Batya Weinbaum


Batya Weinbaum is an American poet, feminist, artist, editor, and professor. In addition to founding Femspec Journal, for which she is an editor, she has published five books and numerous articles and essays in a wide-ranging variety of publications.

Biography

Born February 2, 1952 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Weinbaum spent her childhood in Terre Haute, Indiana. Her parents Barbara Adele Hyman and Jack Gerald Weinbaum, who were active in the civil rights movement and the presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy and following, passed on a socio-political consciousness and activism to their daughter. Along with thousands of other anti-war activists Weinbaum participated in the Mayday 1971 protest in which over 7,000 were arrested in Washington, D.C. In the late 1970s Weinbaum voiced her feminist views in several articles published in political journals such as "The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption," co-authored with Amy Bridges in Monthly Review and "Women in the Transition to Socialism: Perspectives on the Chinese Case," in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1976 and "Redefining the Question of Revolution," in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1977. In 1984 Weinbaum briefly stayed at a commune known as Twin Oaks. Her essay on her experience living in the commune became a chapter in Rudy Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch's book, Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers In the early and mid-80s, she began attending the Michigan Women's Music Festival and worked on the crew the years she wrote the proposal that founded the alternative healing space, Oasis, which she negotiated into being with Kristi Vogel as a result of an outburst of activism of alternative healers on the land. Also from 1984 to 1986 Weinbaum met and taught courses with Dr. Liz Kennedy at SUNY Buffalo. Her association with Kennedy helped decide Weinbaum's multicultural approach to her academic direction. In 1997 Weinbaum founded a peer-review feminist journal, Femspec, an interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, surrealism, myth, folklore and other supernatural genres and continues as editor-in-chief. Since 2013 she has been operating a feminist art installation project on Isla Mujeres, MX, and in 2014 bought land in Floyd, VA where she has been developing a feminist educational retreat, organizing gatherings, and offering camping to women interested in experiencing and contributing to healing goddess space. For 25 years she maintained booths at various festivals reading palms, cards, feet, and faces as well as vedic astrology and numerology, and selling goddess art, wearable art from her own wearable art business that she ran for five years, and jewelry cast in silver from her own goddess designs or from ancient goddess designs discovered in her research. She wrote a column on transformational palmistry for five years for the Santa Barbara Independent, after working in Carpinteria at the Pacifica Graduate Institute for two quarters, and subsequently published two books based on this column called Opening Palms, and On the Palmist's Road.

Academic career

From 1998 to 2003 at Cleveland State University Weinbaum taught courses in multicultural literature including different genres, theater, poetry and performance art as well core courses on Shakespeare and Classics. From 2003 to 2007 Weinbaum taught as a peripatetic educator teaching speech and debate and organizing literary events, Beat cafes and Victorian parlors in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She was also a visiting faculty and curriculum adviser at Pacifica Graduate Institute from 2006 to 2007. This led to a teaching career based on distance learning with a variety of institutions, Gaia University, Ivy Bridge College of Tiffin University, State University of New York's Empire State College Center for Distance Learning and currently at American Public University, American Public University, and Life University. In 2019, Weinbaum was invited to teach Women and Gender Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Her work is archived at National Archives of the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982 Collection; Yale University Divinity School Library; Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, Durham, NC; Isha l Isha, Haifa, Israel; University of Colorado, Fort Collins, CO; Mazur, LA; Pacifica Radio Archives, Bay Area, CA; Sexual Minorities Archives, Holyoke, MA; Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY; News and Public Affairs Archives: Alternative Independent Radio News Programming; Kalvos Damion Broadcast Audio Archive; The Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University.

