Over the past couple of years I've received some messages in my inbox asking for advice. I can't imagine why anyone would ask me, a straight woman, about advice coming out, except out of desperation and having nowhere else to turn. It breaks my heart to know I can't help you because I can't possibly …
Category: identity
Things That Make Me Happy
Sometimes when my hair is undone it looks something like this: Except it still grows down, not up, and the result is a "nightmare." To come across it in professional photography, even if it is just to showcase a hair salon, is such a funny feeling.
The Stealth Hijabi
If it isn’t clear already, I am not a hijabi. But while other young Muslim women would express disapproval (in a not-so-keen patriarchal tactic of pitting women against each other) at the trope of the hijabi who goes clubbing with her friends and wears vivid makeup while simultaneously donning a “modest” persona, I would almost …
Race and the Other Consequence
Sometimes I wonder if I love my state more than I love my country. In fact, not even all of California--just the Bay Area specifically; the rest of the state might as well be another to me. I suspect that I haven't felt loved here--after all, the city is a harsh and lonely place. There …
Maladaptive Daydreaming (Disorder)
Recently, compelled by the interests of one of the women I follow on twitter, I partook in quite a bit of reading about my Myers-Briggs Type, a psychometric typology test designed by psychologist Carl Jung, the result of which is for me is INFP. In digging through information about INFPs, I came across a page …
On sexual knowledge
Very briefly, I’d like to address the annoying and incessant reemergence of a peculiar social/unfortunately feminist phenomenon: the defining of sexual pleasure in rigid constraints and the application of these constraints to the criteria of a feminist accordingly. You may be familiar with it. Not long after Role/Reboot republished a post I had written months …
The Western Muslim Woman, Part III
The last installment. This little series has felt quite tentative, possibly because I’d attempted to discuss an expansive subject in three parts. An appreciative ‘thank you’ to anyone who tolerated the disorganized writing and disheveled thoughts between essays and finals. I hope that somewhere in the midst of it all I managed to make some …
the fatal feminist 