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This week I took a visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in order to see "Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives that Transform Communities". The goal of the exhibition is to display folk art from all different cultures around the world that women have created in order to provide for a family, escape poverty, or to sustain a safe haven community. While I was amazed by what women were doing together in communities all over the world, I was extremely fascinated by the Indian group SEWA, or Self Employed Women's Association.

This past Tuesday evening I attended the Sex Industry Workers/Stripaerobics Class event. Begininning around 8:45, Campus Women's Organization members led a brief talk about the history and current prevalance of the sex industry before instructing a group of girls on the art of pole dancing. As we assembled in a circle we were taught how prositution, burlesque dancing, pornography and strip clubs came to exist, and other noteworthy facts. 

The event that I recently attended was the showing of the “Made in India” film by by Rebecca Haimowitz & Vaishali Sinha. This event simply demonstrated a movie that expressed the journey of surrogate mothers in India as well as the biological parents who are searching for these women to complete this specific task.

Last Monday night, I attended a lecture held by the Pitt Program Council at the William Pitt Union featuring prominent author, womanizer, and creator of "fratire", Tucker Max. "An Evening with Tucker Max" was advertised to be about finding your passion in life, presumably just like the speaker had. However, in the ensuing hour and a half of Tucker talking, I was struck more by his front of masculinity than about his unconventional talk about life.

The documentary, Made in India, follows an infertile couple from Texas and their journey of ‘outsourcing’ pregnancy to a surrogate mother in India.  After seven years of trying to have a baby, Lisa and Brian Switzer use a medical tourism company to match and facilitate the transaction as well as negotiate fees.  In Mumbai, India, Aasia Khan accepts the new job of surrogacy to help support her own children. This film shows the troubles faced by the Switzers as well as Aasia throughout their journey.

     Last Tuesday, I attended a presentation given by Medea Benjamin, the author of Drone Warfare, a book published this past May about the violent American invasions in  Afghanistan since 2002.  Medea explained that in her book, she aims at giving her readers a clear understanding of exactly what “drone warfare” is and what we, as Americans and as women, can do to put an end to it.  I learned that a drone is a modern kind of technology, which the United States uses to wage war in the Middle East.  Drones apparently can be utilized in several diff

 On November 13, Darryl Roberts presented his research about beauty in America in relevance to his documentary titled "America the Beautiful".  He is working on his third documentary right now about how sexualization of younger people occurs in society.  He spoke about many different topics from the history of beauty (phronology and eugenics played a crucial role in this) to the FDA's regulation of make-up (or should I say non-regulation).  The topic that resignated most with me, though, was the topic of health.  Darryl stated that "your health is your wealth" which

Last Thursday, the People of Color Zine Project visited the University of Pittsburgh as part of their Race Riot! Tour. Five speakers took turns sharing their experiences and why they are part of this project. Although each came from a different background, they were all united by one factor – the alienation they experienced because of their race.