10 step recipe for the amazing feelings I’m having right now about Girls Rock Iowa City: 1. Become a riot grrrl in the 90s. Let punk rock and supportive female friendships save your life. 2. Have a kid as a riot grrrl in the 90s, become radicalized about birth and reproductive health, become a doula and a midwife, attend a couple hundred births over a couple of decades. 3. Marvel as those babies grow. 4. Teach gender studies at the University. Marvel at the fearlessness, intelligence, and creativity of your young feminist students. 5. Do a bunch of guest speaking about the RG movement, and struggle with how to answer the question, “How can we keep this kind of thing alive?” Default to saying, “It’s never too late to create cultural space for girls’ voices.” 6. Be amazed as some of those students start a Girls Rock camp in your very own community. 7. Teach a Gender 101 workshop at Girls Rock camp with Naomi Greyser, and as you survey the room, see that a good proportion of the people around you are kids whose births you’ve attended and former students. Feel your heart swell as one those kids whose birth you attended is playing your bass guitar. 8. Realize that you are also in the presence of personal and community mentors, and feel immense gratitude. Feel the boundaries between teacher and student dissolve as the workshop culminates with the kids showing us all their strategies for resisting gender policing - with important lessons from unicorns! 9. Listen to these girls perform songs about wanting to scream at school, their love for paleontology, and doing things for themselves. Their voices are beautiful, brave, and authentic. They have confidence. They have skills. They have attitude. 10. Feel just as inspired as when you were a riot grrrl in the 90s, only A HUNDRED MILLION BAZILLION TIMES MORE SO. It’s blowing me away to feel connected to this awesomeness on so many levels, but I don’t mean to speak as though any of these accomplishments are mine. So much praise and respect to the campers, their parents, and the amazing people who made this happen: Merit, Alyse B, Kt, Seanna, Natasha, Jordan, Laurie, so many others. Thank you! YOU ROCK!
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 19:09:51 +0000
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