Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore
by Marisela Gomez
This review originally appeared on indyreader.org.
Memory Against Forgetting: Marisela Gomez's book illuminates the history of the fight against displacement and dispossession in East Baltimore
Let's start with a website. Visit ebdi.org and you'll find a glowing description of responsible urban development, of a large institution acting benevolently, even munificently, to lift up a troubled neighborhood, mired in generations of poverty, and bringing prosperity back to a decaying city. This is a good story, and one that postindustrial cities, clinging to their “anchor institutions,” are increasingly vocal in telling.
In Baltimore, however, this website and its reassuring story leaves something out: the real history of struggle, led by the residents of the Middle East neighborhood who have been fighting the East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) for over a decade. These were the residents who learned that the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI), through its quasi-public proxy EBDI, would be taking their homes through eminent domain: one morning when they woke up to the story in the Baltimore Sun. These were the residents who refused to go quietly and agree that the public good would be served at the cost of uprooting their community, and who dared to fight back against the very powerful institutions who wanted to decide the future of the Middle East. And these are the residents whose story is told in Dr. Marisela Gomez's new book, Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore. 
Supernatural Strategies for making a Rock 'n' Roll Group
by Ian F. Svenonius
This newest volume by contemporary art and music's favorite quasi-anti-hero pundit Ian Svenonius is a programmatic for, as the title suggests, forming a rock 'n' roll group.
Help us raise money to distribute Marisela Gomez's long-awaited book on anti-displacement organizing in East Baltimore!
by Red Emma's
More info here
Audio: "Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives" w/Breanne Fahs
by Breanne Fahs
On May 16th, 2012, feminist, professor, and scholar of Women and Gender Studies, Breanne Fahs, came to Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse to discuss her new book Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives. To an engaged packed house, Fahs lively and candidly discussed her research, work, and critique. In Performing Sex, Fahs does immense research into "women's erotic lives", as well as interviews forty women about their relationships to their own sexual subjectivites.
Fahs findings are at once surprising, but only due to the resonance of their frank revelations. As is highly detailed in her book, and seen through the active discussion at the event, a large portion of women can relate on various levels to Fahs's portrayals.
We have undergone numerous "waves" of feminism and, in many ways, women have more sexual autonomy and freedom than ever before. However, oppression always finds a means in which to sequester liberation. Fahs details that women today are caught in a perilous period "between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment." (Performing Sex)
Her account reveals: women's immensity and frequency of faking orgams, habitual inability to orgasm but pressure to do so, fantasies that downplay or eliminate their own agency, regular distaste for sex, and alarming ways in which they approach/perform sex not for their own - or collective - pleasure but purely for their partner's.
In this discussion, Fahs asks us to critique the world we've inherited from prior feminist movements, oppression's backlash results that we must grapple with today, and the long road we still must travel down in order to find, meet, know, embrace, unabashedly pursue our own female needs and desires. A key point that Fahs stressed was that not only do we need to work for the freedom to but also the freedom from. Sexual liberation does not only lie in the ability to desire sex but also in the ability/acceptance for lack of desire. She asks to analyze and acknowledge the complexities in our sexual selves and in ourselves.
The female-lead collaborative discussion weaved through topics as diverse as the regulation of female body hair, to traversing these territories in LGBTQ relationships, to engaging on these issues with male partners (and males in general), and to a plethora of other terrains.
Here is audio from this event:
Listen
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Red Emma's is closing!
We're going to take the summer off as we get ready for the big move to our giant new space on North Avenue this fall; and so after nearly nine years of continuous operation, we are closing the doors of our storefront at 800 Saint Paul Street for good on Saturday May 18th; Details of the closing party, as well as our special moving sale, are coming soon, so make sure to stay in touch via our mailing list, or through Twitter or Facebook.
Red Emma's Pepper-Sprayed!
As some of you know, someone walked into Red Emma's yesterday and pepper-sprayed two of our worker-owners, as well as the entire front counter, and grabbed a cell phone and ran. This wasn't a random act of violence, this is someone who robbed us last year, and then kicked in our door. We don't know for sure, but it's possible this is the same person who smashed the glass in our front door twice last month.
Thankfully, no one has been seriously injured in these attacks, and the store has been thoroughly decontaminated. But the store can only stand up to so much beating ... and the same is true of the workers. In the past month, we've lost over $1,000 in damages, lost business, stolen property, and pepper-spray-contaminated food.
Please support us in these difficult times. With our move looming on the horizon, we're down to reduced hours, and with that comes reduced income. Please come into the store on the days that we are open (Thursday - Sunday)! The best way to support us is by being in the store, and helping us to generate income, as well as by just providing moral support - there's strength in numbers.
For those of you who feel better off these days, please consider making a donation to help recoup some of our losses: https://www.wepay.com/donations/please-support-red-emma-s
Everybody in the streets for fair, not failed, development!
On April 20th, at 11AM, a coalition of labor and community groups is going to descend on the site of Baltimore's new casino, demanding a vision of development that doesn't gamble away our city's future on tax breaks for the rich, while demanding austerity for everyone else. You should be there---we will! More info here.
Symposium: Equitable and Sustainable Redevelopment in Abandoned Communities: A Path Forward
We're honored to be cosponsoring a one-day symposium convened on the occasion of the publication of Marisela Gomez's Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore, which will take place on March 9th at Sojourner Douglass College.
Equitable and Sustainable Development: A Path Forward from Dottye Burt-Markowitz on Vimeo.
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Friday Jun 7, 7PM @ 2640
Baltimore Circus!
Come one! Come all! This is the Circus show you've been waiting to see!
Join us for a night of costumes and revelry. Your eyes are sure to be dazzled, your heart opened, your jaw dropped.
We have a show of epic proportions, featuring aerial arts, juggling, hula hooping, stilt walking, acrobatics, puppetry and much much more.
The artists in this show practice weekly in the very space where this show will be held. Proceeds from the show go to benefit 2640 Space and its sister project Red Emma's for community activity and involvement.
The show will dazzle you first and then welcome you to become part of it, as the circus becomes a dance party in the end, encouraging circus-goers to get out of your seats, meet the crew, and play along. Advance tickets available at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/367245.
Hope to see you there!
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