I write libation to all those known and unknown ancestors across lifetimes that have gone before me and upon whose shoulders I literally stand.

Audre Lorde
copyright Dagmar Schultz

Tuesday, February 18, 2014 is the 80th birthday anniversary of Audre Lorde, the self-defined Black Lesbian Feminist Mother Warrior Poet. In her short lifetime in the physical form, Sister Lorde published ten volumes of poetry and five works of prose, including Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; The Cancer Journals; A Burst of Light; Sister Outsider; Our Dead Behind Us; From a Land Where Other People Live; Cables to Rage; Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power; and The Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance. She is credited with co-founding, with Barbara Smith, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher by, for, and about women of color. In her lifetime, Sister Lorde was a recipient of many distinguished honors and awards, including being named the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991-1993. Toward the very end of her life, she was given and fully embraced the African name Gamba Adisa, which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Clear.” She died on November 19, 1992, after a 14-year battle with breast cancer, which metastasized to her liver. She is recognized as one of the most important radical Black feminists of the past half century by Drs. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and the late Rudolph P. Byrd in their edited volume I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Today, The Feminist Wire takes a bold step by launching a global (US, Europe, and the Caribbean) two-week forum to celebrate Sister Lorde’s life and living legacy, which continuously touches hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It is a profound responsibility to be here with all of you who will read these words in this cyberspace called The Feminist Wire on the 80th birthday anniversary of our beloved Audre Lorde.  In this co-created sacred space in honor of Daughter, Sister, Mother, Friend, Comrade, Partner, Teacher Audre Lorde, I write libation in the name of her global living legacy.

My Personal Is Political

In Dagmar Schultz’ award-winning, internationally acclaimed film Audre Lorde, The Berlin Years (1984-1992), Sister Lorde said,

I started out like all of us start out, a coward…afraid. It‘s not to say that I’m not afraid now. Whether I’m afraid or not, I count less. I value myself more than I value my terrors. It does not mean that I don’t have them. Once I take that position, I can look at them and see what it is that they teach me.

In many ways, the seed for this forum began in February 2012, when my dear sister/friend Lynn Roberts, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at Hunter College, told me about the Women’s and Gender Studies Department’s plans to celebrate Audre Lorde’s life and legacy to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her passing into the Spirit world. Without hesitation, I immediately expressed an interest in being involved in any way possible. Several months later, Lynn asked me to serve on the media committee and present on one of the panels. Fast forward to August 2012, when my new colleague and subsequent big sister/friend Dr. Joyce A. Joyce asked me if I wanted to teach a course on Audre Lorde at Temple University in the spring 2013 semester.  Joyce is the chairperson of both the Women’s Studies Steering Committee and the English Department at Temple. She knew that I was long-term cultural worker whose cultural productions and writing over the past 20-years were tremendously informed and influenced by both Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara. While we both respected each other immensely and knew each other tangentially for many years, we never worked together. At the time of her inquiry, we were just beginning the fall semester of my first year teaching courses in both Women’s Studies and LGBT Studies at Temple. Needless to say, all I wanted to do was focus on persevering in the fall semester. However, true to her visionary form, Dr. Joyce was envisioning the 2013 spring semester. At best, the thought of creating and teaching an inaugural graduate and undergraduate seminar that would focus on one of my all time heroes’ life and living legacy was daunting. And yet, I knew it was a gift of an opportunity that I could not refuse. I was afraid. I knew I didn’t want to say, “No,” but I was terrified to say, “Yes.” I didn’t allow my fears to completely paralyze me. I faced my deep-seated fears of complete failure. I named them to myself; and a few chosen others in my sacred circle. Equally as important, Dr. Joyce never waivered in her belief and full support of my carrying out this most auspicious task, which was an invaluable gift. I went into deep meditation in my spiritual tradition based upon the teachings of Buddha. And, I called upon Sister Lorde’s written words, which have informed my path for over two decades.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us…”[i]

Dr. Joyce and I moved forward together. The title and course description for my inaugural Audre Lorde: The Life and Work of A Silence Breaker seminar was conceived one month shy of the 20th anniversary of Sister Lorde’s passing on November 17, 1992 and on the eve of Hunter College’s Women’s and Gender Studies department’s national celebratory gathering.

The Lorde was working with me in her mysterious and magical ways.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons & Toni Cade Bambara
Photo credit: Michael Simmons

That was not the first time that I called upon Audre Lorde’s words to help me face my fears. It was almost exactly 24-years ago when her words first anointed me. I have been walking with Sister Lorde  since April 1990 when a friend and former colleague Hollie Van Ness first introduced me to Sister Outsider, Lorde’s classically timeless book of essays. I was a very frightened, young 21-year old who was struggling with coming out as a lesbian. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Audre Lorde and if I had, I definitely didn’t know anything about her trailblazing life and work. Reading Sister Outsider, most especially her essay “Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” forever changed the trajectory of my life. My father, and confidante, Michael Simmons, and my teacher, mentor, and big sister friend, Toni Cade Bambara, both gave me invaluable tools to continuously use what evolved into my Black feminist lesbian journey. Sight unseen, Audre Lorde’s words gave me the roadmap from which I would chart my own path as an unapologetically out, undeniably race conscious Black woman, and non-negotiable feminist lesbian. If there was any doubt, my father did all that he could to eliminate it. However, it was Sister Lorde whose words convinced me beyond one shadow of a doubt that I wouldn’t ever, ever have to choose between my race, my gender, and/or my sexual orientation. They were one. I was….I AM WHOLE. I was metaphorically baptized in the Lordean Ocean. This baptism led me to create and name my production company AfroLez® Productions. This was followed by my coining the term AfroLez®femcentric to define the cultural conscious role of Black/African-descendent identified women who are Afrocentric, feminist, and lesbian. Shortly afterwards, I produced and directed my very first short video, Silence…Broken, which was conceived in a Toni Cade Bambara scriptwriting class at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. Silence…Broken, is an experimental narrative short that visually builds upon “Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action.” It is about an African American lesbian’s refusal to be silent about racism, sexism, and homophobia. Featuring the poetry of acclaimed poet and my sister Jourdan Imani Keith, Silence…Broken is dedicated to the memory of Audre Lorde.

Silence is never without fear – of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and probable judgment, of unspeakable pain from the judgment, and of death…We have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective…[ii]

I never had the great fortune of being in the presence of or meeting Sister Lorde. Over the years, I have spoken and written extensively about how Sister Lorde’s words played a pivotal role in my being able to break what for some are unbreakable silences. I credit how Sister Lorde’s words ignited the fire that enabled me to publicly identify as both an incest and a rape survivor. I can also publicly share the details surrounding my safe and legal abortion, which could’ve resulted from my rape or from my having pleasurable consensual sex less than 24-hours after my rape with a different man. I’m able to challenge the homophobic questions, which connect my Black feminist queer identity to my having been repeatedly molested as a child and raped as a very young woman. Without hesitation, I encourage people to compare the global statistics of violence against women and children and compare those rates to the numbers of LGBTQIA people in the world. If sexual violence “made” people queer, most of us in the world would be queer. I also don’t play into the game of focusing on pathologizing queer identity, instead of working toward eradicating sexual violence. Sister Lorde empowered me to say that I am a Black lesbian because I love women, not because I hate men. I do not want to imply that this work happened overnight. It absolutely did not. The aforementioned paragraph sums up years of continuous extensive, hardcore, and non-negotiable self-work. I am an ongoing work-in-progress. Sister Lorde never said it would be easy, and she was right. It isn’t. It’s relentless and exhausting work, but the rewards are priceless.

Don’t Mythologize Me! ~ A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde

For years, I have worshipped at the altar of The Lorde, as I intentionally refer to her from time to time. Over time and most recently within the past few months especially, I learned that this was both a betrayal to her life and to myself. I am unequivocally clear that Sister Lorde was and dare I say her spirit still is a force to be reckoned. However, as long as any of us place her “up there,” we create a paradigm that foremost, doesn’t honor the sacred power that she challenged each one of us to tap within ourselves. Secondarily, we are not honoring her living legacy when we mythologize her. We can easily explain all of the ways the Warrior Poet consistently broke her silences in the face of tremendous fear and terror, while simultaneously giving both a context and justification for why we can’t or don’t. We will quote our favorite Lordean passages and include her name in the roll call of amazing social change agents who transformed the world. Make no mistake: she is at the top of the list of those names for me. But what does it mean if we are only talking the talk and not walking the talk? Often, many of us don’t truly take to heart and spirit what it took for Sister Lorde to literally “transform her own silence into righteous engaged anger, language and international activism” during her 58-year span of life. We don’t remember that she often told us that she transformed her silence into language and action in spite of her fears and not feeling secure. One of her many long term sister-friends and colleagues, Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole wrote,

Audre Lorde could be fierce, but she was rarely secure. The way that she moved through the world reminds us that greatness is not synonymous with perfection. Indeed, to be human is to be flawed.[iii]

Sister Lorde said and asked,

I am doing my work…Are you?

Inaugural Audre Lorde seminar at Temple University
copyright: Aishah Shahidah Simmons

This forum was originally conceived as an opportunity to solely feature essays/poetry/love notes by the interested students and all of the invited guest lecturers  — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Melinda Goodman, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, Darnell Moore, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall — in my Lorde seminar at Temple. I initially viewed the forum as part of the tradition of Toni Cade Bambara‘s Tales and Stories for Black Folks. However, after some thought, I realized that this envisioned forum would be an amazing opportunity to widen the net and highlight some of the many voices who knew Sister/Mother/Teacher/Poet Audre Lorde; while simultaneously celebrating the amazing Lordean scholarship, cultural work, and activism that has happened or is happening.

Students & friends after Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins & Melinda Goodman’s guest lecture in Simmons’ Lorde seminar

This forum is a humble attempt to celebrate and uplift the groundbreaking intersectional work to centralize the margins within the margins in the United States, the Caribbean, and Germany. We will feature meditations, critical essays, sermons, personal reflections, poetry, love notes, and videos by a wide range of diverse people  The contributors range in age from their early 20s to their early 80s. We are straight, gay, lesbian, bi, cis, trans, feminine, masculine, Black American, Black European, Black Caribbean, Asian African European, white American, and/or white European. I haven’t even addressed spiritual/religious traditions. Many of the contributors knew Sister Lorde personally, while others only recently encountered her within the past year through her written and spoken words. The two “Feminists We Love” we will feature  in this celebratory forum will be intimate video interviews with Sister Lorde’s daughter, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, M.D., (February 21, 2014), and her partner in the latter years of her life, Gloria I. Joseph, Ph.D., (February 28, 2014). As diverse as this global collective of over 40 individuals is, we’re not as diverse as we could be. In her own physical lifetime and twenty-two years as a beloved and cherished ancestor, Sister Lorde’s imprint is far reaching. TFW is only able to touch the tip of a huge surface that covers so many diverse individuals from around the world. Writing as the organizer and lead editor of this forum, I can attest at 3:02 a.m. this February 18, 2014 morning, that we’ve intentionally stretched ourselves as far as we can go while simultaneously carrying out the invisible feminist labor whose currencies are non-attached love and compassionately radical, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic social change. The Audre Lorde Forum Team is a TFW village that began with Ness white, my former graduate student in both my Lorde seminar and “Introduction to Feminist Studies” seminar at Temple University. Ness’ invaluable assistance during summer 2013 and for a significant part of fall 2013 transformed into them becoming a co-editor. The members of TFW Editorial Collective who, when I put out the call, immediately said, “Sign me up in the service of The Lorde,” are Heather Laine Talley, Heidi Renee Lewis, Brooke Elise Axtell, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Darnell L. Moore, David J. Leonard, Kai Green, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and TC Tolbert, with Stephanie Gilmore. Tamura A. Lomax and Monica J. Casper always hold it down as and when necessary. Trust that we are still working on this forum. On behalf of TFW, I extend deep heartfelt gratitude to Dagmar Schultz who graciously and generously granted us permission to use the majority of the featured photos in this forum on Sister Lorde from her personal library. A special thanks to my student Riannon Caflisch for her German translation skills. We are indebted to all of the incredible contributors who put so much time, love, care, and respect into their submissions. It has been a journey from the invitation to the publication. Today is day one of a dip into a vast and very deep Lordean Ocean that will hopefully strengthen or ignite your compassionately righteous fire to make this world a more humane place for all of its inhabitants. We hope you will continue to swim with all of us to the other side of this small and yet, all encompassing section of the vast Lordean Ocean. In the Hands of Afrekete! Ashe’.

The post The Lorde Works in Mysterious and Magical Ways: An Introduction to TFW’s Audre Lorde Forum appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Zillah Eisenstein

In Beirut, +20 women rose boldly to dance in unity w/ their sisters around the world defying injustice against women.

My writing is a small offering to give political voice to the extra-ordinary attempt at trans-national and cultural and racial and class and gender solidarity. It is to give a public recognition to women doing revolution on behalf of their bodies—sexually, economically, racially, politically. “We” are migrants, middle class, unemployed, poor, hungry, tired, gifted, powerful, indigenous, colored, and we trust each other to stand together against violence in all its forms, perhaps mostly because of the shared violence of our bodies—in rape, and war, and hunger, and dispossession.

I am giving witness: to see, to look, to name, to think, to act, “to dance,” “to rise” for justice. It is also an attempt to theorize what a woman’s revolution might look like — if you are really willing to “see” it: inclusively messy with every type and kind of sex and gender that is raced and classed, and devoted to freeing our bodies of sexual violence.

Without theory there is no revolutionary vision or practice. It is why so many of us have been writing feminist theory for decades. Theory is not abstract. And it is not one and the same as idealism. Theory lets you see connections between sites—so that at any one point the structural and systemic expressions of events is knowable. Theory connects the dots, and the connected dots expose the messy connections of patriarchy. Such knowledge is the lifeblood of revolutionary acts.

