WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3963
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2022-03-17 09:00:40
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-17 09:00:40
    [post_content] => 

We need narratives that explore our shared problems and point the way toward collective liberation, but South Asian stories in U.S. popular culture haven’t kept pace with our new political realities. 

Until 9/11, I didn’t feel a strong need to see my ethnicity represented in American pop culture. Growing up in the U.S. as South Asian was an experience in cultural invisibility, but not one that was necessarily undesirable. GenXers and older Millennials came after the hippie era, which convinced mainstream American culture that Indian culture could be summarized with yoga, incense, and kirtans, and there was little in the 1980s and 1990s to dispel those lingering narratives, or to ground South Asians authentically in popular culture. What we did see, whether it was Amy Irving in brownface playing an Indian princess, or Apu in The Simpsons, was often problematic and unrepresentative. 

This situation changed over the last two decades. The first film I saw in theaters after 9/11 was Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, which played at New York City’s storied Paris Theater, right outside the Plaza Hotel. Steeped in joyous chaos and vitality, the film, which is set in New Delhi, portrays an exuberant, extended upper middle class family gathered at the home of the bride’s family to celebrate her arranged marriage to a suitably handsome Indian doctor. Tinged with a hint of tragedy and immersed in love for both family and the kind of colorful Desi spectacle Pico Iyer calls a “marigold tapestry,” the film was an escape, a connection, and a salve in the recovering-but-still-desolate city. I hadn’t realized how much I needed it. 

The only previous occasion on which I'd had an inkling of this need was while watching Nair's 1991 film Mississippi Masala. This bittersweet and boundary-breaking love story stars Denzel Washington as Demetrius, a Black American man from a working class background, and Sarita Choudhary as Mina,  an Indian woman born in Uganda. After Idi Amin expelled all the “foreigners” in 1972, Mina, who at one point in the film says she has never been to India, lives with her family in a small-town Mississippi motel owned by relatives who represent the great wave of migration from Gujarat to the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s. The film pulsates with the same vibrancy that would be seen in Monsoon Wedding 10 years later. 

But while Monsoon Wedding tells a deeply Indian story, Mississippi Masala tells a deeply American one. As Durba Mitra writes in an essay celebrating the film’s 30th anniversary, Mississippi Masala is a “love story wrapped in histories of postcolonial displacement, settler colonialism, and the shadows of Jim Crow, offer[ing] an account of the cruel circuitous routes of displacement and migration to the American South.” The film is one of the first mainstream American artworks to show both the discrimination experienced by the Indian-American diaspora, and the anti-Black racism the community directs at the Black people amongst whom they now live. Even 30 years later, it stands out as a political inquiry that interrogates what it means to seek liberation through young, urgent love across race, class, and culture. 


A scene from 'Mississippi Masala,' Mira Nair's 1991 film starring Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington.

Mitra notes in her essay, “The Indian diaspora in the U.S. has always been imagined in the American political landscape as a people neither here nor there.” South Asians who were either born in the U.S. or came as children following the 1965 Immigration Act were so few in number—even today there are only 5.4 million—that, Mississippi Masala aside, the microculture of American-born GenX Desis made little more than a blip in popular culture. On the one hand, this environment provided a kind of freedom in which we could try to shape culture and community without a spotlight. We could try to form bonds of solidarity in the face of entrenched political, cultural, religious, national, and caste lines that separated our peers on the subcontinent and were embraced by diaspora members who clung to their xenophobic, racist, or communal ideologies. On the other hand, the community could be insular and, existing in what Shilpa Davé calls “ambiguous racialized space,” both the victim and the perpetrator of discrimination.

Events in post 9/11 America made clear the need for South Asian stories with political and cultural specificity in mainstream culture. The months immediately after that terrible day were a period of intense discrimination, surveillance, violence, and Islamophobic and anti-immigrant policies. As Representative Pramila Jayapal said, “9/11 changed what it meant to be Arab, Muslim, or South Asian in this country.” Jayapal delivered her remarks during the first ever Congressional hearing on Discrimination and Civil Liberties of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, held over twenty years after 9/11. Finally.

Representation in this political context matters. Rashad Robinson, the prominent civil rights activist, rightly warns us not to mistake presence for power: Being in a room doesn't necessarily establish a direct line to decision making. None of us relates to the experience of being South Asian in the same way, and none of us should have to represent any or all of the rest of us. But one of the adverse effects of underrepresentation is to convince members of a minority community that they lack power within the dominant culture—that access and opportunity are limited, and their own stories will be unheard or filtered through stereotypes. In an essay about Lisa Ling’s food docuseries on Asian food in the U.S., Marina Fang writes: “Asian Americans often start from the default position of being “the other.” We have to explain ourselves, usually to a white audience.” In this kind of cultural environment, the need to present perfect or one dimensional characters—a pillar of the toxic “model minority” myth—takes root, and division and misunderstanding flourish. 

Presence and visibility may not be the entire solution to these problems. They are nevertheless crucial levers toward power. And the years between 9/11 and the 2016 U.S. election—marked by cross-MENASA community organizing to fight discrimination and state violence —gave rise to a mini renaissance of South Asian content that explored and played with the place South Asians occupy in the U.S. cultural landscape. 

Rampant xenophobia in the post-2016 world makes the need for solidarity, representation, and narrative shift even stronger. But the South Asian diaspora community has splintered over the past few years. Rising authoritarianism—from Trump to Brexit to Modi—emboldened Hindu nationalists in India and around the world, greatly exacerbating existing caste and religious discrimination. On the international stage, South Asians have been slow to rise in defense of our common humanity. It feels like a fraught time to embrace South Asian identity and a deeply precarious time around the world. We desperately need narratives that explore our shared problems and point the way toward collective liberation, but South Asian stories in U.S. popular culture haven’t kept pace with our new political realities.

I’ll admit to some satisfaction these days at seeing so much South Asian content made by people in front of and behind the camera. South Asian actors are playing a variety of dynamic, complicated, and sexy (but not exoticized) characters in content ranging from the color-blind casting of Bridgerton and The Green Knight, to the coming-of-age stories in Never Have I Ever and Spin, to superheros (that most American of genres) as seen in Eternals and Ms Marvel

In this landscape, the character that most closely represents me, at least demographically, is Seema in …And Just Like That. Played by Sarita Choudhary (who also played Mina in Mississippi Masala), Seema is a GenX New Yorker, unapologetically sexual, self-made, fabulous, and untethered to familial or cultural expectations. She is refreshing. I understand why the show disappointed many viewers with its portrayals of aging, race, class, consumerism, gender, and sexuality, but a small part of me enjoyed watching a glamorous brown woman of a certain age chewing up the scenery. 

But reality these days always creeps in. It's hard to get past what is happening politically in the South Asian community and watch even escapist content with unadulterated joy. As I watched her, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Seema enough? 

Her character comes from what appears to be an upper caste Hindu background and lives the life of a one percenter in Manhattan, with a private driver and a luxurious wardrobe of exceedingly expensive designer clothes, shoes, and handbags. She sits in privilege and has origins in what is now the oppressor class in India. As do I. Not all South Asians are privileged—far from it, especially in terms of race, class, or caste. But for a community that is small in numbers, we have a relatively high level of power and privilege. This is what Seema, as fabulous as she is in some ways, also represents. 

In the current state of our world, confronting society from our perspective as South Asians should require us to interrogate where we sit along the spectrum of power. What is our collective responsibility? Where do we have social power, and where do we use it for good? We need rich, complex stories that explore these questions. We need more than a few of these stories every decade. 

I want to know what Demetrius and Mina would do in our world. That’s the story I’m looking for now. We are living in monstrous, devastating times. We need lightness, escape, and joy—and a more inclusive roster of characters that will shape the way people perceive one another.  Even more so, we need to tell stories of solidarity. 

[post_title] => Representation matters: South Asians in American pop culture since 9/11 [post_excerpt] => During the 30 years since Mira Nair's groundbreaking film 'Mississippi Masala,' the representation of South Asians in American pop culture has evolved significantly. But is it enough? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => representation-matters-south-asians-in-american-pop-culture-since-9-11 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3963 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Representation matters: South Asians in American pop culture since 9/11

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3955
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2022-03-14 08:14:50
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-14 08:14:50
    [post_content] => 

Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights.

What is reproductive justice?

For decades, Black feminists in the U.S. have been pushing a women’s movement too often dominated by the concerns of middle-class white women to expand its horizons. In June 1994 a caucus of Black feminists pioneered the concept of “reproductive justice,” hoping to spur their fellow advocates to broaden their definition of reproductive freedom by taking into account most women’s daily lives and experiences.

Part of what they objected to was the reduction of women’s rights to a simple, one-time choice. They knew, often firsthand, that many women who become unexpectedly pregnant do not have easy access to comprehensive health care, including abortion and other reproductive services. Because many white, middle-class feminists took stable housing, decent health care, and safe neighborhoods for granted, they did not always see that a range of other rights related to women’s bodily autonomy were also in need of defending. As Dorothy E. Roberts, author and professor of law, sociology, and civil rights at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in Dissent in 2015, “The language of choice has proved useless for claiming public resources that most women need in order to maintain control over their bodies and their lives…giving women ‘choices’ has eroded the argument for state support, because women without sufficient resources are simply held responsible for making ‘bad’ choices.”

Roberts and other champions of reproductive justice believe all women have the right to opt out of parenthood entirely, to end some pregnancies and continue others, and to have as many children as they want and raise those children in safe, healthy, and nurturing environments. Loretta Ross of SisterSong, the largest multiracial reproductive justice collective in the U.S., has described reproductive justice as “the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women’s human rights.” In Ross’s view, the reproductive justice framework “analyzes how the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community.”

Those conditions are “not just a matter of individual choice and access” but include social realities like unstable housing, poverty, racial discrimination, and lack of proximity to health care facilities that provide abortions and/or prenatal care. A 2017 study found that one in five U.S. women would need to travel at least 43 miles (69 kilometers) to reach the nearest abortion clinic. Pregnant women’s and newborns’ lack of access to health care is just as crucial to address as lack of access to abortion. Pregnant women in rural areas often receive inadequate prenatal care; some rural communities do not have even one practicing obstetrician/gynecologist. Around one in four Wyoming women receive less-than-adequate prenatal care, meaning that, on average, they begin prenatal care after the fourth month of pregnancy or attend less than 79 percent of recommended checkups.

The U.S. also has a shameful record of letting women die during or around childbirth, a particularly shocking fact in such a wealthy nation. Maternal health outcomes are even worse for women of color and low-income women. The maternal mortality ratio more than doubled in the U.S. between 1999 and 2014, and Black women are approximately three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Stress caused by racial discrimination plays a significant role in maternal mortality rates, as does lack of proximity to hospitals providing high-quality care. Reproductive justice means ensuring that every woman has not only the right and ability to end a pregnancy, but control of her fertility, freedom from coerced or forced sterilization, adequate health care, and the ability to give birth to and raise children in a safe and healthy environment.

For the pro-choice movement to truly represent all women, reproductive justice advocates believe it must significantly broaden its demands for privacy and respect for individual choices to include, in Ross’s words, “the social supports necessary for our individual decisions to be optimally realized.” They also believe that control of one’s reproductive destiny is a human right, and that governments are obligated to protect women’s human rights by fully funding the programs required to keep them and their children healthy and safe.

Rather than focusing solely on the legal right to an abortion, reproductive justice advocates seek to work in coalition with other social justice movements, from the Movement for Black Lives to the movements for economic justice, the rights of people with disabilities, and LGBTQ rights.
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ) has defined three primary frameworks for fighting reproductive oppression and furthering reproductive justice:

  • Reproductive Health - deals with delivery of services
  • Reproductive Rights - addresses legal issues
  • Reproductive Justice - focuses on movement building

Reproductive justice goes beyond efforts to safeguard abortion rights. It is not solely dependent on courts, political parties, or sympathetic politicians and physicians. It’s about empowering women and girls to make decisions not just about a particular pregnancy but throughout their entire reproductive lives. Reproductive justice can only be achieved when all women have not just the same rights on paper, but the power, freedom, and resources necessary to exercise them.

What are the principles of reproductive justice?

Reproductive justice is a broad concept, and as such it touches on a wide range of issues. The list below is not comprehensive—however, it does provide a useful framework for understanding just how multifaceted the fight for reproductive justice can be:

  • The right to remain child-free
  • The right to end one or multiple pregnancies
  • The right to free health care, including abortion
  • Easy access to every kind of health care, including abortion and other reproductive services
  • The right to raise as many children as one wants
  • The right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment
  • The right of every child to a safe and healthy home
  • The right to support a family
  • The right of all mothers, including those charged with and convicted of crimes, to see and care for their children
  • The right of pregnant women and mothers in prisons and jails to be treated in accordance with international human rights law
  • The right to nonjudgmental and medically sound health care, including abortion, prenatal care, and care for new parents and newborns
  • The right to create a birth plan honored by all health care providers assisting in a birth
  • Respect and support for essential care work performed inside and outside of the home
  • Freedom from food deserts, contaminated water, and state violence
  • Freedom from prosecution for struggling with drug addiction while pregnant
  • Freedom from forced or coerced sterilization
  • Freedom from forced or coerced abortion
  • Freedom from shame and stigma

Who coined the term ‘reproductive justice’?

After organizing an informal Black Women’s Caucus at a national pro-choice conference sponsored by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance in Chicago in 1994, a group of Black women social justice advocates came up with the term and defined the framework. They recognized that the mainstream feminist movement of the time, which was led by and represented the interests of middle- and upper-class white women, was not familiar with or equipped to meet the needs of women of color, trans people, and other marginalized women.

