Iris: A Journal About Women articles from March 2002

Iris: A Journal About Women archives from March 2002

Editor's letter.
March 22, 2002... Welcome to the new Iris. There are some significant changes afoot in terms of our look and content -- and one of my real joys as Coordinating Editor is to be the one to unveil them. When I began my tenure at the journal last summer, Iris...

Aimee Armentrout. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Aimee Armentrout (associate editor) is a recent graduate of UVa's MFA program, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction. When she's not at Iris, she reaches English at Piedmont Virginia Community College, babysits, reads, and writes. She...

Julie Baker. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Julie Baker (web design) is a 4th-year student majoring in psychology. She aspires to a career in the Human Resources field.

Brooke Bakun. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Brooke Bakun (poetry) is a 3rd-year student majoring in English. She enjoys being involved in campus activities, participating in academic discussions and aspires to a career incorporating writing and creativity. Brooke is originally from...

Sandra Beasley. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Sandra Beasley (poetry) will graduate this spring from the University of Virginia's poetry program. She has published poems in numerous on-grounds magazines, as well as the Cville Weekly and Streetlight Magazine.

Sarah Brown. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Sarah Brown (layout) is a native of Fork Union, VA in her last semester at UVa. She is an intern for UVa Athletic Media Relations, a career she will continue at the ACC office next year. Her involvement in the Young Women Leaders Program and...

Cristina DeSalvo. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Cristina DeSalvo (non-fiction features) is a 3rd-year English major at UVa. She is originally from Newark, DE. Upon graduating, Cristina plans to take a year off to travel before attending law school. She enjoys writing, and would like to be an...

Reighan Gillam. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Reighan Gillam (fiction) is a 3rd-year student studying anthropology and African/African-American studies. In the future, she hopes to take part in the revolution to break the chains of oppression in the United States.

Amelia Grana. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Amelia Grana (layout) is currently a 3rd-year student majoring in French and Italian. She is a big sister with the Young Women Leaders Program. She has climbed Mt. Rainier, the Grand Teton, and lived abroad in both France and Italy. Amelia...

Sara Johnson. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Sara Johnson (non-fiction features) is a 4th-year English major. She has studied abroad in Australia and interns in UVa's International Studies office, where she is co-editing an anthology of study abroad essays. She plans to pursue a career in...

Thuy Lam. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Thuy Lam (web design) is a 4th-year student majoring in Environmental Studies. She is a first-generation Asian American who enjoys working with adolescent girls in the Young Women Leaders Program. She aspires to work in the public health field...

Renee Mack. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Renee Mack (fiction) is a 3rd-year Spanish Linguistics major. She is involved with Mediation Services, Young Women Leaders, and the Film and Media Society. Presently, she would like to work in public television and is working on a documentary...

Lida Noory. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Lida Noory (marketing) is a 2nd-year who hopes to major in Studies in Women and Gender and Marketing. Her family is originally from Afghanistan, but she was born in Alexandria, VA. She has worked with the DHHS, the HRS exploratory committee,...

Kaeisha O'Neal. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Kaeisha O'Neal (marketing) is a 3rd-year student, double majoring in Economics and Studies in Women and Gender. She takes part in the Young Women Leaders Program and HUES, a UVa Women's Center mentoring program for women of color. Her future...

Blake Points. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Blake Points (non-fiction features) is a 4th-year majoring in American politics and Studies in Women and Gender. She studied abroad in Florence, Italy last year and is the current facilitator for the Young Women Leaders group at Walton Middle...

Priti Trivedi. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Priti Trivedi (fiction) is a 4th-year majoring in Foreign Affairs and South Asian Studies. She will be starting law school in the fall. Afterwards, she hopes to be a lobbyist/advocate for women's and children's issues. Her favorite time in...

Alexandra Vargo. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Alexandra Vargo (layout) is a 4th-year Art History major from McLean, VA. This is her third semester working with Iris magazine. She contributed a three-page photo essay "Journey from Moscow" for the #42 Generations issue.

Jessica Wolpert. (Meet the Staff).
March 22, 2002... Jessica Wolpert (layout) is a 4th-year American Studies major from Fairfax, VA. She has worked in public television and hopes to begin a career in publishing this fall.

Say what?
March 22, 2002... In the spirit of emerging voices, IRIS has compiled quotations reflecting challenge, determination, and women's strength as articulated by women. Some names may be familiar, some may not, and some may be someday. We invite you to gain...

A gibbous moon and down syndrome.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A GIBBOUS MOON AND DOWN SYNDROME Maybe it happened in meiosis, doctors guess. After kisses in the dark. An extra chromosome, though his twin sister is spared. A roll of the dice, a mistake in Nature's cell division. Child of...