Knowing Sexual Violence

The perpetual and monstrous violence directed at female sexual selves is too often silenced or ignored—in wars, both in the past and present, by the Pope and religious hierarchies and extremists of all kinds, and in descriptions of chattel slavery. When it is not being ignored it is specified as different than other kinds of violence, like domestic violence, or sexual harassment, or date rape. It is made particular, and somewhat different from the standard that is based on masculinist and public viewings.

Feminisms of all sorts for decades have argued that the personal is political, that there is a politics to sex, that sexual politics is encoded throughout all other manifestations of power—racial, gendered, cultural, geographical, environmental, and legal. No two women share identical tragedy, but instead know the similarity of their violations. The shared bodily vulnerability alongside its resistance binds women and girls across their differences to resist. Now, after decades of political work—from participating in union organizing with women in China or India, or women’s rights work in Ghana, or breast cancer health activism in Cuba, I see how women always already know the fear of sexual violence.

The violence in Syria, Congo, Chicago, USA, Kiev, Egypt, Venezuela, Brazil, and India are not reducible to sexual violence but they are each complexly connected to the invisibly palpable—expressed and repressed—politics of sex. Sexual violence is repeatedly articulated through racial, national, and gender violence.  If the fear and practice of sexual violence were eradicated, people would be free to love and be loved.

Revolutionizing Revolutions

I have questions without easy answers. But the questions shed light on what we need to better know. Who gets to say what a revolution is? Who gets to say when it is happening? When was it recognized that revolutions were sweeping Europe in 1848? Who gave the status of revolution to the American and Russian Revolution? Who named the Arab revolutions simply the Arab Spring? What about the Occupy Movement? And, what of the continuing rebellions in Egypt? Recognizing the recent “risings” of One Billion Rising For Justice across the globe as revolutionary would be a revolution in and of itself.

Denying women’s revolutionary status is part of the denying of sex as political. That means that rape or incest is not only an individual act, but takes place in a systemic and systematic structural system of racist misogyny and patriarchy. Sexual violence is simultaneously personal and political but never simply one or the other; nor does it exist outside the racial and class matrix.

The “we” of feminist ferment is intersectional today. Yet, sexual violence is the translocal language that binds the differing experiences together — not identically, but coalitionally. The centrality, so to speak, of sexual violence, is not singular but it is critical in location. Sexual violence—knowing our body’s vulnerability—binds the differences together. This does not flatten out sexual violence as the same for all women and peoples. Though distinctly unique, they are also polyversally bound together. It is the crosscutting connections from sexual violence that allow for a rare possibility of revolutionary coalescence.

Sexual violence is war in yet another form. Each normalizes and naturalizes the other because of both the repression and expression of each. Karl von Clausewitz — thinking nothing about sex — popularized the notion that “war is simply politics in another form”: an opponent, so to speak, must succumb to another’s will. Politics and war are extreme, and are naturalized and normalized as such. Enter sexual violence, which is actually not “simple in any form,” yet makes maiming, torture and death almost ordinary. Rape becomes the invisible site of war through the discourse of sex. Instead of political it is made inevitable, rather than an abomination.

At a “State of Female Justice” panel in California, hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITTV, Eve Ensler, founder of 1BR4Justice, spoke about women organizing across their differences of privilege and access to build a worldwide movement. She spoke of building and establishing trust with women in the Congo. She spoke of the risk, hardship and pain of crossing divisions, but of staying there for the hurt, and the building after. She described an actual political practice of building love and finding new energy with it to continue no matter what. She described what coalition building actually is—tears and risk and doubt and new bonds.

We need to stop looking for leaders or making talented women heroes or villains. It makes the rest of us passive and less insurgent than “we” can be. Ordinary people make revolutions and become extra-ordinary in numbers. It is the violence that keeps us from seeing and loving each other. I am daring us to find this connection.

Love and justice

A just society allows people to love one another. Any person is free to do so because they are not fearful of violence, or oppression, or exploitation. If there were no rape, no incest, no sexual battery, no sexual violence of any and all sorts, women could love themselves, and others, with no shame, or fear, or blame. If this violence were removed from the planet, war of all sorts would become an anathema. If war is sexual violence by other means, then violence in all its forms must be de-normalized.

It is one thing to want to stop sexual violence and another thing to actually stop it. It is one thing to expose, and educate, and mobilize consciousness about violence and another thing to end it. It is one thing to be against incarceration and the prison system in the U.S. and another thing to rehabilitate rapists. The space between knowing and doing is where revolutions happen. It is why they are so hard to envision and actualize. It takes huge leaps of trust and a willingness to love.

Today the more complex and multiply identified bodies of women continue forward. Whatever the color or race or class or gender, the “we” of rape has been contextualized with variety. “We” imagine together. “We” know together. So there is a “we” even though the “we” does not erase difference, inequality, or assume sameness. So this feminist revolution has been in process for many decades and is now in new phases. All of us need to recognize the false starts and the new beginnings.

The coalitions we need to build recognize that no two people have the same panoply of identities and yet we trust that we share enough to believe in each other. A problem with intersectional selves is that it makes each of us complex, right alongside the problems we wish to address. And, yet, the multiplicity of oppressions can also seem to dilute the shared connections.

This—sexual violence and the way it repeatedly intersects with all other structural violence—locates a revolutionary political site. It is glue. Revolution will derive from struggles here. Although sex is relegated to the personal and distinguished from the political, it is the political of the personal. Everything is turned inside out from here. Kind of like Elizabeth Streb imagining what it means to fall up, rather than fall down.   It is what OBR4Justice means when we “rise” and stand up with intentionality.

Seeing/Being newly 

OBR4Justice exploded on February 14, 2014 in flash mobs, and song, and dance, and marches, and movies, and in myriad forms of individual expression. Multiple social platforms speak to this process: videos, films, many shown on Facebook, and Twitter.

Every kind of site is used: texting, calling, emailing, watching, and also being.  Bodies matter so they are also present. “We” see each other and hug and feel power from our presence together. But we also meet on Skype and trust and hug through cyberspace. There are no simple borders here. Everything is in play.

New forms of visibility become revolutionary.

Feminisms of all and every sort are happening. The connectedness between them is the revolution.  Without a personal history of sexual violence I was pulled more and more to the visceral understanding between women about the violence they receive and endure. Politics explodes from here. Little if any translation is needed. It creates sisters under and with the skin.

Violence bespeaks the failure of revolutionary politics. Flip your vision. Look for a revolution where you see people loving justice and making justice with and through love.  Look, see and name it.

___________________________________________

Zillah Eisenstein has been a Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York for the past 35 years and is now “Distinguished Scholar in Residence” there. Besides her recently published THE AUDACITY OF RACES AND GENDERS: A PERSONAL AND GLOBAL STORY OF THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN (2009, Zed Press, London; Palgrave, U.S.), her books include among others: SEXUAL DECOYS, GENDER, RACE AND WAR IN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY (London, Zed Press; New York, Palgrave, 2007); AGAINST EMPIRE, ibid.; HATREDS: RACIALISED AND SEXUALIZED CONFLICTS IN THE 21^ST CENTURY, (Routledge, 1996); GLOBAL OBSCENTITIES: PATRIARCHY, CAPITALISM AND THE LURE OF CYBERFANTASY (NYU PRESS, 1996); and MANMADE BREAST CANCERS, (Cornell Univ. Press, 2001). For more information see:www.ithaca.edu/zillah.

The post New Revolutions? Finding and Naming Them for Transnational Feminisms appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Betty Rosenda Green, Sikivu Hutchinson, Jamion Allen, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons

On Friday, March 7, 2014, TFW Associate Editor Aishah Shahidah Simmons gave a presentation on the importance of naming and ending sexual violence with approximately 50 African-American and Latino students from Washington Prep High School  and Duke Ellington Continuation School’s Women of Color in the U.S. class  in South Los Angeles. This International Women’s Day (IWD) presentation was conceived and organized by TFW’s Contributing Editor Sikivu Hutchinson who is an award-winning author, senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, and founder of the Women’s Leadership Project (WLP), a high school feminist mentoring program. While WLP’s focus is on girls, this IWD presentation was mixed gender because sexual violence impacts everyone directly and/or indirectly.

During her presentation, Simmons screened an excerpt of her internationally acclaimed, award-winning film NO! The RapeDocumentary, shared parts of her own incest and rape survivor herstory, and talked about some of the issues covered in the film. They included: rape as a community issue that reinforces interlocking systems of oppression; the role of religion in violence against women; media stereotypes about Black women; and Black men as profeminst allies in the anti-sexual violence movement.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons at Washington Prep High School

In spite of the time constraints, Hutchinson and Simmons were able to persevere with their shared vision for the late morning session, which focused on raising awareness about the prevalence of sexual violence. They created a space where students could freely ask questions and discuss topics, which are often viewed as taboo and inappropriate in an academic context. Additionally the students also had an opportunity to meet and engage with a Black feminist filmmaker and cultural worker who uses the camera lens and other cultural mediums to break deafening taboo silences and make visible the invisible.

Since 2006 WLP has been based at South L.A. high schools like Gardena and Washington Prep High School, and Duke Ellington CS. Using a humanist curriculum with a social justice lens, the goal of the program is to empower young women of color to develop their own voices, increase their self-esteem, foster healthy relationships, promote critical consciousness about and activism around race, gender, and LGBT equality, and prepare for college and careers. WLP guides young women through public advocacy projects of their own choosing, toward helping them develop and sharpen their critical thinking, writing, organizing and leadership skills.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Jamion Allen

The presentation was supported by program coordinator Betty Rosenda Green and intern Jamion Allen, a 2013 graduate of Washington Prep High School. Allen, a WLP alum, was featured in  TFW’s April 19, 2013 “Feminists We Love,”  profile and is presently in her first year of college. In addition to her technical expertise, Allen played an important role in co-faciliating, with Hutchinson, the opening icebreaker, which dispelled some of the countless rape myths and misconceptions.

The post TFW’s Sikivu Hutchinson and Aishah Shahidah Simmons Partner to Address Sexual Violence with Youth in South Los Angeles appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Truth levitated like smoke

Thoughts came from the depth of our bellies

Rose and set like a fresh breath in

Out of all the names left hanging on trees

Burned on crosses

Torn at the mercy of animals teeth

Out of all the names gunned down in the name of God

Raped out of existence

Lashings breaking them into death brutally

Out of all the names who couldn’t take no more

Out of all the names that is kind that is smart…

All the names that killed themselves kindly

Out of all the names put to silence in false accusations

Wrongfully executed

Out of all the names gutted out of the belly of the brave like fish

Cut at the feet and hands are the names that dared to run

Cut out of the womb of the hanging are the names dare to be born again

Out of all the names entertained at picnics

All the people whose stomach spoiled in the privilege of their silence

Didn’t quite know what to say to stop the bleeding

But say they don’t see the difference of the shades of skin today

Out of all the names who have been led to their deaths with that last line.

At the mercy of pure luck and desire to believe in tomorrow

The mercy I was taught to have on a God that turns devil quietly

After the brutal beating of my own name, being strung around the South in pieces

Cherishing rumors as rich history

Generational telephone games as legacy

They call Fowler-Chapman in a crowded room

Carrying on the innocence of a serial killer’s last name as my own

I answer

I am here

I survived.

Her name is not the type of name you repeat twice

Butcher its identity

Question its existence

And then ask to hear it again.

Teré Fowler-Chapman is an artist whose medium is black ink. Her creative works possess fluidity that allows her work to bend into multiple genres. She has empowered her audiences nationwide by sharing her truths through spoken word.

Teré Fowler-Chapman currently resides in Tucson, where she hosts a community open poetry reading called “Words on the Avenue” at Café Passé.  An open reading designed to provide a platform and safe space for the Tucson community to share their bravery through poetry. Check out her website: sliverofpearl.com.

Author photograph by Liora K. Photography. liorakphotpgraphy.com

The post Poetry by Teré Fowler-Chapman appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Shivani Davé

I knew what rape was before I knew what sex was.

It wasn’t violent stranger rape that my mother told me about. That I knew by watching the news, by being afraid to walk down the street, it became instinct. It was the friend-that-you-invite-over-after-dinner, the guy-that-lives-down-the-hall-from-your-dorm-room, the date-that-doesn’t-take-no-for-an-answer-while-your-roommate-is-sleeping-in-the next-room, kind of rape that my mother told me about when I was eight. She would come home after work with stories and my sister and I would listen to them on the couch in my living room. I remember staring out of the dark windows as she warned me of the terrible ways I could be violated, only able to see my reflection and wondering about the things I couldn’t see.

“We trust you, we just don’t trust them,” my parents would say when I would ask if I could go out. My mother made the rules and my father enforced them. There couldn’t be an equal number of boys and girls, because that would be a group date. If there were more boys than girls, they might take advantage of us; but if there were more girls than boys, who would protect us? I feared men and I needed men.

Growing up, I rarely hung out with boys whose mothers my mother didn’t know; I checked in often, calling every time I reached or left somewhere, providing phone numbers for any friends in the vicinity who would find me if she couldn’t. I continue to text, email and call regularly. If more than a couple of hours goes by and she can’t reach me, I get an angry phone call from my sister telling me to “call mom, she’s freaking out” or a friend sending me a text to let me know that my mother is looking for me.

My mother and I made it work and we continue to make it work.  I know my mother wants to protect me from the sexual harassment—“eve-teasing” they call it—she experienced every day on the streets in India, from the “what did you do wrong?” response to being raped, and from the painful, all too normal experience of being violated. She wasn’t trying to victim-blame, she was trying to teach me how to survive. My mother wanted to keep me safe. It never felt like she was insinuating that it would be my fault if I were raped. Instead, she wanted me to take precautions so that we would never have to have that conversation.

