Workshops - Panel Workshop Discussions
Camp Betty will hold 6 main panel discussions over the weekend. Speakers are still being finalised for these, but the themes and topics that will be covered appear below. Stay tuned for more detailed information, including full speaker names.
1. TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS: SEX, GENDER AND ANTI-CAPITALISM
(10:30am - 12pm, Friday 8 June @ Irene Warehouse)
From June 6-8, the G8 will hold their 33rd annual summit in Berlin. They will be confronted by up to 20,000 protesters from around the world, in the latest manifestation of anti-capitalist 'summit protests', made famous in the global north in 1999 with the protests against the WTO in Seattle. At the same time, in the south of Mexico, the Zapatistas, often seen as the model for much anti-capitalist organising and politics, will continue to build their 'other campaign' for civil society in Mexico while they and their allies defend themselves from increasing government repression and attacks. This panel will aim for a self-reflexive and critical discussion of various forms of anti-capitalist politics, and how they relate to a radical politics of sex and gender. There will be a particular focus on politics and political movements in Australia.
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Summit protests as sites for radical sex and gender resistance?
Speaker: Victoria Stead
Tori is a Melbourne-based activist who had her first political mind-blowing experience at the S11 protests at the Crown Casino in 2000. Since then she's been involved in a mixed bag of campaigns and projects, including various May Day shenanigans, refugee activism, the anti-G8 mobilisation in Scotland in 2005, A Space Outside, the Melbourne Radical Cheerleaders and the G20 Arrestee Solidarity Network. She also works for Arena Magazine. -
Fairwear - an analysis of the gender and racial politics of outworker advocacy in NSW and Victoria, in the context of anti-corporate, but perhaps not anti-capitalist struggles, and the not-so-welcome return to our screens of the well-meaning whitey. With a little bit of inside dirt about why Fair Trade isn't....
Speaker: Liz Thompson, FairWear Victoria campaign co-ordinator
An Ex student hack, previously put out to pasture with other former student leftists in the RMIT Student Union, Liz's predictable left-bureaucrat career trajectory was rudely interrupted (or perhaps just diverted) by Voluntary Student Unionism legislation. She is now the Victorian FairWear campaign co-ordinator. -
Holding the Aurora - Lessons of the Zapatistas
Speaker: Dave Eden -
Queer Anti-Capitalism
Speakers: Mark Pendleton & Liz Humphrys
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2. BARBARISM BEGINS AT HOME
(5:30pm-7pm, Friday 8 June @ Irene Warehouse)
Laura Bush says George Bush went to war in Afghanistan to defend the rights of women. Conservative and even liberal gay commentators and politicians tell us the same things about queer rights. Meanwhile, in Australia, Mardi Gras is bedecked with pink Australian flags, while those same flags (but without the pink) are wrapped around the bodies of 'Aussies' in Cronulla who tell us they are making 'their' beaches safe for 'their' women. At the same time, according to Jerry Falwell, the S11 attacks were caused by feminists and queers in the first place. This 'clash of cultures' is a strange war, and one that is constituted in the intimate links between politics of race, gender and sexuality in the west. This panel looks at the war on terror from the perspective of sex, gender and sexuality, and in particular looks at the crucial roles that these issues play in understanding, analysing and ultimately, resisting the war on terror.
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Hegemony, Homonormativity and the 'War on Terror'
Speaker: Ibrahim Abraham
Ibrahim Abraham is a postgraduate student at Monash University. He's published and presented work on the relationship between religion, politics, culture and sexuality in Australia and oversees. -
Queer Pride as White Pride
Speaker: Domino
Domino is a Chinese Australian queer and co-editor of slit magazine - www.slitmag.org -
A War for Women? Feminism and the 'Clash of Cultures'
Speaker: Tanya Serisier
Tanya Serisier has been involved in activism around sex and gender for a long time. For several years, a major focus of her political involvement, and academic work (she's writing a Ph D) has been focused on issues of sexual violence, race and feminist politics.
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3. TROUBLING GENDER TROUBLE
(10:30am - 12pm, Saturday 9 June @ Barkly St Warehouse)
Trans* identities and trans*specific issues and campaigns are increasingly visible in radical queer communities and puts the issue of gender back on the map with a vengeance. Queer Theory looms large in this new vocabulary and perspective on gender and gendering but what does this mean for people outside of the English-speaking, Western ‘queer bloc’? What does it mean when the medical establishment tells us who and what we are? Does beautiful androgyny spell the death of gender? What is a gender gaol and can we bust outta there? Can queer communities cope with radical femininity? And who are those gender pirates standing strong on two high heels?