These women, who called themselves the “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice,” argued for a new and broader conception of reproductive freedom rooted in internationally recognized human rights standards developed by the United Nations. Advocates of reproductive justice seek to unite the struggle for reproductive rights with the fight for social justice. The women who coined the phrase published a full-page statement with over 800 signatures in The Washington Post and Roll Call to announce the birth of a new movement.

When did the reproductive justice movement start? 

Though many of the ideas behind it have existed in some form for decades, it officially began in 1994, when a group of Black reproductive rights advocates who participated in a number of national conferences in the U.S. and the International Conference on Population & Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt, gathered in Chicago to pioneer a new reproductive rights framework. They hoped that framing these rights as a question of “justice” would better address both the full spectrum of women’s reproductive rights and the particular experiences and concerns of Black and/or low-income women. They shared frustrations about the status of Black women’s reproductive health around the globe and the limits of a pro-choice movement rooted in narrow notions of privacy. And they urged the larger movement to contextualize abortion care as one crucial aspect of a broader spectrum of human rights, including bodily autonomy and the full range of reproductive decision-making.

Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. “In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda,” which employs a reproductive justice framework, focuses on three key policy areas: abortion rights and access, contraceptive equity, and comprehensive sex education.

How does reproductive justice relate to intersectionality?

The concept of reproductive justice is an outgrowth of intersectionality, which is itself related to the original meaning of identity politics as defined by the Black socialist feminists of the Combahee River Collective. Members of the Collective believed their identities and the various forms of oppression they experienced as members of different but overlapping groups—Black people, women, LGBTQ people, and working-class people—uniquely suited them to fight these  oppressions.

Intersectionality means that all forms of oppression are interconnected, and all people experience oppression and discrimination differently as a result of their particular identities. As the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde once said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” And in the words of SisterSong, “Marginalized women face multiple oppressions and we can only win freedom by addressing how they impact one another.” Reproductive justice is about recognizing, honoring, and easing the lives of all child-bearing people by fighting all forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, able-ism, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and economic injustice—not only in isolation, but when and where they intersect.

Why does reproductive justice matter? 

Reproductive justice matters because it relates to the lives and experiences of every person capable of giving birth. By significantly broadening the lens through which most people view reproductive rights, it covers a far wider range of human experiences, is relevant to and supported by many more people, and has the potential to transform millions of lives by harnessing the collective power of various social movements—for economic justice, criminal justice reform, and civil rights, among others—that are connected but too often siloed.

Reproductive justice in childbirth

Until the mid-1800s, women in the United States managed their own birth experiences with little oversight and intervention. Abortion was common throughout the nineteenth century. It was only in the latter half of the century, when medicine became a respected profession and the American Medical Association was established, that physicians lobbied to have abortion banned. Their concern was not about the morality of abortion, but the financial and professional implications of being forced to compete with midwives and purveyors of home abortion remedies.

Tensions arose around that time, and persist today, between midwives, many of whom were trained in traditional healing practices, and formally educated and/or state-licensed physicians, nurses, and other medical practitioners. The conflict was partly between an authoritarian and patriarchal medical establishment and the women giving birth and the midwives they trusted to assist them.

Women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities typically had and have fewer choices about where and how to give birth and who may attend them when they do. Reproductive justice advocates seek to eliminate these disparities and ensure that all women can give birth safely, comfortably, in the company of their chosen attendants, and in the setting and manner of their choosing.

Reproductive justice in schools

A key aspect of reproductive justice in schools is comprehensive sex education, which can help students prevent unintended pregnancies and increase their odds of graduating.

Teenagers who are given partial or no medically accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and/or STIs and explicitly or implicitly taught to be ashamed of their bodies and sexuality are likelier to become pregnant or cause a pregnancy—a circumstance which interrupts their educations more often than not. Students who are pregnant or parenting should not have to choose between raising children and completing their educations. They deserve time to recover after giving birth, permission to make up missed work, child care, transportation, counseling, health care, personalized graduation plans, flexible schedules, and freedom from stigma. As the novelist Toni Morrison said in a 1989 Time interview in response to a leading question ("You don't feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?”) about teen moms, “They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons…That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it. I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black—or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money.” The U.S. will not achieve reproductive justice until it is willing to invest the necessary resources in all of its children.

Reproductive justice in workplaces

In 2014, then Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), a woman of color and a veteran of the Iraq war who lost both legs in a 2004 helicopter crash, was 46, pregnant, and in her third trimester. Because her doctor had advised her not to travel at that stage of her pregnancy, she appealed to her fellow Democrats to make a one-time exception to the Democratic caucus’s ban on proxy voting so she could participate in House Democratic caucus leadership and committee member elections.

Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders denied her request. Far more disturbing than what happened to Duckworth, who went on to become a U.S. senator, is what happens to women in retail and service industry jobs on a regular basis. Employers routinely deny pregnant workers basic accommodations like access to bottled water, the ability to sit down, and extra bathroom breaks. In 2014 Bene’t Holmes, a 25-year-old single mother and Walmart employee who was then four months pregnant, asked her manager for the less physically demanding job duties her doctor had recommended. Her request was denied. The next day she had a miscarriage at work.

Reproductive justice means supporting whatever choices women make about their reproductive lives, not forcing them to choose between supporting their families and following a doctor’s advice. It means fighting to ensure both that every woman who wants to end a pregnancy can do so and that every woman who wants to continue one can do so safely and with dignity. And it means that employers and governments must support workers while they are becoming and once they have become mothers. During World War II President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort. Despite the best efforts of mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators, and social workers to keep them open after the war, President Harry Truman shut them down as soon as Japan surrendered. It shouldn’t take a world war for governments to meet people’s needs.

Reproductive justice in prisons

Women in many countries, including the United States, have been arrested and incarcerated for ending or attempting to end unwanted pregnancies and/or endangering fetuses, which is particularly ironic given how the state often treats incarcerated mothers. It is cruel and illogical to imprison pregnant women for possibly jeopardizing a nonexistent baby by, for example, using drugs while pregnant and to separate mothers convicted of crimes from the living children who need them. The treatment of pregnant and nursing women and/or mothers in prisons and jails, including for pregnancy-related crimes, is clearly connected to poverty, xenophobia, and racism.

In 2017, a U.S. government official denied an abortion to a teenaged immigrant detainee who was pregnant as a result of rape and said she would rather harm herself than continue the pregnancy. In 2014 a Pennsylvania woman named Jennifer Whalen was charged with a felony and three misdemeanors, including endangering the welfare of a child, and sentenced to prison after helping her 16-year-old daughter end an unwanted pregnancy by ordering the abortion pill online. Whelan, a single parent who worked as a nursing home aide, said her daughter did not have health insurance and could not afford a hospital abortion.

In 1989, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, began arresting pregnant women whose prenatal tests showed they were smoking crack. In some cases, Dorothy Roberts wrote in her 1997 book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY a team of police officers tracked down expectant mothers in their neighborhoods. In others, officers appeared at hospital maternity wards to haul away women in handcuffs and leg irons hours after giving birth. According to Roberts, one Charleston woman spent the final weeks of her pregnancy in a dingy cell in the Charleston County Jail. When she went into labor, she was taken to the hospital in chains, where she remained shackled to the bed throughout the entire delivery. All but one of the 48 women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston that year were Black. And in 1978—five weeks into a 40-year sentence, with no painkillers or sterilized medical equipment of any kind—22-year-old Debbie Sims Africa gave birth to her son Mike in a Pennsylvania prison cell. She cut the baby’s umbilical cord with her teeth, hid him under a sheet, and relied on her fellow incarcerated women to hide the noise by singing or coughing when he cried. She couldn’t keep her baby with her under jail rules and knew it would be difficult to conceal his existence for long. After three days, she told the authorities, who promptly took him away.

Reproductive justice demands that all women terminating or carrying a pregnancy, giving birth, and/or raising a child be treated like human beings in life-altering circumstances. Then President Trump signed a law banning the shackling of pregnant women in 2018. Far more remains to be done to guarantee reproductive justice for incarcerated people.

Who invented intersectional feminism?

Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw is often credited with having coined the term in 1989, when she published a paper entitled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, a collection of interviews with pioneering Black feminists, Demita Frazier, one of Taylor’s interviewees, questions that narrative. “I have to talk to the young woman—Kimberlé Crenshaw…who says that she coined the term intersectionality,” Frazier says. “I always laugh when I read that because I remember the day we were sitting at the women’s center in Cambridge, drafting our probably third or fourth draft of the [Combahee River Collective] statement, I said, ‘You know, we stand at the intersection where our identities are indivisible.’ There is no separation. We are as Black women truly and completely intact in our paradox, and there’s nothing paradoxical about oppression [laugh]” (How We Get Free, Haymarket Books, p. 123).

In the 1970s, Frazier and her fellow Black socialist feminists conceptualized identity politics as the idea that Black liberation, feminism, and the fight for economic justice didn’t have to and shouldn’t be disparate and conflicting movements; it was only by coming together to fight all forms of oppression that organizers could truly free all people. In 1977 the Collective issued a statement which proclaimed, among other things, that “work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work…and not for the profit of the bosses,” but added, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

Many of the core concepts of intersectionality can be traced back to nineteenth century figures like the abolitionist and women’s rights crusader Sojourner Truth, who wanted to be recognized for and freed from the specific indignities she had suffered as a Black woman in the United States. Truth is said to have challenged attendees of the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, to include women like her in their conception of women’s rights: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

Reproductive Justice Around the World

Defending the rights and dignity of all women often means confronting state power, as Irish women did when they took to the streets to demand the repeal of Ireland’s abortion ban in 2017 and Polish and Mexican women did when they protested their countries’ abortion laws en masse in 2020. Women in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries followed suit in 2021. In the last decade and a half Marea Verde (Green Wave), a Latin American women’s movement, has waged “aggressive campaigns” and led mass popular protests “organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights” that have helped liberalize abortions laws throughout the region, as reproductive rights litigation expert Ximena Casas recently explained in The New York Times.

Reproductive justice in the United States

Abortion is, for now, legal in the U.S. but heavily restricted. Women, many of whom are poor, immigrants, and/or women of color, have been prosecuted for ending pregnancies and having miscarriages. United Nations human rights monitors harshly criticized the state of Texas for a particularly draconian 2021 anti-abortion law which, they said, violated international law by endangering women’s lives and denying them the basic right to control their bodies. Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer tasked by the United Nations Human Rights Council with fighting to end discrimination against women and girls, characterized the law as “sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst,” adding that it has “not only taken Texas backward, but in the eyes of the international community, it has taken the entire country backward.”

The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate among developed nations. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., which is more than double the ratio of most other high-income countries. It has far more OB/GYNS than midwives and an overall shortage of maternal health care providers of any kind relative to births. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave to women who have just given birth.

Government officials have sterilized thousands of U.S. women without their full knowledge or consent and required many more to have fewer children than they wanted in exchange for desperately needed financial support. These policies have disproportionately affected Native Americans, Black people, Latinas, low-income people, and people with intellectual disabilities. From 1950 to 1966, Black women in North Carolina were sterilized at over three times the rate of white women and over 12 times the rate of white men.

Reproductive justice in Canada

Inducing an abortion was a crime in Canada until 1988, when the country’s Supreme Court determined its abortion law was unconstitutional and struck it down. Abortion has since been legal at any stage in a woman’s pregnancy and is covered as a publicly funded medical procedure under the Canada Health Act, but provinces such as New Brunswick place limits on these funds. In New Brunswick only hospital abortions are covered by insurance; abortions at private clinics are not insured. As in the United States, access to abortion varies widely throughout the country. Inhabitants of many rural provinces and territories have access to only one or two providers. Canadian officials have a long and ugly history of sterilizing Indigenous women without their knowledge or consent.

Reproductive justice in India

India allows abortion during the first trimester with approval by a medical practitioner and under specific conditions, including when the pregnancy is the result of a rape and when a patient’s life or health is at risk. In cases involving severe fetal anomaly, a three-person medical board composed of a gynecologist, a pediatrician, and a radiologist must confirm the diagnosis in order for a pregnant person to access care, a requirement that is particularly difficult to fulfill outside of major cities.

Activists in India have been seeking to reform the country’s abortion laws for over a decade. In March 2020, a new set of amendments to the 1971 Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act were introduced in parliament. Critics have suggested the proposed amendments were inadequate and not framed “within a rights-based context for a person seeking abortion.”

Reproductive justice in Poland

Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The government instituted a near-total ban on abortion in October 2020, triggering the country’s largest protests since the fall of communism. In September 2021 a 30-year-old woman named Izabela died of septic shock after doctors refused to perform a life-saving abortion. “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, thanks to the abortion law, I have to lie down. And there is nothing they can do,” she wrote in a text message to her mother shortly before her death. “They'll wait until it dies or something begins, and if not, I can expect sepsis.”

Draconian abortion laws notwithstanding, Poland has one of the world’s lowest maternal mortality rates. Its National Health Fund, for which the vast majority of Polish residents are eligible, covers most of the costs associated with giving birth in a hospital. The government also covers uninsured women during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Low-income parents receive a government allowance for their first child, and parents of two or more children get around $130 per month per child. Every woman, regardless of insurance status, gets a home visit from a midwife within days of giving birth. The Health Ministry guarantees a woman's right to choose the place and method of birth, decide who is in the delivery room, and be with her newborn for at least two hours after giving birth.