Thank you, mom. Thank you for never shielding me from the unfortunate reality of our sick, dangerous world. But, I can’t help but wonder about the women who don’t fear men as much as I do, maybe simply because they haven’t been thinking about it for as long as I have. I envy them. They who can walk down the street alone after dark; who don’t mind using public transportation in the middle of the night; who don’t carry a pocket knife and pepper spray wherever they go. They who haven’t been brought up in a culture where victim-blaming and survival share a fine line because most of us know it’s never a woman’s fault, but we’ve been taught that you don’t go out alone at night or hang out with men that are not your brother or husband.

I gawk at the white women who travel alone in the rural parts of India, away from the urban streets where I would be unfazed by their tank tops and shorts. They chat loudly, and walk proudly; I cower on the side, covered head to toe with a scarf to hide my face, wondering if those women have any idea what the men are actually screaming at them, wondering how their parents let them fly across the world alone, wondering if they will be safe.

I remember the long walk home one evening, frustrated from the cat calls and uncomfortable subway rides, I gave one man on a motorcycle the finger as he blew kisses and asked if I wanted some obscene thing that has no direct English translation, and shouldn’t. I remember walking quickly, almost running home as he followed on his motorcycle. I prayed for a male companion. But this isn’t the way most rape occurs. We are told that assault from a friend or acquaintance is much more common. So, I wonder if they are being naive or if I’m being paranoid? Are they putting themselves at risk or am I restricting myself over an irrational fear?

I wonder if I’ve distanced the problem, so that I don’t have to face what is right next to me. When I sit in a room with my female friends, I wonder who in our group is the 1 in 4*? Is it me? Have we all been violated, and we just don’t know? Have I spent so much time immersing myself in conversations about interpersonal violence and sexual assault that I can’t help but see it everywhere? When I look back, I question how consensual some of my experiences really were and wonder if things would have gone differently if I were older or stronger or sober.

I think about relationships I’ve been in and wonder how comfortable I was with saying no and how much I felt like I needed a man to protect me that I would compromise to keep him by my side. I wonder about when being asked for consent isn’t enough because society tells you your voice isn’t valuable enough to be heard, when saying no leads to a fight or hurts someone you love, or when we are so socialized to please others that we are unable to recognize what we actually want so that when you ask me, I don’t even know the answer.

We’ve talked about masculinity. We’re working on deconstructing it and we’ve learned that at the base, masculinity breeds men who strive for power. To grow up in this society and aim to be a “proper” man you will end up hurting women. So I wonder, as a woman, am I destined to be a victim? If I exist in this society and behave as a “proper” woman should, will I be hurt by men? Have I been hurt by men just by being a woman?

To claim that all women are victims is like claiming that all heterosexual sex is rape (yes, Andrea Dworkin) and you have to wonder how productive that is. We have to live in this world, we have to interact with men and we have to hold on to some sort of agency, some sort of power. I don’t know if my fear is irrational, but I also don’t know if that matters if it keeps me safe. Sometimes, I want to unlearn the rape statistics and every way our justice system can and will re-victimize you when you try to report. I want to un-hear the stories from the hotline calls at the domestic violence shelter. I want to stop seeing violence everywhere I go. I would never suggest anyone to think about rape as much as I do, but I suppose I would encourage everyone to think more about positive interactions, consent, and conversation. We can all participate in this conversation, about sexuality, about consent, about what makes us happy and about how we can love each other enough to stop hurting each other. I know that I am trying. For every man that I convince to stop using the B word, I feel stronger. For every woman that discloses her pain to me, I feel determined. For every reminder of the love and support I have from my friends and family, the violence feels a little easier to fight.
________________________________________________

Shivani Davé is trying to navigate her existence as an Indian woman in a white world. She attends Vassar College where she studies Biochemistry, Women’s studies and Asian studies

The post I Knew what Rape was Before I Knew what Sex was appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Fakhra Hassan

TFW Disclaimer: Some names of individuals and organizations have been changed or eliminated in order to focus on the saliency of Fakhra’s testimony. These changes have been marked with an asterisk (*) at first mention.

During the last week of February, I had the opportunity to meet Pakistani feminist activist and IT genius Malala Riaz* at the Karachi Literature Festival. Before meeting personally, Malala and I had been interacting online and over the phone since late 2012. The occasion of our meeting was serious. I had inadvertently reported rape. In 2013, I was falsely accused of defaming a man I barely knew, the rapist’s lawyer.

Malala and I didn’t discuss anything like that in Karachi. I was laden with autographed books, and had that “don’t-even-think-about-it” look on my face. She read that very well, and was courteous enough not to “ask” what “I had decided.” I broke the ice about my book and how excited I was to finish writing it. On the last day of the festival, we went to hear Zia Mohyuddin narrate the story of an Indian courtesan, her marriage to the rich Gora sahib (white man), and her tragic end that left her alone in her misery, suffering with her borrowed riches. Despite Mohyuddin’s eloquent storytelling that filled the warm air, the silence between Malala and me won to a nauseating extreme. We didn’t say a word to each other, but exchanged momentary glances that meant more than words, in a disturbing way.

There had also been a rather disturbing silence after I noticed Ada Durrani* standing right next to Malala. Ada was a good friend of the rapist and long-time business partner at some point, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her. In 2012, she was one of the prominent “Pakistani IT activists” behind a small-scale national survey on “rape” that was “apparently” completed “only by men” and circulated widely on Twitter. The survey, which I am now unable to locate, indicated that women are more likely to be raped because of what “they wear,” suggesting that it is essentially the victim’s fault when rape happens. Through Malala, I learned that Ada had been struggling with cancer for the last two years, which made me forget asking about her role in that dreadful survey. I had sent a Tweet inquiring about the gender ratio of the survey sample, but never received a reply.

I was fairly convinced that I was trapped in rape culture. I was discouraged from taking a stance against it, because the rapist was a prominent figure in the Pakistani IT industry. I had lost my job in those days, and was emotionally unstable. The feminists who “did” approach me to “help” often patronized my financial status. For instance, one of them nicknamed me “bloodsucker,” even though I had helped her in retrieving her long-due salary from my previous employer. One of them had also declined to offer me a job.

In January 2013, as an act of solidarity in the women’s collective that was formed to lodge a complaint against the rapist, I shared my testimony of rape with the all-women Board of Directors of the Association of Progressive Communications (APC), the rapist’s employers, and co-founders of his organization. Under the guise of a non-existent organization, the rapist had gotten his closest friend to sponsor our group Drag It to the Top, among others from Pakistan, for an IT workshop in Karachi in April 2012. It was only after receiving the certificate of participation that I discovered that this sponsor was one of the funding partners of that workshop. I was tricked into taking a favour from the rapist’s organization, and nearly fell with nausea and helplessness trying to undo the trickery.

Moreover, sharing that testimony with APC exacerbated my frustrations with the feminist communities further because no other feminist from that women’s collective who had fairly longer histories with the rapist spoke up. I was all alone. There were several attempts from people in power to convince me to go public and expose the rapist. However, I was largely unsupported and ignored by the LGBT community because, unlike most of them, I was the only one out in the open. The assumption, then, was that their public support for me could have endangered their security. Additionally, the feminists trying to convince me to go public were financially secure, and had a lot of social, moral and legal support, and in some cases, support from the government. It was only recently that I learnt from Malala that Ada followed suit and gave her testimony against the rapist, as well. Malala’s exact words were, “Ada broke partnership because of the situation and harassment, and she had been smeared in every international circle because of that bastard.”

I really didn’t mean to participate in an act of solidarity with other women who had past and current relationships with the man who raped me. I am a “gay” Pakistani single woman who has a “history” of relationships with men. I’ve experienced scary episodes of “homophobic stalking” and “harassment,” things I’ve dealt with primarily on my own. I don’t know why I am expected to support those oppressed Pakistani women who can’t or won’t take a stand on the violation of their own rights to dignity and bodily integrity. After all, it did take a “decade” for a political entity and bold author like Dr. Fouzia Saeed to do it. I wonder why they didn’t approach her to share their experiences. I wonder why the violation of queer women’s rights seem to function as the more “juicy” story. My friend and legal scholar, Sarah Suhail, reiterated those feminists are not really haranguing me to go public in order to “save me.” She thinks they are essentially cowering behind me because no one else could or would do what I did.

People who call themselves my friend often say I’m an easy target, because people know I lose my temper very quickly. They say I’m like a baby with a strong inclination to be irrational. They say this is what instigators want in order to achieve their goal of sabotaging my personal and professional relationships using character assassination tactics. For instance, some people have been “informing” family members of my “promiscuous” history, “financial upheavals,” “smoking and drinking,” “lack of well-informed opinions,” “man eating habits,” “lesbian stalking,” “misogyny,” and so on and so forth. In this way, these “instigators” are similar to the people who participated in the aforementioned “online survey,” suggesting that rape victims “asked for it.” The sad reality is that an angry queer woman with an open-to-the-public history of rape and sexual violence never gets the “benefit of the doubt.”

For these reasons, I don’t think there is a lot of difference between victimized Pakistani queer women and the women and children killed in wars for three reasons: the excessive feminization of poverty and the resulting patronization of women; the homophobia and transphobia that leads to the invisibility of queer Pakistani women, as well as the subordination of our self-esteem, enforced feminization, and coercive sex; and the fact that a Pakistani queer woman without a sexual partner is considered “desperately available” and “exploitable.” So, the million dollar questions are: Are efforts intended to increase reporting sexual harassment worth investing in for the greater good of womanity? What does the future of feminism hold for the queer women of the third world? Unless there are a hundred witnesses willing to stand up against the rapist, “solidarity” doesn’t really mean a thing, does it?

“You do what you think is best and what you think is right…when you feel ready,” was Malala’s concluding remark on that last phone call. After nodding good bye and catching the flight back to Lahore, I kept agonizing over why she didn’t say a word to me at Karachi. I expected her to show some re-assurance then, like good-luck hug at least. The message was plain and simple: I had to be ready no matter what the consequences might be. Women go bankrupt and lose their jobs, honor and reputation, their right to good health and education and their lives every day. With the exception of my seemingly worthless life, I have nothing else left to lose.
_________________________________________________________

Fakhra Hassan is a self-identified queer feminist. She is an academic with scholarly interests in eco-feminism, history of religion art, typography, fashion, and music. She is currently working on publishing her first book.

The post On Misconceived Toxicity, Malice and Failures appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Kari O’Driscoll

Image credit: http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2014/05/06/federal-investigations-bring-attention-to-campus-sexual-assault-problem/

On Tuesday, April 29, the White House issued a set of guidelines designed to address the hot-button issue of rape on college campuses. It would seem that the issue of sexual assault in the military has taken a back seat to the growing awareness of just how often college students are victimized sexually by other college students.  There is a push to gather more information as well as to re-think the ways in which these incidents are handled when they are reported. While I fully support these efforts, I am astonished at what I have learned in just the past few weeks about the culture of silence and ineptitude that surrounds this issue.

Three days after the first shot across the bow, the US Department of Education released the names of 55 colleges and universities currently under investigation for their mishandling of sexual assault cases. While I am pleased by this progress, one enormous question remains looming in my mind: why are colleges and universities “handling” sexual assault cases? If I were raped in the bathroom at my local supermarket, I wouldn’t expect the grocery store to “handle” it. I would call the cops and I imagine the grocery store would support that 100%. I’m not sure how or when this system of separate investigation and punishment began, but what it has created is a dangerous double standard that both perpetuates rape culture and allows some perpetrators to avoid well-deserved consequences.

Most colleges and universities are in a unique situation, given that a large number of students live in residence halls or school-owned properties. The majority of them have their own security force that is charged with keeping students and staff safe and most have also created some sort of internal judicial council, often comprised of staff and students. But there has to be a line drawn somewhere and it seems to me that these schools aren’t doing themselves any favors by taking on responsibility for dealing with crimes that are clearly out of their league.

As I see it, there are two major issues with the way these systems are crafted. The first glaring problem is that these institutions are not set up to investigate crimes and mete out punishments. They never were, and they frankly have no business doing so. In a May 1st NPR report, Tovia Smith asserts, “…colleges have a fundamentally different mission than the criminal justice system,” referring to remarks by Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel for the Victims Rights Law Center. Bruno’s work with victims has taught her that schools are more often than not dealing with allegations of sexual assault through an educational lens rather than from the perspective of justice. This process is probably just fine when it comes to students who have stolen school property or engaged in drunken vandalism, but when it comes to felony offenses, it is patently absurd.

In 1986, following the rape and murder of Jeanne Clery in her dorm at Lehigh University, Congress enacted a law requiring all colleges and universities receiving federal financial aid to disclose information about crimes committed on or near their campuses. I would say that notifying potential students of sexual predators living in their midst qualifies under this statute. And notwithstanding the legal ramifications of failing to report such crimes, I can’t imagine why any college or university would think it was a good idea to use their administrative or security staff to determine whether a crime had been committed when there are trained professionals who are paid to do just that.

Claire Gordon, a journalist for Al Jazeera America wrote an article on April 17^th in which she also interviewed Colby Bruno. In one instance, Bruno is quoted as saying she has “met many school administrators who don’t understand or believe in their own policies.” If that is true, why would any school think it was a good idea to have their own policies and procedures in place to investigate serious crimes like sexual assault.  Why wouldn’t every school simply defer to the laws that are already in place and outsource the investigation and prosecution to those people who are qualified? The fact that we have separate systems for college students and military personnel than we do for everyone else means that a college student who is determined by their university’s judicial process to be guilty of sexual assault is not held to the same standard as any other individual walking the streets of this country. Why is rape any different when it is committed on a college campus?

