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ON TOPIC: IN WHICH WE RETURN AFTER 30 DAYS (THIS IS OUR DECEMBER)

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Sunday was Delhi Queer Pride! Did you go?

 

Aanchal Tuli reports on a discussion about Fire, Deepa Mehta’s alternately celebrated and reviled movie:

“In a clip presented at the session, we were reminded of how posters were torn and theatres damaged by Shiv Sena activists, who thought the movie was against Bhartiya Sanskriti. During their session, the director remembered how she was told that there were ‘no lesbians in India’ and that she should be banned for introducing this ‘western devil’ in the country…we concluded that a film like Fire would never have seen the light of the day had it been made in 2015.”

 

Paromita Vohra says some brilliant things about selfies, the gaze, and the multiple meanings of our actions.

“Recently, I got into a small debate online about whether men take more selfies or women do. Research based on data from Selfiecity indicated that women take more selfies. A more recent survey indicates men might have overtaken women…The question may be: why does it matter?…What is this anxiety rooted in?”

 

The Ladies Finger blessed us this week with this hilarious list of things to avoid saying as a dude in a feminist space: “As a feminist man I will acknowledge my privilege, like the PRIVILEGE of being surrounded by these pretty women.” (Who hasn’t heard some douchebag say this at least once?!)

 

On these online forums, Indians seeking maids can be classist, casteist, and generally disgusting with exceptional candour. “BookMyBai was in the news this month for their problematic ad saying, “Diamonds are useless. Gift your wife a maid.” Terrifyingly, that’s an ad for a product, not a service.”

 

On the intolerance debate:

  • Arundhati Roy says that intolerance is not an accurate description for the violence visited upon minorities in India, and argues that the current government promotes Brahmanism. The ABVP takes offence, calling her words anti-national, anti-Indian-Army, and pro-Pakistan.
  • Ratna Kapur in The Wire argues that tolerance in an inadequate concept: “Tolerance operates as a gatekeeper, policing the boundaries and drawing a line between those we like and those we do not like. It does not offer any vision of transformation and becomes a substitute for justice.”

 

Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg talk about the rise of the surveillance state:

“I was glad to see that when Snowden made his debut on Twitter…he said, “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.” Implicit in that sentence is the belief that the government does not work for the public. That’s the beginning of a subversive and inconvenient conversation. By “the government”, of course, he means the US government, his former employer. But who does he mean by “the public”? The US public? Which part of the US public? He’ll have to decide as he goes along. In democracies, the line between an elected government and “the public” is never all that clear. The elite is usually fused with the government pretty seamlessly. Viewed from an international perspective, if there really is such a thing as “the US public”, it’s a very privileged public indeed. The only “public” I know is a maddeningly tricky labyrinth.”

 

Why science fiction matters to the postcolony:

“But Dune is more than a direct allegory for the tragic unfolding of history. It recasts the Middle East and North Africa and its peoples into a new, and perhaps truer, image of themselves; an image that can only be appreciated through the experience of reading. Yes, events have not unfolded as triumphantly [for MENA] as they do for the Fremen. But the literature of science fiction and fantasy expresses the irrationality with which the real world violently comes into being. It draws out the metaphors with which reality is made.”

 

Katha Pollitt’s take on the shooting at a women’s health clinic in Colorado – “Abortion opponents are at the forefront of a wider effort to punish poor women and attack social services.”

 

Jason Hickel says, enough of aid – let’s talk reparations for colonialism.

“It is tempting to see [colonialism] as just a list of crimes, but it is much more than that. These snippets hint at the contours of a world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority…This history makes the narrative of international development seem a bit absurd, and even outright false. Frankie Boyle got it right: “Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.”

 

In the wake of the death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of yet another police officer, Black Americans stage an economic boycott of Black Friday, the U.S.’s annual post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza, vowing to give #NotOneDime to the capitalist state.

