points.of.crossing

Mural by Alaa Awad. From The Buraqs of “Tahrir”, Mona Abaza, Jadaliyya.

Political poster call and response.

(via Ester Meerman)

Nawal el Saadawi at the women’s march in Tahrir, 20 April 2012. (photo by Gigi Ibrahim)

“The revolution came and we were very happy, but I believe nothing has changed. I am still censored on the television, for example. All the writers and journalists who are writing in the big newspapers are the same. They are Mubarak people! When you read Al-Ahram today or even Al Masry Al Youm, they have the same mentality: patriarchal, capitalist, classist. They are against women, against the poor. They are also hypocrites. … During the eighteen days in Tahrir, I was remembering when I was a child. I used to close my eyes and hear the millions chanting, ‘Noorid esqat el nezam.’ We demand the fall of the regime. This was my slogan when I was a child! My dream was to change the system. When people asked me what I wanted, I said, ‘I want to change the system.’ When I was a student in high school and also later in the faculty of medicine, I wanted to change the system. Now people ask me what my dream is and I say, ‘I want to change the system.’”

- From “The Particular Believer,” A Conversation with Nawal El Saadawi, Bidoun #25.

Khader Adnan, Araba, West Bank, 18.4.2012 (by activestills)

‘The police station where Khadija Hajji Diriye, in the background, works is like a Mogadishu version of “Hill Street Blues.” in Mogadishu. Veiled women and prayer-capped men People flow through the gates in a constant stream to take their seats at a big desk and make complaints — spousal abuse, stab wounds, contractual disputes, a missing TV. The officers type up reports with an ancient typewriter and occasionally investigate and make arrests do their jobs.’

(You’re welcome, NYT.  Anytime.)

Union of Revolutionary Artists, Tahrir Square, 30 November 2011.

(by Hossam el-Hamalawy)

“… note the variety of ideas, images, and fears that Islamic fundamentalism evokes in the American imagination: women wearing headscarves (now, burqas), the cutting off of hands and heads, massive crowds praying in unison, the imposition of a normative public morality grounded in a puritanical and legalistic interpretation of religious texts, a rejection and hatred of the West and its globalized culture, the desire to put aside history and return to a pristine past, and the quick recourse to violence against those who are different. In other words, the notion of fundamentalism collapses a rather heterogeneous collection of images and descriptions, linking them together as aspects of a singular socio-religious formation. Moreover, in their longstanding representation of Islam as violent spectacle (like a 1400-year-old train wreck), CNN and their competitors have managed to endow each one of these images with the power to immediately animate all of the others, each one a falling stone capable of bringing the avalanche of Islamic global terror down on the US. What allows this reduction is the idea that all of these phenomena are expressions of Islam in its dangerous and regressive form, its fundamentalist form. 

“… What is at stake here, however, is not simply a problem of definition, but of political strategy: that is, the reduction effected by terms like fundamentalism allows US public opinion in this moment to equate those who attacked New York and Washington with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, with those Islamic schools that impart a strict interpretation of Islam, with Muslim preachers who criticize the US for its liberal social mores, with Arab families in Detroit that have daughters who wear headscarves. In so far as these different actors and institutions may be thought of as different faces of a global fundamentalism, now increasingly associated with terrorism, they may also be conceived of as legitimate targets, whether for intelligence gathering or for aerial bombing.”

- Charles Hirschkind & Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2, Spring 2002.

(‘Infographic’ representing demographics in the current Egyptian parliament.)

“… the current deployment of a gender analytic is akin to studying the class grievances, backgrounds and anxieties of only half of the Egyptian or Syrian population, for example. The assumption that socio-economic class is only an analytic to study those that are not members of the privileged classes reproduces international and national political and economic dynamics, alliances, and interests. Likewise the division of gender justice from economic justice lends itself to debates on female ‘quotas’ in various parliaments that do not take into account the need for economic diversity among parliamentarians.”

- Maya Mikdashi, “The Uprising Will Be Gendered”

Community Rejuvenation Project mural in Oakland.

(via Eric Arnold)

That’s one way to go with that.

(by ganzeer)

Scissor Spider
Christopher Locke

TSA-confiscated scissors.

(website, via Colossal)

Riley, Robin L., Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt.  Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism.  London: Zed, 2008.

PDF edition here. (Zip file password: archive)

“Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism builds on the presentations, papers, and dialogue at [the October 2006 ‘Feminism and War’ conference held in Syracuse, NY] to reveal and analyze the complicated ways in which those in pursuit and justification of US wars continue to use gender, sexuality, race, class, nationalism, imperialism — and even invoke women’s liberation — to legitimize and continue those wars. Given the centrality of US imperial wars in the world today, it is impossible to understand ‘feminism and war’ on a global scale without understanding the specificities of the racist, heterosexist, and masculinized practices and ideologies mobilized by a USA in pursuit of economic and political hegemony. Feminists critiquing and organizing against war in most places in the world will thus need to contend with the effects of US imperial wars in their own backyards, whatever part of the globe they happen to be living in. The current wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and the threat of war against Iran, are a continuation of the many US wars of the last fifty years. … This is the context in which the essays in this volume examine and challenge US imperial wars crafted as rescue missions in the name of democracy and ‘civilization.’ These wars, with their disproportionate and annihilating effect on the lives of women, with the ensuing traffic in gendered bodies, with the manipulation of racialized discourses of male supremacy and female helplessness as justification, raise profoundly feminist issues, and require a complex, anti-imperialist feminist engagement.”

Contributors: Angela Y. Davis, Zillah Eisenstein, Jasbir Puar, Patricia McFadden, Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, Huibin Amelia Chew, Setsu Shigematsu, Anuradha Kristina Bhagwati, Eli PaintedCrow, Elizabeth Philipose, Alyson M. Cole, Nadine Sinno, Jennifer L. Fluri, Shahnaz Khan, Isis Nusair, Jennifer Hyndman, Berenice Malka Fisher, Leilani Dowell, Judy Rohrer, Nellie Hester Bailey, Berta Joubert-Ceci, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Leslie Cagan, Cynthia Enloe.