It has been purported that students are often reluctant to report rape and other sexual assaults to authorities because they feel they will be re-traumatized by the police investigation process. It may initially feel safer to report a rape to someone on campus, but that is not a good enough reason to allow schools to police themselves, especially when it is becoming increasingly obvious that they are not capable of doing the job properly. Given what we now know about the absolute train wreck most colleges have made of dealing with such complaints, this strategy ultimately doesn’t serve the purpose of keeping students safe or punishing perpetrators adequately for the seriousness of their crime. Private investigations by university staff, who are not held to the same legal standard for information gathering as police officers are, could inadvertently have the effect of hindering a proper police investigation when and if the assault is reported.

In March of this year, a group of students at the University of North Texas created a petition on Change.org to pressure the school into providing rape kits in the health center on campus because the nearest hospital is five miles away. I have to say I disagree with this idea strongly.  If I were a victim of sexual assault, I would want the most highly trained person to administer my rape kit so that I could be more confident that the evidence would result in a conviction. Imagine the chain of custody nightmare that could ensue after a college health center employee administers a rape kit and the field day a defense attorney would have with whether or not evidence was collected properly.

Beyond the fact that colleges are woefully unprepared to handle serious criminal investigations, there is an obvious conflict of interest in doing so. Claire Gordon’s piece points this out quite glaringly. About fifteen years ago, Brett Sokolow, a consultant who works with colleges and universities around the issue of sexual assaults on campus, came up with a plan to “rebrand” rape for those schools. Sokolow explains that many of the schools he worked with, “had policies about rape, and recognized that rape happened. But when it came down to it, they just didn’t want to believe their own students actually raped.” Because he noticed that many college administrators were “squeamish” about the word rape, he ultimately coined the term “nonconsensual sex” which has been widely accepted by and integrated into the policies and student handbooks of a large number of schools over the last decade or so. Sokolow believes that this more bland term allows schools to have difficult conversations about criminal allegations more readily. Many victims’ rights groups beg to differ, saying that the word rape is ugly and uncomfortable for a reason – because the act itself is ugly and uncomfortable.

Frankly, these schools often invest a significant amount of time, energy, and sometimes, money, in their students, and nobody wants to believe that someone they admitted is capable of a violent crime. But the fact that so many of them are so incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of rape that they have to rebrand it in order to have frank discussions about it is precisely the reason they ought not to be in the business of investigating and punishing rape. Yes, the stakes are high if you botch an investigation and accidentally punish an innocent person, but they are equally as high if you allow a rapist to get away with the crime because you don’t want to ruin his life. How many sex offenders are on our college campuses offending again and again because their school lacks the resources and knowledge (or backbone) to adequately address the accusations of another student? How is that not a liability? And how is it fair to the students who remain on campus completely unaware that they are living among rapists?

In that same article, Gordon notes that, “According to a 2010 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, only 10 to 25 percent of students found ‘responsible’ for a sexual assault were permanently kicked off campus.” These students are not behind bars because investigations carried out by schools are not legally binding. But when an attacker is allowed to remain on campus to pursue his degree despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence showed that he was guilty of victimizing another student, exactly what is the college saying? It says to me that they have determined that one student’s concerns are more valid or valuable than another’s. By failing to properly address these issues, the university is reinforcing the messages that perpetuate rape culture, that rape doesn’t really matter, or that rape victims don’t really matter, that rape “isn’t that bad.” If I were raped by a fellow student who was determined to be guilty but not removed from school, I think it would impossible to feel safe on campus anymore. I wonder how many female students have left school because their attacker wasn’t forced to leave.

In giving over the investigation and prosecution of all sexual assault cases to local authorities, colleges and universities would be doing themselves and their students an enormous favor. While there still may be some privilege or bias on the part of individuals involved in the investigation, it is less likely to matter whether the accused is the star quarterback of the football team. Yes, our legal system has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to rape, but if rape is so awful that colleges and universities can’t even bear to use the word, they certainly can’t be trusted to thoroughly investigate rape allegations on their own. And there is no reason whatsoever that a college student ought to be treated differently than any other individual when it comes to serious criminal behavior. Living on campus or in a fraternity or sorority house does not render you above the law.

The recent actions of the White House and the Department of Education are admirable as a first volley in this battle, but it is far past time for us to take rape and sexual assault inquiries out of the hands of colleges and universities forever.

____________________________________

Kari O’Driscoll is a non-fiction writer and book reviewer for BookPleasures.com. She writes about social justice, health care, parenting and spirituality, and her most recent work has appeared in “Get Out of My Crotch! Twenty-one Writers Respond to America’s War on Reproductive Health and Women’s Rights” and “The Cancer Poetry Project, Part 2.” Previously, her work has been syndicated by BlogHer Publishing Network and published in the online magazine BuddhaChickLife, as well as The Feminist Wire.

The post Op Ed: Why On Earth Do We Let Colleges and Universities “Handle” Their Own Rape Cases? appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

The Up-to-the-Minute Religious Access Programming for Women

Born on the belt of justification of a woman’s Bible

guide to cooking turkey, without her turkey baster,

between her oven “Mitts,” an almost-president

trying to take her rights away. Her womanhood,

her green tights, bow, and arrows.

She’s the Katniss of housewives.

She’s a firestarter or better yet a red head from head to.

Last month her birth control cost her ninety dollars.

Yaz, that’s a lot of dough for one month of waiting to praise

of praising God that he made Jesus turn wine into her period.

As she sat on the porcelain God reading passages from Matthew 1:18AM:

The night the stars of Bethlehem hung heavy in the sky,

stains of glass stitched her porcelain face.

They came from the east,

those angelic glow preaches.

“What’s your name?”

              Mary.

“She was a good fuck,” Cameal, Samael, and Gabriel said.

This is the date she will remember forever.

Tattooed on her arm, 9-13-12, her Holocaust.

Her holy of holies to be judged at arm’s length.

by a man holding her bible, her words,

the savior absent during the courtroom’s final veil

that rape is the new four letter word for…

Fuck, Mary had to visit the GYN.

Where she found a pamphlet with big block letters

proclaiming,

              “Keep calm and there’s a clinic near by.”

Where Mary draws chalk lines.

Chalk is all she could find at the age of fourteen.

Thought chalk could defend her from snakes tongue

biting the apple of belief, claiming

her fetus’ finger tips feel pain more then Mary ever did.

              The night-

her clothes were too tight and promiscuous.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image,

so that he may rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, over.’”

              The night-

they slammed her head into bricks.

“So God created mankind in his own image.”

              The night-

they made her give them up, the mouth, the tongue, her breast.

“And God saw that it was good.”

              The night-

they used the metal rod.

My God she must not have felt pain.

I guess the media forgets “her.”

Sometimes she almost forgets him on top of her-

almost forgets his breath pushed up into her-

forgets almost the moment she became a statistic.

250,000 women’s wings are torn off each year.

What about the ones forgotten when we closed our eyes.

Because numbers like those, you can’t do the math,

because remember the stereotype,

Women are bad at math.

Can’t multiply David’s stars burned in her back,

subtract a cross-nailed to her legs and divide the hijabs choking her.

Open eyes to the addition of shoulder blades tugging to cliffs,

blessing new wings on the way down, the second coming of women.

________________________________________________

Jaclyn Weber is a California native and transfer student attending her final semester at Bradley University. She has a forthcoming piece in Collision Magazine and has published in Zaum Literary Magazine. Jaclyn’s work has been performed at Peoria’s lively Whisper and Shout reading series, the Cornell College University of Illinois Springfield, and Upper Iowa University Fine Arts Series. Jaclyn was awarded the 2013 and 2014 Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2013 Civil Rights Poetry Competition at Bradley University.

The post Poetry By Jaclyn Weber appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Emily Barasch

The dominos fall quickly in the way that I choose

              And I have to act fast because they’re falling.

                            Falling—and I direct the lean.

I direct the lean.  I have the power to choose.

I can’t control what happens to me.  Attacked—assaulted.

I had no control over his

actions. “I couldn’t have done anything differently.”

But I decide how to proceed.

He didn’t take that from me. My freedom to move forward.

Empowerment

              Comes from within.

But the darkness can bubble over and drown you.

Rise so high that you can’t get out until

someone rescues you.

Helpless.

Hopeless.

              Tears flowing like an infinity pool, never ceasing.

I know what it’s like—and I don’t want to fall.

I don’t want my freedom taken from me.

He took that day

              Those two days

                            Those three days

                                          Those ten minutes

Powerless—at his mercy—no way out until he stopped.

But he’s gone now. He’s not holding me anymore.

His hands aren’t on my face—my

neck.

I’m free. Free from his grasp. Free to move forward. Free to rise.

And I want to rise.

              Rise up—Rise away—not fall.

It happened and I’m okay.

              I’m alive. I can move.

Emily Barasch is a senior at Tulane University studying sociology and dance. Exploring the place and power that art has within society is her greatest passion. Her thirst for experiences and expanding herself has lead her to live in Israel, New Orleans, and South Africa. She hopes her words can help empower other women to get through difficult experiences and find solace.​

The post The Dominos Fall Quickly appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Error: Page Not Available

I’m sorry.

What you are asking for is not an option.

This page Is Not Available.

Error.

My breasts are my own.

Do not ask me if you can see them.

My waist is my own.

Do not touch it.

My lips belong to me.

As do the words that come from it.

My legs are made for climbing mountains,

not to distract adolescent boys and immature men.

My cheeks are not sweet,

nor am I your baby.

Error.

Ask me about my friends.

Other women.

who have been touched.

Violated.

Raped.

Ask me how they felt

when they begged for help and mercy

and were told:

This page Is Not Available

Error.

Ask me how I felt

when the Unspeakable

was threatened to be done.

That Page Is Available.

++++++++++++

“Fire!”

This is what I have been taught to scream

when someone is attacking me.

They say,

do not scream “rape!”

do not scream “help!”

do not scream “but please!”

Scream “fire!”

Because otherwise no one will want to help you.

No one will care.

Your body’s violation

is not as important

as the threat of an invisible flame.

Then I will get fined

for lying

because my single lie

held more power

than one disgusting

truth.

****************************************

Lorean Galarza is a sixteen-year-old high school student.  She aspires to be a pediatric nurse and hopes to help children around the world to receive higher quality health care. Lorean has been writing poems and short stories since middle school—both writing and feminism are very important to her.  She strives for a better future for all women through education and writing.  She advocates for humane feminism and the importance of feminism in her short stories and poems because she believes anti-feminism is harmful for everyone.

The post Two Poems by Lorean Galarza appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Elena Carter

In the hours after I was date-raped and had stumbled, still drunk, into the hotel room where I was staying with my identical twin sister, Corrina, I couldn’t shake the question my rapist had asked me earlier in the evening as he leaned in close to me,

“Are you the good twin or the bad twin?” Before I could open my mouth, he had answered for me:

“I can tell, you’re the bad one.”

Corrina and I had traveled from Minneapolis to Ames to celebrate our twenty-fourth birthday together. Corrina had initially accompanied me to the hotel party, but left to go home early in the night.  By the time I got back inside our room, she was already asleep. She had passed out wearing the red floral dress I’d lent her. My sister’s hair no longer held her perm and it fell out across her pillow as straight and as flat as mine. She left her reading light on and I could see her face very clearly. As I watched her, asleep and without her glasses, I felt vaguely surprised at how similar Corrina and I looked. There was a breeze coming through the open window, the curtains twisting and I felt scared and alone. I thought that this is almost like watching myself. At the same time, I felt as though I wasn’t watching myself as much as I was studying the self I aspired to be.

The longer I stood there, the more it occurred to me that if someone had been in the room with us in the moment before I reached for the light switch on Corrina’s reading lamp, he or she would have seen Corrina, on her back, illuminated, and me, not at all. An image of one stands in for an image of two.

Finally, I moved to the bathroom. I turned on the water and stood in the shower for a long time. When I stepped out of the shower, I caught my reflection in the dim mirror. My face contained my sister’s, but my body looked and felt my own. It occurred to me then that I used it in ways Corrina wouldn’t—and, at this moment, it shamed me.  A few minutes later, as I crawled into bed beside her, I lay with my front to Corrina’s back and pulled the covers over her shoulders as if I could protect her from all things. I closed my eyes against the dark and, drifting to sleep, held tightly to the image of my second self.  The woman inside I am, but cannot become.

When Corrina and I go out together, we often hear from men:

“You’re twins. That’s hot.”

Such comments are irritating, objectifying, and a common experience for female twins. In 2012, Feminist bloggers and twins Elin and Hennie Weiss write,

“Sometimes men ask us if we’ve ever slept with the same man, or even if we’ve ever slept with the same man at the same time. The sexualization of identical twins is troubling to us because it suggests that identical female twins are not viewed as individuals, but as a pair or a twosome. It also creates the notion that identical twins are somehow more sexual than other women, or interested in having sex with the same partner. At the same time it endorses a creepy sexual or sensual bond between twins that borders on incestuous.”

More frequently, however, I am asked if I’m the evil twin, the bad twin, or the good twin. I want to respond, how do you define good and bad? I deeply resent the reduction of me into a type. Though the latter approach might seem grounded in a desire to differentiate between twins, it’s as objectifying as the first and, to me, more infuriating.

