Michigan Womyn's Festival
| Michigan Womyn's Music Festival | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Genre | Women's music |
| Dates | August |
| Location(s) | Hart, Michigan |
| Years active | 1976–2015 |
| Website | |
| michfest.com | |
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, and called the "Original Womyn's Woodstock", was an international feminist music festival held every August from 1976 to 2015 in Oceana County, Michigan, USA, near Hart Township, in a small wooded area known as "The Land." The event was completely built, staffed, run and attended by women. The 40th Festival, in August 2015, was the last one. The Festival, throughout its 40-year history, occupied a central and powerful place in lesbian history, embracing and creating a women-only space for the vast diversity of female experience, or as Bonnie Morris described it: “an entire city run by and for lesbian feminists."
In a 2013 "Letter to the Community", Michfest founder and organizer Lisa Vogel explained MWMF's intention:
The Festival, for a single precious week, is intended for womyn who at birth were deemed female, who were raised as girls, and who identify as womyn. I believe that womyn-born womyn (WBW) is a lived experience that constitutes its own distinct gender identity.
Controversy about Michfest's objective to be a space for womyn-born-womyn led to protests by trans women and the 2014 call by LGBT civil rights advocacy group Equality Michigan ("EM") to boycott the Festival, which was joined by the Human Rights Campaign ("HRC"), the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation ("GLAAD"), the National Center for Lesbian Rights ("NCLR"), and the National LGBTQ Task Force ("The Task Force") (in their entire history, this was the first and only boycott that both NCLR and The Task Force had participated in).
In response to the anti-Festival petition, The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival stated:
MWMF is not just a party. It is a space wherein females—who have been subjected to all manner of degradation from the moment of their first breath—can unpack and put down the oppressions that are directly tied to that experience under patriarchy...Equality Michigan has initiated a petition and call to action against the Festival based on misrepresentations, purposeful omissions, and selective editing of prior Festival statements on this issue. In doing so, they are choosing to sidestep the decades long true reason for the Festival’s existence – to create an alternative to the debilitating misogynist culture we are all steeped in.
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