Young women leaders program redeems middle school years.
March 22, 2002... Ask almost any woman who has survived adolescence what three years of her life she would most like to erase. A pair of braces and a snap bracelet say that she will cringe and reply with a grimace, "middle school!" Middle school can be...

Life time.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... LIFE TIME I disappeared from the girl's locker room at the YWCA on Waterloo Road, October 23, 1977, around 2:00. Fourteen days after my thirteenth birthday, I got up, stuffed an old yellow bathing suit in my bag and ran out to...

Memories from a mixed race childhood.
March 22, 2002... My parents tell me that at age two and a half, I ran around the house shouting "I'm an American, I'll speak English!" I rejected my mother's heritage in vicious outbursts as she told me bedtime stories about "long loy lew" and used picture...

Got a problem? (ask Iris!).
March 22, 2002... Welcome to the Ask IRIS column! My name is Iris (of course) and I'm an aspiring women's studies professor -- so, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable when it comes to women's issues. I'm here to answer any questions you have about feminism,...

Vietnam revisited for the first time.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Stepping out into the crammed streets of Hanoi, I emerge from the flat surface of my western-oriented history books and dive into the reality of Vietnam. Before my arrival in this beautiful, though deeply scarred, country I read that the last...

Suitcase of wings.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... SUITCASE OF WINGS That or it was evening. (It was always evening: ebbing screech of trolleys, televisions of the elderly speaking Spanish.) But focus now on the cooking, the back yard of stolen signs and mesh enclosed birds,...

Each vertebra alone.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... EACH VERTEBRA ALONE August arrived yesterday. Tractors breaking summer from the stems. Now envelopes sail shadows of a woman's fingers collecting like distance in old metal bins. Behind each stamp: dust, mustang...

Rummaging for words.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... At the time of purchase, the little orange shirt had seemed like a fabulous idea. We had been shuffing around the stuffy old warehouse for over an hour, painstakingly sorting through mothball treasures at the Humane Society's summer rummage...

Anniversary.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... ANNIVERSARY Where nothing changes they winter into sleep, his hand heavy as a cat on her thigh. Shadows soak up the familiar: warm cave of his mouth releasing gentle sighs and snores, the flash of...

The wake.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Tom relocated his family twenty years ago, when bypass surgery forced him to quit long commutes from North Adams. But she didn't know about his heart until Thursday's wake, where she listened to anyone who might explain why Tom was in a coffin...

Iris reviews the Vagina Monologues.
March 22, 2002... The rehearsal opens with hot pants. Actually, they're not exactly hot pants -- instead, they're velvet flares, draping over a pair of six-inch sparkly red pumps that look like they arrived straight out of an S/M version of The Wizard of...

The refrigerator project.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Family, memories, and reminders reside in the many cracks and crevices of a woman's kitchen. Sandy Smith, photographer and artist, has captured the spirit of women as seen by the melange of magnets, drawings, and pictures that decorate their...

Knit and purl.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... Last week I was shaken alive in the thin, wooden pews of a local black church. The African-dancers bounced from hip thrust to head roll, drumming a tattoo of thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr. with their bare feet. The building and the audience...

An interview with Vickie Nam.(Interview)
March 22, 2002... When I first opened Yell-Oh Girls, I thought to myself who is Vickie Nam? I, like the writers in the book, am a young Asian American woman still trying to embrace my differences, negotiate my identity and discover my voice. Yell-Oh Girls! is a...

Activism: a reflection.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... In the summer of 2000, I spent nearly two months volunteering at Kasisi Orphanage, located on the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia's capital city. My family lived in Zambia for five years, from when I was seven to twelve years old. Ever since we...

Cool women to watch for. (Iris Profiles).
March 22, 2002... Instead of speaking for them, as some adults tend to do, Winx Lawrence helps youth in Charlottesville, Virginia, to speak using their own voices and words. As if earning a Ph.D from the University of Virginia, balancing a husband and three...

The perils of masculinity studies.
March 22, 2002... One of the most welcome developments in gender studies in the past few decades has been the critical study of masculinity -- from the work of philosophers like Susan Bordo and Harry Brod to the more journalistic investigations of critics like...

Mary's dirge.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... "Mary, there were no mangoes at the market this morning." My sister is clearly disappointed. She knows that when she brings the boxes of overripe mangoes from the market into the kitchen they will be featured in every meal throughout the...

A simple plan.(marriage in India)
March 22, 2002... When my sister and I were young, we used to play a game called "house." We would dress up in my mother's saris, pile on her makeup, and run around pretending to be housewives. This act was largely made up of rushing to and from the kitchen,...

Making room for teen voices: feminist discourse in magazines by and for girls.
March 22, 2002... I studied the beauty tips, took every quiz, and read every article in every magazine I could get my hands on for years.... I was probably in eighth grade before I realized that the magazines were merely processing the same old information in...

