sexual violence
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A New Kind of Superhero
Not your average comic, Priya’s Shakti is a new graphic novel out of India created to combat gender-based violence and fight the patriarchy. The hero, Priya, is a rape survivor who empowers women with help from the Hindu goddess Parvati…
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The Disappointing Grandfather
After hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box…
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Counting Bodies
The violences that women fear and the violences that women carry are violences of objectification, of involuntary disembodiment. The transformation of a human into a thing.
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Tramp
On what would turn out to be the eve of the death of the recent gang rape victim in Delhi, my family and I gathered together to watch a Hindi film that my parents had ordered on Netflix. The 1951…
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In the Wound Lies the Gift
At 13, I never hear anyone use the words “slut, whore, bitch,” until they are said to me, about me. Brain damage, in one area of my skull. Straight A’s in the other.
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Eleven
We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing…
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What We Hunger For
I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong.
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On Portraying Sexual Violence
The Millions has an essay on sexual violence and its literary and cinematic representations. Is it better to represent sexual violence through a code of silence, through allusions and subtlety or explicitly? Books and films that portray sexual violence diverge…
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Still with the Scarlet Letters
Last week journalist Mac McClelland wrote a brutal, exceptional essay for Good where she plainly discussed her experience with PTSD and her desire for violent sex as one means of coping with the atrocities she had witnessed as a human rights…
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The Careless Language of Sexual Violence
There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are, I suppose, matters of scale.