Whenever we turn a woman into a “type” of woman, we’re being reductive. As an identical twin, I am frustrated when my peers assume that my sister and I should look and act alike. But I am more frustrated by the opposite tendency that characterizes twins as contrasting types. In middle school, my peers referred to me as “the pretty twin” and to Corrina as “the smart twin.” Both of these distinctions were hurtful to us. In the aftermath of my sexual assault, I felt stunned, all over again, by the cruelty of being measured against my sister. In being deemed “bad” I was being defined against my sister as the more sexually available — and therefore more rapeable — of the two. Was this distinction made based on my outward appearance? Was it my choice to wear a short skirt vs. Corrina’s choice to wear a more conservative dress? Or my choice to wear make-up vs. her choice not to wear make-up, event though both are equally valid expressions of femininity?

Was it because I had been drinking? I’m still trying understand why it is that if a man is drunk when he commits a rape, he is considered less responsible.  However, if a woman is drunk, she is considered more responsible for her rape.

Alongside the implications for “which women” get sexually assaulted, the organization of women into categories of “good” and “bad” represents an attempt by men to control and define women, particularly through our physical appearance. Our appearances are subject to public scrutiny on a daily basis. Cat-calls or even compliments on our choice of dress, hairstyle, and etcetera are all ways for men to articulate how, and in what contexts, women are desirable and approachable. I wonder, too, if it’s as my best friend and co-worker Katherine tells me,

“Each problematic reduction isolates us from each other and forces us to compete for more than just one label, to compete for our very humanity.”

Rationally, I know that I am no less good or bad regardless of how many men I have slept with, or what contexts, and in what ways I choose to have sex. And yet, the circumstances of my sexual assault marked me as promiscuous.  I was positioned as “bad” against societal perceptions of “good” chaste women like the representation of my sister that night. Sexual assault is unacceptable regardless of good/bad categorizations of women.  These categorizations are reductive and false, but nonetheless they have cultural meaning as well as far-reaching impacts on all aspects of our lives. I know, for instance, that being described as good or bad cannot possibly capture the myriad of ways that I present myself across all facets of my life. But I still deeply internalize the distinction. We live in a world in which this good/bad distinction produces words, like “slut,” that have strong cultural cache it can lead to high school girls committing suicide when labeled as such. I blamed myself for my rape. I had, after all, followed my rapist into his hotel room. I had been wearing heels and a short skirt. I had been tipsy. Though I said “No” five times, I hadn’t put up physical resistance.

Initially, I couldn’t tell my sister what happened. I felt ashamed. As identical twins, we had always struggled to be seen as individuals and not as one of the twins. As I stood there in the hotel room, for once, I wished I was more like her—as good, as smart, as innocent.

But if becoming my sister means rejecting a fundamental part of myself, such as the way I choose to perform my femininity and sexuality, I’d rather be me. Or, if I do want to be like my sister then it is because I admire and want to match her confidence and ability to define herself regardless of outside pressures. I aspire, then, not to engage in behaviors that mark me as “good” according to someone else’s standards. Rather, I seek my own self-determination in sexual expression. In rejecting proscriptive cultural stereotypes that tell me, and others like me, how to behave sexually, I am, as Katherine suggested, embracing a fuller sense of my own humanity, a fuller sense of myself.  A self that is un-definable and irreducible. A self that is naive and shy, aggressive and sexual, grave, and playful, all at the same time.

*****************************************************

Elena Carter graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a BA in Literature/Writing. She will be starting a MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa this fall. Elena’s writing has previously appeared in The Rumpus and Counterpunch.

The post On Date Rape and the Good Girl/Bad Girl Dichotomy appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Megan Koopman

When you become a woman

and your breasts start to show

in a way that makes vice principals shake

and neighborhood boys stare.

You begin to know three words so perfectly

they string together like a banner from eyelash to eyelash.

Just in case

You see them while you pay $12.99

for that hard pink plastic tube

of pepper spray.

While your car keys

form hard calluses

between the soft skin

that webs your middle

and pointer finger.

While you walk

in groups of three or four

after the sun sets

and the moonlight forgets to

warn you of the shadows.

A boy put his finger on the trigger

because he thought you were in debt.

Well, you’ve got this shiny pink tube

and this cab fare

to prove that you had insurance.

But he has lives

and you have a self defense class

on Thursdays.

He has blood

and you get pulled to the side

for a skirt too high

or a top too low.

They say, “slut.”

You say, “just in case.”

They say, “whore.”

You say, “just in case.”

They say, “she was asking for it.”

You say, “just in case.”

**********************************

Megan Koopman studies psychology and creative writing at the University of Michigan. She wishes to live her life writing poetry as a way to remedy the solitude of female adolescence, and to be surrounded by dogs at all times.

The post Just in Case appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Metta Sáma

12^th grade. My boyfriend, Marty, lived with his aunt and her 37-year old son Jane. His mother had died in a car accident, along with his two sisters, years ago, and his father had given himself over to alcohol in grief. He had been saved because, as the youngest person in the car, he got last dibs as to where to sit. So, he got smushed in the middle, on the half-seat, the child’s seat. The car was hit hard on the right, spun into the opposing lane, and was slammed by a semi on the left. They all died on impact, except him and his father. The first car that hit them was driven by an alcoholic who survived the accident. His father had not been drunk that time, but was having a fight with his wife about Marty. This is how my boyfriend remembers the story.

Often, when I’m at his aunt’s house, I sit at her bar, look at myself in the long, wide gold-speckled mirror, and watch Marty behind me, pacing, recounting this story, and how his father left him with his aunt, how his father could no longer look at him without getting angry, without blaming him for the loss of his wife and their daughters.

Marty, like my brother, became a juvenile delinquent. Years after we broke up, when they were both adults in the same city jail, they would call me, passing the phone between them. They would do this often, and I would keep the phone away from my ear, listening to these two men who had, at one point or other in my life, traded my trust of them for their own power.

The year before my brother ended up in jail with Marty, he’d moved back into my parents’ house. There he was downstairs, and there I was upstairs. My parents were out-of-town, and I’d invited my current boyfriend, S., to stay with me. I didn’t feel safe alone in this house with my brother, who had raped me when we were both children, and whenever he was home from juvenile detention, he would find some way to lie down next to me. For two days, S. and I stayed in my room. One day he needed to breathe another air and went downstairs to chill with my brother. He came upstairs, soon afterwards, fuming, “Get your shit! Get your shit now! We’re not staying here! I’ll kill that motherfucker!” My brother had asked S. for intimate details about how we have sex. “Does she suck your dick? Does she suck it right? Does she start slow at the head or does she go all the way in? Does she get on top? I bet she looks good on top like that. Does she move? I know she makes a lot of noise. I heard her.” When we were far from the house, sitting in a gas station in the middle of the day, he began crying and beating the steering wheel, feeling powerless and helpless and violated. I imagine he wanted to hold me and say, “It’s okay, love. It’s okay, love. It’s okay.” But by then, he knew I’d been lied to enough and that it wasn’t okay, and it would never be okay. So, instead, he said, “I will kill that motherfucker.”

I’ll be honest with you. I was in 9^th grade, 14, at the start of this story, 5 years past my first period, past my first training bra, and a virgin. But only in the lying way of being a virgin, when a woman wants to own her own body, and says she’s a virgin even though her brother first penetrated her 7 years previously. The kind of woman who was never a virgin, who experienced the first piercing before her first period.

When Marty went to juvie the third time after we’d begun dating, he wrapped a shortened bicycle chain around my ring finger and said I was his wife. In the dozen holes in that ring, I saw a dozen escape routes and a body too large to fit through. He fastened the chain with a paper clip, one sharp edge that kept prodding my palm. I pretended not to notice as I listened to him say, “My uncle will take care of you.” Perhaps he needed me to be an orphan, like him, in need of a distant relative to serve as protector. I couldn’t see my boyfriend’s face clearly in the dark, couldn’t tell him with my eyes that I already had a father, and more importantly, that I’d already laid next to his uncle and felt his cock pushing against his jeans, against my skirt, and that his uncle’s palm had already touched a part of my skin that Marty had never seen. We only have a few minutes, he said, locking his fingers between mine, pressing the paper clip deeper into my palm, and pulling me up from the overturned buckets we’d been sitting on. I’d never realized how strong he was, until he was tugging at me to keep up with his fast pace, pushing me against the side of his aunt’s house and kissing me with pressure.

I think I loved him then, especially his brute strength, but this is the story of many girls who have been raped. Sometimes we become confused about strength and passion and control and force and brutality and protection. Sometimes we crave the painful parts, and I did that evening as he bit and sucked three large bruises on my neck. Days and days afterward, no one’s eyes would miss those bruises. “You’re mine,” he said. “You belong to me.” “Yes, yes, yes,” I said, as I buried my nails into his skull, raised my leg and pressed my thigh into his hip bone, and looked into the eyes of his uncle, Jane, who had come up from the backyard, watching us and running his hand across his crotch. I swelled, “I am yours yours, yours. I belong to no one but you.” Then, my father called for me, Jane hurried away, and Marty, whose face was wet and swollen, sang, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

His uncle is an alcoholic, and has a prominent bald spot in the top of his head with little knots of hair floating on the surface. His hairline is receding, just cruelly enough to make the bald spot noticeable. Or I may be confusing him with a man who would be my boss 10 years later, a man who also had crooked teeth, a drinker’s pouch for a stomach, and a deep tenderness for young girls. What I mostly recall about the uncle is his name, Jane, a woman’s name. I often wondered, when he held me on his bed, pressing his hand in my stomach, if he hated women because his mother gave him not one but two women’s name, Jane Catherine, no way to escape the taunts of children, no nickname, no name to hide behind.

But I was safe, I thought. Boyfriend in juvie. Brother in juvie. Jane lived miles away. Until my parents were called to Jane’s house to bring gallons and gallons and gallons of water, because his mother had missed another couple of months of paying the water bill. It was late at night, so my parents brought me and my sister along. Our family lived in an apartment adjacent to Jane. I went with my mother to Jane’s house and my sister went with my father to our relatives’ house. After we hauled all of the water in, my mother and his mother went over to my relatives, forgetting that I was still in the house. Jane had pulled me into his room again, and I was there with him held and holed up when I was supposed to be next door at my relatives’, where his mother and my mother were, talking in my relatives’ well-lit apartment. His mother hadn’t paid the light bill either, so Jane and I were in the semi-lit apartment, our shadows heavy on the walls. I was supposed to be somewhere with my cousins, gossiping about boys or in the kitchen with my grandmother trying to figure out how to make a pie but I was there with him, my hand squeezing his cock, his hand pressing my clitoris and goddam it, I liked it I was me and not me hovering and grounded shirking and seducing and yes, I knew right from wrong and yes I gasped because I liked the feel of his cock throbbing in my hand and yes I wanted someone to hear us. I wanted him caught. I wanted him in jail. I wanted every man who’d hurt every girl caught. And I liked it. I had been handed over to him. What was I supposed to do? I squeezed and pulled and squeezed and pulled until his mother’s voice rescued me, until his hand went from my pussy right to my mouth, a fist thrust into my mouth, and, “Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!” We scrambled to put ourselves right, to grab the holy book, him leaning against his dresser and me sitting on his bed my legs tightly crossed. And the hate volleyed from his eyes to mine and back again. I can’t remember how this all happened. I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I can’t.

“Bible study,” we said and meant the Koran. His mother, like my parents, is Muslim. I said I was helping him with his lessons. I look right in his mother’s face and lie. And it’s okay, it’s okay. This is every girl’s story, I tell myself, this is every story of every girl whose been raped. We learn to lie and lie, and it’s okay.

Metta Sáma is author of Nocturne Trio (YesYes Books), South of Here (New Issues Press), and the forthcoming chapbook After “Sleeping to Dream” (Nous-zot). Her prose and poetry has been published in bluestem, Drunken Boat, fringe, Pyrta, Rattle Reverie, and Sententia, among others. Her critical work on Terrance Hayes, Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, and Audre Lorde can be found in Muse and Mentor: Essays from Poets to Poets; Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the 20th Century; Femininities and Masculinities in Action; and The Caribbean Woman Writer as Scholar. Sáma is Assistant Professor & Director of Creative Writing at Salem College and Director of Center for Women Writers.

The post On Impact We Lie Die appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Farah Tanis and Aishah Shahidah Simmons

(L-R) Nikki Patin, Christina Jaus, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Farah Tanis, Sherley Accime #CERD
photo: Frances Nielah Bradley

With each of our dead, we mourn the loss of a piece of ourselves and with each of our raped we mourn the loss of a piece of our souls. We can and will name Renisha McBride alongside Michael Brown; Rekia Boyd alongside Trayvon Martin; Jada alongside Abner Louima; Naffisatou Diallo alongside Amadou Diallo; the New Jersey 4 alongside the Jena 6; Mia Henderson and Kandy Hall alongside Jordan Davis and John Crawford III; Aiyanna Stanely-Jones alongside Oscar Grant; and Sakia Gunn alongside Sean Bell. The right to freedom and the right to live and breathe should not, does not, nor will it ever exclude Black women.

We name 94 year old Recy Taylor who, on September 3, 1944, was kidnapped while leaving church and brutally gang raped by six white men in Alabama, propelling Rosa Parks into action, and we name her alongside ourselves—Black women, brazen women who today are still engaged in a centuries old “painful, patient, and silent toil … to gain title to the bodies of their daughters.” -Anna Julia Cooper, 1893.

Anna Julia Cooper
source: http://bit.ly/1AcLOmE

The week of August 9th, 2014, over two hundred years after Anna Julia Cooper’s statement, six Black women, an out-of-the-ordinary delegation from the United States travelled to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland to hold the U.S. responsible for ending racial discrimination on its soil.  The very first of our kind, this herstoric delegation of Black women from America went to face the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). We went to speak of the atrocities and the havoc wrought by racism on the Black bodies of women across sexualities and gender identities. As Black Women’s Blueprint Executive Director and Co-Founder Farah Tanis, Co-Founder Christina Jaus, Critically Acclaimed Poet Nikki Patin, Award Winning Activist Filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Healer Sherley Accime and Visual Artist Frances Nielah Bradley, we were transported and transfixed in moments which could only be articulated in historical terms.

