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Mirha-Soleil Ross
Canadian transsexual videographer and activist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Mirha-Soleil Ross is a transsexual videographer, performance artist, sex worker and activist. Her work since the early 1990s in Montreal and Toronto has focused on transsexual rights, access to resources, advocacy for sex workers and animal rights.
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Early life
Ross grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec. As a teenager during the 1980s, she became aware of animal abuse, becoming a vegetarian and getting involved with animal rights activism.[1] She struggled to "pass" as a boy and was often attacked for looking too feminine.[2] Ross moved from Montreal to Toronto during the early 1990s, where did sex work and began producing zines and videos.
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gendertrash from hell
From 1993 to 1995, Ross and her partner Xanthra Phillippa MacKay published gendertrash from hell, a quarterly zine which "[gave] a voice to gender queers, who've been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other."[3] They managed the zine's publisher, genderpress, which also distributed other trans pamphlets and literature, corresponded with local organizations and sold buttons.
In standard zine format, gendertrash was a combination of art, poetry, resource lists, serialized fiction, calls to action, classified ads, illustrations, collages and movie reviews. By and for transsexual, transgender and transvestite people, it addressed gender experiences at the individual and societal level and prioritized sex workers, low-income queer people, trans people of colour and prisoners.[3] Articles frequently addressed the erasure of transsexuals from queer communities and the co-opting of trans identities and issues.[4] Four issues of gendertrash were published, and its run ended in 1995.[5]
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Videography
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Ross' videos, primarily short films, centre on gender, sexuality, animal rights and the transsexual body. Her videos are distributed by Vtape in Toronto.[6]
Videos
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Performance art
Ross produced a one-woman show, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore, based on her sex work and activism, at the 2002 Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts and in 2004 at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.[25] The show intended to educate audiences about issues facing sex workers and refute stereotypes contributing to violence against them.[26] Yapping Out Loud also incorporated Ross' animal-rights activism with comparisons between oppression faced by sex workers and coyotes, inspired by the American sex-worker organization COYOTE.[25] In 2001 and 2002, she performed The Pregnancy Project, a 9-month piece where she appeared in public with a prosthetic belly to spark conversations about gender, motherhood and the possibility of womb transplants for transsexuals.[27]
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Counting Past 2
In 1997, 1998, and 1999, Ross ran Counting Past 2 (CP2), a trans film, video, performance and spoken-word festival which provided a space for trans people to speak for themselves without catering to cisgender audiences.[28] The festival's goal was to be more inclusive of trans artists than mainstream gay and lesbian film festivals by centering trans voices, accepting less-polished work and including cabaret and performance components instead of restricting submissions to films.[29] Participants included Aiyyana Maracle and Max Wolf Valerio.[30][31] In 2002, the festival returned after a two-year hiatus, under the stewardship of Boyd Kodak and Cat Grant.[32] In a 2007 interview with Viviane Namaste, Ross said that her efforts with CP2 to create transsexual spaces outside a lesbian and gay framework had failed and that those spaces had disappeared or been absorbed by the LGBT community.[4]
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Social service
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Ross was involved in social service work for trans and sex worker communities in Toronto.[33] In 1999, she was the founding coordinator of Meal-Trans at the 519, a drop-in program offering meals and peer support to trans people. Ross was involved in the expansion of the 519's trans-related programs, providing services for trans people who are HIV-positive and sex workers as well as founding peer support groups for trans men and trans women with colleague Rupert Raj.[34]
She worked with women's shelters, community centres and sex worker organizations to improve access and educate service providers.[35] Ross was involved in pushing back against efforts by residents' associations in the Gay Village and Allan Gardens areas to expel sex workers.[36]
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Awards
Ross has received several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her video Mateřština (co-directed with Mark Karbusicky) won the Marian McMahon Award at the 2004 Images Festival in Toronto.[37] In 2001, Ross was the grand marshal of Toronto's Pride Parade.[38] In 2011, she was inducted into Canada's Q Hall of Fame.[39]
Exhibitions
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References
External links
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