CELEBRATING QUEER CULTURE

new merchandise has landed!

A turquoise and black cotton tote bag featuring the Andro and Eve logo sits underneath a pile of Andro and Eve merchandise. Including postcards, stickers and badges.

We’re thrilled to share our brand new merchandise! Available on our online shop now! 

The new merchandise includes Tote Bags, Postcard Sets and Mini Badge packs. After consulting with our community a few weeks back, we chose two colour ways for the new tote bags. They are made from sustainably sourced cotton and are available in Turquoise or Black. Designed and printed in Sheffield, they’re a fab way to show your support for Andro and Eve and send out low key queer vibes!

4 postcards with different designs are laid on a turquoise surface. They feature hand drawn images. One is of rapper, Bad Lay-Dee, one of drag king Sammy Silver and the other Christian Adore. The fourth depicts the words 'Reyt Queer' with patterns including moustaches and rainbows around the words. The postcard of Christian has been coloured in with vibrant colours.
Our brand new Postcard Set.

The Postcard Sets features hand drawn artwork, by Andro and Eve co-founder, Katherine Warman, and showcase three of the artists who have previously performed at our events. The Mini Badge packs feature 4 different designs and are a perfect way to spread some queer joy!

4 badges. The badges say, Andro and Eve, Reyt Queer, and Queer Joy. The fourth badge is a 5 stripe rainbow.
Brand new Mini Badge Pack!

You can win everything pictured for you and a friend. Head on over to our Instagram or Facebook pages to find out more and enter the prize draw. Deadline is midnight on the 25th October!

All profits from sales of our merchandise are used to support the work of Andro and Eve. Find out more about our work here.

Happy browsing!

Stop the scandal

As part of Centre zine, we chose to highlight the Stop the Scandal Campaign. This grassroots campaign was created by Yorkshire’s Racial Justice Network and supported by Yorkshire Resists. They wrote the following piece for our new zine, which is on sale now. 50% of profits from sales of Centre zine, will be donated to the Racial Justice Network. Read on to find out more about Stop the Scandal.

The Stop The Scan campaign challenges a move initiated by West Yorkshire Police in 2019 to introduce mobile fingerprint scanning linked to immigration databases, using equipment funded by the Home Office.

These biometric devices are used with officers’ mobile phones, as they detain people in the street. This adds an extra, dangerous dimension to Stop and Search protocol, which according to the government’s own research, disproportionately targets Black and Brown people (with Black people 10 times more likely to be targeted by police¹).

The technology is used once police officers have deemed an offence to have been committed. This could be anything from loitering to dropping litter. If the officer doubts the given identity from the person detained, they may then use a scan of their fingerprints in order to carry out a person search on their identity. It’s crucial to emphasise that an officer uses their own discretion to determine how authentic your given identity is, a subjective judgement, which in the campaign’s view, has the potential to even further discriminate against trans people within Black and Brown communities.

Black painted text says 'Hands off our prints' with a stylised fingerprint placed behind some prison bars to the left

Scans like this have only previously been carried out at police stations following an arrest. But what future lies ahead, where one’s dignity is stripped down and reduced to the opinion of a police officer, and a frequently inconclusive fingerprint machine?

The officer may choose to check identity against records held on IABS (the immigration fingerprint database). Stop and Scan is part of an immigration system that a 2019 inquiry into the Windrush scandal showed, to hold not only “poor quality systems and data”, but a “failure to monitor the impact of compliant environment measures” (now known as hostile environment measures)². A flag on the database – which could exist for any type of activity – may prompt a call to Home Office enforcers, heightening the risk of entering indefinite detention, or being deported.

The question remains: why use a device which could only identify those with fingerprints either on the IABS or criminal database, IDENT1?

The Stop The Scan campaign was created by the Racial Justice Network and supported by Yorkshire Resists. We are a network of individuals and organisations working together to end racial injustice. Our campaign is about alerting you to the racist nature of the intrusive power that biometric technology extends to the police. These technologies are being introduced, but they lack any meaningful scrutiny of their impact on the communities that the police are supposed to protect.

