GenderYOUTH Network

IUSB: Blurr zine calls for submissions

Call for submissions... on gender.

Greetings!

Gender Project is well underway at Indiana University of South Bend. We are a new, student organized, gender advocacy group on campus associated with GenderPAC.

Last month we distributed our first issue of Blurr, a new zine with a focus on gender. It was a great success here at IUSB and soon we hope to be able to share the zine with a much larger audience by making the publication available online.

In the meantime, we are currently compiling works for the second issue. We hope to begin printing in just a few short weeks.

This zine is a focus on all aspects of gender and how it crosses lines of socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and more.

A call for submissions... more info below.

With as much diversity as we have among our students and faculty here at IUSB (and the larger community), I know there is just as wide a range of creativity. I would like to use these creative voices in order to educate and advocate the versatility and complications of gender as they are portrayed and interpreted in our society.

We're looking for artists, poets, essayists, personal stories, etc. -anything that can be related to gender, be it positive or negative.

Can you help or do you know someone who would be interested? If you would like to send us a submission or if you have questions, please contact us via e-mail.

Karrie Blevins
Coordinator, The Gender Project
Indiana University at South Bend

For submissions:
E-mail: blurr@iusb.edu

For questions:
E-mail: kblevins@iusb.edu

For snail mail:

The Gender Project
Indiana University South Bend
1700 Mishawaka Ave
South Bend, IN 46634

X-posted to relevant online communities including the GenderYOUTH Network on Yahoo.

RSS feed available via Livejournal.

Notes on inclusive health care from Sam Crane of Swarthmore

GenderPAC had a hard time finding new members because there were already so many people involved in activism in other groups, and due to random points of Swarthmore culture many people are skeptical of organizations that aren't Swarthmore-specific, so we decided that the best way to get anything meaningful done was to cooperate with other groups and pool our resources.
Other students seemed interested in doing activism with the school's health center, which can be relatively non-inclusive to trans and gender-variant students. We were interested in that too, so we formed an independent coalition, the Swarthmore Coalition for Health Care. Most of the people in it were from GenderPAC or the school's queer-straight alliance, but we attracted other people too at our planning meetings. We contacted the head nurse at the health center to inform her that we wanted to investigate ways to make the health center more inclusive, and she was pleased and very cooperative.
Then we held an all-campus meeting to brainstorm and workshop ways that the health center could better serve the student body, addressing a wide range of issues, from improved transparency in counseling services, better systems for allowing students to provide feedback, and trans-sensitivity training (we hope to get people from the Mazzoni Clinic, a local center, to do this training). Overall it was a success, and we still hope to meet with the head nurse to go over our concerns. There are a good number of students who will still be here in the fall, and who will hopefully follow through.