Reina Gattuso

  • Woman Imprisoned for Converting to Islam Tells Indian Supreme Court: “I Want Freedom”

    Woman Imprisoned for Converting to Islam Tells Indian Supreme Court: “I Want Freedom”

    Read the original article at Feministing.  On Monday this week, a young Muslim woman faced the Indian Supreme Court, finally allowed to speak after being imprisoned for converting to Islam and marrying a man of her choice. After months of petitions, news coverage, and speeches from everyone but her, she said laid out her demand clearly: “I want freedom.” In…

  • Begums, Buddies, and Bandits: Imaging Queer Histories and Imagining Queer Futures in Dedh Ishqiya

    Begums, Buddies, and Bandits: Imaging Queer Histories and Imagining Queer Futures in Dedh Ishqiya

    The full essay is published at Critical Collective, an Indian journal of art and visual culture.  In December 2013, under Delhi’s smoggy winter skies, the queer community gathered in response to bad news: The Supreme Court had just upheld Section 377 of the Indian penal code. Prohibiting all forms of sex besides heterosexual intercourse, the…

  • Here’s How Street Harassment Affects Women’s Mental Health—And How We Heal

    Here’s How Street Harassment Affects Women’s Mental Health—And How We Heal

    Read the full article at the Talkspace blog.  I remember what I was wearing: A blue tank top with a picture of a peacock, jean short-shorts, and flip-flops. I remember the weather: High summer, sweet grass scenting the air and the sun just beginning its slow descent to the horizon. I was walking down a…

  • We need to confront gendered violence in movement spaces.

    We need to confront gendered violence in movement spaces.

    Read the original article at Feministing. It’s easy to talk about gendered violence from conservative men because, well, their ideology is often consistent with their douchebaggery. When you’ve devoted your entire career to ranting against abortion rights on television or groping your way to a white-supremacist presidency, there’s a pretty clear and obvious connection between your stated values (sexist)…

  • What Does it Mean to Break Silence?

    What Does it Mean to Break Silence?

    Read the original article at Feministing. After the Trump — and the Cosby — and the Weinstein — and the Toback — revelations, we heard the same question asked over and over again: How can everyone know that sexual harassment and assault are happening, and still not admit that it is happening? Why are sexual assault and harassment so often “open secrets”?  When we say that rape culture is a…

  • Neoliberal Academia Shows its Ass: Harvard Rejects Manning, Jones, Unions

    Neoliberal Academia Shows its Ass: Harvard Rejects Manning, Jones, Unions

    Read the original article at Feministing Harvard’s been sucking this week, and this suckage provides an important reminder of why corporate higher education, for all its rhetoric about “innovation,” actually acts as a barrier to radical social change. First order of suckage: Recently, despite the fact that the History Department had initially accepted her and…

  • Pink’s Right. Sometimes You Just Want To Clock a Man With a Beer Bottle

    Pink’s Right. Sometimes You Just Want To Clock a Man With a Beer Bottle

    Find the original article at The Ladies Finger.  Sometimes, you just want to clock a man on the head with a beer bottle. This, at least, is the lesson I draw from Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink. And boy, is it true. The past few weeks have been one of those times. It’s the beginning of cooler…

  • Broad City’s Amorphous Partiality

    Broad City’s Amorphous Partiality

    Read the original article at The Advocate. Adrienne Rich was not writing in an age when women could video chat each other while riding their male partners cowgirl-style. But when she wrote about existence as a spectrum of decentralized pleasure—about the hands and the clit and the cunt, about the wrists and the toes rather…

  • Why are There so Many LGBT Youth in Prison?

    Why are There so Many LGBT Youth in Prison?

    Read the full original article at attn: For the thousands of LGBT youth in the American juvenile justice system, bullying is just the beginning. That’s because, while lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming (GNC) youth makeup five to seven percent of young people in America, they are 15 percent of young people in the juvenile justice…

  • Prison Justice is an LGBT Rights Issue

    Prison Justice is an LGBT Rights Issue

    Read the full article at attn: For the millions of LGBT people incarcerated each year, the sentence is only the beginning. Oftentimes, what happens behind bars is worse than what the state mandates. Five percent of LGBT people in America have been incarcerated in the past five years. That rate is almost double the 2.7 percent incarceration…