the ch!cktionary
I'm Lena Chen, a writer, activist, and media producer who's been called a "skank" (by Bill O'Reilly) and "a small Asian woman" (by The New York Times). My favorite part of my workday is the hate mail.
For the unlikely story that is my life, read on.warning/disclaimer Visitors on this website are being outted and targeted for harassment. Please use pseudonyms when leaving comments, "liking" posts, or entering giveaways.
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irregular features
Ask Lena: Reader Questions Answered
Anatomy of an Outfit
Bad Feminist Confessions
Freelance Friday: Career Advice for Young Writers
Hate Mail
Gratuitous Photos Of My Bulldog
Notes & Snapshots from Abroad
After seven years in New England, I’m leaving Boston for good on Wednesday and moving to Germany in March.* Before I bid adieu to the East Coast, I’m making a pitstop at the Barnard Center For Research On Women in New York City to participate on a panel about young feminist activism.
I’ve spent the last few months writing less publicly to reflect privately on whether and how I can better serve the causes, communities, and people I’ve come to love during my time at Harvard and in Boston. What this means in practice: less time spent on the Internet, tweeting, Facebooking - and in its place: listening, thinking, journaling, surprisingly learning things I never thought I’d need or want to learn. Taking a break has helped me reflect on the work I’ve done (as part of a movement, as an individual) and the work I hope to do in the future.
Naturally, I thought this conversation at Barnard would be a lovely way to end my time in America, and I also liked the idea of being able to see friends and readers before my departure. I’m planning to spend February on the road in California, Lunar New Year with my mother, while the contents of my apartment/life got shipped to Berlin. So, when a bureaucratic error almost forced Patrick to leave the country last week, I cursed immigration laws, sort of freaked out, and almost cancelled everything in order to fly the coop literally and figuratively.
Needless to say, I’m glad that didn’t happen and that Harvard worked it all out. Because otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to all these lovely people :) Whether you’re a real-life friend or an online acquaintance or first-time reader, details are below - please, please, please come and say hello to me and spread the word and invite your friends.
FEMINISM AND BEYOND: Young Feminists Take on Activism and Organizing
with Lena Chen, Jessica Danforth, Dior Vargas, Sydnie Mosley ’07, Julie Zeilinger ’15, and Dina Tyson ’13
January 30, 2013 | 6:30PM
Event Oval, The Diana Center | 3009 Broadway, New York, NY
Young feminists have long battled invisibility. Countless media articles bemoan young women’s lack of activism or suggest that movements that “go viral,” like SlutWalk or Occupy Wall Street, have come out of nowhere. In fact, feminism among young people is as active as ever, constantly pushing boundaries both inside and outside feminist communities and engaging with issues new (privacy in the digital age, universal healthcare) and old (racism, rape). Young feminists today are consistently building coalitions and questioning narrow interpretations of what makes a feminist issue. This activism is local and transnational; in the street, in the classroom, online. It frequently engages with multi-layered identities and challenges itself as much as it shakes up the wider culture.
In this panel, moderated by Dina Tyson ’13, five feminist activists discuss their areas of interest, what they see as the major challenges for feminist movements, how organizing today compares to that by previous generations, intersections between feminism and other approaches to social justice, and how to build coalitions that can enact structural change.
This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible.
Image courtesy Ennuipoet on Flickr, BY-NC-SA.
“According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), use of IUDs by female ob-gyns is three times greater than that of the general public.”
Not that it’s a competition, but I humbly predict the public will soon follow. Since I switched from the Pill to the IUD in 2009, I’ve heard more and more stories from readers and friends about people clamoring to get them - some even go as far as crossing the border to Canada, which frankly impresses me. Trend or cult? I don’t think the IUD is going to get any less popular (and I think a lot of readers would agree).
My text and soul are one and the same, and I make no Faustian bargains.
Getting ready to show my apartment today - so bizarre, but I’m just five weeks from moving out. New York is one of my last stops before I go onward to California (where I’m visiting family as my stuff gets shipped to Germany). In late January, I’ll be in NYC to say goodbye to friends and talk to people about book stuff. A final opportunity to get face-to-face time with so many people - it’s all a little overwhelming. I’ll also be speaking at Barnard College on the 30th - probably my last event for a while. I’d love it if any readers would like to attend. Please let your NYC-area friends know that this is happening :)
Young Feminist Activism Today
Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 6:30 PM
Event Oval, The Diana Center
As long as there has been feminism, there have been young feminists. On the street, on college campuses, and online, young people have worked to break down oppressive systems and nourish creative communities that honor the worth and dignity of all involved. Young feminists continue to labor on a daily basis to change policies and perceptions around reproductive justice, policing and the prison system, popular culture, gender-based harassment and violence, sexuality education, and much more. With this panel, BCRW continues a decades long tradition of examining the forefront of young feminist activism with this group of dedicated activists under 30.
I mean that in the least suicidal/extraterrestrial way possible.