Reproductive justice in El Salvador

Latin American women, particularly in El Salvador, have served decades-long prison sentences for having miscarriages the authorities claimed were self-induced. El Salvador is one of four countries in Latin America with no-exceptions abortion bans. In 2021, the authorities freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison for what the authorities claimed were self-induced abortions. A fourth woman was released in 2022. In 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found El Salvador responsible for the death of a Salvadoran woman sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide after losing a pregnancy in 2008. The woman, who had two children, died of cancer in prison two years later, partly as a result of inadequate medical care. Among other reforms, the Court ordered El Salvador to tighten regulations governing doctor-patient confidentiality and, in a ruling that applies to countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, ruled that health care providers can no longer report women seeking abortion care and other reproductive services to law enforcement.

Reproductive justice in Ghana

In 2022, Ghana’s national health insurance program expanded to include free long-term contraception with the goal of sparing millions of women already covered by the country’s national health insurance program from paying out-of-pocket costs for effective long-term contraception. Ghana has high maternal mortality rates—its maternal mortality ratio is 308 per 100,000 live births—high rates of sexually transmitted infections, and low levels of contraceptive use. Women in rural communities have a particularly hard time accessing birth control and other reproductive health care services. Abortion is still a criminal offense in Ghana, with exceptions in cases of rape, incest, serious fetal anomaly, and/or risk to the woman's health. Around 22–30 percent of maternal deaths in Ghana are thought to be the result of unsafe abortions.

A few last words on reproductive justice

In the last 25 years, reproductive justice advocates have worked to broaden the view of an occasionally myopic pro-choice movement overly focused on electing Democrats and pressuring sympathetic administrations to appoint liberal justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Having a Democrat in the White House and a more liberal Supreme Court does make it likelier that American women will retain certain rights. But it would profoundly improve the lives of all U.S. women, and women and people capable of giving birth around the world, if governments treated control over one’s reproductive and family life as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege reserved for those with the means to obtain needed services.

“Every child a wanted child” has long been a credo of the pro-choice movement. Reproductive justice seeks to take this laudable goal several steps further by challenging us to build a world in which every child is not only “wanted” by its parents at birth, but well provided for. It offers a path to creating societies that truly honor life by treating all who are capable of creating it, and every person born, as worthy of love, respect, and care—and investing our collective resources accordingly.

[post_title] => A beginner's guide to reproductive justice [post_excerpt] => Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-beginners-guide-to-reproductive-justice [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3955 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

A beginner’s guide to reproductive justice

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3943
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2022-03-07 12:11:51
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-07 12:11:51
    [post_content] => 

Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.

As the debate over Critical Race Theory, also known as CRT, rages across the United States, the foundational principles, values, and aims of the American education system are called into question. The war over CRT amplifies these essential questions: Who gets to tell the stories of this country, whose stories are worth telling, and how do these stories inform our lives today? It is ironic, of course, that these heated controversies are playing out across historic and contemporary Indigenous homelands.

There is a manufactured nature to the controversy surrounding Critical Race Theory. Far from an attempt to make white children feel guilty about atrocities that took place before they were born, or shame for their skin color, as CRT detractors have argued, the scholars who pioneered and practice the theory use it as a tool for understanding systemic oppression.

Academics recognized CRT in 1989, but its roots go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when legal scholars developed critical legal theory as a means of interrogating how the legal system served the interests of the rich and powerful at the cost of the poor and marginalized. Today, teachers use CRT to inform their age-appropriate lessons about discrimination, history, and oppression. Political pundits who claim that teaching the perspective of the marginalized is the same as teaching CRT are simply wrong.

It’s easy to see how the sudden outrage from right-wing politicians over CRT has deflected attention from this moment of racial reckoning in the post-George Floyd era. Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin, for instance, made opposition to Critical Race Theory a centerpiece of his election campaign; on this platform, he successfully secured his place as Virginia’s first Republican governor in more than a decade. On his first day in office Youngkin made good on his campaign promise by passing an executive order to “end the use of inherent divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, and restore excellence in K-12 public education in the commonwealth. Put simply, Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.

To understand the implications of this political development for Native communities, it is important to consider the larger context of Indigenous peoples within existing school curricula. Long before Critical Race Theory was ever formulated, schools in the U.S. failed abysmally in teaching about Indigenous histories, cultures, and contemporary politics. The effect of this failure is painfully obvious among the college students who sit in lecture halls like the ones in which I teach.

As a university faculty member who teaches both American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies at a predominately white institution, I often poll students about their knowledge of Native American history and culture, in order to teach effectively. In most cases, their exposure to Native histories is limited to a sanitized version of Columbus’ “discovery” of America, the Thanksgiving myth, and a little bit about the Cherokee Trail of Tears. My students from California often report on their fourth-grade experience of learning about the Spanish mission system—a system of mass death, forced labor, disease, and starvation—by building miniature replicas of the missions out of popsicle sticks and sugarcoating the historical narrative with actual sugar cubes, which they fashioned into mission fixtures.

One of the most striking and disturbing trends I have noticed throughout my years in the classroom and as a public advocate for Indigenous issues is that non-Natives tend to be woefully unaware of the fact that, in addition to the local, state, and federal government levels, there is also the tribal government level. My students are often dismayed to learn that these tribal governments are not marginal, but numerous and powerful—that there are, in fact, 574 sovereign nations with a government-to-government relationship with the federal U.S. governing institutions. The syllabus of my public high school’s civics and government course did not include any lessons about tribal nationhood, self-governance, citizenship, and sovereignty, and this is clearly the case for the vast majority of public schools.

I am deeply concerned to see that our nation’s rising college-educated youth could potentially embark on careers in government without learning that more than 56.2 million acres of this country—for context, only 11 of the  50 states are larger than 56.2 million acres—are under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. Nor are they aware that the largest tribal reservation, governed by the Navajo Nation, is larger than one-fifth of all states, including West Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island.

This ignorance is not the fault of the students. The responsibility for ensuring that our youth—our next generation of leaders—receive a historically accurate education and are prepared to go out into the world with a toolbox of knowledge that will carry us all through to the next day falls upon parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers. At a time when Native students are still subjected to racial slurs, nonconsensual haircutting, Indian-themed mascots, and screeching, headdressed mockeries in their schools, the idea that states are passing legislation that will result in teaching even less essential information about Indigenous peoples and our roles in this nation is extremely difficult to accept or understand.

Given the pitiful state of existing education regarding the First Americans, it seems that  Critical Race Theory has become the Right’s latest desperate effort to perpetrate a colorblind national narrative. For Native peoples, colorblindness—although not conceptualized as such at the time—can be seen in the pedagogical philosophy of Richard Henry Pratt, the former military officer who, after the Civil War, established residential schools for Native Americans where the guiding pedagogical theory was “kill the Indian, save the man”—i.e., strip Native children forcibly of their culture and language and force them to assimilate into white society.

Pratt ushered in a new policy era that shifted the country’s policies regarding Indigenous populations away from military warfare and physical death, to the new goal of achieving Indigenous cultural and political death through assimilation. Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and hundreds of others that copied his pedagogical model, achieved this aim by separating Indian children from their families and enrolling them in institutions where the children’s hair was cut, their languages and religions forbidden, and all forms of Indigenous community connections disallowed. These are now the sites where hundreds of Native children’s bodies are being discovered in unmarked graves. They are a stain on our national history, an example of the failures of colorblind and assimilationist ideologies, and, indeed, a testament to soundness of the concept of structural racism.

When it comes to the intersection of the current Critical Race Theory debate and Indigenous populations, these continued attempts to silence discussions about the violence endured by Native communities, our strength and resilience in overcoming attempts to wholly eradicate us, and ongoing injustices facing Native peoples today can all be understood within the framework of the attempted erasure our people. But these efforts are not new; various political attempts to “solve” the “Indian problem” have changed and evolved since the founding of the United States.

Those who oppose teaching accurate, representative lessons about Indigenous peoples overlook a fundamental truth that must be reckoned with if we are to continue to grow as a society: Native peoples did not vanish, we are not extinct, and we remain an important part of America’s history and present day. The same is true for Black and other people of color, members of the LGBTQ2S+ community, folks of differing abilities, women, and gender nonconforming individuals, all of whom are represented within the Native population and with whom Indigenous communities are allied in this shared struggle. The very fact that a sizable portion of this nation supports the imposition of legal restrictions on teaching students about race, identity, and history demonstrates the importance of this type of educational instruction.

[post_title] => Critical Race Theory, Native communities, and American education [post_excerpt] => Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => critical-race-theory-native-communities-and-american-education [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3943 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Critical Race Theory, Native communities, and American education

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3923
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2022-03-03 19:34:29
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-03 19:34:29
    [post_content] => 

Menstrual inequity is not unique to developing nations. It affects all low-income girls and women.

What if someone’s circumstances forced them to experience their period without access to sanitary napkins or tampons? Would they go to school or to work worrying every minute about blood soaking through their underwear, whether the makeshift pad they made with a fistful of toilet paper, a dirty rag, or even cow dung or leaves stayed in place, whether it increased their risk of bacterial infection?

Would you?

Millions of young girls and women experience their monthly periods under these undignified and unhygienic circumstances. They miss school, they miss work, and as a result their earning potential and opportunities for social and financial advancement in their lives are irrevocably affected. In some extreme situations, young women even exchange sex for money to buy menstrual supplies. This is referred to as period poverty.

Period poverty creates poverty

“Imagine not being able to sit through class,” says Jessica Williams, Chief Communications Officer for Days for Girls, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that aims to improve educational and livelihood outcomes for women and girls by “turning periods into pathways.”

“You can’t work, you end up staying home, all these missed opportunities to contribute and make money. Period poverty literally creates poverty.”

The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear. Half the world’s population in developing and poor countries lacks the fundamental necessities a woman needs to deal safely and with dignity with a bodily function that recurs monthly for 40 years of their lives.

Operating in over 144 countries in six continents, Days for Girls creates washable and reusable menstrual health products and kits that include carry pouches, underwear, soap and washcloths, and a menstrual cup alternative. These products are manufactured and sold locally by women, providing them with a dependable stream of revenue.

Period inequity is our problem, too

While menstrual inequity is far more pervasive in developing nations, it is not unique to far-away countries. Low-income girls and women, women in Indigenous communities, and women experiencing homelessness in western countries—where supermarket and pharmacy aisles are brimming with all brands, colours, sizes, and shapes of sanitary products—are still not able to afford basic menstrual products.

Many countries are now having long-overdue conversations about making sanitary products free or at the very least tax-free and affordable—finally seeing them as medical necessities women don’t have a choice about purchasing. Scotland was the first country in the world to make period products free. It’s perhaps no accident the bill was first introduced by a woman and passed by a government that has a woman at the helm. Countries like Canada and Australia have removed the GST from period products, New Zealand and a handful of U.S. States have already mandated free period products in schools. Recent U.S. studies have shown that about a quarter of menstruating students struggle to access period products, with both anxiety, stigma, and educational barriers cited as the direct result.

Breaking the stigma

Period poverty goes beyond a lack of access to period products. It also refers to taboos attached to menstruation.

“In some cultures, women on their period are considered unclean,” says Williams. “Our job is to help people overcome this, educate them on the subject, teach young boys, their brothers, fathers, husbands, about female bodies so they can be more understanding and supportive of what is essentially a basic human right.”

Nepali schoolgirls holding bags of washable menstrual products.

In Nepal, one of the countries Days for Girls operates in, menstruating women are considered bad luck. The stigma forces them into isolated menstruating huts every month, which makes them vulnerable to rape, animal attacks, and bad weather. Many young girls have died while alone. Aside from the physical dangers involved in forced isolation, superstitions like these also degrade women and position them as inferior in a society that should see them as equals.

The scent of solidarity

Barb Stegemann, founder and CEO of The 7 Virtues, a perfume company, decided to help the Nepali women who are shunted into menstruating huts.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, she’s launching Lotus Pear, a scent that uses sustainably sourced geranium from Egypt, with part of the proceeds helping to advance menstrual equity for 700 young women in Nepal.

“It’s about women and power, the loss of it, and getting it back,” Stegemann says. “Each of us is a potential agent of change.” The entrepreneur says she prefers empowerment over charity because it creates self-sufficiency and confidence in one’s abilities. As a young teenager, she saw first-hand how poverty can undermine one’s potential and self-esteem.

“We fell on hard times when I was a young,” she says. “My mom started having health issues and all of sudden… record scratch. We’re living in a trailer on welfare and mom is in the hospital all the time.”

Stegemann says she knows what period poverty feels like.

“Not to get gross,” she says, “but we were poor, I would often use toilet paper.”

Period kits that Day for Girls distributes.

Women lifting other women

Women helping empower other women is a running theme through Stegemann’s career and overall philosophy. When she launched her business 12 years ago, she worked out of her garage and bankrolled the venture with her credit card. She aspired to support families in war-torn nations by flexing women’s buying power to reverse issues of war and poverty.

Her fragrance collection is made with natural essential oils purchased and often manufactured in countries rebuilding after war or strife, from Haiti to Afghanistan and Rwanda, what Stegemann refers to as “retail activism.”

Impact partners like her are essential to the work non-profits like Days for Girls do.

“Without impact partners like The 7 Virtues, we wouldn’t be able to do our work because they essentially fund the work that we do,” says Williams.

Like Stegemann, the founder of Days for Girls is also a woman whose actions have been shaped by difficult personal experiences.