Fannie Lou Hamer
source: http://bit.ly/1lKRovw

Vulnerable, determined and glued to our seats ready to bear our souls as survivors, as human rights defenders, as witnesses and testifiers, we summoned the courage in the presence of the international community to speak the unspeakable—rape in Black communities has become a trivial matter, victims are the brunt of jokes and social media fodder, harm-doers and rapists are excused without question within the context of a racist, sexist, “free-for-all” status quo environment we haven’t seen since slavery reigned in the Antebellum South and rape was legal and profitable. We assert that we are still living in the climate described by Fannie Lou Hamer, when she said a “Black woman’s body is never hers alone.”

We were there to denounce the daily rapes of Black girls and Black women, expose state sponsored violence, denounce the invisibility we feel is almost complete, our relegation to the extreme borders of the margins, and yes we would denounce other crimes—those crimes not just against the majority of Black women in America, but against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, other gender-non conforming people of African descent—“others” routinely unnamed in critical debates on the evils of racism in the U.S.

Trembling with humility and responsibility, filled with reverence as we knew we were and had been for a long time, standing “on other people’s blood”, and standing on very great shoulders. Now more than ever it was time to speak.

Unseen and Unheard

Farah Tanis, Christina Jaus, Frances Bradley, Sherley Accime, Nikki Pattin, #CERD
photo: Aishah Shahidah Simmons

We each spoke in turn and simultaneously, in a chorus of voices, video, art, testimony and statement. We deployed our voices in a collective outcry against the brutality that is sexual violence and asked the U.N. CERD Committee what would be done to end the suffering of Black women, girls and LGBTQ people in the U.S. and for reasons too many of us understand feared the worst— that we would not be heard and the response was indeed silence. Member after member of the U.N. CERD Committee spoke on education, prisons, the shooting of our Black sons and brothers, the very real plight of endangered peoples and LGBTQ people, but we Black women did not make the cut that day, despite all we had spoken and despite all we had shown.

“I keep hearing about the murder of Black children, but what about the rape of Black children, women, men, trans folks? What about a form of violence that can result in the murder of the spirit? What about this insidious form of violence that is so pervasive that practically every woman I know has been touched by it? What about protecting the right to exist freely in one’s body? We revere the dead and condemn the living. Who will stand up for the walking wounded? Who will dare shatter this awful, awful silence?” ~ Nikki Patin

Were we truly better off dead?

Sherley Accime, Farah Tanis, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Nikki Patin #CERD
photo: Christina Jaus

“We know and understand full well that the pain [of rape] is real, and though it is expected to eventually become a distant memory, for many of us it is a pain that resurfaces over and over again.”~ Sherley Accime

“As a Black feminist lesbian who is an incest and rape survivor, I am reminded that the struggle to talk about and address state and personal violence against Black women and LGBTQ people in a local, national and international racial justice framework is never ending and relentless. Any individual, organization, institution, treaty and/or law that ask us to choose our oppression is not interested in our full liberation. The end of racism, while extremely important does not mean that Black women and LGBTQ people will be safe from violence.” ~ Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Were all the Blacks still men?

We are making critical demands to the U.N. Committee members on the issue of personal violence. We are speaking honestly and unapologetically about the epidemic of state-sanctioned violence against Black women, girls and gender non-conforming people in the U.S. It is pervasive, it is destructive and the long-term effects are tremendous.~ Christina Jaus

Nikki Patin, Frances Nielah Bradley, and Sherley Accime

“What I offer is visual representation of my narrative. It was meant to be for me to be here, and you were all meant to witness this”- Frances Naelah Bradley

Though we were standing there, fully flesh and blood, had we really fallen out of sight and out of the minds of these leaders from which we demanded justice?

“It is by telling our own life stories and by writing new narratives toward justice that we practice liberation, heal ourselves and shift the current paradigm—lifting the foot of oppression off of our necks so we can be free. Therefore the Black Women’s Blueprint will continue to make our voices equally central to all processes, all debates and strategies on race, racism and we will position our gendered experiences squarely within the context of what you consider the “broader” racial justice concerns of Black communities—bar none. The rapes and sexual assault of Black women are racial justice issues.” ~ Farah Tanis

All Black Lives Matter

We refused to beg. Not after all we had done. Not after all we had said. It was enough. We were enough, and this is exactly what we told three women from the African continent. We meditated on the words spoken by Anna Julia Cooper in 1892:

Only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

We demanded recognition and ready with strategies, prepared to act in voice and protest, and on August 14, 2014 the last day of our mission to the U.N. it was African women Fatimata-Binta Victoire Dah of Burkina Faso; Afiwa-Kindena Hohoueto of Togo; and Patricia Nozipho January-Bardill of South Africa who named Black women in America. It was African women who acknowledged the centrality of our experiences to the broader racial justice struggle, and it was them who named the rape of Black women in America a human rights violation. We had finally been heard and it was African women who were able to hear us. We had been seen and it was them who saw us first, with all the pieces of our selves and all the pieces of our souls.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Frances Nielah Bradley, Farah Tanis, Nikki Patin, Afiwa-Kindena Hohoueto, Sherley Accime #CERD
photo: Christina Jaus

With the release of the U.N. response acknowledging the plight of Black women and LGBTQ people of African descent in the United States, it has increased our resolve. We must build where racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic systems have worked to divide and conquer. We must move from positions of arrest. We must tell our stories. We must protest in whatever way we deem fit or enough, and we must certainly heal as we seek justice. All of these are acts of revolution.

About Black Women’s Blueprint Truth Commission

Black Women’s Blueprint‘s Truth and Reconciliation Commission On Black Women and Sexual Assault is the first of its kind to focus on Black women in America and their experiences with sexual violence was launched by Black feminists in the U.S. It is a bold, innovative and groundbreaking move by Black women across generation, ethnicity, sexuality and other identity to confront the ever shifting nature of rape culture, and sexual violence against African-American/Black women in the United-States.

Since its launch in 2010, Black Women’s Blueprint’s and members of its Truth Commission have been very involved in human rights advocacy, which places gender, gender identity and sexuality squarely within the context of what are often considered “larger” racial-justice concerns of Black/African American communities in the U.S. Part of our work over the years has been to monitor U.S. compliance with regard to specific human rights treaties and engage with treaty bodies as well as communities through training, development of testimony and since 2013, the development and submission a Shadow Report in response to the U.S. periodic report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.  On June 30, 2014, Black Women’s Blueprint (BWB) submitted their first Shadow Report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Please access the report entitled “Racial Discrimination And Sexual Violence Against Black/African-American Women, Including Those Identifying as LGBTQ and The Impact of Inadequate Racial Justice Initiatives and Violence Prevention Policy Implementation in the United States” co-authored by Farah Tanis, L. Michelle Odom, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons.

__________________________________________________________

Farah Tanis & Aishah Shahidah Simmons #CERD
photo: Christina Jaus

Farah Tanis is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Black Feminist Organization Black Women’s Blueprint (BWB) and the Museum of Women’s Resistance (MoWRe). Currently housed at Black Women’s Blueprint’s HerStory Archives, MoWRe is internationally recognized as a Site of Conscience.  Farah launched and Chairs the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the U.S. ever to focus on Black women and their historical and contemporary experiences with sexual assault. Farah also created Mother Tongue Monologues, a vehicle for communicating Black feminist praxis at the grassroots and for addressing Black sexual politics in African American and other communities of the Black Diaspora. You can follow Black Women’s Blueprint and Farah on twitter at @BlackWomensBP and  @FarahTanis1. For more information, please visit: www.mothertonguemonologues.org/aboutfarahtanis.htm

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is the Creator of the internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length film NO! The Rape Documentary and an Associate Editor of The Feminist Wire. She is a member of BWB’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Aishah is also an adjunct professor in Women’s and LGBT Studies Program at Temple University and she was an O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor at Scripps College during part of their 2014 Spring Semester. She screens her work and lectures extensively across North America and internationally about ending all forms of sexual violence; queer identity from an AfroLez®femcentric perspective; the grassroots process of making social change documentaries; and non-Christocentric spirituality. You can follow Aishah on twitter at @AfroLez. For more information, please visit: http://NOtheRapeDocumentary.org

The post Better Off Dead: Black Women Speak to the United Nations CERD Committee appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Princess Harmony-Jazmyne Rodriguez 

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

- Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, (1978)” in Sister Outsider, 2007

Dear Survivors of Violence, Friends and Allies of Survivors, Anti-Violence Activists, and Temple University,

Survivors of sexual and gender violence, in general, are not cut from the same cloth, especially survivors of sexual and gender violence on college campuses. Some of us are trans, some of us are male, some of us are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, some of us are people of color, some of us were raped while intoxicated, and some of us have mental illnesses even before the traumatic experience. There are still many whose voices have yet to be heard—some who because of societal expectations cannot speak out and some whose voices are suppressed under the weight of the image of what a survivor is supposed to be or look like.

I am Princess, and I have a silence of my own that must be broken. In fact, I will do much more than break my silence—I will smash it and never be silent again. Audre Lorde (2007 [1978]: 41) argues that “your silence will not protect you.” She was right, very much so. I write this today as a survivor of rape, stalking, and anti-trans hate violence. I have survived much more than that, but what makes these events stand out is that they all occurred on a college campus, at my dream school: Temple University. I thought my initial silence—fear masked as strength—would protect me from getting hurt more. I thought silence would protect me from the veil of pain I’d lived behind since the incident. I was wrong. There is nothing that I’ve ever been more wrong about. It has hurt me far more to stay silent and to speak my pain silently through rage and sadness toward my sister and best friend. I’ve made a better choice, I have chosen to shout my pain at the world—not in a fury, but in organized efforts to tell my story and hopefully encourage other survivors to demand the justice owed to them.

I’ve told my story to everyone I could find at Temple University who would listen, and whom I thought could bring me justice. From security officers to administrators, my story was met with feigned concern and eyes that betrayed their dishonesty.  I was raped on my very first weekend at Temple University during “Welcome Week.” It was also during those weeks in August that a man started stalking me.  He would never leave me alone, until I learned to hide in my room out of fear that he’d find me. It was the only place he couldn’t get me. The last act of violence that sealed my fear and silence into place was another man threatening to “crack my f*ggot skull.”

Temple University defended these men overtly and covertly. The rape was presented and put on display as something that I deserved because I’d been drinking. They pulled the, “I don’t mean to blame the victim, but…” card in articles written by the school paper. The entire time Temple University swore it was helping those of us who had been assaulted. I can’t speak for any of the others who were assaulted, but Temple did not help me.

My stalker was given free reign to stalk me because Campus Safety Services (CSS) didn’t do anything to ensure my safety and well being, and neither did Temple University’s Wellness Resource Center (WRC). CSS told me to investigate my own stalker. He would come up and harass me, and my sister, and there was nothing that could be done. The WRC refused to help me with the rape, their official reason being that it was “out of their jurisdiction.” Unofficially, they were not equipped to deal with trans survivors. Helping me would have been “the same as helping a male and they could not do that,” as I was told by one Temple University administrator.

These betrayals—although shattering my faith in the institution I wanted to take pride in—could have been survivable had it not been for the total isolation. I stayed silent because I was discouraged to speak.  Administrators and student employees told me that talking about my rape—even to say that I had been raped—was “negative.” I was asked, unofficially, not to make Temple University look bad. Officially I was told that if I continue to speak the truth about what happened, I was placing the future of my student life in jeopardy.  However, all I can think to say about this statement is that Temple makes itself look bad. Everything about my case is and looks bad.

Temple failed to investigate any of my experiences with violence. The very first incident could have been successfully dealt with, if only an attempt was made. Resident Assistants, security officers, Temple University Police Department officers, and paramedics had all been there—they all flooded the lobby of Temple Towers, my dorm at the time. They were all asking me questions and preparing to send me to the hospital because I was drunk. At the time of the questioning, I began to awaken from a short blackout. My assaulter was visibly panicked, but they let him walk away. Despite the ample physical evidence of a rape that he left on me, they didn’t ask me anything about him.

The failure of the authorities to take any physical evidence meant I would have an uphill battle, if I pressed charges. Shortly after the incident, I received an email notification stating that I violated the student code of conduct for drinking.  At the end of the conduct hearing, the Coordinator for Student Conduct forced me to talk about what happened to me. I didn’t receive any offers of help from anyone until after I had been hospitalized—a hospitalization that happened after I’d seen my rape paraded all over the newspapers on multiple occasions.  However, these delayed offers were short lived the moment I mentioned that I’m a trans woman.

When I decided to press charges, phone calls had been promised but none were made. That door was shut in my face and I could never open it again. I live knowing that my rapist is out there and I’ll never get justice. Worse, I live knowing that he will rape again and again because nobody will stop him—and they never stop at one.

Eventually, I went back to the Coordinator for Student Conduct. From the very start her face revealed that she could not care less. When I asked what happened with the case against my rapist, I was met with: “I don’t know, what do I care?” I will never forget the coldness in her eyes and outright contempt she showed for me when she forced me to report and spat out those words.

“I don’t know, what do I care?” is essentially Temple University’s motto when it comes to student-on-student violence. Temple University, nestled in North Philadelphia, is an area of the city that has a reputation for violent crime. Some even believe that students are targeted purposely by members of the surrounding community. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant because debating that narrative is used as a means to hide student-on-student violence. The people of North Philadelphia are scapegoated as the perpetrators of crime on campus.

