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I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like my quotes

Date: June 6, 2007

I’ve been quoted in publications before, but this is a new one: in the book “Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement” edited by Jo Reger, I am quoted or referenced by four different contributors in four different articles on three different topics. It’s so weird…

First, in Sally Hines’ “‘I am a Feminist but…’: Transgender Men and Women and Feminism,” she writes:

Thus political practice rather than gender or sex lies at the heart of feminist identity. We can add on to this that a feminist viewpoint need not depend upon feminine socialization in order to enable the feminist voices of trans women to be heard. Emi Koyama’s discussion of trans-feminism, which expresses the feminist concerns of trans women, shows how trans politics may enable contemporary feminism to move beyond the confines of second wave feminism.22 In conclusion I suggest that, if attentive to gender diversity, third wave feminism may provide a collective arena through which our differeces may produce a more extensive feminist knowledge.

When you look at the endnote 22, it cites “The Transfeminism Manifesto” (available in readings section as well as in the zine “Whose Feminism is it Anyway? and Other Essays”).

Next, in “Solitary Sisterhood: Individualism Meets Collectivity in Feminism’s Third Wave,” Astrid Henry writes:

Turbo Chick‘s critique of the term sisterhood–and caution that to use the word could prove “controversial”–seems grounded in the feminist history of exclusion that shapes so many of the other third wave perspectives that I’ve been discussing here. Viewing the term _sisterhood_ as naive, this definition stresses the ways in which differences become erased–and consequently, exclusion becomes inevitable–when the metaphor is evoked. The recent emergence of a transgender movement within third wave feminism may also point to the ways in which “sisterhood” is a problematic rhetorical device given the implied female subject of this sisterly coming together.34

I am not directly mentioned, but if you look at the endnote 34, here I am:

34. See Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in Catching a Wave, 244-59. Interestingly, Koyama’s essay is written in the collective “we” voice (speaking as and for trans women) and, as its title suggests, is not an autobiographical essay but a call to arms in the spirit of the earlier second wave manifestos.

Stephanie Gilmore discusses the relationship between feminism and the prostitutes’ rights movement in her “Bridging the Waves: Sex and Sexuality in a Second Wave Organization”:

In addition to proclaiming their own sexual identities, needs, and desires, many third wave feminists have also joined the prostitutes’ rights movement. Some third wave feminists’ perspectives on prostitution contend that a woman’s sexuality, even in the context of sex work, ultimately belongs to herself. As Emi Koyama wrote in Instigations from the Whore Revolution: A Third-Wave Feminist Response to the Sex Work “Controversy,” feminism and prostitutes’ rights are integrated movements that shape the philosophy that all people should enjoy rights to dignity, respect, and job safety–issues feminists have fought for in a variety of contexts. Rather than chastise prostitutes for getting paid for sex, Koyama and other feminists in the contemporary prostitutes’ rights movement recognize and criticize the economic and cultural forces that shape people’s labors, including sex work, and constrain individual choices.38

“Instigations from…” is a zine that is available here.

Finally, Jo Reger and Lacey Story cites a Just Out (newspaper for Portland’s LGBT communities) story on a flyer campaign I did at a production of The Vagina Monologues

Activists from the Intersex Society of North America have attended productions of the monologues, passing out informational flyers. One of the pieces in the monologues that has drawn the most fire from intersex activists is the one in which a father promises his daughter, born without a vagina, that “we’re gonna get you the best homemade pussy in America.” According to activist Emi Koyama, the laughter following that segment is hurtful and offensive to intersex peopl, making genital surgeries a joke.36 The Intersex Society has organized events at a variety of college campuses, and has persuaded some college organizers to donate the money to intersex organizations.

For more information on this, see the resource kit I created for the Intersex Initiative.

Are you impressed now? ;-)

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