About Tongues
Tongues (QUE VIVA) is a non-profit organization working within and among queer, feminist, and women of color communities to increase cultural and community development, strengthen political involvement, and contribute to social justice efforts across diverse cultures, peoples, and geographic boundaries. The main vehicle we use toward realizing our goals is Tongues Magazine, a web-based and print community publication. Tongues Magazine is replete with messages, articles, images, and text that reflect the multiplicities of Queer women of color lived realities while encouraging critical consciousness and action. Through creative expressions, social commentaries, historical coverage, academic essays and testimonials, Tongues Magazine addresses issues pertinent to social change, identity, arts and culture, politics, and education.
Our organizational motto “Queer women of color collaborating for social change” captures how we understand and thus prioritize our organizational goals. We understand that “social change” takes place on a variety of scales catalyzed by a broad array of forces, and thus requires an assortment of efforts. The variety of scales on which change occurs may include the personal, local, national, and transnational, making it crucial that we make attempts to organize on each of these scales. We circulate and deploy Tongues Magazine on each of these scales in an attempt to address the ways in which change manifests differently. By creating and utilizing media space, virtual space, and community space, Tongues—the organization—seeks to be a force that makes it possible to envision and enable a more just and healthy world.
We choose to work collaboratively and non-hierarchically in an effort to challenge the hegemonic order and composition of most organizations.