 

In her new video ‘Borders’, M.I.A. fuses biography with art and politics to create compelling commentary on refugees – commentary not prompted by the current European ‘crisis’, but by the invisibility of other, past, forgotten ‘crises’. Sinthujan Varatharajah writes:
“As a Tamil woman and refugee, M.I.A. has been subject to racist and sexist discourses on refugees before they became public grounds of debate. She today applies these tropes as a political strategy to subvert mainstream conceptions on refugees, borders and security regimes. Shorthanded accusations of exploitation made by some, specifically people of color with no refugee background, divorce her from the tremendous work she has done for her own refugee community – and beyond to support refugee advocacy over years. MIA has always articulated her art and politics from the position of a former refugee, a position not many of her critics can claim for themselves. Her “refugee-dom” has always been paramount to her career and has been reflected in her multimedia art long before her most recent video. It was never a trend or bandwagon she jumped upon, but one that was created and picked upon by others: non-refugees.”

 

Fatima Bhutto in Granta writes about the pleasure and the labour of the kitchen – her “other thing”, when she’s not writing:

“I love to cook. It’s joyous. I love the creating and the sharing. I think of how it connects mood and sentiment, occasion and celebration. But cooking has always been a luxury to me, all indulgence and praise. I never worked seriously on it, never so thanklessly. No one who comes into the Delaunay, or any other restaurant for breakfast, however well-meaning, thinks to thank the tourier. No compliments are sent to the chef, who has given up his night and also his day, when he returns home to sleep through the afternoon.”

 

PS: Join us for this Saturday for a day of conversations between European and Indian women writers! Curated by Zubaan with support from EUNIC India, this event will feature, amongst others, Annie Zaidi, Paromita Vohra, Bee Rowlatt, Espido Freire, Mrinal Pande. What else are you doing with your Saturday anyway?

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ON TOPIC: THE DADRI LYNCHING, DALITS AND FOOD/FARMING AUTONOMY, THE POLICING OF REPRODUCTION/MOTHERHOOD, U.S. MILITARISM AND THE MEDIA, WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE AND LITERACY

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Regarding the recent Dadri lynching, Tarun Vijay of the BJP attempts to convince us why the lynching was un-Indian and un-Hindu.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta rebuts:

“Lynching a person merely on suspicion is absolutely wrong,” Vijay informs us with all sincerity. It is almost as if lynching is fine so long as it is not based on mere suspicion. It is saying, in effect, that if Akhlaq had actually been guilty of eating beef, it would have been fine to lynch him…[he says] differences [are] tantamount to provocation to murder.

If you read one thing from today’s On Topic, read this. Gautam Bhan writes on Kafila –

Mohammad began to die a long time ago. When violence against particular bodies becomes legitimate, becomes a series of “misunderstandings,” it is not violence at all. It is the order of things. It is not prejudice but probability. Beef, property, a panchayat election, love jihad, a job, an argument, a WhatsApp message – these are not causes, they are just modes. The last circuits in a motherboard whose pattern is set in place.

Mohammad began to die at least as early in 1992. When we speak of his death in September 2015, it is already too late. The violence is not his death. The violence is that his body lost its right to be murdered because it has slowly been stripped of its life, bit by bit, for years.

Rural farming collectives run by Dalits reduce dependence on, and therefore subjugation by, the upper castes:

What is really remarkable is that Dalit girls are leading some of these agitations. In February last year, Sandeep Kaur, a 25-year-old diploma holder in computer applications from Matoi village in Sangrur, floated an Ekta Club along with a group of 10 Dalit girls. They launched a two-month long agitation, and managed to convince the Dalit families of Matoi of the need to bid collectively for the land…”Now we don’t need to beg upper caste farmers for even cattle fodder. This land is enough to feed cattle of all Dalits in Matoi,” says 45-year-old Amarjit Kaur.

Unwanted, unneeded hysterectomies performed on marginalised Indian women without their informed consent show the intimate connections between modern medicine and patriarchal, class, and caste oppression:

…women reported going to private hospitals in Gulbarga or cities close to the border in Maharashtra and Telangana complaining of lower abdomen pain or menstrual irregularities. The doctors would tell women that their uteruses were damaged, swollen, had worms, were stained, or had turned green or black. The women in Chapla Naik said that doctors had told them that the uterus “kharab hua” (Hindi for “had gone bad”)—and had to be removed…“Others who are educated can look at the report and say this operation has to be done for this kind of pain. What do we know? If someone tells us to get an operation done, we will get it done.”

