A Meditation on Death, Killing, and Possibility I knew my body was healing from the surgery when I found myself ready to engage with the world and posted on Facebook: I am always anti-zionist. And never an antisemite. And always an anti-racist feminist against...
I started writing this the day “Barbie” was opening in the theatres. I had not seen it yet, because I am writing less about the film and more about the cultural and political moment we inhabit as it opens. I went as soon as I finished an early draft, exactly one week...
Natalia Almada’s documentary essay film “Users” (2021) questions a mother’s deep ambivalence about technology. But the film’s aesthetics makes clear that she has already chosen technology. The film is the binational Mexican American director’s first shot in the United...
On Contemptuous Men and the Women who Fight Back A short note about the subtitle before I begin: it is interesting how these gender terms hold sometimes in all their simplicity and binary force. Other than the title, when I use the term woman/en it is inclusive of...
I haven’t thought about playing on the Brown High School girls basketball team in decades. But as I was thinking about the controversies surrounding the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Women’s Basketball Championship — racism, hood-talk, great...
March is Women’s History Month. It celebrates women's contributions, struggles, blocked opportunities, and ultimate triumphs. It is also a time for issuing empty promises that things will improve, a refrain often heard but only partially fulfilled. For Latinas,...
Julia sat in the basement of the Student Union at the University of Iowa engulfed in a circle of women college students wearing flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots, drinking coffee to power them through a study night at the university library. It was 1976. I was a...
Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, the U.S., Ukraine, South Africa, and… I started writing this before the latest decree by the Taliban banning women from education post-puberty. And while Iranian women were leading their revolution despite new tortuous rapes and...
The first time I walked down the streets of my neighborhood without a headscarf was a strange experience. Like many Iranians around me, I was never a Muslim in heart and I had never wore…
I had been contacted by a few Iranian women to speak with them just shortly after Mahsa Amini’s death and the demonstrations/revolution began. Then later I contacted them to ask whether the new decree to disband the “Morality Police” was of any real consequence for...
