Friday 10 July 2009

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Tuesday 7 July 2009

Done hair and nails, now what?

check this out:)xx

Done hair and nails, now what?


Why modern day youth workers should
consider binning the beauty box


Thoughts ideas and catchy slogans by the
Feministwebs.com gang

From a base in Manchester, and with a focus across the North
West, a collective of academics, youth work practitioners and young people have
come together to 'do something' about young women and girls' youth work.


'When OFSTED came into the youth club, the boys we playing on
the pool table and the girls were hiding out in the toilets'


'In the session there were young women who had never worn
make-up in their lives, and they had all been given by their youth worker a
'Girl's world' head to practise putting make-up on... and I thought... have we
stepped back to the 1950s?!'


The increasing emphasis on crime and disorder within youth
work has meant that agendas, focus, and inevitably funding is being directed
toward work with is diversionary, targeted at young men, and starts from an
ideology of 'prevention'.


Good youth workers on the other hand, start from a position
of possibility, creation not consumption and participation. But the support for 'progressive' work is
patchy.


In youth work settings, the inevitable dichotomy emerges
therefore, of boys at the pool table or playing football, and girls doing
make-up or creating raunchy dance routines.


An end to sexism.... are we nearly there yet?


So this is what we have done: we have created an online
archive and resource for young women and girls' work from a feminist
perspective at www.feministwebs.com
which includes ideas, session plans, tools and levers for change. We are now in our phase two (or 'second wave'
if you will!) in which young women from across the North West are being trained
in oral histories and are going to go out across the north west collecting
archive materials and stories from older feminist youth workers that were
active in the 1970s-1990s. So spread the word, get involved, and urge young
women you know to go out there and learn how to fly a plane instead of always
doing their hair and nails... it's time to bin the beauty box!


Interested? Contact Amelia@ica-uk.org.uk

Urgent call out to Queer youth and workers


Please see below for this amazing event and email antpaperclip@hotmail.com if you can help :)

******************************************************

call out to queer zine and poster makers: please send your work to queer youth camp for our radical queer culture library!


Camp fYrefly is a youth camp for queer and trans kids aged 14 – 24 in the middle of Canada’s most politically conservative province, Alberta. I am the artist-in-residence at camp this year and the program involves all things radical: history of queer activism and art, workshops on how to make posters, zines and projects for political action, and building supportive communities outside of the rainbow mainstream.

I am collecting fuel for the fire! Please send your work to me to help build our resource library of queer culture.


**need it by July 20!**

email me if you need help with postage.

****************************************************************


Great stuff huh, maybe we could get something going like that over here? :)


Monday 6 July 2009

Ugly Shy Girl: A Book Review


Ugly Shy Girl by Laura Dockrill is a real treat of a book. Its a story of a outsider, the kind of kid who tries to hide behind her fringe but screams her presence through her inability to read, let alone follow, the unspoken rules of school. A girl who can no more 'fit' then the baggy, torn, coat on her back. If you pick it up the bookshop you could easily think that it had been dumped on the closest shelf by a teen, with it's youthful format and gorgeous child-like scrawls and accompanying drawings, its screams 8-15. But make no mistake this is definitely a book for older folk. In fact, with it's vivid desciptions of bullying and it's..ahem..vibrant language, it really could be too much for the young reader. As Dockrill notes ''You might have once known somebody like ugly shy girl..... you might have even been like her yourself''. What reader cannot find them selves on either side of that fence. And if you too were Ugly Shy Girl, you will brave your discomfort and pain as you experience (re-live?) Ugly Shy Girls oppression at the hands of those that excel at the rules. But you will persevere and share the relief and joy with Abigail (a.k.a Ugly Shy Girl) as she finds her own strenght (despite the cruelty of the 'popular girls') her own resilience and ultimately her own confidence in her individuality. I love the playfulness of this book, the emotional honesty and the creativity, I love the fact that it shows the power of a strong female relationship. It is a rarity is girls fiction, it is female autonomy and female solidarity which rescue Abigail, never a boy. What an absolute delight.