A report in Vantage about tuberculosis and the pregnant body:

The 30-year-old told me that she had never had a regular menstrual cycle since her periods first began when she 13 or 14 years old. She was married soon after. “When I got married and came to Mumbai, I realised that my sister-in-law was getting periods every month. I had no idea we were supposed to get it every month. I have been taking medicines to treat this problem. Socho—Think!,” she said. Soon after, she began visitng several doctors…to try and understand why she was not able to conceive. More often than not, she would be faced with condescending practioners who did little to help her predicament. “My neighbours taunt me and say I am not able to bear a child. My family also scolds me sometimes, out of love,” she said, before adding, “They are bound to say some things to me, aren’t they?” After she was finally diagnosed that day, she told me that she hoped her disease would not infect others in the house, even though the doctor had informed her that extra-pulmonary tuberculosis was not infectious.

Should Virginia Woolf have had children? Rebecca Solnit questions why women who devote their lives to things other than birthing and raising children are subject to constant interrogation:

People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfil your capacity to love…[b]ut there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world. While many people question the motives of the childless, who are taken to be selfish for refusing the sacrifices that come with parenthood, they often neglect to note that those who love their children intensely may have less love left for the rest of the world.

An app that tracks American drone strikes is banned from the Apple App Store for being “crude”.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports on the suspected U.S.-led bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan…

…and the Intercept reports on U.S. media sources’ obfuscation of the U.S.’s role in the bombing:

In its own special way, the New York Times has been even more craven [than CNN]. Its original article on the attack opted for this bizarrely agent-less formulation: [Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan]. Some airstrike, traveling around on its own like a lost tourist, ran into a hospital in Afghanistan.

This article engenders conversations in the office. U.S. centric, but interesting:

…academic Marxism tends to view working-class people abstractly, leaving college-educated revolutionaries unable to speak plainly to anyone outside of academia. As soon as they step out of school, they discover that no one understands a word they speak unless they speak plain. This further deeps the idea that revolutionary theory is not for the working classes. These college educated revolutionaries have fundamentally accepted, in a-historical terms, the profound devastation of the working class… It is accepted as eternal that working class people cannot read, do not like to read, do not like to think, etc. This ignores the fact that the weapon of theory has been vital to oppressed people’s liberation, from illiterate slaves risking their lives to learn how to read, to Malcolm X discovering the power of knowledge while sitting in his prison cell.

A conversation between Angela Davis and Toni Morrison on the importance of literacy, and public access to reading material (through libraries that are available to marginalised classes, in prisons, in rural areas) in the revolution.

See you next week! Or whenever we get around to the next On Topic.

P.S. We have an online sale UP TO 80% OFF! Support your friendly neighbourhood independent feminist publishers!

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ON TOPIC: ZUBAAN MELA IS AROUND THE CORNER. WE ARE FRAZZLED.

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The Zubaan office has seen major upheaval and rearrangement over the last week. Books, shelves, and cheese(s) have been moved. We are bemused, befuddled, and often lose our way between the door and our desks. Still, we rounded up the best of the feminist interwebz for this week’s On Topic, for the benefit of our faithful readers (who should all come to the Mela).

Some well written and pertinent things we have been reading:

  • A fresh and well-researched take on how imperialism uses the rhetoric of feminism to justify itself:

    Do women, their freedom, their clothes and their marriages provide some crucial avenue into establishing hegemony, a method of representing the foreign invaders as good? The most compelling reason for this enquiry is that South Asian and Afghan feminisms are tainted by an imagined complicity with colonialism and imperialism. Making explicit just how aspects of women’s lives – their clothes and marriages – have been put into the service of Anglo-American imperial projects of domination, and how little these projects have had to do with those actual women, is a step towards lifting the weight of imperial complicity on Afghan feminism.

