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 February 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea set the stage for the historic inter-Korea and North Korea-US summits, which occurred in quick succession in the following months. The North and South Korean leaders, Chairman Kim Jong Un and … Continue reading “Women as “Dupes,” “Stooges,” and “Armies of Beauties””
The archives of Howard University’s student newspaper The Hilltop might seem an unlikely place to find evidence of a revolutionary Iranian student movement in the U.S. Yet the rowdy bunch of Iranian foreign students enrolled in the 1960s and … Continue reading “New Directions in American Studies”
Arab Talk recently posted an archived interview with Social Text Collective Member and Co-Editor Neferti X. M. Tadiar about her trip to Palestine in 2012, sponsored by the USACBI. You can also read Tadiar’s article “Why the Question of Palestine … Continue reading “Arab Talk Interview: Neferti Tadiar on Palestine”
The DSM5 is finally finished.[i] As with all momentous occasions, most people are disappointed. Feminist critics cast the DSM in the role of your worst ex-boyfriend, the one who won’t stop following you around and whispering mean things in your … Continue reading “Label C/Rip”
Overmedicalization, as every feminist, queer, and disability scholar knows, is a cornerstone of oppression. Yet traditional critiques of medicalization also have oppressive effects. For one thing, they typically fail to challenge stigma against sick people, preferring instead to simply … Continue reading “Happy Asexual Meets DSM”
Work Reviewed: Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xii + 168 pp. Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. […] I do not know. I know only that my entire … Continue reading “The Touch of Flesh with Flesh”
Introduction by Walter Mignolo Tanja Ostojić? And what is decolonially aestheSis in her work? Simply, Tanja’s work unveils the logic of coloniality through the intersectionality of the European Union’s politics of migration, gender, and sexuality. When Rolando and I invited … Continue reading “Crossing Borders / Development of Diverse Artistic Strategies”
Rumor/Contagion Here’s a story: In late 2012, a rumour circulated throughout the Bangladeshi community living in and around Mile End, London. A vampire was sucking the blood of children dry. This vampire would strike late at night and in … Continue reading “The Axiomatic of Counter-Terrorism”
Under review: J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2012. The stardom of Lady Gaga has stimulated academic studies in ways that few celebrities typically have (aside from icons like Madonna and … Continue reading “Occupy, Gaga”
I was recently part of a fact-finding delegation to Palestine organized by the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The delegation was composed of concerned academics and scholars based in the U.S., including myself. During our weeklong investigative trip, we were witness to multiple and varied testimonies to and clear evidence of the daily acts of violence, harassment and humiliation that Palestinians are subjected to, both massive and intimate. Individuals from several families living in Eastern Jerusalem told us their personal stories of being physically thrown out of their homes in the middle of the night, their houses pillaged and taken over by settlers (many of whom were only recently residents of the U.S.), their belongings strewn onto the streets only to be looted by morning, their children targeted to bear recurring nightmares of the punishing character of their eviction (being made to see, for example, the displayed burning of their dolls alongside that of their beds).
You know times have changed when the question, “Is Iran next?” no longer refers to whether Iran will be the next target in the US “war on terror,” but whether or not it will be next to succumb to a wave of revolutions. I obviously don’t have the answer but I can say that there is a profound radicalization under way in Iranian society that overruns the boundaries of class and sweeps across the continuum from religious to secular.
Reviewed: Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 In her sweeping new work The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed provocatively challenges the idea of happiness as a necessary social good. Ahmed delivers a compelling and engrossing argument about … Continue reading “The Promise of Happiness”