Celeste Mergens was born in Oklahoma, to a family that faced poverty, spent time living in a car and often went without food. At the age of seven she was raped. When she heard that some North American men were travelling to poor countries with suitcases full of menstrual products these women needed just so they could sexually assault them, she knew she had to do something. Since 2008, her organization’s two-pronged approach to period poverty—the sale and manufacture of menstrual pads and the education to eliminate taboos—has changed countless of lives.

“I was told over 400 women immediately came forward for the program in Nepal,” says Stegemann. “The organization has invested for so long in the community there’s now trust, and I think that’s what’s so exciting, it’s a movement.”

The invisible problem

The global pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges women and girls face. A recent report indicates almost 10 million children worldwide might never return to school. It predicts girls will have a harder time than boys, because many will be forced into early marriage or the labor market as families struggle with extreme poverty. With these obstacles in mind, efforts to tackle period poverty and the limitations it imposes on women worldwide can only be encouraged.

“I think the issue of period poverty should be part of everyone’s political platform,” says Stegemann. “It would be refreshing to hear a candidate say, ‘These are the things that advance a community,’ and find a way for companies to provide them for free.”

Stegemann says she was shocked to learn that a lack of sanitary products in the north of Canada, where a box of tampons can run from $16 to more than $45, remains a huge problem among Indigenous communities.

“Was I living around a rock?” she asks. “Why don’t more people know about these things?”

[post_title] => Why period poverty is everyone's problem [post_excerpt] => The World Bank estimates 500 million women and girls globally lack access to adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management. That means access to basic needs like sanitary napkins, tampons, toilet paper, separate bathrooms with a door that can safely close behind them and running water to wash their hands and underwear. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => why-period-poverty-is-everyones-problem [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3923 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Why period poverty is everyone’s problem

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3880
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2022-02-24 08:30:30
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-02-24 08:30:30
    [post_content] => 

The isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the pandemic have caused a sharp spike in demand for mental health care, but the system is not providing the help people need.

Chelsea, a 33-year-old part-time CrossFit coach, managed her lifelong anxiety by keeping herself busy and physically active, but the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing measures deprived her of those essential coping mechanisms. Suddenly she found herself alone at home and her anxiety, which had been acting up since 2018, became a serious problem. A resident of Edmonton, Canada, Chelsea tried to find a therapist within the public health-care system who could see her for free or on a sliding scale. But the waiting lists were long, and she was unable to afford a private therapist. She tried BetterHelp, a company that provides web-based therapy, but stopped when she realized she had to pay extra to speak with a therapist via video camera. She also tried a free phone service through the Edmonton municipality, but she needed long-term therapy—not a one-time chat.

Chelsea was on two separate wait lists for over two years but did not receive any updates so, to her frustration, she had no idea when her turn would be. Recently, thanks to a new job with improved benefits, she was finally able to find a therapist in the private system.

Canada’s national health-care system, which, for the most part, is publicly available and funded through contributions from the federal and provincial governments, has been stretched to its limits by the pandemic. But even in better times, before COVID, mental health care was difficult to obtain. The national health-care system places a priority on physical health, with a particular focus on critical and emergency medicine. But now, after two years of extreme stress caused by isolation, unemployment, uncertainty, loss, and increased family responsibilities, the demand for mental health care has spiked.

A recent survey by the Canadian Mental Health Association found that the number of Ontario residents currently seeking mental health care has risen to 24 percent, up from 9 percent in 2020. According to another survey conducted in the fall, about one in five Canadians rated their mental health as “poor,” while half the respondents said they were worried about a lack of access to care.

Dr. Simon Sherry, a clinical psychologist and professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said his waiting list has risen from 150 pre-pandemic to about 450 people today. “In Nova Scotia, poor mental health has become statistically normal,” he said, adding that people with pre-existing conditions are having “an especially rough time.” The pandemic has left them with physical and psychological scars.Dr. Karen Hetherington, a faculty lecturer at McGill’s School of Social Work, agreed with Dr. Sherry, pointing out that “it’s no surprise” to see a decline in the mental health of a person who might have spent months in lockdown in a small apartment during Montreal’s long, dark, frigid winter.

Lyla* is a mental health-care specialist in a Montreal hospital’s outpatient clinic, working with patients suffering from schizophrenia. She has seen many cases of people with severe pre-existing issues experiencing a complete breakdown during the pandemic. “I know some patients that just couldn’t function anymore because everything they had in terms of socialization was taken away from them,” she said.

A global calamity of this scale is a natural vector for a mental health crisis, but those who have worked in mental health care for years are grimly unsurprised that the system failed to respond to the sharp increase in demand. They have been asking for extra support for years, but felt as though they were screaming into a void.

“It’s simply been the case that both the health-care field and public health have focused overwhelmingly on physical health,” said Dr. Nicholas King, a professor at McGill University who is an expert in public health ethics and policy. “So, when you have a major, large-scale event that has a huge impact on mental health, that system for dealing with mental health is obviously going to come under strain.”

Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist and Chair and Chief of Psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Previously, he lived and worked for a decade in Ontario. Dr. Sukhera trained in New York State, which, he believes “has a pretty decent” mental health care system. “Where I trained, if a young person needs support, regardless of whether they were poor or not, they usually got fairly timely intervention,” he said.  In Canada, by contrast, he encountered “huge obstacles in accessing basic evidence-based psychotherapies” for his patients.

Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care. In fact, Dr. Sukhera said, “There are many jurisdictions in the U.S. where access to basic evidence-based mental health support is way better than in many parts of Canada. And that’s a difficult piece of truth to recognize and reconcile for Canadians who idealize our system. But my lived experience would say that’s the truth.”

Like health workers more broadly, mental health-care providers have burnt out during the pandemic, with many choosing to quit. Lyla cited a combination of overwork, low pay, and a lack of acknowledgment as the factors driving the resignation among her colleagues in mental health. Now, newly vacant positions are going to inexperienced recent graduates. Lyla said that mental health-care jobs were once desirable and difficult to obtain. But these days she and her colleagues are constantly begging for extra support and left feeling that “the benefits [of staying in the profession] don’t outweigh the risks.”

Noelle* works in youth mental health care at a public clinic in Montreal. She, too, has seen many of her colleagues choosing to leave. The vacant positions are going unfilled, which increases the strain on those who stay, which in turn leads to more burnout and more departures. The problem with the public sector, she said, is the way it’s structured. In the type of clinic in which she works, psychologists are told they have “four months to help the patient and then you have to close the file and move on to somebody else,” she said, adding: “In a private setting, you don’t get that.” The government, she says, “treats people like numbers, like employees. Like the way overtime was mandatory for nurses for a long time. How is someone with children supposed to be working 18 hours in a row?”

Although everyone I spoke with agreed that additional funding for the public system was much needed, Noelle also recommends more funding go into community organizations, such as AMI-Quebec, a non-profit that helps the families of those with mental illness, or Cyprès, which provides direct mental health services to individuals in their community. Dr. Hetherington agrees. In her view, the culture in the public sector is simply too “top down. It has no understanding of the real needs of the population, the clientele. It’s so bureaucratic.”

She also does not believe the public sector can be adequately transformed to meet the needs of those suffering. “You can’t change a culture when it’s such an elephant. Then you need to build new structures that integrate a different culture,” she said. She’d like to see the Quebec government fund new non-profit mental health centers with public money. These centers could then contract directly with community organizations. She hopes that this would allow a new culture to flourish in mental health care.

When we last spoke, however, Dr. Hetherington was feeling newly optimistic about mental health care in Quebec, with the provincial government having recently announced that it would invest $1.2 billion in mental health services. “This is the first time the money is attached to a vision,” she said, with funding for both school and refugee mental health. The plan is also focused on bringing mental health services into the community and sensitizing the community. She confirmed that the pandemic “was a facilitator.”

“What we need,” said Dr. Sherry, “is a fundamental kind of courage from decision-makers and government to actually center people who are suffering when making decisions because they’re politically convenient or politically popular.” Many are still waiting for a public system that is failing to provide care for them. Private therapy “is really not affordable unless you’re making a lot of money,” said Chelsea. Without her new job, she’d still be waiting—along with thousands of others.

*Names have been changed upon request.

[post_title] => A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada's health care system [post_excerpt] => Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => in-canada-the-pandemic-has-had-a-severe-impact-on-mental-health-but-help-is-elusive [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3880 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada’s health care system

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3756
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2022-01-27 21:13:29
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-01-27 21:13:29
    [post_content] => Forced sterilizations on detained migrant women is in line with the US's long, sordid history of eugenics.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed House Democrats on allegations concerning several gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, that a physician performed on migrant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia—allegedly without their informed consent. The incidents became public knowledge in September 2020, after a consortium of human rights groups filed an explosive report on behalf of Nurse Dawn Wooten, a whistleblower who worked at the detention center.

In a December 3 letter signed by the chairmen of the House Committees on Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform, legislators wrote: “We are concerned that Dr. [Mahendra] Amin may have been performing unnecessary surgical procedures to defraud DHS and the Federal government without consequences.” The letter, which is addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, also requested information on the steps the Department has taken to review treatment Dr. Amin provided and ensure migrants receive proper medical care in the future.

The Conversationalist confirmed a December 15 DHS briefing with two committee staffers, both of whom declined to share additional details about the information presented. A staffer from the Committee on Homeland Security clarified that this was a DHS review of the Irwin County Detention Center and not a general review of migrant detention facilities, although Congress requested the Department to brief them on the matter months ago.

The December 3 letter says, “the Committee on Homeland Security requested a briefing on August 10, 2021, on DHS’s efforts to review the suitability of detention facilities. To date, DHS has not fulfilled this request. We ask that you ensure the Committees receive this briefing without further delay.”

On January 3, the DHS released a report that found “the facility’s chronic care, continuity of care, and medical policies and procedures to be inadequate” but did not find that unnecessary or unwanted hysterectomies had been performed. The report does, however, quote an ICE employee who alleges that there is a systemic issue in the ICE leadership that makes the agency “unwilling to listen to concerns or complaints about detention facilities.”

Nurse Dawn Wooten worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) for three years. She says that Dr. Amin, who was referred to as the “uterus collector,” had performed hysterectomies on at least 20 women without their consent. Many of these women did not speak English well enough to consent to the procedures or understand what had been done to them. Thirty-five women are now suing ICE over Dr. Amin’s abuse.ICDC, run by a for-profit prison company called LaSalle Corrections, also came under harsh scrutiny for their botched COVID-19 response, which sparked hunger strikes and protests among detainees early in the pandemic.

The Georgia-based advocacy group Project South filed the complaint, which describes a filthy, insect-infested facility with inadequate COVID-19 safety precautions, where staff refused to test symptomatic detainees and fabricated medical records. Detainees who protested the conditions were punished with beatings, pepper spray, and solitary confinement. Nurse Wooten told The Intercept that she was demoted after raising concerns with her supervisors.

“It is deeply concerning that neither DHS nor the private prison company running Irwin have yet to face accountability for the medical abuse that migrant women faced at Irwin,” Azadeh Shahshahani, the Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South said in an email statement to The Conversationalist. “This is setting an awful precedent. Congress and the Biden Administration must act now.”

The joint committee investigation subpoenaed LaSalle Corrections in November 2020 after the company refused to turn over medical records on the procedures Dr. Amin performed. Dr. Tony Ogburn, Department Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, reviewed those records. He concluded that Dr. Amin’s care “did not meet acceptable standards.”

“My concern is that he was not competent and simply did the same evaluation and treatment on most patients because that is what he knew how to do, and/or he did tests and treatments that generated a significant amount of reimbursement without benefitting most patients,” Dr. Ogburn concluded in a November 2021 letter to the Georgia Medical Board.

Following pressure from lawmakers, activists, and advocacy groups, DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced he would sever ties with LaSalle Corrections in May 2021, though migrants were not removed from the facilities until September 2021—a full year after Project South filed Nurse Wooten’s whistleblower complaint with the ICE administration.

While these abuses came to light during the Trump presidency the lack of accountability continues under the Biden Administration, with migrant arrests now at a 21-year high. The current administration has ramped up deportations under a Trump-era health policy that allows the government to expedite the process without giving migrants the opportunity to apply for asylum. The government claims the rushed deportations are a COVID-19 safety precaution.

Under Title 42, the Trump Administration expelled 444,000 migrants. Under Biden, this number has already reached 690,000. COVID-19 still runs rampant in migrant detention centers and in prisons such as New York City’s Rikers Island, where more than one-fifth of the incarcerated population has tested positive.

Immigration advocates have been disappointed with the new administration. Since taking office, Biden has filed 296 executive orders on immigration, 89 of which have reversed actions taken by the Trump administration such as the travel ban on Muslim majority nations and construction of the border wall.

When Dawn Wooten stepped forward to make a whistleblower complaint about the medical abuses at ICDC, international headlines about “mass hysterectomies” sparked outrage and comparisons to Nazi Germany. Others placed the story within a long history of American eugenics that targeted Black, brown, disabled, and indigenous women.

“People with Spanish surnames were disproportionately sterilized during the period of peak eugenics in the 1920s through the 1950s,” says Heather Dron, a Research Fellow at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan.

During the twentieth century, U.S. states subjected over 60,000 people to sterilization without consent, with over 30 states establishing eugenics boards. State governments targeted minorities, the disabled, and others who did not fit into “social norms” for forced sterilization.