  • Shared on the Zubaan Books Facebook page, we feel the need to once again point to this brilliant and incisive article on being Dalit, woman, and upwardly mobile in Bengal:

    …I was told, rather absurdly by a professor that there are no Dalits in West Bengal. I had responded with a wry smile and had nothing to say. It is my contention that there are no Dalits in West Bengal because of the simple fact that Dalits are not allowed to exist. You can be a casteless Brahmin, Baidya or Kayastha. On the other side of the equation, you can be an untouchable/achyut waiting to be emancipated (accultured) by upper caste casteless radicals or you can be a scheduled caste employee perpetually embarrassed for enjoying the “privilege” of affirmative action…When I identify myself as a Dalit I am making a claim and seeking recognition for that discrimination, prejudice as well as that resistance. But inadvertently by identifying myself as a Dalit I am also doing something more. I am challenging a practice of “division of labourers” that is endemic to West Bengal. This is the division between emancipators (which includes writers, intellectuals, social activists, doctors, economists, trade union leaders, Naxalite leaders) and the to be emancipated (which includes peasants, workers in factories and homes, taxi drivers, rickshaw pullers etc).

  • In part of a series on gender (read them all!) on Medium.com’s Matter, Laurie Essig tells us why we’ve got gender all wrong:

    …what frustrates me is that “born this way” protects straight and cisgender persons from ever being one of us. They cannot be infected with our queer desires or queer gender presentations. In this worldview, we all enter this world with a stable gender identity and unwavering sexual desire. Identity is simple.

  • An MIT student shows how stereotypes of gender and race are destroyed by most sensible research studies.
  • A linguist tells us why criticising women’s speech is not only unhelpful, but also misogynistic:

    This endless policing of women’s language—their voices, their intonation patterns, the words they use, their syntax—is uncomfortably similar to the way our culture polices women’s bodily appearance. Just as the media and the beauty industry continually invent new reasons for women to be self-conscious about their bodies, so magazine articles and radio programmes like the ones I’ve mentioned encourage a similar self-consciousness about our speech. The effect on our behaviour is also similar. Instead of focusing on what we’re saying, we’re distracted by anxieties about the way we sound to others. ‘Am I being too apologetic?’ and ‘Is my voice too high?’ are linguistic analogues of ‘is my nail polish chipped?’ and ‘do I look fat in this?’

  • A profile on the West Bank’s first woman taxi driver:

    Ahmad became interested in cars at a young age – but even then, she understood that it was not considered a “normal” interest for a girl. She watched her cousins work on their engines when she was a teenager – never asking questions, but taking mental notes instead. “I can work on my own car [now]. I watched and watched, [and] now I know about cars. I can take even apart the carburettor,” Ahmad said.

  • A young Muslim girl in America coped with racism by listening to Green Day. “This language, imprecise as it was, was my first political vocabulary.“
  • TW: Sexual harassment, stalking. The editor of Khabar Lahariya writes about the sexual harassment she and her colleagues faced, and the difficulty they faced in getting the police to do anything about it:

    When…I said I wanted to file my FIR against this man, the SI said I should just switch my phone off if I didn’t want to talk to him. I said I couldn’t, that I needed to use my phone. So get a new SIM card. But people have this number and call me on it. So if he abuses you, abuse him back. Get the men in your house to do it. The calls will stop…He sounded like so many other men I knew. Let go of this desire to control your life, and everything will be ok. Really? One phone stalker was going to get me to let go of everything?

  • On the Munnar women’s agitation in Kerala:

    Two aspects of the Munnar mobilisation need to be recognised. One, the protesters openly stressed the gender aspect of the mobilisation — Pembila Orumai (Unity of Women) is how they called themselves. Two, the protesters were part of the organised sector and members of trade unions…The women were discovering agency and identifying trade unions as a male preserve, a trend increasingly visible in women dominated work sectors.

  • On the attack on the women’s train, Matribhumi, in West Bengal:

    Some women passengers reportedly said that many among the aggressors happened to be men they travelled with regularly. They expressed their utter bewilderment at the familiar dhoti-clad bhadrolok…turning into such a violent rabble of attackers and raring to assault them; an all-woman train was all that it took to rip apart the veneer of the ostensibly progressive Bengali man…Bengal prides itself on being a matribhumi state as opposed to the pitribhumi states of the Hindi heartland—a matriarchal society, not a patriarchal one. It is not uncommon to hear ordinary Bengalis, as well as political leaders representing the state, wax eloquent on Bengal’s gender equality, its respect for women, its past historic traditions of social reform, the iconic personalities of male reformers such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Ram Mohan Roy. But the bitter truth is that Bengal, much like the rest of the nation, has rarely seen women in any role except that of a mother or sister. Regardless of the shades of radicalism that have defined its politics, individual autonomy has been conscpicously absent from public and private space,  and the conversations around gender have been stripped of any radicalism. Patriarchal roots, instead of being removed, have been inadvertently nurtured.

