Tag Archive for "Intersectionality"

Posts Tagged Intersectionality

The Population of Loss: What patriarchy does to us all

In writing about the frightening Isla Vista shooting this week, I focused on what the shooting dredged up online—a cavalcade of opinions and rants that show the hidden army of men willing to see women’s dead bodies as an acceptable sacrifice to their own lusts and entitlements. The number of people willing to tacitly justify what happened by suggesting, with terroristic logic, that women should give in to sexual advances we do not want, or indulge male entitlement at every turn in the name of forestalling more dead men and women, is horrifying.

In that article, I also drew a connection between what happened in Isla Vista and the suicide of women like Alyssa Funke, the young college student and ...

By Ava Kofman • 9 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: College 101: A Girl’s Guide to Freshman Year

Julie Zeilinger’s College 101: A Girl’s Guide to Freshman Year is the book I wish I read four years ago when I started college. The guide advises incoming freshman on how to navigate the confusing new experiences that come with being a freshman and a woman in college — namely, the ways in which tricky roommates, demanding academics, rising debt, insufficient mental health resources, and unfamiliar social pressures interact and intersect with sexism. But even as a soon-to-be-graduate entering the Adult World, the guide gave me tips I wish I had known three months ago, when I entered the second semester of my senior year. It also kindly reminded me, in a chatty voice, of the many lessons ...

By Syreeta McFadden • 10 years ago

“It’s like saying the word ‘feminism’ is like saying that ‘all men should die.'”

Um, no. It’s actually not.

We’ve all encountered this argument against the “F word” before. But let us celebrate how deftly writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shuts down this tired claim while simultaneously breaking down why Nigerian all men should become feminists too. In an interview with Swedish film critic Jannike Åhlund at the Göteborg International Film Festival this past Sunday, Adichie answers this man’s question and addresses his fear of the big bad word F E M I N I S M. (Sidenote: Check out minute 47 of the exchange to witness how expertly Adichie answers a rather clumsy and myopic question about the legacy of European colonialism in Africa because it’s exquisite.)

Transcript after the jump.

Um, no. It’s actually not.

By Juliana Britto Schwartz • 10 years ago

Why can’t I be both?: Questions on binaries, privilege and activism

“Where are you from?”

I turn to the man at the bus station. Wearing mismatched army pants and an African Kufi hat, he looks like some of the other lost souls that usually try to talk to me.

I sigh, and decide to be difficult.

“I’m from San Francisco,” I tell him, smiling innocently.

“Oh,” he says, but doesn’t give up. “But what is your heritage?”

“Oh you mean, what is my ethnicity? My mother is Brazilian, my dad is white American.”

“Brasileria, huh? Bailas samba?”

The man then starts on the usual spiel about how he thinks Brazilian women are so sexy and I have beautiful eyes. I begin to tune him out. I decide it’s not worth giving him a speech about the exotification of ...

“Where are you from?”

I turn to the man at the bus station. Wearing mismatched army pants and an African Kufi hat, he looks like some of the other lost souls that usually try to talk to me.

I ...

By Syreeta McFadden • 10 years ago

“A respect for humanity says that you respect women”

On Sunday’s show, Melissa Harris-Perry perfectly contextualizes the climate where we are witnessing state by state assaults on women bodies, privacy, and reproductive freedom protected under the 14th Amendment in the year where Roe v Wade turns 40, the landmark decision that affirmed a woman’s right to privacy. Stay for the interview with Ohio State Senator Nina Turner. Again, the voting rights act is a feminist issue. To quote State Senator Turner, “Elections have consequences.”

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news,

By Syreeta McFadden • 10 years ago

What we don’t talk about when we talk about Mommy Wars

I should begin by saying that I’m not a mother. I was raised by a single black mother; and our narrative isn’t unlike the stories of working class single mothers nationwide. One of struggle, sacrifices, and compromise. A complex and harrowing navigation of the public safety net and stone-faced determination in defiance to shaming by our culture of women, children and families in need. These sacrifices sent me to college.

When I consider how class-conscious discussions of work/life balance operates in our spaces online and television, it is often to the absence of including voices of working class women. For some reason over the last decade or so, I thought perhaps things would’ve balanced out already, that we’d reach equilibrium in ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 10 years ago

Quick Hit: Juanita Diaz-Cotto on women of color and the prison-industrial military complex

Check out this great interview with academic-activist Juanita Diaz-Cotto at Guernica.

Juanita Diaz-Cotto knows she’s seen as radical. The activist academic blurs the lines that often delineate two clear, if not antagonistic, camps: scholarship and social justice. An expert on Latina and Chicana women’s experiences in the U.S. prison system, she’s been one among just a precious few voices in academia calling attention to the devastation the criminal justice system wreaks on women of color.

Her work deals with a crisis hidden in plain sight. While Latinos made up just 16 percent of the total U.S. population in 2011, they were the majority of all those sentenced for federal offenses. Women of color, meanwhile, comprise the fastest-growing sector of the prison ...

Check out this great interview with academic-activist Juanita Diaz-Cotto at Guernica.

Juanita Diaz-Cotto knows she’s seen as radical. The activist academic blurs the lines that often delineate two clear, if not antagonistic, camps: scholarship and social justice. ...

By zerlina • 10 years ago

How to deal with rude people and command respect starring FLOTUS in GIFs

So by now you’ve heard that First Lady Michelle Obama has a somewhat different strategy for dealing with hecklers than President Obama.

This week at a DNC fundraiser in D.C., Ellen Sturtz of GetEqual interrupted the First Lady’s speech yelling out demands for the president to keep his promise and sign an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating based on sexual orientation and gender identity. A valid critique, to be sure, but the yelling was off putting to the First Lady and her allies, and the way she handled it has been analyzed ad nauseum.

I fiercely defended the First Lady’s response to the heckler and have since seen her reaction as instructive. The First ...

So by now you’ve heard that First Lady Michelle Obama has a somewhat different strategy for dealing with hecklers than President Obama.

This week at a DNC fundraiser in D.C., Ellen Sturtz of GetEqual ...