When Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, came out I didn’t have much to say. I just scribbled a short comment on my personal blog about the fact that capitalist feminism is being presented as “the neutral” and everything else outside this paradigm needs to be qualified. Instead of writing something myself (which I couldn’t do […]
There is a food safety scandal sweeping Europe since the second week of 2013. Every week has brought more chilling details of how tainted our food production is and how we, as consumers, have our agency removed by fraudulent corporations that show utter disregard for our autonomy and right to choose what we eat. The […]
This has been the week of backlash against feminism. In fairness, it is always backlash week against feminism but Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece at The Atlantic, Why women still can’t have it all, has revived some of those sentiments. Feminism has failed us, she implies. We were promised a balance between career and private life. We […]
[Content warning for discussions of sexual material, including racist violence – no images in the post, though] I love porn! I do! I have even written about porn recently! Yet, I really resent that I need to offer this disclaimer any time I would like to address something about the genre. Because it seems that […]
This week, Europe commemorates the end of World War II, the event that marks a breaking point in contemporary history, the event that faced us with this reminder of humanity’s capability for evil. I don’t need to re-visit the significance of this war or the importance of the event as others have done it (and […]
[Content warning for language use and descriptions of sex acts that are certainly NSFW] Last night my Twitter feed was ablaze with a debate over the merits of the erotic book everyone’s talking about: Fifty Shades of Grey. Some people like Garland Grey or Jessica Luther rightfully pointed out that one of the reasons the […]
Today, I woke up feeling uneasy. See, it is International Women’s Day and I am supposed to be celebrating. Several people have wished me “A happy Women’s Day”. However, I cannot be happy. I do not know how to celebrate a day that media promotes through a hegemonic, universalized category of “woman”, presenting issues of […]
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
I thought I would write about the myth of choice. How when we talk about choice in a feminist context we mean “We want people to have a choice in terms of how and when they get pregnant and if they carry that pregnancy on”. How we want people to have a choice on their […]
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
“You cannot come in with that ugly cow standing over there”. Said by the bouncer at a posh disco, to my brother, when I was sixteen? maybe seventeen? and trying to enter said disco with a group of friends. I was the “ugly cow” the bouncer referred to. Summer dresses and lipgloss, and a place […]
Thursday, February 2, 2012
It started with a news item I came across a few days ago: Two deaths in three weeks in Spain’s notorious detention centers. On 19 December 2011, an unnamed woman, aged 41, believed to be from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, died of meningitis hours after her admission to hospital from the Aluche detention […]