However, the reality is that Temple is not any different from any other college campus in the U.S.—students rape, stalk, and attack other students. Student crimes are swept under the rug. Or, more appropriately for Temple University, swept under posters and colorful signs. Temple University prides itself on its participation in V-Day, the Clothesline Project, National Coming Out Week, and it even goes so far to title itself as the “Diversity University.” Violence against women and the LGBT community is hidden underneath all of these, perhaps purposely.

You can champion every single cause on the planet, but if you simultaneously betray all of them, you will be exposed. I will never stop shouting from the rooftops, even if I have to shout into the wind. I will never stop shouting for those survivors who aren’t convenient for their schools to deal with, or those survivors who aren’t the “conventional” image of the survivor (or, rather, “victim” since that is what they desire us to be forever). There is no undoing the damage this experience has caused me. My college dream turned into a nightmare. However, what I can and will do from this point forward is help others to find their voices and tell their stories.  Ultimately, I want to help ensure this will never happen to another person.

As I write this open letter, I await the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to make a decision to investigate my Title IX complaint. I have every hope they will. I will use every legal means at my disposal to fight for justice for myself and to reform Temple University and all other schools’ process for handling sexual violence against LGBTQ-identified people. Anti-violence work by University organizations requires more than slogans, posters, hashtags, and public relations campaigns. It requires mentioning, acknowledging, and dealing with issues or words that aren’t convenient for a PR campaign. It requires recognizing and dealing with a variety of violences. If Temple is still devoted to the mission set forth by its founder, Russell Conwell, then it should be brave and engage directly with the issue of student-on-student violence.

For the survivor who has not come out at Temple University, or anywhere else, know that you are not alone. There are thousands and tens of thousands of survivors here supporting you. I understand why you may not want to speak about what happened to you, and I support you if you choose not to.  If you want to, but are afraid, do it. Shout and make them hear you.  As Audre Lorde (1997 [1980]: 13) encourages us to consider,

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

I don’t know what happens from here, or what the future holds. All I know is that I will continue to fight against violence and tell my story until my very last breath. It may be a fool’s dream, but I want to see the day when universities are the institutions of higher learning and eternal culture that they were meant to be—free of violence and freely flowing with knowledge.

Perseverantia Vincit,

Princess Harmony R.

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Princess Harmony is a highly opinionated Afrolatin trans woman who is a survivor of sexual violence, drug addiction, and mental illness. She holds an Associates Degree in the Social Sciences and is currently pursuing Bachelors Degrees in History and Social Work at Temple University. Her writings include several published articles on HIV awareness, issues facing trans women, and campus sexual and gender-based violence.

The post Perseverance Conquers: An Open Letter appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

The reality is that the women and girls are the fabric of the community and hold all together. The women usually think and work for the whole, and daily confront death-dealing forces, internal and external, on behalf of the flourishing of the collective. As we know this radical politic isn’t televised or acknowledged, and most often erased, muted, or invisibilized. There is so much to unearth here when we centralize these bodies and voices. — Karlene Griffiths

Jameila White

Several weeks ago while in Ferguson, MO with Black Life Matters Ride, I had the honor of meeting Jameila White. After a day of protesting, some of us retreated to a community barbeque while others traveled to St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch’s neighborhood to continue political demonstrations. Concerned about white fear, hostility and vigilantism, I chose being in community with the folk of Ferguson. It was an amazing experience. The sun was hot. Brown skin glistened. Food and beverages overflowed. The music was right. And the community was welcoming.

But one thing remained on everyones mind: justice for Michael Brown. And more, a history of socio-political disenfranchisement that created the context for Brown to be murdered in the first place. I spoke with a range of community workers that day. But none captured my attention quite like White. A petite sista with rich deep chocolate hues, the embodiment of Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous words, the fighting spirit of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur, and the big piercing voice of Ella Baker.

While standing around talking in the 90 degree plus heat, White waxed and waned poetically and politically about the history and infrastructure of Ferguson; police corruption, negligence, violence and exploitation; civil disobedience; the grandstanding of certain black celebrity leaders; the unexpected love and support they received from entertainers like J Cole and Benzino; and the too often silenced experiences of the black women in the community—the mothers, daughters, and sisters of the slain and abused. And, the survivors of systemic and interpersonal violence themselves.

White fearlessly recalled several stories about black women and girls disproportionately being arrested for petty crimes and thrown in prison when they could not afford to pay city fines and court fees. She had an unassuming political savvy about her. She spoke of incarceration rates and how the unfair jailing of black folk not only fueled the local economy, but heightened black women and girls’ vulnerability to physical and sexual exploitation. She lamented that black women and girls were abused while incarcerated. And that these abuses and incarcerations impacted families and entire communities.

Everybody is impacted. Not just us. This is bigger than Ferguson. But no one will listen to me. The big names come and grandstand. But they don’t do anything but take pictures and leave. We need help. The police are corrupt. They don’t want us to protest. When we try to gather, they make us walk in a circle! When we get arrested, we get raped! And then we can’t vote or work. We can’t take care of our families. We’re tired. And we know when y’all leave they gone beat our asses. But we’re still gonna fight. But who will listen to me? Nobody is listening to what I have to say. I have something to say. — Jameila White

I was listening. White’s passion was captivating and her voice boomed. The narrative she told about exploited black flesh both sustaining and being marginalized in Ferguson is a common one. It’s the American story. It’s the story of black susceptibility to a range of social risk factors that in turn lead to desperate methods of survival that are then criminalized. This is the story of breathing while black. And it impacts generations. And not just black men and boys. It overwhelmingly affects black women and girls too.

White soothing the eyes of a man suffering from mace burns.

But the underlying message in White’s narrative is also true: many simply will not hear what she has to say. Unfortunately, there is a long and documented history of black women fighting on behalf of and simultaneously being ignored within black social movement. White stands among a long line of storytellers. Like Mary Helen Washington, Paula Giddings, Deborah Gray White, and Darlene Clark Hine, White makes visible the deeds, lives, sufferings and thrivings of black women, too often made absent.

Their concerns and historical contributions are often sidestepped in historical and communal narratives that gain their power and precedence through the production, centralization and circulation of black boogeyman counter-narratives on the black male savior figure. But truth is, black activism and thriving has always constituted a multitude of hands, from young to old, and this has never looked like black patriarchal heroicism in reality. And while I get the desire to re-appropriate the patriarchal narrative to include black masculine super powers, if it wasn’t for the women… 

As White reminds us, we don’t need black super heroes. Social movement requires everyday folk willing to put in real work. And black women have always partnered in this work — on the frontlines. They’ve been the leaders of civil disobedience, the organizers, the liberators, the cooks, the politicians, the childcare, the healthcare providers, the spiritual leaders, the laundresses, the teachers, the banks, and the social services—on and off the battlefield. Their story is the American story. And we’d all do well to not only listen, but take copious notes.

White after being maced by the police.

As we were parting ways I learned something else about White. She’s the woman I read about prior to traveling to Ferguson. She’s the “Good Samaritan” who “walked a mile to hand out water and snacks to protesters…and wound up being maced.” I had no idea. She’s also a mother. And a revolutionary. And she’s still marching, protesting, strategizing, bringing supplies, and speaking truth to power. You can follow her on twitter  — or in the streets of Ferguson.

The post #FergusonFridays: If it wasn’t for the women…[i] appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Shama Nathan

Recently, I came across an old post that had quickly surfaced on Tumblr. The post was discussing the problem with teaching girls “how to avoid rape.” I decided to share this post with a male friend of mine, and his was response was, “If girls continue to dress a certain way, how can you blame a guy who can’t control himself?”

Prior to this encounter, social issues did not have great importance to me. However, as I grow up, the harsh realities of life slowly seem to unfold. As a young girl, my parents sheltered me from the violence of rape culture. For the first time in my life, the veil was lifted and I saw the world for all its ugliness. Since this realization, I am compelled to analyze the issue of rape culture.

Being harassed or assaulted is something that most women have or will experience in their lifetime. Sexual violence too often is said to be the “realities of life” and therefore “normal.” This belief that gender based violence is normal contributes to society’s desensitization to violence and rape culture as an urgent social issue. For instance, sociologist Heather Hlavka at Marquette University conducted an interview with a hundred girls age three to seventeen. Hlavka discovered that these girls believed their everyday experiences with harassment were part of normal life.

It is heartbreaking for me to know that my generation believes that we simply can’t help sexual violence and therefore it is O.K. Why is it acceptable that “men are supposed to be aggressors” and “women are expected to tolerate these sexual advances” because, after all, “boys will be boys?”  Too many times, I have heard that it is simply our biological nature to act on impulse. Regardless if the latter is true, it does not justify nor excuse disrespectful, violent behavior.

I recall an incident last year, when a man approached me outside the mall. He inched closer and his voice crawled under my skin with each word he spoke. His hot, coated breath stifled the atmosphere. I bit my bottom lip and stared into the red circles illuminated beneath his eyelids. I ignored him for a few seconds and then I snapped around. He laughed a cynical snort. “Give me a little touch aye girl?” He stroked his hand against mine and walked away. I stared at him, dumbfounded that a man of his age would approach a girl my age.

In that singular movement, I looked at my hand as if it were covered in filth. I wiped it furiously against my skirt and ran towards the bus station to get home. I did not know then that this would not be the last time I would be harassed or shouted at with sexual requests. I remember telling my parents and, perhaps with good intentions, their response was, “How you carry yourself depends on how men will respond to you.” Such advice has never been more deceiving and dangerous. Their response was unsettling to me.   I made it a habit to change out of my navy knee-length uniform after school. I was under the impression that somehow, if I dressed differently, men would stop harassing me. But they did not.

By Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
http://www.visualtherapyonline.com/?p=28638

My generation, and society as a whole, needs to know that a predator can stop themselves from harming his victim. Telling women to be mindful of what they wear and how they carry themselves reinforce sexism, misogyny, and bigotry; it contributes to a false sense of security and victim blaming. When a woman is assaulted, we hear absurd responses such as, “Well, what was she wearing on the night of the attack?” and “Where was she?” Part of the problem of these questions is that they suggest that we do not recognize gender based violence as something real and tangible.

We cannot simply tell young women to avoid the so-called dangerous places. Such a warning creates the idea that gender and sexual violence only happens in those places and therefore if you do not go there, then these warnings do not apply.

It is not enough to tell women to carry and dress themselves “properly.” What is proper, and whose terms define it as such? For some, it seems perfectly justifiable to tell women to stop dressing provocatively. Problem solved—not.  This is victim blaming.

Again, I came across an article that discusses the role of the media and its influence on the perception of women. Reading this article made me draw connections between rape culture and the media’s influence on youth. Years ago, it was uncommon to see sexually explicit ads, or video games that depicted violence. While some did exist, the general public considered them to be disrespectful or perverse. As society continues to evolve, we become more desensitized to gender and sexual violence.

I recall an incident where a mixed gender group of youths were huddled around a table staring intently at a computer screen, I decided to peep over their shoulder. It was a music video with two women groomed for the male gaze. Some of the lyrics explicitly explained the man’s plans for the evening. I argued that the video encouraged male dominant sexual attitudes against women, which contributes to the normalization of rape and sexual harassment. The video suggested that women should tolerate any advances men make toward them. I argued that the media promotes the over-sexualization of women and this informs how our generation interacts with each other. As expected, the repetitive assertion was made that when women dress “provocatively,” it only provokes the predator’s interest. This made me realize that part of the problem lies in cringe-worthy comments such as these.

In today’s world, it is common to hear rape jokes by men and women. While the media does influence the minds of youth, it is ultimately us who allow it to do so. We are becoming immune to injustices just because society is saying it is trivial. This is not OK. We need to continue to change the way we view socially constructed ideas of gender. Men are not the aggressors and women are not weak. When we start questioning the roles society tells us to play, it is only then that rape culture will stop.

The purpose of this the article is not to blame men. I say this because too often I feel the need to apologize for fear of sounding too prejudice against men. I hope one day I can raise awareness to social issues without being labeled as a “ranting feminist,” which is simply a deflection tactic to end the conservation. For now, I want to encourage and support young girls in recognizing different realities of gender and sexual violence. I want people to have productive conversations that build strategies to fight against rape culture. I want young women and girls to be confident, fearless, and to respect themselves. I want young women and girls to define themselves not by what they wear, but by their character and the unique individual they are striving to become.

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Shama Nathan is a seventeen year-old freelance writer. With a voice for feminist issues, she’s working on her first non-fiction novel The Dark Side of Our World.

The post A Call to Young Women appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Nashwa Khan

I used to love The Mindy Project. I would buy a pint of ice cream, drop all my work on Tuesday nights, and cancel plans with other people. It would be Mindy and me in my dorm room. I would watch repeat episodes, loving an unapologetic South Asian woman on screen. And I saw myself in parts of Mindy. But living in a mainstream feminist echo chamber, we become accustomed to never questioning those we idolize.

Before realizing the show’s problems with sexual consent, I had noticed the anti-blackness, which caused me to disengage from my Tuesday night ritual. Having avoided every episode of the third season, I thought I would give Mindy another chance. Clicking through channels recently, I came across an episode that ended in disappointment, regret, and frustration.

The episode, entitled “I Slipped,” was disgusting and triggering, to say the least. Years have gone by without Kaling’s body of work being critically examined regarding the issue of sexual consent. Her fan base is largely young and feminist, and thus reoccurring flaws in The Mindy Project’s handling of consent is disturbing.

This particular episode centered around a scene early in the episode, as Danny and Mindy are having vaginal intercourse. The audience hears the dialogue during the scene and it sounds pleasurable and consensual — up until you hear Mindy exclaim, “Wait, wait! Danny, that doesn’t go there!” And here, a red flag should go up. And this red flag should be cemented upon hearing Danny’s character reply, “I slipped” instead of offering an apology.