Betty’s guests, Vek Lewis, Liz Alexander, norrie mAy-welby and Ash Pike, will grapple with these questions and more. So grab your thinking hat and a healthy dose of self-reflexivity and sensitivity and come along to hear what they’ve got to say and participate in a short facilitated QnA and discussion session.
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Strapping Femme
Speaker: Liz Alexander
Liz Alexander is a Melbourne-based queer femme, feminist and genderphiliac. She has a background in Cultural Studies, where she got her rocks off writing about butch identities. Liz continues to use her body and mind to disrupt the status quo and shift borders. She has worked in the community sector for a number of years largely with queer and/or trans* young people and as an educator around sexuality and gender diversity in schools and agencies. Liz has recently switched the big picture for the small, enabling change one person at a time in her current work as a counsellor. Other time is spent resisting through play, writing, event work with Upstart Alley, all round mischief making and searching for the ultimate lipstick colour.
Liz believes in strapping on her femme power to fuck up normative ideas of gender, sexuality and desire. -
Do Political Identities Translate Cross-Culturally? The Case of 'Transgender'
Speaker: Vek Lewis
Vek Lewis has had a patchwork history in several forms of collaborative activism centred on the environment, anti-corporate action as well as on social and economic justice for the marginalised. He's also a restless academic and a talkative depressive, who aims to produce work of political and practical value. He lives in Sydney where he teaches Spanish and writes and lectures on Latin American cultures and sex/gender diverse people. -
‘Is there space between the extremes of gender conformity for humanity? Are the gender rules made for us to play with, or are we made for the gender rules to toy with?’
Speaker: norrie mAy-welby
norrie mAy-welby is a human of no fixed gender or breeding role, has a go at this sort of anarchic proposition. -
Resisting the medical binary
Speaker: Ashlan Radio Pike
Ash “Radio” Pike, who looks a lot younger than the number of years under ze’s belt is a vegan trans identified queer who lives outside the male/female binary of gender and is never quite sure what pronouns or bathrooms to use. He attempts to break down the notion that there is only one path for trans people to follow and is determined to not let the medical institution steal his autonomy by denying access to gender related surgery for trans people who choose not to take hormones. Ash is currently studying health promotion and is working at a housing and homeless service for people living with HIV/AIDS. Ash is part of the menacing Upstart Alley crew (www.myspace.com/upstartalley) as well as Trans Melbourne Gender Project (www.genderproject.net.au).
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4. BAD MEDICINE: BIOPOLITICS, MEDICINE AND BODIES
(1pm - 2:30pm, Saturday 9 June @ Irene Warehouse)
A central component of the Camp Betty weekend involves exploring ideas of biopolitics and biopower. These terms are used to describe the various techniques of how governments and other institutions control populations, literally through the regulation of bodies. An important locus of control and domination, especially around gender and sexuality, has been and continues to be institutions of medicine, psychiatry and public health. This panel aims to explore the contemporary application of this power, looking at what happens when doctors become sovereign.
The emergence of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s unleashed heightened surveillance and demonisation of gay men's sexuality and now, recent media reports talk of explicitly tracking people with HIV and continuing to close our borders to those 'infected'. The 'hystericisation' and medicalisation of women continues through over-diagnosis and medication of Pre-Menstrual Stress (PMS). Both the clinical practice of abortion and the periodic re-surfacing of debate around it continue to
function as crucial sites for the medical governance of reproductive practices and the articulation of racialised and nationalist anxieties regarding security and the birth rate.
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DVD Screening: 'Cambodia' (10 minutes)
Womens Network for Unity, Cambodian sex worker organisation, took on Bill Gates and Donald Rumsfeld to fight against unethical trials of a HIV/AIDS PREP drug, Tenofivir, in 2004, and won. This excerpt from Art Resistance TV Program 17 tells the story of their struggles and celebrations. -
Dangerous (Anti)Bodies: Biopolitics and the Criminalisation of HIV transmission
Speaker: Dave MacDonald
Dave is currently completing a PhD in Criminology at Melb Uni. His thesis comprises a collection of case studies which explore the cultural and legal rendering of paedophilia as homosexuality. In 2004, he completed his honours thesis, also in Criminology, on Victoria's legal framework for managing intentional and reckless HIV transmission, and the discourses of risk, contagion and regulation which pervade this framework. -
Premenstrual change: The regulation of women's bodies and emotions?
