Celebrity Lezbian Fists

Celebrity Lezbian Fist is a limited edition series of silicone fists cast from the actual hands of famed and favourite queer cultural icons. The series includes fists by Harmony Hammond, GB Jones, Eileen Myles, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Opie, Jack Halberstam, and Savoy Kapow Howe. Inspired by the infamous cock-castings by rock groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, the fists come in a range of punchy colours personally selected by each participant. Each "model" was made in a limited edition of 25. These celebrity fists are mostly art, but are made of 100% silicone and are use-able. Made with love in Canada by Happy Valley and Paige Gratland.

Special thanks to the celebrities behind the fists for the bios below!

Harmony Hammond

Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer and independent curator who lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico. Considered a pioneer of the feminist art movement, she lectures, writes and publishes extensively on feminist art, lesbian art, and the cultural representation of difference.

Hammond's work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Walker Art Center, Mpls., MN; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Phoenix Art Museum; the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa FE, NM; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CN.

Her book Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art & the Martial Arts (TSL Press,1984), a classic on 70s feminist art, is out-of-print. Her ground-breaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000) received a Lambda Literary Award.

GB Jones

G.B. Jones is an openly queer, self-made in the punk rock tradition, artist, film maker, rock musician, writer and publisher of zines. The writer Kevin Killian asked, "If we call G.B. Jones the 'female Tom of Finland,' what doe' that say about the American fantasy of unlimited sex, power, and class privilege both artists satirize and pull apart?"

G.B. Jones has an uneasy fascination with authority and uses her gender and sexual preference to exploit fantasies of rock & roll, sex, groupies, booze, drugs, money, leather, torn jeans,motorcycles and stardom as an all out assault against values that would strive for assimilation of queer culture into the mainstream. She's every queer girl and boy's hero, whether you want her to be or not. Believe it or don't, she is looking out for every queer's best interests.

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles was born in Boston in 1949, attended catholic schools in Arlington, Mass. and graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Since then she's become widely known in writing circles, art circles, queer circles and beyond as one of the most restless interpreters of the American vernacular, moving fluidly from the poetry to writing novels, essays and plays, art reviews, performances and libretti, and perhaps most notably as someone with an uncanny knack as John Ashbery put it, for making people feel uncomfortable and awake=85chanting softlyand beautifully the harsh if humorous realities that combine to make whatever life a poet can piece together today.

Eileen will be touring the Iceland book widely in this fall in North America, Iceland and Europe. She's toured with Sister Spit in 1997 and in 2007 and looks forward to more. She is a Professor Emeritus of writing & Literature at UC San Diego where she taught from 2002 to 2007. In Spring 2010 she will be the Hugo Writer at U. of Montana in Missoula. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, Art Forum, TimeOut, Book Forum and Another Magazine. She received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers' grant for Iceland. She will be blogging bi-weekly on the Harriet site for the Poetry Foundation till the end of September. She lives in New York.

Cheryl Dunye

Cheryl Dunye is a director, screenwriter, and filmmaker whose work explores issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Her work is characteristically postmodern in the self-referential disclosing of Dunye's role as both actor and director. Combining intensely personal accounts with humor, Dunye's films and videos are engaging and provocative, revealing the complexities and struggles she has faced, as well as her happiness and pride, in being an African-American lesbian.

Cheryl Dunye, who graduated with an MFA from Rutgers University, has been a video art practitioner for well over a decade, making such pieces as She Don't Fade, Vanilla Sex, The Potluck and the Passion, and Greetings from Africa.

Cathy Opie

Catherine Opie was born in 1961 in Ohio. She received her MFA from CalArts in 1988. Her solo exhibitions include LA Freeways (San Francisco) and Being and Having (New York). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions from Pari' to Australia to New Orleans, including the 1995 Whitney Museum Biennial in New York and In a Different Light at the University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1995. She lives in Los Angeles and is on the staff of the University of California, Irvine.

In the late eighties to mid-nineties Opie gained national attention for her large format portraits of dyke daddies, gay male performance transvestites, FTM transexuals, tattooed and scarified gay men and lesbians and other members of a social milieu where sexual identity is most dramatically thrown into question. In a non-confrontational manner, Opie's places her subjects clearly and calmly in the center of focus. Her subjects appear to reverse the gaze--outwardly toward the viewer.

Jack Halberstam

Judith Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at USC. Halberstam teaches courses in queer studies, gender theory, art, literature and film.

Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and a new book from NYU Press titled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.es, gender theory, art, literature and film.

Savoy Howe

Savoy Howe founded the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club in 1996.

Savoy started boxing at the Toronto Newsboys Boxing Club at Broadview and Eastern in 1992. At that time there were few females in the boxing gym. After training for a year Savoy participated in the first sanctioned bout for women organized by Toronto in 1993. Wearing the Toronto Newsboys t-shirt in competition, Savoy decided that one day she would fight wearing a Toronto Newsgirls t-shirt.

In 1996 when the Toronto Newsboys moved to the corner of Queen and Greenwood and became the Unitas Boxing Club, named after the Newsboys founder, Tony Unitas, Savoy started teaching as a way of supplementing income so she could keep training. She put up posters weekly to advertise the women=EF=BF?s boxing program and within a short time 40 women signed up. Thus began the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club.

Savoy Kapow! Howe has been honoured with the individual/community award for accomplishments in the calendar years 2005 and 2006. Three individuals and three organizations will be honoured. These awards recognize exceptional achievements that break through traditional barriers and pave the way for girls and women to participate in sports and physical activity at every level.

Savoy has also been honoured with an award from Pride Toronto recognizing outstanding contributions that have made an extraordinary impact on the quality of human experience within the queer community over the last year.