Education

See Also:
2017. Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities. Second Edition.
2013. Feminist Voices. Seattle: Aqueduct.
2012. This Could Happen To You: Post 9-11 Memoir. Femspec Books.
1983. El Curioso Noviazgo Entre Feminismo y Socialismo. Madrid: Siglo XXI.
EDITED JOURNAL ISSUES:see femspec.org
1998-present. Femspec, 37 issues, Vol. 1.1-20.1. 20.2 in production.
EDITED BOOK: Mercer, Naomi, Toward Utopia: Feminist Dystopian Writing and Religious Fundamentalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan, and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Femspec Books and Productions, 2015.
IX Chel Press, Issues 1-3, Isla Mujeres.
According to Gale Contemporary Authors additional books and other writings have included
Searching for Peace on Hostile Grounds: Interviewing Grassroots Women in Israel, 1989-1999.
Sasha's Harlem, Pyx Press 2004.
Jerusalem Romance, East Coast Editions, 1993.
Fragments of Motherhood, Angel Fish Press, 1996.
Mexico in Motion: Actions and Images, Angel Fish Press, 1997.
She has also been a prolific contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Meydele, What She Wants, Buffalo Mountain, Mother-tongues, Birth Passages, Flower, Counterpoint, Catharsis, Old Crow, Town Crier, Spectrum, Mountain Laurel, Feminist Review, Key West Review, and Heresies, and a contributor of articles, stories, and reviews to periodicals, including Spectrum, Rain and Thunder, Trivia, Goddess Alive, Maize, Journal of Progressive Judaism, Extrapolation, Foundation, Frontiers, Multicultural Education, What She Wants, Science-Fiction Studies, Signs, Magic Realism, MELUS, Quill, Phoenix Rising, Anything That Moves, Journal of Feminist Therapy, Kibbutz Trends, Peace Review, Off Our Backs, Popular Photography, World, Second Wave, Iowa Woman, Midwivery Connection, Common Woman, NWSA Journal, Counterpoint, and Women's Studies International Forum and to numerous anthologies on a variety of themes such as language of survivors, healing through trauma by art, and mother/daughter relationships as well as race and early sf.
Some reviews of and comments about her critical works:
Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities is a detailed examination of the Amazon archetype as it has been used in the ancient Greek world, in Asia, among pagan cultures, and in nineteenth-and twentieth-century art and literature. From serving as a heroic symbol to the ancient Greeks, the image of the woman warrior was gradually altered by writers such as Herodotus, and in many manifestations of the image in later cultures it was sullied, emblematic perhaps of a patriarchal triumph over women. In twentieth-century culture the Amazon was rekindled in the wake of feminist consciousness-raising, bringing to fruit such Amazon icons as comic-book character Xena, and a host of literary characters. Choice reviewer S. A. Inness praised the book as "especially comprehensive" and found Weinbaum's approach to be "engaging and carefully researched." Calling Islands of Women and Amazons "a book for feminists to pour over, to savor, and to keep within arm's reach when teaching or writing," Utopian Studies contributor Linda L. Kick added: "While Weinbaum admits to having explored only a portion of available literature and cultural practices, readers of her book will be amazed by, and grateful for, the breadth and promise of her interdisciplinary scholarship."
Weinbaum told CA: "I usually start writing to try to catch something that is going on in my life that I want to understand. Then, as I progress through this process, my desire is to make life clearer and less confusing for those who read what I wrote. That is, I began my first book, The Curious Courtship of Women's Liberation and Socialism, when I was in Chile interviewing and photographing women for UNICEF News, and I didn't understand what was going on around me in the socialist coalition government headed by Salvador Allende, Unidad Popular. Then, as I returned to the United States and did extensive library research, my desire was to make the relationship between these two political movements clearer to those who hadn't had the opportunity as I did to try to write and understand. I have come to recognize this process and its stages in any major book project I undertake, whether it is discovering the struggle for peace in the Middle East or the nuances of discrimination in academe.
"During the writing process I take a lot of quickly jotted notes, and then have to go back and retype them. I show drafts to people. Eventually I send out to publishers and journals. I also present at conferences or read my works in public to develop a piece."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Choice, July, 2000, S. A. Inness, review of Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities, p. 223.
Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 8, 2000, Zina Vishnevsky, "Seeking Zena's Sisters in Legend of Amazons."
Journal of Research on Mothering, spring, 2002, Gail M. Lindsay, review of Islands of Women and Amazons.
Lambda Book Report, January-February, 1994, Judith Katz, review of The Island of Floating Women, p. 36.
Off Our Backs, August-September, 1979, interview with Weinbaum, p. 22; October, 2000, Carol Anne Douglas, review of Islands of Women and Amazons, p. 16.
Utopian Studies Journal, Volume 11, number 2, 2000, Linda L. Kick, review of Islands of Women and Amazons, pp. 305-307.
Women and Politics, Volume 2, numbers 1-2, Annette M. Bickel, review of The Curious Courtship of Women's Liberation and Socialism, p. 145