Rookie’s interview with Shelby Knox, feminist activist.

…encourage everyone to not be afraid to make your own path and not be afraid to ask for help when you need it and certainly never refuse to help others, because in the end our sisterhood is the most important thing that we have, and we have to build it in our generation. - Shelby Knox

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the feminist internets – everywhere, really – about the Republican “war on women.” The bevy of anti-choice legislation is absolutely that – Republicans intend to go after women. But I’m finding much of the feminist response hurtful in its conflation of “women” and “people who can make babies.”

pptexastour:

As the old saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas — including the threat to women’s health.

One in four Texas women is uninsured. Texas has the third-highest rate of cervical cancer in the U.S. And Texas has some of the worst laws in the country aimed at shaming and demeaning reproductive…

Dee Rees’ debut film, Pariah, has rightfully been celebrated for its tender coming-out and coming-of-age story of a shy yet sexually curious 17-year-old African-American girl, Alike (Adepero Oduye).

An unprecedented black LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) success at the Sundance Festival in January, the film was immediately picked up by Focus Features for distribution and has since received two nominations for the Spirit Awards, which recognize independent film. In November, Rees was awarded breakthrough director of the year at the Gotham Awards.

Clearly, the movie’s positive critical reception owes much to the brilliant dramatic performances of newcomers Oduye and Pernell Walker, veterans Charles Parnell and Kim Wayans, Bradford Young’s beautiful cinematography and Rees’ subtle yet sophisticated depiction of Alike and her middle-class African-American family’s coming to terms with her lesbian identity.

But Pariah is also indebted to a cadre of often overlooked but no less important documentaries and coming-out films released during the height of black lesbian filmmaking from 1991 to 1996.

chescaleigh:

I got this amazing email today and just had to share

Dear Franchesca,

First of all, I loved your video, Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls. It was so funny and well done. As a white woman not only did it make me laugh but it also made me think, “have I ever said something like that?” And…

Ms. Clinton’s 1995 speech, given when she was the First Lady, is amazing. I don’t know whether to find it sad or inspiring, in that so much of its argument remains timely:

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed — and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.

It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.