From 1929 to 1974 North Carolina ordered as many as 7,600 women sterilized— a majority of whom were Black women from low-income backgrounds. Margaret Sanger and Dr. Gregory Pincus exploited government birth control centers in Puerto Rico to subject one-third of the female population to sterilization procedures, often without their consent, purportedly to address “overpopulation” and poverty on the island. Under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 physicians sterilized an estimated 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age in a six-year period.

Adolf Hitler writes admiringly in Mein Kampf of eugenics policies practiced in the U.S. “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the United States], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State.”

Heather Dron’s research focuses on eugenic sterilization in California, where roughly 20,000, or one-third, of U.S. sterilizations were performed starting from 1909.

“There was a law on the books between 1909 and 1979 that allowed for the sterilization of institutionalized people housed in psychiatric hospitals, or in homes for what was then called the ‘feeble-minded,’” Dron says. “Sterilization was seen as a solution to all these other social problems. They saw it as a way to keep these people out of institutions.”

While eugenics laws in California have been repealed, sterilizations have continued. A 2013 investigation by Mother Jones revealed that 148 women in two California prisons were sterilized from 2006 to 2010.

“You get a similar dynamic there,” says Dron, referring to the recent ICE cases. “There were a few people who were performing a lot of procedures who seemed like they didn’t have a great ethical practice in general.”

There is no evidence to suggest that Dr. Mahendra Amin was motivated to perform these surgeries for anything other than financial compensation. Last month's letter from House Democrats expressing concerns that Dr. Amin performed these surgeries to “defraud the government” further supports this theory.

“It sounds like there’s some sort of incentive to perform surgical interventions because you’re paid per intervention and some people took advantage of that,” Dron says of Dr. Amin’s case. “But you have to read that with a little bit of skepticism because often we point to these bad actors and say it’s just them as opposed to a system that systematically thinks that people who are incarcerated shouldn’t have kids.”

The breaking news of hysterectomies performed on migrant women in ICE custody barely made it through one news cycle before news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death broke just days later. Her death was followed by a swift Republican push to nominate a third Supreme Court Justice under Trump just weeks ahead of the 2020 election.

The media might choose to remember the hysterectomies performed at the Georgia ICE facility as a particularly egregious act that happened under a uniquely evil administration. That would be a huge mistake.

According to a December 2021 article in The Texas Tribune, the number of immigrants held in ICE detention centers has increased by more than 50 percent since Biden took office. Moreover, the investigation into Dr. Amin’s medical practice has been conducted on Biden’s watch.

Detentions have been accompanied by a spike in border crossings in 2021. Biden has downplayed this as a seasonal phenomenon while Republicans have pointed to plans to offer 11 million migrants a path to citizenship as cause for the surge. Others say the migrants are motivated by growing instability in their home countries. With less attention on the issue of migration, Biden has gotten away with his continuation of the “remain in Mexico” policy by pointing to Title 42, which has been extended twice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a matter of public health.

Under the Biden Administration, we no longer hear overtly fascist rhetoric from the White House aimed at migrants, but detainees at ICE facilities continue to suffer from extreme medical neglect and abuse as COVID-19 cases soar.

In order to prevent us from reliving the past, we need to understand the circumstances that led us to where we are today. Ending Trump’s remain in Mexico policies, fulfilling a campaign promise to offer migrants a path to citizenship, and holding Dr. Amin and LaSalle Corrections responsible for their medical abuses would be a great place to start.

 
    [post_title] => The 'uterus collector': the surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women
    [post_excerpt] => The forced sterilizations are in line with the U.S.'s long, sordid, racist history of eugenics. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => the-uterus-collector-the-scandal-of-the-surgeon-who-performed-coerced-hysterectomies-on-detained-migrant-women
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3756
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

The ‘uterus collector’: the surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3629
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-12-21 19:53:03
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-12-21 19:53:03
    [post_content] => Pro-choice Americans need to stop deferring to institutions that don't represent them and start organizing. 

I was 15 in October 1998 when an anti-abortion zealot murdered Dr. Barnett Slepian, a doctor who performed abortions in my hometown of Buffalo, New York. A married father of four, Dr. Slepian had just returned home from his synagogue, where he’d attended a memorial service for his father. It was a Friday evening and he was standing in his kitchen heating split-pea soup in the microwave when the sniper hiding in his backyard shot him in the chest.

I did not know Dr. Slepian, but my family knew people who did. I also knew that two of his young sons were in the room when he was shot. That detail haunted me the most. My father is not a doctor, but he is a kind, caring, socially conscious Jewish man who believes strongly in a pregnant person’s right to end a pregnancy. I adore my father and the thought of two children younger than I was at the time witnessing the sudden, violent death of theirs was hard to bear. Even at 15 I knew that Dr. Slepian’s life had been a full one cut brutally short—one on which many other people, including his children, had depended. What he did with it helped fully formed adult women live theirs. It was the first time I realized that caring for vulnerable women could get you killed.

The U.S. Supreme Court is, following its December 1 hearing about the legality of Mississippi’s most recent abortion ban, widely expected to overturn or gut Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that formalized a pregnant woman’s human right to end her pregnancy. For nearly 50 years, Roe has prevented states from banning abortion at any time before fetal viability outside the womb. This suggests (a) that a woman has more rights than an incubator; and (b) that a person who exists—one with hopes, dreams, relationships, and obligations—matters more than one who does not.

Reversing or substantially weakening Roe would flip that formula and reduce women from fully fledged people to single-purpose objects. It would make obtaining an abortion a dangerous, degrading, and difficult-to-impossible undertaking for millions of women. At least 21 states will ban or severely restrict abortion virtually overnight if the Court dismantles Roe. Those who believe that forcing a woman to undergo pregnancy and labor against her will is a uniquely misogynistic form of torture are understandably alarmed. A right that’s been under threat for decades is still a right. Abortion bans harm women and their children and terrorize anyone who tries to help them. Overturning Roe would restructure American society for decades to come by forcing into existence millions of children, many of whom will not be adequately cared for.

As a result of laws and policies that limit or ban access to medical terminations, women in the U.S. and parts of Europe are today in greater danger of being prosecuted, punished, or allowed to die horribly from being denied an abortion than they are of being harmed by the procedure itself.

Shockingly, the prevailing response from legacy media outlets in the U.S. has been terrifyingly passive and fatalistic—heavy on doom and gloom and light on practical solutions. Pro-choice voters are being told what we have been told in every election cycle since at least the 1980s: that our most fundamental rights are hanging in the balance and voting has never mattered more. Rarely do liberal columnists remind faithful Democratic voters that our loyalty has been rewarded with the most reactionary Court and the direst threat to Roe in decades. House Democrats did manage to pass a bill in late September that would enshrine the protections guaranteed by Roe in federal law. But thanks to antiquated procedural rules like the filibuster, which President Biden and Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have been reluctant to eliminate, there’s virtually no chance of passing it in the Senate. Despairing references to The Handmaid’s Tale and the fact that women will soon be legally reduced to “vessels” abound.

This despair is often cloaked in gallows humor, and there is a dark comedy to the whole situation: imagine living in a country where women can do anything—vote, live alone, drive a car, buy a house, get a divorce, become a Supreme Court justice—and still be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, despite the availability of pills that can safely and easily end an early pregnancy in the privacy of one’s home. The most privileged women are the least likely to be denied this right. Women of means, who are used to living freely, will continue to do so. Those who lack money, child care, the ability to travel, supportive partners or family, understanding bosses, and/or other forms of support will suffer even more. But what can we do? First Trump, then the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, then COVID, then Amy Coney Barrett, and now this. Given that the right controls the Court, we’re basically doomed, the thinking seems to go. Now get out there and vote Democratic in the midterms!

It’s time to acknowledge that this playbook has failed women for decades. If I were a theist I would consider freedom from forced pregnancy and labor a God-given right, as many deeply religious people do. Just as Black people have always been full human beings with inalienable rights to life and liberty, regardless of what the Court has, at various times, decreed, those with the power to bring forth life have an inherent right to decide whether and under what circumstances to use it. These rights cannot be revoked by judicial fiat; we should stop behaving as if they can. Six judges cannot strip us of a right that exists whether or not they recognize it.

Anyone serious about defending the rights and dignity of all women needs to stop mourning and start confronting state power, as Irish women did in 2017 and Polish and Mexican women did in 2020, and as women in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries did in 2021—in response to far graver threats to their humanity. Even in the U.S., where abortion is restricted but legal, women have been prosecuted for ending pregnancies and having miscarriages. Latin American women, particularly in El Salvador, have served decades-long prison sentences for having miscarriages the authorities claimed were self-induced. Over the last decade or so Marea Verde (Green Wave), a Latin American women’s movement, has helped liberalize abortion laws throughout the region “with aggressive campaigns and mass popular protests organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights,” as reproductive rights litigation expert Ximena Casas recently explained in The New York Times.

The pro-choice movement in the United States is comparatively piecemeal and diffuse, given the country’s size and diversity, and far less effective than it should be. The 2017 Women’s March, which was described at the time as the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history, was the last time U.S. women protested sexist oppression en masse. But while I saw plenty of signs referring to abortion rights, the women’s march was not specifically or exclusively about reproductive justice; it was a general expression of rage at Trump’s election. The largest abortion rights demonstration in the U.S. in the last 20 years was the April 2004 March for Women’s Lives, which drew hundreds of thousands of people (organizers put the number at over a million).

There will almost certainly be large street protests in June, when the Court is expected to issue its response. But we cannot wait until then to defend these rights. “I think it's going to mobilize people to go to the polls,” Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently said, referring to the impact the Court’s expected ruling could have on the 2022 midterms. “You will see an outcry like you've never seen before.” About seven months after the 2004 march, George W. Bush, whose policies had prompted it, was reelected by a clear margin, winning with over three million votes more than his Democratic rival, John Kerry.

In other words, while anger motivated American women to show up for a large demonstration, it did not drive them to sweep Bush out of office or defend abortion rights against further attack. This is partly because U.S. women’s attitudes toward abortion do not differ substantially from men’s; pro-choice Americans, including men, need to defend these rights more vigorously. Voting is not enough. U.S. voters swept Trump out of office in 2020, but only after he had packed the Court with far-right ideologues. And in the absence of major structural reforms—expanding or abolishing the Supreme Court, eliminating the filibuster and passing federal voting rights legislation, amending the Constitution, abolishing the Senate—which many organizers are demanding but the Democratic Party has so far been unwilling to do, we cannot vote our way out of the devastation that will result if Roe is gutted.

There are a number of ways to help:

Although medication abortion has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for over 20 years, the agency continues to restrict one of the medications, mifepristone, for reasons that have more to do with politics than safety. According to Carrie N. Baker, who chairs the American Studies department and teaches courses on gender, law and public policy at Smith College, abortion medications are “safer than Tylenol” and “six times safer than Viagra,” which is commonly prescribed and easy to purchase online. “The Supreme Court doesn’t get the last word on this,” Brown told me by phone. She mentioned the abortion rights bill Democrats passed in the House and could, in theory, pass in the Senate. “Technology has outstripped the anti-abortion strategy,” she added. Women in countries that criminalize abortion have known for years how to end pregnancies safely; according to Brown, pharmacy techs in Brazil discovered that misoprostol could be used to induce abortion when they were warned not to handle the drug while pregnant. “There’s never been a better time to have an at-home abortion than now,” Brown said. “In the 1960s we faced butchery, and that is completely unnecessary at this stage because the pills are widely available overseas.” The FDA suspended rules barring doctors from mailing the abortion pill to patients due to COVID. On December 16 the agency announced that it would allow doctors to send the pill by mail on a permanent basis—a victory for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the restrictions in court, and one that will enable many more doctors to prescribe the drugs and many more women to order them online and receive them by mail. But over a dozen Republican-controlled states have already passed laws restricting access to the pills, including by outlawing delivery by mail. A Texas law that went into effect on December 2 bans prescribing abortion pills online and mailing them to patients in the state. Providers who break it could be jailed or fined up to $10,000. Regardless of how the Court rules, women will keep getting abortions, as they did before and after abortion was criminalized in the U.S. and before Roe. There will be protests and marches and underground networks and sympathetic providers willing to break what they know to be unjust laws. Those who refuse to be bullied into abandoning their patients will be threatened, prosecuted, jailed, or worse. That is why we cannot afford resignation or childlike deference to institutions that have outlived their usefulness, like the Supreme Court. An unelected, unrepresentative, and thoroughly politicized entity willing to endanger pregnant women, their children, and abortion providers has no moral authority. We are not vessels or chattel; we are people, with lives as real and complicated and meaningful to our families and communities as those of any other human being. Reactionary judges are not just threatening choice or women’s health care or a specific medical procedure; they are calling into question our fundamental humanity. There is no reason, especially in the age of the abortion pill, to sit back and let them. There will always be disagreement on the morality of abortion. But the personhood of women and those who care for them is not up for debate. [post_title] => Women are people, no matter what the Supreme Court says [post_excerpt] => Anyone serious about defending the rights and dignity of all women needs to stop mourning and start organizing. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => women-are-people-no-matter-what-the-supreme-court-says [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3629 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Women are people, no matter what the Supreme Court says

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3247
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-10-07 22:29:15
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-10-07 22:29:15
    [post_content] => Abuse turns your world into a kind of sadistic haunted house setting—frightening but also extremely disorienting

A police officer’s body cam captured a young woman standing on the side of the road, sad and sheepish, the sun in her eyes. Her relationship was on the rocks, but she was earnestly telling the officer that she wanted things to work out, she wanted them to be OK. It looked like an unfortunate incident, a stumble on the way to a great adventure, that would soon be behind her. A few weeks later, however, the pretty woman in the footage would be dead.

