On April 23rd, 2012, Mona Eltahawy wrote an article titled, “Why Do They Hate Us?” to protest the treatment of women in the Middle East. The article, featured in Foreign Policy magazine, prompted a variety of responses, ranging from admiration for the author’s courage to criticism for her portrayal of Egyptian men. In online Islamic …
Continue reading Functions of the Language Barrier as Protest in the Muslim Feminist Jihad
There was a time when I used to read the Qur'an daily for about 30 minutes. When I did this, I noticed myself changing and was forced to reduce the reading to twice a week. When I read "too often," I became calmer, more at peace, and I cared very little about troublesome events or material …
Continue reading “Violent” verses in the Qur’an don’t bother me anymore.
I'm actually not an incredible fan of anime, in that I've never really immersed myself in it, other than--of course--the obligatory elementary school obsession with Sailor Moon. But I've had friends who very much were, from elementary into high school. I went to a predominantly Asian and Latinx (thank God) high school rather than a …
Continue reading Anime Characters Don’t “Look White” and the Ridiculousness of White-as-Default
I have a lot of hair. Piles and piles of hair. It's gorgeous when I can muster up the energy between work and class and guest lectures and conferences and writing and playing piano and dancing in my bedroom and non-alcoholic pina coladas to take care of it. And there's so much of it; I'm …
During the time of the Prophet, women were encouraged to engage in housework, but it was seen as a charity, not as an obligation. The woman who cooked and cleaned was viewed as being generous with her labor. I'm not even kidding; you can look this up. Women who didn't know how to cook (those …
Continue reading You’re actually not even obligated to do housework.
Update: Most of the attackers in Cologne were white. "On Friday, the Cologne prosecutor Ulrich Bremer in fact told me that, of the 59 suspects pinpointed so far, just four are from war-torn countries (Syria and Iraq), only 14 are in custody, and nobody has yet been charged. Nearly 600 hours of CCTV reveals very little, …
Continue reading Racists Targeting Refugees Pretend to Care about Assaults in Germany and Sweden
Patriarchy will always perceive the actions of two groups of people as "rebellious"--women, and teenagers. Take note that although "rebellious" is denotatively defined as resisting authority, the connotation is that women and teenagers are disobedient and insubordinate for the mere the sake of resisting authority, and not for the grander revolutionary cause of upholding the …
the fatal feminist 