page.pl

**The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability
accommodations contact the Disability Services Office at least 10 days in advance at: (206) 543-6450/V, (206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-7264 (FAX), or dso@u.washington.edu.

**If you wish to request captioning and/or ASL interpretation, please contact the above.

**If you wish to request childcare, please email asuwomn@uw.edu.

 
2) Queer Youth Space, ASUW Queer Student Commission and Women’s Action Commission presents:BECAUSE YOU’RE BROWN HONEY GURL: A QPOC INTERVENTION ~*
FRIDAY, MAY 17TH @ 8:00 – 10:00 PM
QUEER YOUTH SPACE
911 E PIKE ST, CAPITOL HILL, SEATTLE, WA

FREE & OPEN TO ALL!

‘Because you’re brown honey gurl’ is a queer of color artistic intervention in the gaystream. How do we distinguish our ways of desiring, thinking, feeling, relating, and creating from the economies of white supremacy? How do we turn to sex, intimacy, and desire in response to histories of ancestral violence and contemporary violent racialization? How do we use art as a way to heal and decolonize from legacies of violence and actually re-imagine this violence as sites of resilience and fabulosity? How do we envision a (a)sexual praxis that is about solidarity and revolution rather than manipulation and capitalism? We’re not tryna get gay married honey gurl. We’re building solidarity outside those refracted beams of white light we call rainbows. And renegotiating ways of loving our bodies. Join us for an evening of poetry, discussion, and community. Decolonize//queer//repeat.

ACCESSIBILITY
get all our accessibility info at queeryouthspace.org (click “the space”)
or call (206)495-9963 during open hours
always free: near the 2, 9, 10, 11, 49, and 60 buslines
General Space Accessibility: Queer Youth Space is wheelchair accessible. Elevator is around the stairs to the right!
Bathroom Accessibility: There is an all-gender, single-stall bathroom in the space (no grab bars yet!), and multi-stall male and female restrooms (ADA accessible) down the hall.
Scent/Fragrance: QYS is currently a reduced fragrance/scent space. Please do not wear fragrances or essential oils when you come to QYS so that folks with chemical sensitivities can be here, too. Check out our website for more info!
Childcare: During open hours, kids are totally welcome! We provide childcare at our events by request.
Buddies: You can email us at info@queeryouthspace.org to get signed up with a buddy for your first visit to the space!
Interpretation: Unless otherwise specified, our events are presented in English without interpretation.
Accessibility or interpretation requests? Contact info@queeryouthspace.com

Posted by asuwomn