Mangos with Chili - Bluestockings: New York, NY (7/11/2010)

I was thrilled to be able to attend a special Mangos with Chili show on Sunday night at Bluestockings in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was thrilled not just because I consider the founders, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ms. Cherry Galette, dear amig@s, nor because dear amig@s of mine have performed under the spicy sweet banner, pero because the center is queer, trans, and gender nonconforming artists of color. Sunday night, people packed the bookstore and activist center to bear witness to the words and work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Victor Tobar, Ignacio Rivera, and Jai Dulani.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha opened the floor reading a piece from a memoir she’s working on about her life as a queer femme from Sri Lanka and creating community. Victor Tobar, in a series of stunning spoken word pieces, brought us to the Bronx and Brooklyn, and explored struggling against gentrification in those streets, what those streets demand of of their queer brown children, and how those children grow into adults, not easily, but wrapped in memories that constrain and free.

Brooklyn Black Boricua Ignacio Rivera used words to redefine the body as an answer to negative socialization and abuse and, in doing so, reclaimed kinky sexuality in his own terms. Rivera forced the listeners to confront our histories of violence and our daily interactions with it above and underground.

Jai Dulani closed the circle by presenting a film he has been working on regarding Caster Semenya entitled Caster Semenya: Wrong is Not Her Name. The film, through the use of news clips, looks at the invasive scrutiny Semenya’s gender underwent following her win in the women’s world 800-meter race. Dulani shows how race and gender biases collided and the history of the white, male, heteronormative gaze on the bodies of those who claim “woman.”

The artists in this Mangos with Chili performance reveal a breadth of talent fed by real life experiences rooted in personal struggles and continued survival. Some of their work will make you uncomfortable because of its frankness and raw reality, pero for many it will feel like someone opened the curtains in a dark secret room you were sitting alone in, let the sun in, and then threw a party.

It was all love.

Please follow Mangos with Chili as they decide their next tour and please follow all of the amazing artists. Arte, poesia y imagen can change the world.

Review by Maegan La Mala Ortiz

Cross-posted at VivirLatino

Video from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's performance at Sins Invalid

Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica

By Tristan Taormino
Cleis Press

So, I sometimes forget that reading erotica and looking at BDSM queer porn in the library of an Ivy League university is not necessarily standard practice. Lucky for me, I go to Brown, where I’m concentrating in Gender and Sexuality studies, and have somehow managed to legitimize studying sex manuals with postmodern theory in order to (supposedly, so they say) get a degree next year. Along with my academic studies and personal intrigues, I am also active with various events and groups on campus explicitly related to sexuality, so am known on campus for… well, let’s just say, when I pulled out Tristan Taormino’s Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica in the middle of the bustling Science Library lobby during the mad rush of studying for midterms, I got simply passing (mostly jealous) chuckles from friends venturing down into the depths of the stacks with unread textbooks in their arms.

This exciting collection of twenty-three stories is edited by author, director, and educator Tristan Taormino, and is a part of the Best Lesbian Erotica series, which has won three Lambda Awards. Cleis Press, who published the book, focuses on queer sexualities, putting out various sex guides, gender/queer theory texts, and works of fiction.

As the publisher notes, Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica is about “dispelling myths, realizing fantasies, and delivering outstanding writing with distinct contributor voices.” In the introduction, Taormino expresses the desire to “queer gender throughout the spectrum,” viewing gender as multilayered, constantly changing, and problematizing the reductionist and prescriptive discourses around butch/femme identities:

Butch/femme is bulging jeans, smeared lipstick, stiletto heels, and sharp haircuts. It’s about being read and being seen. Sometimes it’s about passing or not passing. It’s about individual identity and a collective sense of community. It’s personal, political. It’s performance and it’s not. It’s the visceral space between the flesh and the imagination.

The stories focus on the separation and convergence of the personal and the political, the body and fantasy, and address some examples of what really goes on in bed between self-identified butches and femmes. As a new reader of butch/femme lesbian erotica, I was surprised about the diversity of relationships, identities and desires, and found that while some of it was a real turn-on for me, others not so much. But that is okay. In the end, the appeal of the collection is about the confidence and attitude that exudes from the authors as they own their own identity expressions, desires, and pursuits of pleasure.

Review by Abigail Chance