"Questions of gender rights and gender justice are not new to the Middle East, and neither are struggles that we now read under the sign of “feminism.” In fact, a large portion of the laws that are often regarded as oppressive to women and LGBTQ Arabs and/or Muslims are relatively new. They were introduced to the region via the Napoleonic code and the codification and the severe hollowing out of the shar‘ia in modern history. For example abortion, long considered a question of women’s rights in the Western world due its twinned history with Catholicism and Christianity more broadly, was not illegal across the Arab world until the rise of the nation state. Some traditions of fiqh continue take a position on abortion that American feminists might wish could be extended to the United States today. In addition, jurists have and do struggle to understand and promote “progressive” notions of male and female relations and to make room for nonconforming gender persons in the region. In fact, scholars such as Paula Sanders have shown us that several centuries ago Islamic jurists were developing a system of accommodation for hermaphrodites and nonbinary gendered peoples in Islamic communities."

-Maya Mikdashi, in her article How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East.

Read this.

(via hizbullahtwerkteam)

REQUIRED READING

(via actyourrage)

(Source: dreamingofhalab)

"Through a career that has included crotch-grabbing, nudity, BDSM, Marilyn Monroe fetishizing, and a 1992 book devoted to sex, Madonna has been viewed as a feminist provocateur, pushing the boundaries of acceptable femininity. But Beyoncé’s use of her body is criticized as thoughtless and without value beyond male titillation, providing a modern example of the age-old racist juxtaposition of animalistic black sexuality vs. controlled, intentional, and civilized white sexuality."

All Hail the Queen? (http://bitchmagazine.org/article/all-hail-the-queen-beyonce-feminism#.UZvUyP56MrU.facebook)

(Source: rickstallion)

gyzym:

rob-anybody:

elandrialore:

Sulu: If you test me… You will fail.
Khan: In another life, we may have been friends.
*theater explodes*

i cannot overstate how amazing this would have been, HOW MUCH I WISH THIS HAD BEEN THE CASTING CHOICE, or how many times harold…

(Source: jovenistheworst)

"Government assistance in America is invisible until black people receive it. Then it becomes racialized, demonized and stigmatized."

Melissa Harris-Perry and Karen Finney (paraphrased), commenting on a recent New York Times editorial wherein black farmers were all but vilified as ‘lazy takers’ who gamed the system —for winning an historic discrimination lawsuit against the USDA: Pigford v. Glickman (via odinsblog)

So true. In fact, the entire capitalist system — all banking, all corporate operations, all military industry — is built on and based upon government assistance; or rather, much more than “assistance”, more like extreme government largesse by granting public funds from taxes and public resources to private interests.

Private banking relies entirely on credit, loans, underwriting, insurance, and political-military protection from the government. All corporate merchandise in the USA is moved and distributed on highways and roads built and maintained using public money. The telecom companies sell you mobile phone service using radio spectrum which belongs to the public and is granted to them by the government. Agribusiness is well-known to be subsidized. Big pharma relies on publicly funded research to isolate its private profit makers. There are no major areas of corporate America which are not entirely reliant on government assistance. And that’s not even getting into corporate tax breaks.

Yet god forbid Black people get any benefit from the government whatsoever, amounting in total to the tiniest trickle in relation to the government largesse extended to corporate America. Suddenly that is seen, within the prevailing racist US political discourse, as a burden upon society and sign of an imaginary racial pathology of laziness and dependency. Good one, white America.

(via zuky)

(Source: nbcnews.com)