What to Do? I am writing especially thinking about Palestinian women. They have suffered so immeasurably and grotesquely while they have tried to care for their children and their pregnancies, while being malnourished, dehydrated, starved, and heartbroken while death...
Feminism
War Rape and the Question of Hamas
Israeli Zionist women have been speaking out these last few days to bring attention to the horrific rape of Jewish women, and the lack of outcry of feminists, for them, to this plight. They demand an indictment of Hamas and its sexual treachery towards women on...
From My Body to Yours, and Gaza to the World
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...
“Barbie”: An Anti-Racist Socialist Feminist Meditation
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...
Motherhood, Technology, and Natalia Almada’s “Users”
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...
Guilty of Sexual Abuse (But Not Rape?)
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...
LSU vs. Iowa: Black Female Bodies on the Basketball Court
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...
Women’s History Month: Latina Invisibility
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,...
Struggles, Solutions, Solidarities: Julia Reichert (1946-2022)
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...
Seeing Women-Led Revolutions
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...