  • On the unpaid and unrewarded labour of being an online feminist, and how community needs to mean more than likes, comments, and shares:

    The think piece industrial complex exploits the young and digitally-native, provoking those of us who are fed up, feminist, and accustomed to unpaid intellectual labor into snapping back on public forums. This organic tone of immediacy and frustration has been made into a reproducible product for click bait and ad sales. Each article’s tagline claims to be more feminist and more urgent than the next. As it pluralizes feminism, it also threatens to dissolve the importance of community restoration and regeneration, and the need to slow down and reflect, in addition to snapping back.

  • On institutionalised misogyny in education, and how the school or college campus becomes a site for controlling women in India.
  • Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, writes about getting a book published as a person of colour in the U.S.:

    Here is the thing about how discrimination works: No one ever comes right out and says, “We don’t want you.” In the publishing world, they don’t say, “We just don’t want your story.” They say, “We’re not sure you’re relatable” and “You don’t want to exclude anyone with your work.” They say, “We’re not sure who your audience is.”

  • On what a #feministfail Katti Batti was:

    Today’s cinema may be a lot more open about lovers being in a relationship (or rather, not pretending to have sex behind bushes anymore) but everything is still coated with a generous layer of misogyny.

  • Speaking of movies, have you heard of 141 I Love You? (It has lesbians and animated heart shaped balloons.)

See you at the mela!

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ON TOPIC: COME SEPTEMBER…ZUBAAN TALKS ABOUT BODY POLICING, MUSLIM WOMEN, LABOUR RIGHTS & MAKING CULTURE

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Workers of the world, unite! On labour issues:

  • Child labour in cottonseed farms – companies are responsible for most of the exploitation, and two-thirds of the labourers are girls.
  • A beautiful article profiling a day in the life of a delivery worker for online retailers.
  • NYC nail salon workers speak out after the recent exposé: “This only happened because people organised.”
  • On the Bharat Bandh: An opinion piece arguing for democratic inclusion of labourers in the drafting of labour laws.
  • A dubiously titled piece that nevertheless has some awesome pictures of the trade union strike across different states.

 

Nuancing the narrative about Indian Muslims – especially Indian Muslim women.

  • The Wire reports: a study on Muslim women and personal laws reveals a desire for reforms.
  • A social scientist pushes for a more nuanced reading of the recent census results.
  • Al Jazeera reports on Dalit converts to Islam.
  • Kindle Mag compares Ismat Chughtai and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
  • A great article that attends to the policing of Muslim women’s bodies and reproductive choices in the wake of Hindu nationalist fear about the recent census.

 

Body policing also crops up in other ways across and outside India: #amiotamoghna, real women, and reproductive justice

 

Indrani, Aarushi, and journalism.

  • An attendee at the launch of Avirook Sen’s “Aarushi” tells us why she won’t be reading his book.
  • A withering takedown of the way the Indrani Mukerjea murder case has been treated in the media.

 

Recent badass cultural projects that have come to our attention.

  • Partition history in objects.
  • Africans in India: A Rediscovery. An exhibition at Janpath, go see it!
  • Indians making cool art about sexuality.
  • Aunty Pakistan takes down misogyny.
  • IP College archives women’s history.

 

Speaking of history, let’s talk about the recent efforts to rewrite it!

  • On the politics of commemoration.
  • Scholars are angry about the Central Government’s efforts to revamp the Nehru Museum.

 

Powerful critiques of white feminism.

  • Taylor Swift is dreaming of a very white Africa.
  • Why Hillary Clinton is not a feminist.

 

Women being friends with other women!

 

Other important things:

  • Greenpeace India’s statement on the recent sexual harassment complaints made against it.
  • The Atlantic reports on the Syrian refugee crisis.

