Category: General (Page 20 of 27)

One of my favourite feminist heroines is finally coming to the UK next year, I don’t know if there are any other fans here but if there are, I though it was my moral duty to post a heads up about her gig in London on the 27th of January. Tickets will presumably go quite fast. There are a few other gigs in other cities too.

http://www.o2shepherdsbushempire.co.uk/event/19935/ani-difranco-tickets

Below is a cross-posted article that Fatima Hussain and I wrote for The Tech, MIT’s newspaper.  It was written for an American audience and so the language is somewhat US-specific, but the content is not.  Incidentally, the article was the source of Friday’s quote of the day on Jill Stanek’s horrible blog, which means that if you’d like to read a really creepy comment thread on the article, you can find one here.

For as long as the United States government has existed, it has been shirking a critical moral obligation. We are talking, of course, about our nation’s failure to protect the right of every woman to receive an affordable abortion on demand.

Abortions in the United States are technically legal, but in practice they can be very difficult to come by. Many women cannot afford the cost of a safe abortion, and even for those who can, a devastating shortage of qualified abortion providers means that they often have to travel long distances in order to reach a clinic. Once they do get to a clinic, they are frequently met with threats of violence from right-wing extremists or stymied by state regulations deliberately designed to make it as hard as possible for them to receive the care they need. The United States is very far indeed from providing universal access to abortion services, and the results of this oversight are nothing short of tragic. Continue reading

Last week’s “Is the work of feminism just beginning” debate at the Cambridge Union deeply resonated with me – not necessarily because of *what* was being discussed, but *how* it was being discussed. The unspoken rules of the prestigious Cambridge Union were turned on their head, put to the side, and made obsolete. Ignoring the offensive and inane contributions of the Fathers 4 Justice speaker, the rest of the speakers – on both sides – engaged in something that was more of a conversation than a debate.

Rather than engaging in a rapid-fire of snide, sarcastic and hostile banter, the women speakers  would pause to ask questions of each other, to clear up misunderstandings  rather than wilfully create them, and to acknowledge personal experience in the formation of truths. The three speakers arguing that feminism’s work is not just beginning were quite divided in their arguments, making it easy for the debate to meander into a more meaningful and nuanced discussion rather than a black and white debate format. Yet in similar situations where the opposing battlegrounds were not so clearly defined, I have seen many Union debates degenerate into rhetorical sparring, ignoring the substance of the debate for the technicalities of the motion. I found it exciting that Zohra Moosa invited a response from her “opponent” after she addressed her point- smiling at her rather than sneering. Bonnie Greer expressed her respect for Erin Pizzey “regardless of what side of the debate she was on”, and Erin asked Zohra, Bonnie and Sarah to clarify what they meant by feminism, and what they meant by patriarchy. I had never really seen anything like it in any of the debates I have attended at the Union- firm disagreement and strong ideas, but without the need for sarcasm or machismo. Continue reading

When I saw the trailer for Angelina Jolie’s bangin new action spy Cold War suspense thriller flick I thought two things: a) this looks generic and boring and b) I believe this may be the first generic, boring action spy film I’ve come across in which the protagonist is a woman. Continue reading