The tragedy of 22-year-old Gabby Petito seemed, at first glance, to be entirely preventable. Before she disappeared while on a cross country trip with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, witnesses saw him slap Petito. This is how the police became involved. 

Petito was an ambitious young woman, originally from New York State, who dreamed about being a travel influencer. To that end, she set out on a cross-country trip alongside her fiancé, documenting their journey along the way. Not all seemed well in their relationship, however, and her family grew suspicious when Petito stopped communicating with them. When Laundrie returned to his home in Florida without Petito, but still in possession of her travel van, it became clear that something horrible had happened.

Petito’s body was found in Wyoming a few weeks after Laundrie returned. Police have ruled her death a homicide; as of this writing, her fiancé remains missing. It is unclear whether he has harmed himself or is simply on the run from the authorities. 

The footage of the police encounter that took place in Moab, Utah, weeks before Petito went missing, gives us plenty of clues as to what may have transpired between the young woman and her fiancé. It is a tragically familiar sight to anyone with experience in domestic violence, but it is even more heartbreaking in hindsight:
  Laundrie is calm and pleasant when speaking with the officers. Petito looks like she is emotionally unstable, but she is clearly heartbroken and dying of shame—the typical response of a woman who is used to being belittled and told that everything that happens to her is her fault. The police are courteous, polite, and clearly sympathetic, but they don’t see the need to put anyone in handcuffs. No one is giving them an explicit reason to do so. The police are focusing on de-escalating the situation, and appear to be succeeding. They believe that what is happening before them is a mental health crisis first and foremost—especially because Petito, at one point, admits to slapping Laundrie—and their actions are consistent with that. In light of what ultimately happened to Petito, the internet cried foul over the police encounter. If only the cops had taken the situation more seriously, the wisdom went, Petito would still be alive.  It’s a noble and understandable sentiment, but as someone who surveyed her own hellish, seven-year-long abusive relationship, I am not sure if it is the correct one.  Human beings have always loved our stories of good and evil to be uncomplicated, and by increasing both the speed and frequency of communication, social media has in particular amplified demand for the simplest of narratives. In the case of tragic stories like Petito’s, it feels only natural to say that what happened to her could have easily been prevented. This narrative is bolstered by the fact that Petito was young, attractive, and white — which is why her case immediately received national attention.  “Missing white woman syndrome” is very much a real phenomenon, particularly when the white woman happens to be young, attractive, and from the sort of background that, while not necessarily wealthy, can be described as “good” or “upstanding.” Some have wondered whether the incident with the police would have gone down differently if Petito and/or her fiancé had been, for example, Black.  Would both of them have been criminalized? Would there have been a chance of the officers being more harsh on the fiancé, hence preventing a murder? The history of policing with regard to domestic violence tells us that a tougher response by officers would not have necessarily saved anyone. In general, policing alone does not appear to be sufficient to solve the problem of domestic violence, and frequently, much depends on luck. The idea that domestic violence outcomes can sometimes depend on blind luck alone is, of course, completely detestable to us. Why should Petito — or any woman, or any abuse victim — have to depend on luck? Why couldn’t her horrifying trajectory have just been stopped? When reviewing the body cam footage, I was struck by the fact that at one point, Petito told a police officer that her boyfriend didn’t really believe she could pull off her dream of building a website and becoming a well-known travel influencer. “He doesn’t really believe I can do any of it,” she says at one point, looking both desperate and desperate to please, an expression I have caught on my own face in videos and pictures that documented my highly volatile past. Two things stuck out: Petito was far away from home, and essentially under Laundrie’s full control. Yet she was also embarking on an ambitious project, which must have made Laundrie feel as though his control was slipping.  The night my husband almost killed me, I too was far away from home, on vacation on the island of Crete, one of my favorite places on earth. That day, I had submitted a new play to a festival, a piece of work my director husband had praised highly. Yet the mere fact that I had written and submitted it resulted in dark feelings of jealousy and resentment in my husband, who felt that I was growing too successful, too fast.  A few drinks into a moonlit summer night, he grew more and more furious with me, until he could no longer contain his anger and he attacked me physically. The hotel owner called the police, an act that almost certainly saved my life that night. When the police interviewed me, they could see the bruises already blooming on my body and had eyewitness accounts to go on. But, much like Petito, I was too mortified to press charges. The fact that my then husband had bruises himself — from when I had, very unsuccessfully, tried to defend myself, much as Petito had apparently done — made the situation murkier. In the light of day, my guilt overwhelmed me, and I was ready to believe that I had provoked the entire incident, in spite of people who were ready to testify on my behalf. That’s the funny thing about abuse—it turns your world into a kind of sadistic haunted house setting, frightening but also extremely disorienting. Up is down and down is up. You are so demoralized and humiliated, that you stop seeing yourself as a full person deserving of the most basic of rights. The Greek police urged me to press charges, but they couldn’t force me to. In the Petito case, the Utah police had even less to go on.  My friend Joy Ziegeweid has spent nearly a decade working with domestic violence victims and is currently the supervising immigration attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Domestic Violence Project. Haunted by the body cam footage of Petito, I called her for an opinion on the case.  Joy reminded me that police involvement “does not always guarantee a good outcome” in a domestic violence situation. Again, we often like to think that it does, but even the most fair-minded officer can only respond in cases when the abuser takes specific actions. If a chillingly manipulative man like Laundrie is not physically attacking a woman in front of the police, and the woman herself does not say that she is in danger, there isn’t much law enforcement officers can do.  Of course, as Joy reminded me, there are some jurisdictions in which a victim does not need to press charges in order for the cops to move to make an arrest. “But that can have its own downsides,” Joy explained. A victim residing in such a jurisdiction may be less likely to seek help in the first place — because victims are gradually taught to place the abuser’s needs ahead of their own, they may not want to see them arrested at all.  According to available data, one in four women and one in nine men experience what is termed to be severe abuse—including physical violence, sexual violence, and/or stalking—in the United States. There has been widespread evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic has greatly exacerbated the problem. For most of us, domestic violence is a problem hidden from view, only spilling out into the public sphere when it is already too late, which is what appears to have happened in the Petito case.   Because of the nuanced and complex nature of domestic violence, solutions not involving law enforcement can be helpful, especially when the victim is not yet able to fully articulate or even realize the problem, which is a phenomenon I have experienced myself. Again, much depends on jurisdiction.  As Joy reminded me, in New York State one can obtain a protective order through family court without involving the police. “But the police can then be called to enforce it,” she said. Availability of beds in women’s shelters and other resources for victims struggling to break free is another important part of the equation, according to Joy.  Simply put, in many cases, a battered spouse or partner has nowhere to go. A battered spouse or partner is also under intense psychological stress. Both economic and psychological factors are cited as very important in determining good outcomes for domestic abuse situations. Without financial support and very specific, targeted counseling, victims frequently cannot be saved by cops alone, no matter how heroic or well-trained.  Hybrid solutions are required to tackle the problem of domestic violence because the problem itself is hybrid, with a victim’s reality constantly shifting. In the first months after I was able to leave my husband—only with the help of friends and family, I could never have done it on my own—I struggled with feelings of guilt, wanting to go back, and wondering if I had made a terrible mistake.  Only by slowly learning how to experience life without constant control—the same control plainly visible to me as I watched the Petito footage years later—did I begin to understand what I had been missing for all of those years: a full life as an adult woman, with her boundaries intact, and her physical safety no longer dependent on someone else’s moods.  The fact that I escaped is extremely lucky. Many things could have gone wrong for me, and simply didn’t. Sometimes, there are no clear cut answers to the question as to why one victim makes it and another one doesn’t, and decisions that seem right in the moment don’t necessarily withstand the test of time.  When I refused to press charges against my husband, all of those years ago, I thought I was doing the right thing. Sometimes, the true nature of a crime emerges only in hindsight. At the same time, I don’t know how criminal charges would have affected my situation. What if my husband had been released pending trial and been sufficiently enraged to kill me? What if financial and psychological resources hadn’t been available to me at the time, forcing me into an even worse situation with a man who had one more reason to hate and to dispose of me? While I believe that it is only natural to say that a murder was preventable, the truth is, what happened to Petito, and what is happening to countless other victims, many of them ignored by the press, requires the build up of a decent preventative infrastructure. Otherwise, we are only offering platitudes. [post_title] => As a survivor of domestic abuse, I recognized my own face in Gabby Petito's [post_excerpt] => The history of policing with regard to domestic violence tells us that a tougher response by law enforcement officers would not necessarily have saved her. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => as-a-survivor-of-domestic-abuse-i-recognized-my-own-face-in-gabby-petitos [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3247 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

As a survivor of domestic abuse, I recognized my own face in Gabby Petito’s

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 3086
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-08-05 16:33:54
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-08-05 16:33:54
    [post_content] => LGBT groups across the Middle East and North Africa rely on social media for networking, information, and empowerment. Now police are exploiting the platforms to arrest & detain them, often destroying their lives. 

Sarah Hegazy, an Egyptian queer feminist, raised a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo. Rania Amdouni, a Tunisian queer activist, protested deteriorating economic conditions and police brutality in Tunis. Mohamad al-Bokari, a Yemeni blogger in Saudi Arabia, declared he supported equal rights for all, including LGBT people.

The common thread in these cases is that all three were identified in social media posts, which allowed their governments to monitor their online activity and target them offline. What happened afterward ruined their lives.

In Sarah Hegazy’s now infamous photo she is hoisted on a friend’s shoulders, smiling elatedly as she waves a rainbow flag at a 2017 performance in Cairo by Mashrou’ Leila, the popular Lebanese band whose lead singer is openly gay. The photo was posted on Facebook and shared countless times, garnering thousands of hateful comments and supportive counter-messages in what became a frenzied digital debate.

Days later, the Egyptian government initiated a crackdown. Police arrested Hegazy on charges of  “joining a banned group aimed at interfering with the constitution,” along with Ahmed Alaa, who also raised the flag, and then dozens of other concertgoers. In what became a massive campaign of arrests against hundreds of people perceived as gay or transgender, Egyptian authorities created fake profiles on same-sex dating applications to entrap LGBT people, reviewed online video footage of the concert, then proceeded to round up people on the street based on their appearance.

Hegazy spoke about her post-traumatic stress after she was released on bail. She had been jailed for three months of pretrial detention, during which police tortured her with electric shocks and solitary confinement. They also incited other detainees to sexually assault and verbally abuse her. Fearing re-arrest and a prison sentence, she went into exile in Toronto, where, on June 14, 2020, she took her own life. The 30-year-old woman ended her short farewell note with the words: “To the world, you’ve been greatly cruel, but I forgive.”

Rania Amdouni was on the front line during the country-wide demonstrations in Tunisia that began in January 2021, protesting economic decline and rampant police violence. People who identified themselves as police officers took her photo at a protest, posted it on Facebook, and captioned it with her contact information and derogatory comments based on her gender expression.

Soon after, her profile was flooded with death threats, insults—including from a parliament member—and messages inciting violence against her. When police harassment extended to the street—outside restaurants she frequented and near her residence—she tried to file a complaint. At the police station, officers refused to register her complaint, then arrested her for shouting.

Tunisian security forces also targeted other LGBT activists at the protests with arrests, threats to rape and kill, and physical assault. LGBT people were smeared on social media and “outed”—their identities and personal information exposed without their consent. The offline consequences were catastrophic—people lost their jobs, were expelled from their homes, and even fled the country.

Amdouni was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine. Though released upon appeal, she reported suffering acute anxiety and depression as well as continued harassment online and in the street.

Mohamed al-Bokari traveled on foot from Yemen to Saudi Arabia after armed groups threatened to kill him due to his online activism and gender non-conformity. While living in Riyadh as an undocumented migrant, he posted a video on Twitter declaring his support for LGBT rights; this prompted homophobic outrage from the Saudi authorities and the public. Subsequently, security forces arrested him.

He was charged with promoting homosexuality online and “imitating women,” sentenced to 10 months in prison, and faced deportation to Yemen upon release.  Security officers held him in solitary confinement for weeks, subjected him to a forced anal exam, and repeatedly beat him to compel him to “confess that he is gay.” Al-Bokari is now safely resettled, with outside help, but remains isolated from his community and cannot safely return home.

Across the Middle East and North Africa region, LGBT people and groups advocating for LGBT rights have relied on digital platforms for empowerment, access to information, movement building, and networking. In contexts  in which governments prohibit LGBT groups from operating, activist organizing happens mainly online, to expose anti-LGBT violence and discrimination. In some cases, digital advocacy has contributed to reversing injustices against LGBT individuals. But governments have been paying attention, and they have a crucial advantage—the law is on their side.

Most countries in the  region have laws that criminalize same-sex relations. Even in the countries that do not—Egypt, ironically, is one of them—spurious “morality laws,” debauchery and prostitution laws are weaponized to target LGBT people.

When I was documenting the systematic torture of LGBT people in Egypt’s prisons, the targeting pattern was unmistakable: Egyptian authorities relied on digital evidence to track down, arrest, and prosecute LGBT people. People who had been detained told me that police officers, unable to find “evidence” when searching their phones at the time of arrest, downloaded same-sex dating apps on their phones and uploaded pornographic photos to justify keeping them in detention. The cases I documented suggest a policy coordinated by the Egyptian government online and offline, to persecute LGBT people. One police officer told a man I interviewed that his entrapment and arrest were part of an operation to “clean the streets of faggots.”