Also, this seems relevant:

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ON TOPIC: THIS IS THE PART WHERE WE READ SOME MORE

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On Dalit and working-class issues:

  • Chhaya Koregaonkar talks about why she identifies as an Ambedkarite writer.
  • On Independence Day, this blog revisits Mahasweta Devi’s words on the death of Chuni Kotal.
  • Is legal protection for domestic help in the works? This policy would prescribe a minimum salary and paid leave.
  • A feature on emerging Dalit feminisms in The Quint.
  • Caravan Magazine writes a detailed report about Unilever’s effect on the health of its employees and Kodaikanal’s climate.

 

Digital feminisms:

  • Indian feminists respond to the porn ban and un-ban…
  • …and Narayani Anand examines various viewpoints on the right-ness and wrong-ness of the ban.
  • Cyber-misogyny: An account of the harassment faced by Preetha G, online activist, and her supporters.
  • By the way, here’s the rad tumblr you never knew you needed.
  • Mumbai’s Wandering Women film festival just ended. Here are some pictures so that you can die in jealousy.
  • Lastly, a music video from queer Indians, designed to give everyone a major case of the feels, set to the tune of Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”.

 

Outside India:

  • Telegraph India reports that Bangladeshi political dissenters live in fear of violent conservative elements.
  • CNN visits the village most affected by recent sexual abuse crimes in Pakistan.
  • Humans of New York visits Pakistan and highlights Syeda Ghulam Fatima, anti-bonded labor activist, in a 7-part photo series and fundraiser.

 

Diasporic voices:

  • Mariya Karimjee writes about damage.
  • Fariha Róisín on her mother’s mental illness, in a moving piece for Vice.
  • An article in Brown Girl Magazine about Kiran Gandhi’s freebleeding run at the London Marathon.

 

And others:

  • Woven: on love, loss and inherited mythologies.
  • Happy birthday to Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, a major leader of the Stonewall Riots.
  • U.N. peacekeepers often become perpetrators of sexual violence.
  • Mourning lives lost to transmisogynistic and racist violence in the U.S.
  • Janelle Monáe is cut off during a speech about #blacklivesmatter and police brutality.
  • Amandla Sternberg is everything: mic.com covers how the Hunger Games actress is becoming a brilliant activist.
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ON TOPIC: August, Blog-ust! Women’s Selfie Nudes, Veil Ban, “Gender Bender” and Lots More

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“August is the winter of summer I’m resting assured.” ~ Ayesha Siddiqi

Policies, Systems and Resistance

  • In a landmark case, the Supreme Court allows the fourteen-year old rape survivor to abort, although the law excuses abortion only within 20 weeks of pregnancy (TW: discussion of sexual violence)
  • Following up on the veil ban by Supreme Court, an Aligarh University student speaks out on the misogyny specifically targeting Muslim women at the heart of this law
  • A recent study by the Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 reveals that women head 23 million households in rural India and many other findings about gender
  • In a scathing piece, Thenmozhi Soundarajan explains how India’s caste culture is a culture that condones rape and sexual violence of Dalit women

 

Yours, Mine & Ours: On Bodies, Lives and Lived Experiences

  • Lalita Iyer shares her experience of consciously and critically growing into loving her body, and the ambivalent “politics of thin”
  • Here’s an interesting read in Tehelka about Indian migrant nurses, most of whom are women from the South, and their precarious status as employees in the UK
  • Anuradha Roy is the only Indian to be selected on the Man Booker Prize 2015 longlist. Read about her book and her story here, amid an array of female nominees at par in number with the male candidates at this year’s Booker selections.
  • Read Sneha Rajaram’s commentary on the intersection of radical feminism and chick lit in Sarai Walker’s Dietland
  • Sonali Gulati on her life as a lesbian navigating family, rejecting marriage, and Section 377 in light of marriage equality in the States.
  • Meet Meghna Kaur Jaswal, a writer whose book Inheritance, sparks a dialogue around the less-talked-about Sikh diaspora in Singapore
  • Why is the “know your neighbourhood rapist” rhetoric insidious, and more?
  • Nirbashito, a film about the struggles and experiences of exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen (and her cat) is “on screen” this week!
  • Check out what this The Ladies’ Finger article has to say about “Gender Bender”, the playful, diverse art show focusing on gender performativity and presentation, organized in Bangalore earlier this month.
  • Read about what Panmai, the first of its kind transgender theater group in Tamil Nadu, has to say about trans productions as a platforms to tell their stories
  • What does it mean for women to photograph their nudes? What kind of relationships do selfies allow many to forge with their bodies? Nishita Jha shares women’s varied experiences with cyber-stalking, abuse, sex positivity on the internet, desire and selfie-care/love.

