Quick Hit: Stigma, Shame, and Sexuality Series

This week, Gender Across Borders, RH Reality Check and the global reproductive rights organization Ipas are teaming up on a great blog series on stigma, shame, and sexuality.

Despite the progress that human rights advocates are making worldwide, stigma seems to pervade as a nebulous stumbling block.

The bulk of the series focuses on abortion, but there are also pieces on sex work, queerness, sluttiness, and more. An overwhelming number of submissions on a range of topics poured in from around the world. I was, and remain, immensely moved by the courage of individuals to tell their stories and examine taboo subjects. Stigma survives, in large part, on silence, and this is a collective effort to undo that.

Yesterday’s articles covered everything from Ipas’ research on abortion stigma in Ghana and Zambia to the erasure of non-binary genders in the mainstream Western LGBT movement and a day in the life of a web cam model.

Go check out today’s posts.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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