In recent years, government digital surveillance has gained traction as a method to quell free expression and silence opponents. Concurrently, the application of anti-LGBT laws has extended to online spaces—regardless of whether same-sex acts occur—chilling even the digital discussion of LGBT issues.

The consequences of digital surveillance and online discrimination spiked for LGBT people just as the Covid-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures closed down groups that had offered safe refuge, diminished existing communal safety nets, threatened already dire employment and health access, and forced individuals to endure often abusive environments.

In Morocco, a campaign of “outing” emerged in April 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ordinary citizens created fake accounts on same-sex dating apps and endangered users by circulating their private information, alarming vulnerable groups. LGBT people, expelled from their homes by their families during a country-wide lockdown, had nowhere to go.

Activist organizations in the region play a significant role in navigating these threats and responding to LGBT people’s needs, regularly calling upon digital platforms to remove content that incites violence and to protect users. Yet in most of the region, these organizations are also hobbled by intimidation and government interference.

In Lebanon, for example, a gender and sexuality conference, held annually since 2013, had to be moved abroad in 2019 after a religious group on Facebook called for the organizers’ arrest and the cancellation of the conference for “inciting immorality.” General Security Forces shut down the 2018 conference and indefinitely denied  non-Lebanese LGBT activists who attended the conference permission to re-enter the country. The crackdown signaled the shrinking space for LGBT activism in a country which used to be known as a port in a storm for human rights defenders from the Arabic-speaking world.

These are not isolated incidents in each country. When state-led, they often reflect government strategies to digitalize attacks against LGBT people and justify their persecution, especially under the pretext of responding to ongoing crises. It is no coincidence that oppressive governments in varied contexts across the region are threatened by online activism — because it works.

Exposing these abusive patterns highlights the urgency of decriminalizing same-sex relations and gender variance in the region. Instead of criminalizing the existence of LGBT people and targeting them online, governments should safeguard them from digital attacks and subsequent threats to their basic rights, livelihoods, and bodily autonomy.

Meanwhile, digital platforms have a responsibility to prevent online spaces from becoming a realm for state-sponsored repression. Corporations that produce these technologies need to engage meaningfully with LGBT people in the development of policies and features, including by employing them as engineers and in their policy teams, from design to implementation.
    [post_title] => ‘Clean the streets of faggots’: governments in the Middle East & North Africa target LGBT people via social media
    [post_excerpt] => Most Middle Eastern countries have laws that criminalize same-sex relations. In cases where they do not, police weaponize spurious 'morality' laws to target LGBT people.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => clean-the-streets-of-faggots-governments-in-the-middle-east-north-africa-target-lgbt-people-via-social-media
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3086
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

‘Clean the streets of faggots’: governments in the Middle East & North Africa target LGBT people via social media

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 2949
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-07-23 03:19:22
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-07-23 03:19:22
    [post_content] => Turkish podcasts that host frank conversations about sexuality are smashing taboos and filling information vacuums. 

If her medium were television or radio, Hazal Sipahi would not be permitted to host her weekly program about sexuality in Turkey.

Thanks to podcasts, which have not yet fallen under the control of the country’s notoriously strict broadcasting rules and regulations authority, Sipahi’s audience gets to listen to “Mental Klitoris” every week.

“I wouldn’t be able to call a ‘penis’ a ‘penis’ on a traditional radio frequency,” said the 29-year-old doctoral candidate from Bursa Province, in northwestern Turkey.

Each week on her show, she discusses issues like sexual consent and positions, sex toys, health, abuse, gender, preferences, and pleasure. Her approach, Sipahi said, is “minimum shaming and maximum normalization of sexuality.”

“Sexuality has always been a favorite subject I could easily talk about,” she said. It is not, however, a subject she could discuss freely outside her social circle. In Turkey, the pervasive attitude toward open discussions about sexual intimacy and sexuality is still very conservative. Turkish schools do not provide any sex education besides the biological facts.

[caption id="attachment_2959" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Hazal Sipahi, host of the podcast "Mental Klitoris."[/caption]

When she was a child growing up in provincial Turkey, Sipahi said, sexuality was only discussed in whispers; but as soon as she could speak English, she found an ocean of sexuality content available on the internet.

“I searched for information online and found it, only because I was curious,” she said. “I also learned many false things on the internet, and they were very hard to correct later on.”

For example, Sipahi explained, “For so long, we thought that the hymen was a literal veil like a membrane.” In Turkey there is a widespread belief that once the hymen is “deformed,” a woman’s femininity is damaged, and she somehow becomes less valuable as a future spouse.

“Mental Klitoris” is both Sipahi’s public service and her means of self-expression. She uses her podcast to correct misunderstandings and disinformation, to go beyond censorship and to translate new terminology into Turkish.

“I really wish I had been able to access this kind of information when I was around 14 or 15,” she said.

More than 45,000 people listen to Mental Klitoris, which provides them with access to crucial information in their native tongue. They learn terms like “stealthing,” “pegging,” “abortion,” “consent,” “vulva,” “menstruation,” and “slut-shaming.” Sipahi covers all these topics on her podcast; she says she’s adding important new vocabulary to the Turkish vernacular.

She’s also adding a liberal voice to the ongoing discussion about feminism, “Which became even stronger in Turkey after #MeToo.” She believes her program will lead to a wave of similar content in Turkey.

“This will go beyond podcasts,” she said. “We will have a sexual opening overall on the internet.”

Inspired by contemporary creatives like Lena Dunham (“Girls”), Michaela Coel (“I Might Detroy You”),  Tuluğ Özlü, an Istanbul native, says her audience’s hunger to hear a conversation about sexuality is unmissable.

In 2020, Özlü launched a weekly talk series called “Umarım Annem Dinlemez,” (“I Hope My Mom Isn’t Listening”). With over a million listeners, it is now the third-most popular podcast on Spotify Turkey. It’s mostly about sex.

[caption id="attachment_2980" align="alignleft" width="413"] Tuluğ Özlü[/caption]

Asked to describe how she feels when she crosses the barriers created by widely shared social taboos about human sexuality, Özlü, who lives in Istanbul’s hip Kadikoy neighborhood, answered with a single word: “Free.”

“It makes me feel I’m not obligated to keep it in, and it makes me feel free,” she says. “As I feel this, I scream."

In one episode of her podcast, she discussed group sex with Elif Domanic, a famous Turkish designer of erotic fetish lingerie. In another, the topic was one-night stands.

Özlü brings prominent actresses on air, as well as her friends. Once she invited her mother on the program. The two engaged in a frank discussion about sexuality—in what was surely an unprecedented event in Turkish broadcasting.
Rayka Kumru is a sexologist, sexual health communication and knowledge translation professional who was born and raised in Istanbul and now lives in Canada. She had the rare good fortune to be raised in a home where questions about sex were, to some extent, answered openly. She says she has made it her mission to provide information about the subject in a straightforward, compassionate and shame-free manner. The lack of access to information about sex and sexuality in her native country, Kumru said, was “unacceptable.” [caption id="attachment_2977" align="alignleft" width="541"] Rayka Kumru[/caption] Kumru said one of the current barriers to freedom in Turkey was the lack of access to comprehensive sexuality education, information and skills such as sex-positivity, critical thinking around values and diversity, and communication about consent. She circumvents that barrier by informing her viewers and listeners about them directly. “Once connections and a collaborations are established between policy, education, and [particularly sexual] health, and when access to education and to shame-free, culturally specific, scientific, and empowering skills training are allowed, we see that these barriers are removed,” Kumru explains. Otherwise, she says, the same myths and taboos continue to play out, making misinformation, disinformation, taboos, and shame ever-more toxic.
Sukran Moral has first-hand knowledge of Turkey’s toxic discourse on sexuality since she first achieved public recognition in the late 1980s, first as a journalist and writer and later as an artist, sparking heated debates. One of her most infamous pieces of work is an eight-minute video installation called “Bordello,” in which she stands on Zurafa Street, the historic location of Istanbul’s brothels, wearing a transparent negligee and a blonde wig, while men leer at her. She said that one of Turkey’s largest newspapers at the time, Hürriyet, labeled her a “sex worker” after that performance. Moral moved to Rome to escape death threats; she stayed there for years. [caption id="attachment_2982" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Şükran Moral[/caption] When it comes to female sexuality, Moral said, Turkey’s art scene is still conservative. “There’s self-censorship among not only creators, but also viewers and buyers, so it’s a vicious cycle.” Part being an artist, particularly one who challenges the position of women, she said, is seeing a reaction to her work. “When art isn’t displayed,” she asked, “how do you get people to talk about taboos?” Turkish academia also suffers from a censorship of sex studies. Dr. Asli Carkoglu, a professor of psychology at Kadir Has University, said it was not easy finding a precise translation for the English word “intimacy” in Turkish. “There’s the word ‘mahrem,’” she said, but that term has religious connotations. The difficulty in interpretation, she explains, illustrates the problem: In Turkey, intimacy has not been normalized. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) have many times expressed  support for gender-based segregation and a conservative lifestyle that protects their interpretation of Muslim values. Erdogan, who has has been in power since 2003, has his own ways of promoting those values. “At least three children,” has long been the slogan of Erdogan’s population campaign, as the president implores married couples to expand their families and increase Turkey’s population of 82 million. “For the government, sex means children, population,” Dr. Carkoglu explained. Dr. Carkoglu believes that sex education should be left to the family, but “when the government acts as though sexuality is nonexistent, the family doesn’t discuss it. It’s the chicken-and-egg dilemma,” she said. So, how do you overcome a taboo as deep-rooted as sexuality in Turkey? Carkoglu believes that that the topic will have to be normalized through conversations between friends. “That’s where the taboo starts to break,” she said. “Speaking with friends [about sexuality] becomes normal, speaking in public becomes normal, and then the system adapts.” But for many Turks, speaking about sexuality is very difficult. Berkant, 40, has made a living selling sex toys at his shop in the city of Adana, in southern Turkey, for the past two decades. But he said that he’s still too embarrassed to go up to a cashier in another store and say he wants to buy a condom. “It doesn’t feel right,” he said, adding he doesn’t want to make the cashier uncomfortable. He is seated comfortably at his desk as we speak; behind him, a wide selection of vibrators are arrayed on shelves. Berkant and his older brother own one of three erotica shops in Adana. Most of their customers are lower middle class; one-third are female. “Many of them are government workers who come after hearing about us from a friend,” he said. The shopkeeper said female customers phone in advance to check whether the shop is “available,” meaning empty. He said he often refers women who describe certain complaints to a gynecologist. “I see countless women who are barely aware of their own bodies,” he said. Dr. Doğan Şahin, a psychiatrist and sexual therapist, said that the information women in Turkey hear when they are growing up has a lot to do with their avoidance of discussions about sex, even when the subject concerns their health. [caption id="attachment_2971" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Advertisement for men's underwear in Izmir, Turkey.[/caption] Men don’t really care whether the woman is aroused, willing or having an orgasm, he said. Unless the problem is due to pain, or vaginismus, couples rarely head to a therapist, he adds. “[Women who grew up hearing false myths] tend to take sexuality as something bad happening to their bodies, and so, they unintentionally shut their vaginas, leading to vaginismus. This is actually a defense method,” he told The Conversationalist. “They fear dying, they fear becoming a lower quality woman, or that sex is their duty.” While most Turkish women find out about their sexual needs after getting married, the doctor says that, based on research he completed about 10 years ago, men tend to fall for myths about sexuality by watching pornography, which plants unrealistic fantasies about sex in their minds. “Sexuality is also presented as criminal or banned in [Turkish] television shows. The shows take sexuality to be part of cheating, damaging passions or crimes instead of part of a normal, healthy, and happy life.” He recommends that couples talk about sexuality and normalize it. Talking is crucial, and so is the language used in those conversations. Bahar Aldanmaz, a Turkish sociologist studying for her PhD at Boston University, told The Conversationalist why talking about menstruation matters. “A woman’s period is unfortunately seen as something to be ashamed of, something to be hidden,” she said. (According to Turkey’s language authority, the word “dirty” also means “a woman having her period.”) “There are many children who can’t share their menstruation experience, or can’t even understand they are having their periods, or who experience this with fear and trauma.” And this is what builds a wall of taboo around this essential issue, the professor says. It is one of the issues her non-profit organization “We Need To Talk” aims to accomplish, among other problems related to menstruation, such as period poverty and period stigma. Female hygiene products are taxed as much as 18 percent—the same ratio as diamonds, said Ms. Aldanmaz. She adds that this is what mainly causes inequality—privileged access to basic health goods, the consequence of the roles imposed by Turkish social mores. “Despite declining income due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a serious increase in the pricing of hygiene pads and tampons. This worsens period poverty,” Aldanmaz says. She offers Scotland as an example of what would like to see in Turkey: free sanitary products for all. During Turkey’s government-imposed lockdown in May 2021, several photos showing tampons and pads in the non-essential sales part of markets stirred heated debates around the subject, but neither the Ministry of Family and Social Services nor the Health Ministry weighed in. “We are fighting this shaming culture in Turkey,” Aldanmaz says, “by understanding and talking about it.” [post_title] => Sexually aware and on air: Beyond Turkey's comfort zone [post_excerpt] => Turkish podcasts that host frank conversations about sexuality are smashing taboos and filling information vacuums.  [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => sexually-aware-and-on-air-beyond-turkeys-comfort-zone [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2949 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Sexually aware and on air: Beyond Turkey’s comfort zone

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 2872
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-06-30 22:44:26
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-30 22:44:26
    [post_content] => Living in Berlin, where the obsession with dieting and the pursuit of a perfect body type don't exist, led to a shift in thinking.