Stepping out of stilettos; porn for the ladies: for women, by women.
March 22, 2002... If pornography has a role in your life, chances are it is a personal and unique one. Pornography is variously defined, but most would agree that at its most basic, pornography depicts erotic behavior to cause sexual excitement. Because women...

Iris reviews music.
March 22, 2002... Double Fantasy Yoko Ono John Lennon Tantalizing Peaceful Mysterious Serene Alluring. All of these adjectives describe one musical album. Curious? You should be. It is very rare to find such a mix of lyrical and musical styles in a...

How I Do Res.
March 22, 2002... Res' debut album is another credit to add to the list of talented Philadelphia artists. Her album comes at a time when neo-soul is defining itself and gaining popularity. It is easy for one to throw her into that pile of Philly-soul that has...

Iris reviews food: the contradictions of Brazilian cuisine.
March 22, 2002... There are multiple aspects of different cultures that must be explored before we can learn to appreciate differences. There are many boundaries -- some physical, some mental. But gender knows no boundaries, and women all over the world share...

Snippets from the trip in reverse order.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... Sarah first realizes someone is approaching from behind because of the faint grinding of soles against pebbled sand. She twists her neck then slumps, as if her pack will conceal her, erase, or negate all her obnoxious howling. Americans can't...

Owning up to Angelica.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... OWNING UP TO ANGELICA Without a chariot, you're just a man with bare feet. She's got cuts, you've seen the marks on her stomach. Things came out of her before you were even near, so don't tell her don't fall. Don't stand...

A brown study.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A BROWN STUDY Stepping into someone else's November, she's called a car, used a voucher to travel uptown. Today, she's her sister-in-law, that same size, same age woman desperate to buy perfection. Now, sealed in a dressing...

Vermeer.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... Jason's mother perched on the edge of a kitchen stool, watching him grill chicken breasts for their dinner. "I don't think you should go to your father's tonight," she said. Her tan thighs spread below her tennis skirt and she balanced a large...

U.Va. Women of Engineering.(University of Virginia)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Maite Brandt-Pearce Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Brandt-Pearce develops math modeling for the design and performance of communication systems. Her goal in designing communication systems is to get more...

Mother's voices. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Mother's Voices, a non-profit grass roots organization, is dedicated to mobilizing parents as educators and advocates for HIV prevention. Some of their programs include communications guidelines on how to talk to children about HIV and the...

The Third Wave Foundation. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Third Wave Foundation promotes activism and female issues to women ages 15-30. By supporting young women activists who are often overlooked, they empower and educate a generation and encourage them to take leadership in their communities...

Lesbian Choral Ensemble. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Voices: Lesbian Choral Ensemble, located in Oakland, California, is an all-lesbian chorus who, through their singing, advocate for the visibility of lesbians and musical excellence. They endeavor to show the diversity of the lesbian community...

The Mu Sigma Upsilon Sorority. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Mu Sigma Upsilon Sorority is the first multicultural sorority in the nation. Established on November 21, 1981 at Rutgers University, the organization encourages awareness and appreciation of each individual's diverse heritage. Its five...

The Famous Door Theatre Company. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Famous Door theatre company, established in 1992 in Chicago, features a company of actors, directors, and designers who produce entertaining and provocative premiere and seldom-produced plays. Their vision of theatre includes serving the...

The Women's Professional Football Combines and Camps. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Women's Professional Football Combines and Camps train women in the fundamentals of football, positions, skills, and development of the football player's mind and body. Players and coaches from the NCAA and NFL come together to train women...

The Emerging Voices Online magazine. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Emerging Voices Online magazine dedicates itself to publishing the work of students in undergraduate and graduate writing programs. Produced in association with the Mississippi Review and edited by graduate students, the magazine takes...

The Voices of Women online magazine. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Voices of Women online magazine showcases articles written by women, a calendar of events, and links to other women-related websites. They create an encouraging community for women using the internet. One can find Voices of Women at...

Nobody knows my name. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Nobody Knows My Name by Rachel Raimist is a 58-minute video on women in the hip-hop movement. Despite hip-hop's origins as a movement for a new generation of artists to express their artistic and political visions, women have to struggle to be...

Zines. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Zines are self-published magazines that address diverse issues ranging from politics and work to sex and music. Zine comes from the word fanzine; the first one published in 1930 was called The Comet. With greater access to inexpensive printing...

The Maa Batakali Cultural Mission, Inc. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... The Maa Batakali Cultural Mission, Inc. (MBCM) was founded with a mission to bridge differences and form a community based on the teachings of Sha'can and on activism in the name of the Goddess. It teaches that the connection to nature is...

Writers. (Hot Flashes).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Writers Laurie Halse Anderson, Virginia Euwer Woolf and Patricia McCormick are tackling adolescent and feminist issues overtly in their acclaimed Young Adult novels. Narrated in the first person, Anderson's Speak tells of a teenager's recovery...