Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

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The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF) is an international feminist music festival occurring every year in August in Hart, Michigan.

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[edit] Creation and purpose

As a response to perceived misogyny, sexism and homophobia, and also to create a place for women to gather in the Midwest, MWMF was created in 1976 by 19-year-old Lisa Vogel, her sister Kristie, and Mary Kindig. All three were working-class women from Michigan who had seen female musicians and stage hands demeaned and repeatedly harassed at festivals and venues run by men. MWMF created a feminist alternative and response for lesbians in the music scene, and continues to create an annual place for living out lesbian feminist politics.

[edit] Functioning, activities and services

The festival is completely builtemt, staffed, and run by women; indeed, women build all of the stages, run the light and sound syss, make the trash collection rounds, serve as medical and psychological support, cook meals for 4,000 over open fire pits, provide childcare and facilitate workshops covering various topics of interest to women in the US and abroad.

Further, in its commitment to living out lesbian feminist politics, community decisions are made through community meetings where the youngest members of the community are given as much access to participate as the oldest.

The festival provides a wide range of services to its attendees for one inclusive price. Three vegetarian meals are served daily to festival goers and festival workers. There is "Women of Color"-only space, accesibility for women with physical disabilities, childcare, health care, and several categories of camping to suit most needs (including "Chem-Free," "Scent-Free" and "Over-50s," and space for "Loud and Roudy" campers, to name only a few). Besides the concerts, there are also workshops, sports, movies under the stars, open mikes, dances, sweat lodges and drum gatherings.

[edit] Production and performances

The festival creates a premium high tech production in an extremely rural outdoor venue. Built over a month-long period by a volunteer workforce, the festival land starts completely in its natural ecological state. After the week-long festivities, the workers tear down the entire operation and completely remove all non-organic materials from the land. The equipment is then stored in a variety of local barns and warehouses to be used the following year. By the time the last woman leaves the land, nothing remains to bear witness of the event; even the electrical boxes that power the festival are buried at each festival's end.

Three stages feature an eclectic selection of women musicians. Tracy Chapman began her career playing to the festival audience and many singer-songwriters before and since then have built loyal followings across the USA and beyond because of their connection with the festival. Despite now in its 30th year, the festival has absolutely no corporate sponsorship, each festival paying for the next.

[edit] Exclusion of transgender and transsexual women

[edit] Women Born Women policy

In 1991 Nancy Burkholder, who had attended the festival the year before without incident, was expelled from MWMF when she disclosed her transsexual status and was reported to organizers. Defending the action from public criticism, the festival organizers cited a unwritten but hotly contested women-born-women policy. Of the more than 90 women-only festivals in the United States, MWMF is one of only a handful of festivals with a women-born-women policy. The organizers state that since its inception (articulated on a 1978 flier for the festival), "the Michigan Festival is and always has been an event for womyn, and this continues to be defined as womyn born womyn" (Lisa Vogel & Barbara Price) i.e. those women who were born and raised as girls and who currently identify as women. This policy has gained notoriety for the festival, as it officially requests that the attendees be women-born-women only. Supporters of this policy, including MWMF's primary organizers, believe that the particularity of women-born-women (WBW) experience (separate and apart from a woman's experience) comes from being born and raised in a female body, and see the festival as a celebration of that lived and embodied experience under the oppression of patriarchy. Supporters of the policy feel that the experience of being women born women in a place that honors that experience is vital for providing a sense of strength for attendees.

[edit] Criticism

Opponents of the policy, including transgender and transsexual activists as well as many non-trans supporters, believe that WBW is a questionable category created solely to legitimize discrimination against transsexual women. They point out that very little of the festival's content and language about itself centers around specific experiences of being "born and raised", but rather focuses on the idea that the festival is by and for "all women". Opponents argue for a less deterministic understanding of gender, insisting that "women's space is for all self-identified women," regardless of whether one was assigned female or male at birth. Trans rights activists claim that the festival's policy exerts non-trans privilege and that it establishes and promotes an atmosphere of oppression and discrimination by allowing some women in but not other women. Opponents view the policy as transphobic and there is an active protest movement including performers criticizing the policy from the stage, attendees wearing yellow armbands, and Camp Trans, an annual protest camp that takes place near the site of the MWMF.

[edit] List of Performers from Past Years


[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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