 

On Gender, Race and Popular Culture

 

A warm and lazy goodbye, feminists! Have a restful and exciting week, unlearning (and self-caring).

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ON TOPIC: PERIOD POLITICS, #SAYHERNAME, AND “MAKING LAUNDRY FUN FOR MEN”

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Let’s talk. Period.

 

Policies, Systems and Resistance

  • The recent anti-Muslim Supreme court verdict forbids hijabi women from taking an exam in the veil. Ratna Kapur speaks out, questioning the Islamophobia of the courts
  • More about women’s voices in light of the verdict: a Muslim hijabi woman discusses her experience on being religiously/cultural profiled when seeking housing in the city of Delhi
  • “Saving” The Girl Child: These brave women conduct sting operations to help activists uncover the sex selection practice perpetuated by doctors to “alert” pregnant mothers
  • This recent Scroll article reveals the declining numbers of senior women advocates in India’s courts
  • Delhi’s first LGBTQ flash mob stuns the crowd at Connaught Place! Watch the video here.
  • What happens when adivasi women spearhead a powerful resistance movement to protect and safeguard their communities, and the forests of India?

 

Yours, Mine &  Ours: On Lives, and Lived Experiences

 

Sandra Bland, #BlackLivesMatter and the Lives of Black Women

 

On Gender, Race and Popular Culture

 

Keep reading for other engaging updates and interesting stories! We ope you had a blissful (and not-so-soggy) July.

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ON TOPIC: As July splatters on

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Women and Sports:

 

On the ‘Runaways’ revelations:

  • Jason Cherkis’ original investigative piece in the Huffington Post, on Jackie Fox, sexual assault and the Runaways.
  • Fellow band members, Cherie Currie and Joan Jett‘s responses to Jackie Fox’s coming out about her rape.
  • An interview with Jason Cherkis on his article, Jackie Fox and the sordid realities of the music industry of the ’70s.
  • A thoughtful read on the need to speak up about and against rape.

 

On Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ video: 

  •  An interesting read on female music artists and the appropriation of violence in music videos like ‘BBHMM’ and ‘Bad Blood’.
  • On why Rihanna’s video is disturbingly misogynistic and why it is not.
  • On how the video is ultimately empowering in the context of Black Feminism. Here and here.

 

Meanwhile here in India:

 

Read on!

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ON TOPIC: WHAT WE’VE BEEN READING LATELY, PART II

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Presenting Part II of ‘What We’ve Been Reading Lately’ and hoping that we can make it a more regular feature.

What’s on T.V.:

 

On trans-activism, trans and queer identities (internationally and in India):

 

On the Obergefell verdict:

 

Selfies and Sexism:

 

On Gender, Sexuality & Feminism:

  • A love piece on understanding and negotiating sexuality during school life.
  • On the new digital spaces of feminist activism.
  • Looking at the intersection of gender and theatre, check out this exciting new book from LeftWord.
  • The first world neo-liberal co-option of feminism that allows exploitation of young girls working in sweatshops (From a socialist feminist perspective).
  • A lovely video from students of DU on menstruation and menstrual taboos.
  • On failed sterilizations and other conversations, a short piece by one of our SVI (Sexual Violence and Impunity) writers.

Happy reading!

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On Topic: What We’ve Been Reading Lately, Part I

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Women’s writing and publishing:

  • Kamila Shamsie’s radical idea to have a year that involves publishing only titles by women in order to address the gender bias in publishing houses.
  • The only titles by women that win awards are ones that are written about men or from a masculinist perspective.

 

On science & tech and women:

 

On feminism:

      •  Meena Kandasamy urges people to understand Clinton’s politics (which are acc. To her anti-feminist) before upholding her as the new feminist icon in politics.
      • A fantastic answer to the question “Where are the women?”: on sexism in events, seminars, conferences and panel discussions and the stands you can take.

 

On that lesbian ad for Anouk:

 

On women and disability in India

 

That’s all for now, folks – part II up soon!

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