Bikini bodies and “hot girl summers”  have been hot topics across social media for the past month or so. Legacy media platforms have been publishing tips for how to lose the weight gained during the sedentary pandemic months, while exercise apps are marketing big discounts to incentivize us to lose weight. I find all this a bit troubling.

Like many other women who grew up in the 1990s, I was brainwashed by an industry that equated healthy with thin—and not today’s thin, but anorexic thin. These were the days of “heroin chic,” of Kate Moss wearing her Calvins below the hip to reveal pubic bones that protruded over her belt loops. My coming-of-age online was at the height of the “pro-ana” madness of the early aughts, and I succumbed to my own disordered habits in college, counting calories in the hope of reaching some absurd “goal weight.”

In the years that followed, my weight fluctuated with moves abroad, job changes, and shifts in eating habits and exercise. In Morocco I was slim, thanks to a vegetable-heavy diet and the fact that I had to walk everywhere. In Boston I joined a gym that I loved and discovered muscles I didn’t know I had. My mind grew healthier, but the culture around me didn’t. The message that there was an ideal body was clear. And though that body changed over time—the heroin chic aesthetic eventually giving way to the slender curves of Gwyneth Paltrow and later the robust curviness, and booty, of Beyoncé—the common denominator was that the ideal body was unattainable.

When I moved to Berlin in my early 30s, my thinking shifted dramatically. Berliners surely have their own ideas of what the perfect body looks like, but the pervasive diet and exercise culture that permeates US society simply doesn’t exist here; nor does the idea that there’s a single, ideal body shape. Going to the sauna, where all genders, ages, and body types mingle—either wrapped in towels or nude—allowed me a glimpse at a much wider range of bodies than I’d ever had the opportunity to see before. And seeing that people here were comfortable with their bodies changed my relationship to my own.

But US culture is pretty inescapable no matter where you are in the world, and for those of us working from home, online at all hours, the pandemic made it even more pervasive. As COVID-19 restrictions began to ease in the US, the talk of “hot girl summer” and the ideal bikini body penetrated my brain’s defenses. Despite all of the progress I’d made over the past decade in how I viewed and cared for my own body, I became increasingly preoccupied with my weight gain.

This is where it’s important to mention the unique circumstances under which I spent most of the pandemic. In 2017, I was diagnosed with a type of chronic leukemia for which the treatment plan is, at first, to “watch and wait.” To those who have experienced acute cancers, this may sound odd, but the logic is that the treatment is often harder on one’s body than the disease, and so it makes sense to wait until treatment becomes utterly necessary.

For me, that moment came just a month before the pandemic. Then, as I began to work with my doctor to make plans for treatment, everything was put on hold for a few months, and I was told to stay at home. 

When summer arrived Germany’s COVID-19 case numbers were low, so we began my treatment. By autumn my health was improving, but the virus was spreading rapidly and the government rolled out strict lockdown measures. Throughout our winter isolation, my body was healing, but my mental health was suffering. To sublimate, I turned to my favorite comfort foods (cheese, baguettes, pizza, and wine among them); and within a few weeks, I gained about 15 pounds. At first it didn’t bother me, but as summer hit with a vengeance and the diet-industrial-complex began its ad campaigns, it (no pun intended) began to weigh on me. I stopped weighing myself years ago and I don’t own a scale, so I judge my body based on how my size eight jeans fit; much to my dismay, they didn’t...at all.

And this is where it was imperative to put to task all of the tools I’d gained over the years, to remind myself that my body had not only survived a once-in-a-lifetime (I hope) pandemic, but had fought off cancer and won. Those extra pounds not only sustained me during a hard winter, but the cheese and wine and chocolate that put them there helped me at the end of long, stressful days stuck at home.

At first it wasn’t easy...but as the rainy spring finally turned to hot vaxxed summer and I began spending more time outdoors—and became more physically active—my mindset began to change. One afternoon shortly after lockdown ended in early June, I met some friends in a park. It was a bright, hot day and I put aside any thoughts of my thighs as I slipped on a favorite pair of short shorts. Later that evening we danced. Our winter-pale thighs jiggled—and not once did I think about mine or compare them to anyone else’s. 

Since the weather warmed, I’ve lost about half the weight without even trying, simply by spending as much time as possible outside and walking and cycling as much as I can. But I have decided that I don’t care anymore. I will go loudly and proudly into my vaxxed girl summer wearing whatever I feel like, not giving a second thought to whether my body fits the advertising industry’s definition of a “bikini body.” And I will be encouraging my friends to do the same.
    [post_title] => How I got over the anxiety of my pandemic weight gain and even had fun
    [post_excerpt] => Like many other women who grew up in the 1990s, I was brainwashed by an industry that equated healthy with thin—and not today’s thin, but anorexic thin.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => how-i-got-over-the-anxiety-of-my-pandemic-weight-gain-and-even-had-fun
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2872
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

How I got over the anxiety of my pandemic weight gain and even had fun

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 2847
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2021-06-24 17:25:51
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-24 17:25:51
    [post_content] => British Vogue's interview with the Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize laureate set off a storm of virulent criticism in her native Pakistan.

The July issue of British Vogue departs notably from the usual fare of supermodels, pop stars, and actresses. Wearing a traditional salwar kameez and matching head scarf, Malala Yousafzai—“survivor, activist, legend”—gazes serenely through honey-colored eyes. Her warm smile is slightly lopsided, a permanent reminder that she survived a gunman’s bullet to her head. She is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and one of the world’s most admired activists for the education of girls and women; and yet, she conveys neither artifice nor arrogance.

The interview, conducted by London-based journalist Sirin Kale, reads like the transcript of a lighthearted conversation between two young women sitting in a café. Malala, now 23 and just graduated from the University of Oxford, happily answers questions about what she likes to eat, how she spends her time, and what her plans are for the future.
 
View this post on Instagram
 

A post shared by British Vogue (@britishvogue)

But when asked about her romantic life Malala became so visibly uncomfortable that her interviewer felt as though she were “torturing a kitten.” In the extremely conservative area of northern Pakistan called Swat, where Malala was born and raised, falling in love or having a boyfriend is considered shameful and dishonorable. But, later, she nonetheless offers some ambivalent comments about marriage.

“I still don’t understand why people have to get married. If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why can’t it just be a partnership?”

In Pakistan, these anodyne comments set off a firestorm of virulent criticism. Social media users called her a “prostitute” and “traitor”; and the hashtag #ShameonMalala trended for days. Z-list celebrities attempted to capitalize on the Malala hatred by issuing sanctimonious statements about marriage, while newspaper columns analyzing the interview made headlines for weeks. A so-called preacher in the conservative north of Pakistan declared that he would assassinate the young woman for violating the sanctity of Islam. By now Malala is used to Pakistanis expressing outrage at what she does and says. But the magnitude of this backlash was particularly intense. Upper middle-class women, who tend to be more educated and thus supposedly more worldly, were particularly critical of Malala for voicing reservations about marriage. In Pakistani Facebook groups, they wrote that Malala’s head injury had probably caused brain damage; or they mocked her appearance, commenting that of course she was against marriage—with her disfigured face, she would never find a husband. How to explain this vicious torrent of outrage? Perhaps these well-heeled, well-educated urban women were lashing out because by questioning the value of marriage, Malala had implicitly criticized the institution from which most Pakistani women derive their identity, status, and privilege. Pockets of liberalism do exist in Pakistan. A 23-year-old woman from a rich family in Lahore, Islamabad or Karachi might be allowed to choose her spouse—even to date or have a boyfriend. But saving face is essential; cultural and religious standards must be upheld. Those who rebel against society’s mores are expected to do so discreetly. It’s a rare woman in Pakistan who remains single by choice. By questioning whether partnership and love should require religious and legal sanction, Malala unintentionally held up a mirror that reflected all the burdens and restrictions of marriage. That is why these women responded to the interview by having a complete meltdown: Their own internalized misogyny trumped whatever lip service they usually give to female solidarity and sisterhood. Their lambasting of Malala, the so-called “darling of the West,” was reminiscent of the ritual of “salvaging” in The Handmaid’s Tale, when the Handmaids gleefully pull on the rope that hangs the condemned woman to death. Of course Malala does have many supporters in her home country, where she’s often called the “Pride of Pakistan.” They counter the haters by holding up examples of Malala’s positive influence in Pakistan and the rest of the world—like the Malala Fund, mentioned in the Vogue interview, which is rebuilding schools in her native Swat, in several African countries, and in Gaza. Few people know about this important work, or that the Fund supports the work of policy reformists who are overhauling Pakistan’s creaky education system. Those who love Malala are happy that she survived the assassination attempt and thrived; that Pakistan’s military defeated the Taliban; and that something excellent can come out of Pakistan, a place where life is difficult and often grim. Pakistanis are under a lot of pressure these days. The country faces serious economic problems even as it tries to recover from decades of dictatorship and terrorism; matters are further complicated by the country’s continued involvement in geopolitical conflicts with India and Afghanistan. Salaries remain low even as inflation and taxes continue to rise. Quality education, health care, and job security are all in short supply. Working-and middle-class people feel the economic frustrations most acutely; for them, dignity and security are a mirage. On popular television talk shows broadcast each night, upper-class Pakistanis argue about the causes of their country’s malaise—e.g., corruption, government incompetence, and the erosion of moral values. But instead of looking for ways to strengthen the country internally, they blame external bogeymen such as India, “the West,” and anyone who seems to be working against Pakistan’s interests. Malala has become a lightning rod for these people. Every time she does something that makes the news, she’s accused of making the country look bad. The usual round of accusations and bizarre conspiracy theories are trotted out: Her shooting was a staged drama so she could obtain a foreign passport; she has been chosen by Western and Jewish overlords to become prime minister of Pakistan one day; her many prestigious awards are in fact compensation for the role she plays in a master plan to dismantle Pakistan altogether. They speculate that Malala is actively working against her own country. On the Vogue cover, Malala is traditionally but elegantly attired: She wears a crimson dupatta draped gracefully over her head and shoulders and a matching crimson kameez; the backdrop is the same shade of crimson—the color of blood, the color of revolution, of love—and she holds one hand up to her face, right where her facial muscles droop because of her injuries. She’s careful to portray herself visually as respectful of her Pashtun heritage. But it’s getting harder to keep her intelligent mind and her ideas as carefully curated. This tension will only grow as she navigates through life: In Pakistan, every word she says will be parsed and every action criticized. Having completed her formal education, Malala is now considering what she should do with the considerable money and influence she has accumulated over the last six years. Besides the Nobel Prize, there is the Malala Fund (Bill and Melinda Gates and Angelina Jolie are donors) as well as appearances at Davos and the United Nations. For some, this is too much power for a young woman from a valley in Swat, Pakistan. Her friends Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, and Emma (‘X’) Gonzalez, the Parkland shooting survivor and anti-gun activist, both of whom have also been targeted by vicious critics, can relate. Malala’s detractors often ask why other young victims of terrorism, especially boys, don’t receive the same treatment as the young woman from Swat. But most people don’t know what happened to these victims, whom they believe are stranded in Pakistan, locked out of the privilege and influence that Malala wields. Waleed Khan is a university student who was shot in a 2014 Taliban terrorist attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. Like Malala, Khan went to the UK for treatment and stayed on to pursue his education; Malala and her family supported him throughout his ordeal. In the wake of the controversy over the Vogue interview, Khan tweeted: “From a long time I have been seeing images of me and Malala circulating around. I would like to request everyone please stop this comparison. We can’t uplift one person by degrading the other. Malala is an inspiration for many young ppl like me and millions around the world.” With so many programs for improving the lives of girls funded by Western NGOs and foreign missions, many complain that boys are left behind. Some of this is fair criticism; but some is sexist backlash in a society accustomed to conferring automatic privilege upon boys and men. Elevating Malala above male victims of similar violence sparks fears about another Western conspiracy to rend Pakistan’s social fabric and make women more powerful than men. The degradation of others considered to have gained too much wealth or prominence is called Tall Poppy Syndrome, a term that originated in Australia. In Pakistan, Malala is the home-grown variety; both men and women want to cut her down because they think she’s gotten too big and gone too far. But not everyone reacts with so much jealousy or negativity to Malala. Many Pakistanis openly adore her; and the government of Pakistan gave her full support and security when she came to Pakistan on a secret trip in 2018. Hundreds of little girls study in the schools she has opened in the Swat Valley. Across the country, plenty of people recognize that those who shot Malala in the head are the real enemies of Pakistan. Malala rarely comments on this negativity, although when she came to Pakistan in 2018, she told the BBC that she couldn’t understand it. But in the three years since that visit, Malala has grown and evolved from a girl into a woman. The biggest sign that she’s ready for the next phase in her life, and that the hatred doesn’t faze her, is a meme, popular among millennials, that she tweeted a few days after the Vogue cover was released online. It’s a GIF of Elmo, the Muppet character, standing with his arms raised in front of a backdrop of flames dancing behind him. For Malala, this is the equivalent of a mic drop. [post_title] => Hating Malala is now 'en vogue' in Pakistan [post_excerpt] => The 23 year-old Nobel laureate's cover photo and interview for British Vogue set off a storm of virulent criticism in her native Pakistan. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => hating-malala-is-now-en-vogue-in-pakistan [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2847 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Hating Malala is now ‘en vogue’ in Pakistan