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Cover of Oral Informants

Unbidden Tongues

Oral Informants

Janet McCalman

€8.00

Unbidden Tongues #4: Oral Informants draws on the work of Australia social historian Janet McCalman who, in 1998, published a comprehensive history of the Melbourne Women’s Hospital. Written through the medical records of the women who were at one time or another the hospital’s temporary residents, McCalman’s account draws on a vast archive of 14,000 gynaecology records and over 70,000 midwifery records to build the hospital’s history through the administrative documents that litter its archive. Composed of an article written by McCalman in 1999 as well as a case file of original nursing notes, Oral Informants presents the process of penning a (medical) history lesson uniquely based in the oral testimony of women.

2021, 32 pages (b/w ill.), 14 × 22.5 cm, English

Published in 2021 ┊ 32 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth

Unbidden Tongues

Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth

Violet Bartley

Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth is a collection of what could be described as concrete poetry, written over the past two years by our niece Violet Bartley, now aged five. Typed at a computer and sent exclusively via e-mail, the poems stand as clear evidence of a person in the beginnings of grasping (at) language. Throughout, characters are repeated uninterrupted until margins break them, keys pushed down by a finger not yet strong enough to lift itself up.

Over the years, as her written vocabulary grew and these attempts at communication slowly stacked up into the collection printed here, Violet delivered poem after poem within which different mutations of the word ‘poo’ were uttered in type: poo, poobum, bum poo, ipoo, poop. While simple, often illegible and definitely isolated utterances (she never replies when you send a poem back in turn), they are decipherable examples of someone learning defiance through language.

Cover of Between the Teeth

Unbidden Tongues

Between the Teeth

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

Cover of Unbidden Tongues #10: Professional Agitator

Unbidden Tongues

Unbidden Tongues #10: Professional Agitator

Jo Freeman

From the beginning, Unbidden Tongues has claimed to publish 'previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life-particularly in relation to language and its administration.' However, over the course of the first nine issues, the 'civic' aspect has been relatively less pronounced, though undeniably subtextual. As such, Professional Agitator-a publication that includes two landmark feminist articles by Jo Freeman-is an attempt to bring civic responsibility more overtly to the surface. While first penned in the 1970s, the articles have a timely relevance, not only because, shockingly, many of the issues on the bill for the women's movement at Freeman's time of writing-employment discrimination, affordable childcare, reproductive rights and sexuality- are back on the table in the U.S. and elsewhere with full force, but also because, in thinking intersectionally as the movement taught me to do, we find ourselves in a moment of necessary and urgent mobilisation for Palestine; with speaking up and out being reprimanded with various forms of organised silencing. 

(From the foreword)

Cover of Piecing Pages

Self-Published

Piecing Pages

Line Arngaard

Piecing Pages is a (visual) reader which collects the work of fifteen artists, writers and designers across twelve contributions. Each contribution offers insights into a practice or research project that in some way embodies the notion of working in fragments. Together, these contributions unravel how a traditional women’s craft technique continues to influence and inform the fragmented working methods of designers, artists and writers today.

With contributions by Asefeh Tayebani, Hanka van der Voet, Jess Bailey and Sharbreon Plummer, Joke Robaard, Linda van Deursen, Lucy R. Lippard, Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Ronja Andersen, Rosita Kær, Susu Lee and Youngeun Sohn

Cover of Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Sinister Wisdom

Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

Cover of MsHeresies 7 - Introduction to The Weather

Rietlanden Women's Office

MsHeresies 7 - Introduction to The Weather

Rietlanden Women’s Office

This seventh issue, four folded offset-printed posters, publishes sampled and reworked material from the feminist collective and publication Big Mama Rag (1972–84, Denver, Colorado), specifically focusing on the issues and articles dealing with the Palestinian and international feminist struggle. Typeset alongside this archival collage is “Introduction to The Weather” (2001) by poet Lisa Robertson.

4 folded posters (narrow A2)

Cover of Cunt Coloring Book

Last Gasp

Cunt Coloring Book

Tee A. Corinne

Over three dozen c**ts of every size and description for you to color. Originally used for a sex-education class. Crayons not included. First published in 1975 by lesbian activist and artist Tee Corinne.

"In 1973 I set out to do drawings of women’s genitals for use in sex education groups. I wanted the drawings to be lovely and informative, to give pleasure and affirmation. I organized the drawings into a coloring book because a major way we learn to understand the world, as children, is by coloring. As adults many of us still need to learn about our external sexual anatomy." —Tee Corinne

Tee Corinne was born November 3rd, 1943 and grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her mother, also an artist, introduced her to the creative principles and techniques that would serve her all her life. She received a B.A. in printmaking and painting from the University of South Florida, then went on to get an M.F.A. in drawing and sculpture at Pratt Institute, graduating in 1968. Afterwards she taught for many years, traveled through Europe, and finally became enmeshed in the back-to-the-land movement and communal living. After nearly ten years of marriage to a man she referred to as her "best friend," Corinne came out of the closet amidst severe depression in 1975. The strength to accomplish this difficult effort would later propel her to heights and achievements that would distinguish her as "one of the most visible and accessible lesbian artists in the world." From the mid-1960’s to the day she died Corinne created, published, and exhibited her art and writing around the world. She was a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars and a co-founder of The Blatant Image, A Magazine of Feminist Photography. She was the author of one novel, three collections of short stories, four books of poetry and numerous arts publications. In 1980, she was one of ten selected artists invited to have their work exhibited in the Great American Lesbian Art Show. The world lost Tee Corinne to cancer in 2006.

Cover of The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Duke University Press

The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Kristen Hogan

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.