Today is National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, which also com­mem­o­rates the anniver­sary of the Montréal Massacre in 1989. I am hon­oured to have been asked to read one of my poems at the Toronto Candlelight Vigil to mark the anniver­sary of this tragic event.

The fact is that vio­lence against women is an everyday reality for mil­lions of girls and women around the world. There are many kinds of vio­lence. The word “vio­lence” is related to the word “vio­la­tion” – and each time a woman’s right to be a full, self-determining human being is vio­lated because she is a woman, vio­lence against women is com­mitted. From media and adver­tising depic­tions of women as vapid damsels in dis­tress worthy of little more than objec­ti­fi­ca­tion for men’s plea­sure, to domestic abuse, work­place sexual harass­ment, date rape, mar­ital rape, the misogyny of reli­gious fun­da­men­talisms, and sexual assault and gender-based vio­lence, women, girls and trans people are still much more likely to be at the receiving end of vio­lence and vio­la­tion. These prob­lems are usu­ally worse for women who are not white, not from the upper-middle classes, and those of us who straddle mul­tiple social-cultural iden­ti­ties as immi­grants and chil­dren of immi­grants. Continue reading ‘National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women’»

This was written as part of a response to Martha Nussbaum’s opinion piece found here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiled-threats

I’d like to share my per­sonal view on the burqa (face mask) con­tro­versy. My views are not based on the black-and-white, binary, false dichotomy pre­sented too often by both sup­porters of the face-mask ban and those who wish to defend the garb.

Continue reading ‘The Burqa/Niqab ban controversy’»

…appar­ently, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante. [with Wikipedia Links & Mouse-over Tags]

It’s got 103 of the most inter­esting fig­ures of his­tory jux­ta­posed together, and in some cases, inter­acting with each other, in a time­less image. From Bill Gates to Plato, Bruce Lee to the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, Margaret Thatcher to Audrey Hepburn, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Sigmund Freud to Jack Kevorkian, Albert Einstein to Che Guevara, Charles Darwin dressed as Noah, to Osama Bin Laden and the 72 Houris. Check it out!

Originally painted by three Chinese artists: Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, in 2006; oil on canvas.

Came across this beau­tiful, artic­u­late and tal­ented Iranian-Canadian singer and activist, Nazanin Afshin-Jan:

and a *MUST WATCH* inter­view with her from AlJazeera English:

If you haven’t seen this yet, here’s your chance It’s a well researched crit­ical analysis of this cur­rent hot-button issue.

Aafia Siddiqui VS (Jews, Zarina Mari, Shazia Khalid and others) by Anas Abbas

A British MP has caused some con­tro­versy by pub­licly stating that pro­filing of Muslims is to be expected in the light of recent events:

He said: “I think most people would rather be pro­filed than blown up. It wouldn’t be vic­tim­i­sa­tion of an entire community.

What I like is that Muslim orga­ni­za­tions and Muslims with influ­ence are starting to finally speak up in main­stream society, bringing up impor­tant issues like the fact that many of the ter­rorist attacks hap­pening in the world today are being com­mitted by Muslims, and in the name of Islam.

What I don’t like is firstly that things have actu­ally come to this, and sec­ondly that pro­filing based on race or reli­gion could really back­fire. First of all, this opens a whole can of worms in terms of who is Muslim and who isn’t. Is it based on name? On one’s par­ents’ reli­gion? What’s next? Requiring people to put their reli­gion or reli­gious back­ground on their pass­ports? Like what was done to Jews in Soviet Russia? And how hard would it be for someone to bypass such a super­fi­cial system of checks: a change of name, a change of outfit?

I do think that people of cer­tain names, back­grounds, looks and ages will, and it could be easily argued, should, be scru­ti­nized more than the mostly super­fi­cial checks that air­line pas­sen­gers are sub­ject to. However, I think the issue needs to be approached intel­li­gently, to find effi­cient solu­tions (and there have to be many com­ple­men­tary solu­tions, there really is no one simple magic answer), that pre­cisely and suc­cess­fully help iden­tify and quar­an­tine those who intend to use public spaces as per­sonal, fatal soap boxes. We could start by hiring people of higher and more sophis­ti­cated edu­ca­tional back­grounds to screen pas­sen­gers, and we could invest in pro­viding training to air­port per­sonnel to better under­stand things like body sig­nals, psy­chology, etc.

All of which leads me to wonder if per­haps we’re headed for this.

Your thoughts?

Have you ever said, “I’m not gay, but…” or “I’m not bisexual, but…” as a dis­claimer before expressing how much you are attracted to someone of the same gender as you?

If you are pro­gres­sive, lib­eral, and you stand for LGBT rights, have you ever won­dered why you need to give a dis­claimer like that before expressing feel­ings that might qualify you as being bisexual?

I have.

First of all, as a bisexual woman (I prefer the term queer) who has been in rela­tion­ships with both men and women, and who is in a happy, long-term rela­tion­ship with a woman, I find it hurtful when some of my friends still qualify their own sexual desires for people of the same gender by first sep­a­rating them­selves from people like me. There’s nothing wrong with being het­ero­sexual, but there is some­thing very wrong with being het­ero­sexist, which is the idea that het­ero­sex­u­ality is the default, nat­ural, normal thing to be, and that it’s a black or white area with no variations.

If you are telling someone how you sup­port gay rights, you don’t need to keep qual­i­fying that with “I’m not gay or nothing, but…”. Similarly, if you are telling people that you are bi-curious, or attracted to someone of the same gender, then those of us who have put our lives on the line to be honest about sex­u­ality, would appre­ciate it if you could stop talking about this matter like it’s a hot potato that you are willing to sup­port in passing, but not willing to own, even when you your­self have feel­ings that would qualify you as bisexual.

Continue reading ‘(I’m not a queer or nothing, but…)’»

From Funny Or Die!

Gus Porter gets mauled by a bear, but he won’t let the socialist Canadian health care fix him up, so he’ll hike back to America.

Terry Eagleton is suf­fering from the racism of otherwise-liberal priv­i­leged, white, west­erners too afraid to speak up against bar­baric reli­gious prac­tices and beliefs.

That state is not too both­ered about what you believe, as long as it does not thwart the right of others to their beliefs.

<snip>

There should be laissez-faire in the realm of belief, just as there should be in the marketplace.

So nice of a person coming from white, western priv­i­lege to allow for such cul­tural rel­a­tivism for us lowly colo­nial sub­jects. It’s a good thing he’s not, say a woman in Swat, or a young girl in Mississauga, who are being flogged and even killed for not fol­lowing the beliefs of their par­ents and their communities.

So nice that he doesn’t have to live in Muslim ghet­toes even in the middle of a Western city and has to follow a script made up for his life by everyone except himself.

So nice of him to allow for the sub­ju­ga­tion of people like me because he’s too afraid of not appearing “lib­eral” enough to his dead, white, male mentors.

Solipsism becomes him.

A long but highly insightful con­ver­sa­tion between acclaimed authors Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji on the nature of belief, Islamism, the his­tory of Islam and Quran, and what to do in a world full of cra­zies on both the Islamist side and the racist west­erner side. Rational, thinking people of all vari­eties will enjoy this video… please watch in full, it’s worth it. Intelligent com­ments are welcome.