You’re not allowed to speak much, and you don’t know which language to speak when you can. Recovery from trauma is finding the words.”- Rebecca Mott (2021), writer, poet and survivor of prostitution 'More listened to dead than alive'. A 'collage' by French feminist in the Paris banlieue. Photography: my own. A philosophical investigation on… Continue reading Testimony, Violence, and Silence – An Examination of Agamben and His Critics
This post is about a presentation I gave last June at the Fonds Ricœur Summer Workshop at the UCD (University College Dublin). I had the same questions, the same goal - demonstrating that male violence is a type of atrocity that brings about its unique challenges to the question of testimony (and to women and girls’ lives of course) - but I responded to a different author, Paul Ricœur.
Photography: my own. 'Ma non troppo' in Italian means 'but not too much'. Let's be feminist but not too much. Let's demand things, but not that much. Prostitution is bad but not that bad. Pornography is bad but not bad enough to stop it, etc. (Amia Srinivasan and others could say). Asthe glass slips from… Continue reading The Right to Sex: A Lesson in ‘Pragmatic’ Feminism
Abandon hope all ye who enter here Dante Ordinary people do not know that everythingis possible. David Rousset – L’univers concentrationnaire, 1946 Photography: my own. Years ago at school, my course mates and I were assigned to read two novels by the feminist writer Dacia Maraini. In the first, she recounted her rape. In class discussions,… Continue reading New Feminist Book Breaks the Silence on Male Torture of Women
Stereotyping is a printing technique developed in the 18th century. A stereotype is a solid plate of metal where letters and illustrations are tightly fit together to be reproduced indefinitely on paper. Metaphorically, a stereotype is a prejudiced cliché. A preconceived and oversimplified vision of reality, a stereotype is an image that only exists in our… Continue reading Welcome to the Sex Stereotype Clinic
Trials of HIV prevention medications used thousands of vulnerable women in Africa and Asia, leaving some infected and sometimes in collaboration with pro-prostitution organizations. Photography: my own Since the 1980s, women in prostitution in Africa and Southeast Asia have been used to test new solutions against HIV. Despite evidence of harm, the nonoxynol-9 spermicide was… Continue reading Prostituted Women Experimented on For Decades in USA-funded HIV Trials Overseas
"Where did my confidence go?" asked the little girl. She looked under the bed, but only saw monsters. She looked inside her closet, but only found insecurity. She looked at her bookshelf, but only saw absence.
This post complements the article published on 4W.pub. It is based on a speech delivered in front of the UN CEDAW expert committee. In previous presentations, I had looked at how speech is used by men to define womanhood, in this one I've looked at how sight and images are used to define womanhood, hence the supplement.
we need to develop a feminist understanding of time. Indeed, the first specificity of women’s condition, compared to that of other male and female oppressed groups, is that the atrocities men commit against us are not historicised. We hear ‘prostitution has always existed’, ‘rape has always existed’. We are made to understand that male violence is like God: it never began so it can never end. Obviously, that's a lie.
In a small teeny tiny town in the grand glorious gorgeous woods, lived a girl everyone knew as Little Red Riding Hood. She was called that way because of the red hood she never removed. Her mama had sown it for her, that's why it was so precious.
Borazan Sesli 