Speaker: Julie Mooney-Somers
Dr Julie Mooney-Somers is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Gender, Culture & Health Research Unit: PsyHealth (University of Western Sydney). Julie's research has focused on sexual and gendered subjectivities, particularly the negotiation of subjectivity in relation to cultural representations and in the context of intimate relationships. Julie's current work explores women's experiences of premenstrual change, how women negotiate these changes in relation to partners and significant others, and how this differs across heterosexual and lesbian relationships. Her PhD explored the relationship between cultural representations of heterosexual male sexuality and men's sexual subjectivity and practice. She has previously conducted research on young lesbian identity and children in non-traditional families, and is interested in the experiences of second generation queers. -
Abortion and its spaces: RU486 and the medically governable home
Speaker: Sarah Tayton
Sarah is a postgraduate student in cultural studies at Monash University. Her research focuses on reproduction, narratives of medical violation, biopolitics and race. She was involved in the Bite project.
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5. STATES OF ENGAGEMENT
(11am - 12:30pm, Sunday 10 June @ Cloudcity)
Radical politics walks a tricky line when it comes to how we align to the State. On one hand, engagement brings benefits, protections and recognition, at times necessary means for coping with the world we live in. On the flip side, are regulation, surveillance and division.
States of Engagement brings together three speakers to discuss the good and the bad that comes from demanding benefits of the state, and actually winning them. Speaker topics:
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Sex Work
Speaker: Elena Jeffreys
Sex workers have been self-organising in Australia for decades, playing leading roles in improving workplace health and safety, agitating for law reform and providing social support. However, over recent years, sex worker organisations have become increasingly reliant on government health funding, to the detriment of advocacy and activism – Victoria’s RhED and Queensland’s SQWISI are but two manifestations of this trend.
Elena Jeffreys is the President of Scarlet Alliance, the national organisation of sex workers and sex work organisations and will address the core questions of legality, legalisation and state dependence at the heart of this debate as she argues that there is a direct correlation between what the Government gets away with and how much sex workers and sex worker organisations in any given city are prepared to roll over for. -
The pitfalls of legislating trans bodies
Speaker: Aren Aizura
Over the last ten years, globally, lots of new laws have been written, all designed to allow transpeople to get better health services, change their official gender, marry and 'have all the rights of normal people'. But when you pass a law, you have to say what defines a 'transsexual' body, and what it is not. If we accept that gender variant people are all different, how does a single version of transness apply? What are the costs of dealing with gender change, while still requiring that everyone has a male or female gender? And what are the costs of relying on the state to make transpeople's lives better?
Aren Aizura is a trannyboy writer, scholar and anti-'activist' who thinks a lot about rights, law, medicine, gender variant bodies and state regulation, among other things. He is involved with the Trans Melbourne Gender Project. He used to do a zine called Skint, and his favourite sticker ever says 'Sodomise me.' -
Trafficking
Speakers: Sanja Milivojevic
Sex trafficking is all over the media these days, with recent arrests and convictions reinforcing the perception of a global crisis. Prominent in these debates are experts – police, judges, academics, ‘feminists’ – often advocating for more state control and tougher border protections. Usually absent from the debates are the ‘victims’ themselves.
Sanja Milivojevic is a PhD candidate at Monash University who researches sex trafficking in Serbia and Australia, with a particular focus on how victims of trafficking have been constructed in Serbian and Australian culture, and what are its implications to women’s status inside the criminal justice system and anti-trafficking initiatives in both countries.
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6. FUTURESEX/LOVESOUNDS (Closing Panel)
(4:30pm - 6pm, Monday 11 June @ Irene Big Space)
Everything that's good about betty wrapped up in an easy take home pack!
Join us to try and process what's happened over the last four days and where we might go from here.
The finest minds of the weekend will have 3 minutes each to tell us what's hot in the worlds of sex, gender, activism and more. Marvel as they debate the future of sex radicalism. Does it have one? Then get rowdy with discussion, gossiping, recruitment, flirting, plotting, action planning and collapse.
Confirmed speakers include The Love Pump, Domino (slit magazine)