After the pilot by West Yorkshire Police ended, no evaluation of its use and impact was done before the technology was rolled out nationally.

Aside from West Yorkshire Police, no other police force is publicly recording the ethnicity of the people they are stopping and scanning. The lack of transparency makes it difficult to ensure that the use of this technology does not target certain communities unfairly.

In response to what we know, and what we can only speculate, the Stop the Scan campaign is calling for:

  1. The dismantling of the Hostile Environment: the UK must be a safe place for all people to seek and live a decent life.
  2. The severance of all links between the Police and Immigration, including a firewall between the police and all Home Office databases.
  3. An end to Stop and Scan.

We are looking for support from people able to help raise awareness, to advise on the shifting legal rights landscape during the pandemic, for advisors who may help construct a legal challenge to the roll out, and for people who have been scanned and are willing to offer their experience as a case study.

To find out more, visit StopTheScan.co.uk and search the #StopTheScandal and #EndStopAndScan hashtags. To get involved in supporting the work, email stopthescan@racialjusticenetwork.co.uk.

Sources:

  1. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03878/

2.https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmpubacc/1518/151806.htm#_idTextAnchor025

Launching centre, our new zine!

A white person's hand holds Centre zine. It has a bright yellow cover with bold black letters overlaid with a purple triangle. The text says 'Centre Zine'.

We’re thrilled to officially launch our very first zine! CENTRE is a collaboration with artist Okocha Obasi, founder of Racezine Collective.

We believe in artists. They have the power to make change. We also believe that everyone has the ability to be creative, and therefore creative opportunities should be available for everyone. Creativity helps us explore. Helps us dream. Helps us find a way back to ourselves. Or discover who we are. Something people LGBTQ+ identified need. In a world that often taught us we didn’t fit, discovering ourselves can take that much more.

Our mission at Andro and Eve is to bring the community together to celebrate queer culture. The COVID-19 crisis has given us an opportunity to adapt our offer and find new ways to reach our community.

CENTRE is one such way to connect our community with one another, in a year in which everyone has been in some way affected by the global pandemic. Okocha has curated and designed this unique collection of stories, poems and creative works, bringing voice to a range of LGBTQ+ people living in the North of England.

4 copies of Centre zine sit on top of a pink surface. The zine has a bright yellow cover with the words Centre Zine in bold capitalised typeface covering the whole page. A big, purple triangle sits on top of the text.
Centre, a new zine, designed and curated by Okocha Obasi and produced by Andro & Eve.

We also believe Black Lives Matter, and stand in solidarity with those who fight against the structural racism here in the UK and across the world. CENTRE contains a piece by Stop the Scandal, a grassroots campaign to stop the use of mobile fingerprint scanning linked to immigration databases by police. We’ve also connected with our friends at LASS (Lesbian Asylum Support Sheffield) to bring you an interview with one of their members. 50% of all profits made from sales of CENTRE will be donated to Yorkshire’s Racial Justice Network, who bring together over thirty organisations in the West Yorkshire region to proactively promote racial justice.

A look inside Centre Zine. With bold black and white typeface. The title says 'you could be happy.
A sneak peek at one of the pieces to be found in CENTRE.

The stories, poems and creative works in CENTRE are about things chosen by LGBTQ+ people living in the North of England that matter most to them. Andro and Eve, as a queer arts organisation based in South Yorkshire, is proud to serve and represent ‘Northern’ voices and we hope you will enjoy reading CENTRE.

Our thanks in producing this zine go to organisers from LASS, Stop the Scandal and Racial Justice Network. A huge thank you to Okocha Obasi for his creative vision and hard work, and to the artists and members of the Andro and Eve community who have contributed their work to CENTRE.

Ready to get a copy? Order from our shop here. And celebrate its launch with our special online party, A REYT QUEER NIGHT IN, on 10th October. We’re bringing the party direct to your front room! We hope that we’ll connect with you online soon.

Katherine Warman. Creative Producer / CEO Andro and Eve. September 2020.

#CentreZine

This zine has been made possible through Arts Council England’s emergency funding in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

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