Now, as an audience member one can deduce that Danny had anally penetrated Mindy without her consent. This is troubling because the Mindy we have grown to love is depicted as a strong female character. How the situation is handled throughout the episode echoes normalized rape apologist behavior. With a young female audience admiring The Mindy Project, this discourse is a slippery slope, normalizing nonconsensual acts in a sitcom. It signals that it’s okay to accept this behavior and to perpetuate it in real life.

Every sexual act requires consent. The notion that, in relationships, consent is automatic is not only wrong, but also incredibly dangerous and disingenuous.

The episode gets more cringe-worthy as Mindy and Danny discuss the incident the next morning. Danny asserts it was accidental, saying “You weren’t where I was. You didn’t see how it all went down.” This discourse of non-apologetic assertion as an accident is eerily reminiscent of manipulative and abusive behavior by partners.

As Mindy seeks advice from her coworker Peter, viewed as a “dudebro,” he insists to Dr. Lahiri that there is no way the nonconsensual act was an accident. Instead of watching Mindy have an epiphany or condemn the act, we see her question her own sexual performance and experience. This is largely seen in broader society when victims interrogate themselves and their own choices because of rape culture.

Mindy sits down with Peter to hear sex tips she might use to please Danny, again another moment where a great conversation about consent in relationships is overlooked in favor of a woman learning to appease the man who violated her.

Later in the episode, we witness more rape apologist sentiments as Danny justifies the act again by saying, “I thought you had done it before.” This is when the grey area of consent becomes black and white. The belief that women who are or have been sexually active are deserving victims of sexual assault is too real to make a joke of. This is unnerving.

Survivors often have their sexual histories used as justification for their assaults. We witness it in cases repeatedly, and rape apologists use it to justify violent acts. Danny also, again without any remorse, mentions that he “got carried away” and asserts that in the past Mindy has bragged about her sexual history. This is also a mainstay in rape culture, demonizing women specifically for sexual histories and “slut shaming” both implicitly and explicitly. The nonchalant rape apologist lines in the episode were not critically unpacked in any way.

Mindy, still in the mindset of pleasuring Danny, recruits another colleague, Morgan, to prescribe her sedatives. She places the sedatives in a glass of scotch; this part is very real for survivors who have been drugged. This scene is also too casually done: Mindy takes the sedatives as a way to desensitize herself to an act she is uncomfortable with, all in the name of ‘keeping her man.’

The sedatives create a roofie effect, which we witness in Mindy’s loss of control. Mindy must go to the hospital and there, Danny realizes what his sexual act has done to his girlfriend. Again a non-apology is issued, as Danny continues to self-assuredly justify the act saying, “It didn’t mean anything. I just tried something.” This discourse around nonconsensual acts is dangerous, and similar to the “boys will be boys” rhetoric. It erases responsibility and accountability.

Mindy’s character trivializes the experience of being drugged in this scene as well saying, it “wasn’t so bad.” For those who have survived being drugged and sexually assaulted, this is not a punchline. Especially when alcohol remains the most commonly used in drug facilitated sexual assaults. This episode ends with what I imagine to be an attempt at discussing the importance of consent in their future relationship, but ends with Danny saying “I should’ve started kissing you, asking sucks!” After their lesson at the hospital, after all the lost potential to have a meaningful conversation about consent, Mindy responds with “Damn it, you’re right!”

Perpetuated over the last two seasons of The Mindy Project are two major myths around sexual consent. First, we see Mindy as a racialized woman presumed to be sexually experienced and thereby deserving of the nonconsensual act. And second, we also witness men being placed into a category of “always wanting it” and not as possible victims of sexual assault themselves, as in the episodes where Morgan is cuffed non-consensually to a bed and Dr. Leotard is raped.

While Kaling is not the sole writer of the show, and a male writer on her staff allegedly wrote the episode about anal penetration, the series is called The Mindy Project. Having one’s name on a project warrants accountability. These episodes are small but significant instances upholding the normalization of sexual assault. Sexual acts, and intimate acts overall, need consent at every step.

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Nashwa Khan identifies as South Asian/African Diaspora living and learning in Hamilton, Ontario. She calls Florida home. Over her undergraduate career in Hamilton, she served on a number of councils including the City’s Status of Women Committee, as Space Allocation Chair of McMaster’s Women and Gender Equity Network, and currently chairs the city’s Youth Advisory Council. Her work has been published in a variety of places including ThoughtCatalog, Guerilla Feminism, and the HuffingtonPostBlog. She is an avid storyteller and lover of narrative medicine. Feel free to tweet her @nashwakay. Nashwa has attended a number of workshops around public health, feminism and creating queer friendly spaces. Most recently she attended the Columbia Narrative Medicine Workshops.

The post Op-Ed: What’s Happening on the Mindy Project is Not Okay appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Katie Wayhart

SILENT NO MORE

Spent more time with mommy than the other girls at school.

Tall, blonde, “mature for her age” little girl.

Older cousin says, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

A seemingly innocent “game” turns into something more.

Years go by.  Are her memories real?  They’re only nightmares.

SILENT

Hot summer day at the pool with your best friend.

Dog can’t stand the heat so he turns on the little girl.

Four hours of reconstructive surgery,

300 stitches,

Twenty percent of each lip gone.

SILENT

Best friend lost, dog lost, girl lost, girl’s family lost.

She hides behind a hospital mask.

Can’t bear to look at her mutilated reflection.

Her once symmetrical face, no longer symmetrical.

She must not draw attention to her mouth…Don’t want to offend anyone.

SILENT

Lexapro and Vyvanse tell most people they have a problem.

They tell her she is the problem.

SILENT

She can’t relate to boys or have real conversations with them.

So she must communicate in the only way she knows how:

Sex, lots of sex… all kinds of sex, all sorts of partners.

One day she gets sick—after three false negatives, she gets a positive.

SILENT

Quits exercising, starts smoking. Gives up running, gains 40 pounds.

She thought she was better. Why isn’t she better?

After all that therapy.

SILENT

She smiles, even though inside, sometimes, she wants to die.

Dyes hair dark, can’t stop obsessing over the fat on her thighs.

Tries to embrace her curves. Tells herself guys like girls with a fat ass, too.

SILENT

Police harass her friend.  She stands up. They make an example out of her.

SILENT

Tells mom about flashbacks of cousin.  Mom tells Dad.

Mom tells girl Dad says not to say anything.  

Don’t want to stir up the family.

SILENT

Gets a little drunk at a bar.  A bouncer takes advantage of her in a back room closet.

This time she doesn’t even bother telling anyone.

SILENT

Meets boy.  She calls it love, even though she knows deep down she’s just lonely.

SILENT

Turns out boy is in a serious relationship with alcohol.  She is the third wheel.

Calls her selfish bitch.  Miserable cunt.  Rapes her.

 SILENT.

How long will I remain silent?

What will it take to speak out?

I may have been silent and silenced, but NO MORE.

My voice has the power to change, the power to put a stop to the silence. NO MORE.

Silence is golden. NO MORE.
You will hear my voice. I apologize NO MORE.

Won’t apologize, not even for the occasional high-pitched stammer that you might recognize as the voice of the little girl that still traps herself inside of me. NO MORE.

Tells me she finds comfort resting in the resilience of my soul. I tell her, baby, you’ll be okay it’s time to part ways—

Dependent on me NO MORE.

I will never be voiceless again.

SILENT NO MORE.

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Katie Wayhart is a feminist, activist, friend, sister, daughter, survivor, and recent college graduate. Her writing encourages the empowerment of feminist and differently abled bodies with a focus on healing and the power of community.

The post Silent No More appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Jennifer Zobair

Whenever the epidemic of rape in Egypt makes the news, I am destined to think of Joyce Carol Oates.

Last summer, the author took to twitter to question whether Islam was responsible for the widespread incidence of sexual assault in Egypt, an argument people continue to make today. As a Muslim woman, I desperately wanted to respond to Ms. Oates’ tweets. I held my cursor over the “reply” button countless times. But I’ve been silent about the things I would have said, about why I follow Dennis Rodman on twitter, and why Pearl Jam is my favorite band, and how my heart shattered for women in Syria who felt like they had to be silent, too.

I have been silent.

I have, of course, told a few close family and friends. When one of them asked why I, a writer and feminist, had never written about the things I have been silent about, I said because if I talk about the ways I’m affected— how stairwells and wooded areas and workers in my house scare me—people will say I am so sorry, and maybe a lot of people will say it, and then I’ll be the thing that happened to me instead of being me.

But I’ve been haunted by Joyce Carol Oates’ tweets about rape in Egypt, even though she eventually backtracked, because they were lazy and bigoted, but mostly because they reflected such a narrow reading of the facts. There are other facts, of course, things I would have said if I had not been silent. For example:

No Muslim teacher ever put his hand on my thigh in the eleventh grade after leading me, distraught, to his office when I learned that a friend committed suicide.

No Muslim police officer ever showed up at my law school apartment after I reported harassing phone calls and told me that his day got a lot better when he saw me, and then made himself comfortable on my couch, looked me up and down, and asked if I lived alone.

No Muslim law partner ever gave me a bad review when I rejected his sexual advances.

And no blond-haired Muslim poet ever gave me a roofie on a date and took me to his home and raped me.

No Muslim man stuffed my nylons in my pocket and let me take a cab home alone in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the night, high on a drug I didn’t know I’d taken, only to wake up the next morning with memories that surfaced in jagged pieces after I discovered that I couldn’t sit without wincing and that there was blood.

My rape and the culture in which it occurred were very non-Muslim affairs.

My survival, however, is not. It is a half-breed: It is part Catholic, like I was at the time of the rape, and like the church I walked into afterwards to say I was sorry. I’d sat for twenty-four hours with the kind of coming-out-of-your-skin sensation that will burn you up or out, or both. I thought if I owned it, I could get rid of it. I have no idea what the priest talked about at that morning’s service. I was too busy dumping my shame in the aisles and on the pews and all over the vinyl-covered kneelers. I tried to leave the shame there, but it followed me home to my apartment where I holed up long enough to risk flunking out of law school.

I was saved by a bad boy NBA player and a 90s grunge band.

Because I’d been a Bulls fan, I owned Dennis Rodman’s autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. I didn’t read it until I found myself locked in my apartment, unable to focus on my schoolwork. I opened the book and fixated on the quote from Pearl Jam’s “Alive” in the front matter. Eventually, I turned the page and read about how Rodman once sat in a truck with a gun and thought about killing himself, and about how he decided to survive.

I played Pearl Jam’s “Alive” over and over until I decided to survive, too.

I returned to my Jesuit law school, stoically told my professors the reason for my absence, and made up my work. I graduated. I started my job at a New York City law firm. I functioned at a high level. I figured no one outside of my closest circle ever needed to know.

I got married and converted to Islam, which means that the past sixteen years of my survival have taken place within the Muslim community. Conservative Muslims believe they are protecting and respecting women with strict rules about women’s bodies. But the logical conclusion too often is that bad things happen when women step outside of this paradigm. I have sat silently while Muslims said these things to me.

This is what happens to bad girls.

I didn’t tell non-Muslims about being raped because I feared being pitied. I didn’t tell Muslims because I feared being condemned. I was on a date, and that means some Muslims will be sure the religion of my rape—something other than Islam—was to blame, and that if I’d been a “good Muslim girl” none of this would have happened.

But just as Joyce Carol Oates’ original tweets failed to account for the one in four American women who are sexually assaulted, most of whose attackers are presumably not Muslim,  too many Muslims fail to consider the large number of Muslim women—many practicing, many covered—who are raped as well, often by Muslim men.

This is the sad, damaging chorus of the point being missed.

There is no religion that protects us from rape. There is no secularism that protects us from rape. There are no clothes that prevent it. There is no level of sobriety that keeps us safe.

Recently, I read about Syrian rape victims who weren’t getting help because they, as Muslim women in a conservative society, would not admit to relief workers that they were raped. Their reluctance does not surprise me. Ms. Oates was wrong to blame Islam itself for rape—even though sexual violence is a problem in Muslim societies just as it is in other societies—but Muslims and other conservative religious communities need to own the ways they often shame survivors into silence.

And I need to own this: If a woman like me living in a fairly liberal society cannot speak about what happened to her, how can we expect women in Syria to speak about what happened to them?

Years after my rape, I sat alone, staring at the phone. Finally, I dialed information and asked for the rape crisis number. The male telephone operator paused before connecting me and gently said, “You take good care, okay?”

I hung up and burst into tears at the compassion of a stranger who didn’t need to know anything else about me—not what I’d been wearing, or whether I was on a date, or what religion I was—but who seemed to understand that something catastrophic had happened and it required care instead of shame.

It has taken me nearly two decades to say it publicly. I was raped. It’s not my fault. It’s not Islam’s fault. It’s not western dating’s fault. It’s not even a date rape drug’s fault. It is the fault of the man who raped me. And dear women in Syria, you who are my sisters not because you are Muslim but because you are human beings, it is not your fault either.

Religion isn’t to blame for rape, and it’s not a panacea for it either. The practice of religion does, of course, encompass cultural meanings, including misogyny, which cuts across many faiths. Sexist and opportunistic interpretations of religious texts and tenets are one part of the larger social context for sexual violence. But we must never forget this: Ultimately, rapists are to blame for rape. Until we get that right, there will be enormous pressure for women to stay silent. And it’s in the quiet, dark spaces that shame takes root.

This is my rape, without creed or sect, praying for more light.

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Jennifer Zobair is an attorney and the author of the debut novel, Painted Hands (St.Martin’s Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay (forthcoming from White Cloud Press, 2015). Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, altmuslimah, Feminism and Religion, and elsewhere. Follow Jennifer on twitter at @jazobair or connect through her website at www.jenniferzobair.com.

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