In a sea of colorful placards, the blanket-stitched banners of Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women seem comforting. It personally reminds me of what Alexandra Kollontai calls “our grandmother’s time”–what family looked like before capitalism: “The woman did everything that … Continue reading “Defend Peasant Women: Stitching to Resist”
With the violence of the patriarchy becoming more prominent and exacerbating worsening socioeconomic conditions around COVID-19, circumventions and confrontations have been necessary as strategies for survival. Art, with its tradition of disestablishing flawed systems and infrastructure as well as exposing … Continue reading “Music as Counterviolence in the Time of Duterte and COVID-19”
Before community lockdowns were enforced in the Philippines in March 2020, Gantala Press, a feminist small press and literary collective, had plans to participate in an exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Library that was to publicly launch … Continue reading “Sewing Dissent: Making Cloth Books During COVID-19”
The urban poor women’s gardens at Pandi and San Roque and the three-decade land struggle of the farmers at Lupang Ramos transcend “arts and crafts.” Their organized resistance, in the form of gardening, belongs to a long-running struggle that defies … Continue reading “Urban and Rural Women at the Forefront of Reclaiming Their Land”
Women account for 39 percent of employment worldwide but constitute 54 percent of job losses during the pandemic (as McKinsey and Company reports). In the US, this phenomenon has been termed she-cession. The same thing is arguably happening in the … Continue reading “The Pandemic and the (Non)Working Filipina”
The day before Mother’s Day, the Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women launched the #DefendPeasantWomen campaign, responding to intensifying state-inflicted violence against peasant women in the Philippines. The campaign highlights rampant human rights violations suffered by peasant women community organizers … Continue reading “On Stitching Land and Peasant Women: An Interview with Yllang Montenegro”
Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: The Breathing Machine”
Planetary transformations are rendering that which we call the human to be in a state of crisis. Life has been decelerated in many processes of production while accelerated at the same time in the exchange of information and in digital … Continue reading “Introduction: Control Societies @ 30”
The “black mirror” of the title is the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone. –Charlie Brooker At first, these initial days of … Continue reading “The Future of Two Presents”
How useless to contemplate Gilles Deleuze in plague times. Or so goes a common anti-intellectual invective. Clearly we need philosophy now more than ever. But what does Deleuze mean today? How to describe the ambient social configuration for which “Deleuze” … Continue reading “Everything Flows”
Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the term new normal circulates ad nauseum throughout news outlets and social networks. This new normal is largely defined by a naturalization of precarity for some and the dramatic elevation of profit … Continue reading “Resilient Natures”