Just did a segment on HuffPost Live about the United Nations declaring contraception a human right. You can check it out above :)
Two months of not being on email has made me realize how little I need email. If you need me, call, text, or if you must, resort to Facebook. My auto-responder will be on until the end of the year.
I’m in no state to be working on my book right now, so I’m refocusing my energy on projects that have fallen by the wayside and reconsidering some ideas that I had filed away in case of a creative drought. Some examples of things I have on the list for next week:
- Finish an article on the Affordable Care Act, the first assignment I’ve taken in ages (since I desperately need to write something, really anything, unrelated to the book)
- Watch at least one movie (promised a friend I’d see Conversations With Other Women, also would like to rewatch Mysterious Skin)
- Retype some more of The Bell Jar, which I need to reread for research purposes anyway
- Catch up on contracts, forms, mail all that boring life stuff I’ve just ignored
- Make a dent in my two-foot tall clothing pile
I really wanted to have a draft of this book done by now, and in fact, it’s been almost exactly a year since I decided to turn what had previously been an idea for a memoir into a fictional novel project. It’s become a much larger, more artistically challenging undertaking as a result, but I also think I’m a better writer and a better person because of it. I continue to be extremely grateful that I didn’t write a memoir or sell the movie option to my blog at age 20 when I lacked both business sense and a sense of self. On the other hand, I’m not able to just take off to the woods (or even to my mother’s house) for an uninterrupted six months of writing - I have a boyfriend and a dog and roommates and, well, people beyond myself to think about. And that’s a really hard position to be in when I’ve been literally trying for years to write this story and don’t feel like I can move on - emotionally or otherwise - until I get this out and get out of Boston.
In other news, I am doing an informal farewell tour that involves eating everything that I won’t be able to eat in Berlin. (Fish tacos are on the top of my list.) I’m trying to fit in a DC trip in December, spending January in California to visit friends and family, speaking at an event in New York at the end of January, and packing up my life in February. I’ll be out of the country by the first week of March.
This has been such an emotionally and physically exhausting year that I need more than a vacation from life. I need a new life, and I need 2012 to be over. I mean that in the least apocalyptic sense possible.
Loretta Ross on the origin of the term “Woman of Color”:
Y’all know where the term “women of color” came from? Who can say that? See, we’re bad at transmitting history.
In 1977, a group of Black women from Washington, DC, went to the National Women’s Conference, that [former President] Jimmy Carter gave $5million to have as part of the World Decade for Women. There was a conference in Houston, TX.
This group of Black women carried into that conference something called “The Black Women’s Agenda” because the organizers of the conference—Bella Abzug, Ellie Smeal, and what have you—had put together a three-page “Minority Women’s Plank” in a 200-page document that these Black women thought was somewhat inadequate.
So they actually formed a group called Black Women’s Agenda to come [sic] to Houston with a Black women’s plan of action that they wanted the delegates to vote to substitute for the “Minority Women’s Plank” that was in the proposed plan of action.
Well, a funny thing happened in Houston: when they took the Black Women’s Agenda to Houston, then all the rest of the “minority” women of color wanted to be included in the “Black Women’s Agenda.” Okay?
Well, [the Black women] agreed…but you could no longer call it the “Black Women’s Agenda.” And it was in those negotiations in Houston [that] the term “women of color” was created. Okay?
And they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”
Now, what’s happened in the 30 years since then is that people see it as biology now.
You know? Like, “Okay…” And people are saying they don’t want to be defined as a woman of color: “I am Black, “I am Asian American”…and that’s fine. But why are you reducing a political designation to a biological destiny?
That’s what white supremacy wants you to do. And I think it’s a setback when we disintegrate as people of color around primitive ethnic claiming. Yes, we are Asian American, Native American, whatever, but the point is, when you choose to work with other people who are minoritized by oppression, you’ve lifted yourself out of that basic identity into another political being and another political space. And, unfortunately, so many times, people of color hear the term “people of color” from other white people that PoCs think white people created it instead of understanding that we self-named ourselves. This is term that has a lot of power for us.
But we’ve done a poor-ass job of communicating that history so that people understand that power.
(Transcript courtesy of Racialicious.)
(via sexartandpolitics)
What does writing teach us?
First and foremost it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not to write, for many of us, is to die.
Virginity at Harvard | The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson’s magazine quoted me in this week’s cover story on student perceptions of virginity and the state of campus sexual politics. Sadly, I think that there’s still a tendency to think of sexuality in terms of an all-or-nothing/virgin-whore dichotomy, which is exactly how people end up being shamed no matter what their sexual practices actually consist of.
My stance has always been that these misconceptions and prejudices arise out of a collective unwillingness to talk about sex and our own desires (as well as our inner conflicts). In hyper-competitive environments, the self-consciousness and fear of failure that students feel toward academic achievement is totally reflected in how they negotiate their interpersonal relationships as well. It’s easier to judge others when we aren’t comfortable with our own sexuality. And in the end, that lack of transparency is what breeds insecurity in everyone, regardless of whether they’ve decided to stay abstinent or hook up,
Check out the whole piece for a sense of what sexual activity is actually like at Harvard today.
