“Please believe that I am falling apart.
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug-that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)”
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s children
(Source: trjoel, via kardashiansfuckyeah)
(Source: animal-factbook, via kardashiansfuckyeah)
(Source: princesconsuela, via saudi-barbie-deactivated2018101)
(Source: bitchycode, via kardashiansfuckyeah)
The Myth of Women's 'Empowerment'
For only $100, you can empower a woman in India. This manageable amount, according to the website of the organization India Partners, will provide a woman with her own sewing machine, allowing her to take the very first step on the march to empowerment. Or you can send a chicken. Poultry farming, according to Melinda Gates, empowers women in developing countries by allowing them to “express their dignity and seize control.” If chickens are not your empowerment tool of choice, Heifer International will, for $390, deliver an “enterpriser basket” to a woman in Africa. It includes rabbits, juvenile fish and silkworms.
The assumption behind all of these donations is the same: Women’s empowerment is an economic issue, one that can be separated from politics. It follows, then, that it can be resolved by a benevolent Western donor who provides sewing machines or chickens, and thus delivers the women of India (or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever in what’s known as the “global south”) from their lives of disempowered want.
[…]
In handing out chickens or sewing machines, Western feminists and development organizations can point to the non-Western women they have “empowered.” The non-Western subjects of their efforts can be shown off at conferences and featured on websites. Development professionals can point to training sessions, workshops and spreadsheets laden with “deliverables” as evidence of another successful empowerment project.
In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.
Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s poultry farming projects. Bill Gates has insisted that because chickens are small animals kept close to the home, they are particularly suited to “empowering” women. But researchers haven’t found that giving out chickens leads to any long-term economic gains — much less emancipation or equality for half the population.
[…]
On the global stage, a return to this original model of empowerment requires a moratorium on reducing non-Western women to the circumstances of their victimhood — the rape survivor, the war widow, the child bride. The idea that development goals and agendas should be apolitical must be discarded.
The concept of women’s empowerment needs an immediate and urgent rescue from the clutches of the would-be saviors in the development industry. At the heart of women’s empowerment lies the demand for a more robust global sisterhood, one in which no women are relegated to passivity and silence, their choices limited to sewing machines and chickens.
(via 997)
Michael Jackson leaves a shopping mall in Bahrain, January 2006
(Source: popculturediedin2009)
(Source: princesconsuela, via soleilcafe)