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Priya Kandaswamy | “Innocent Victims and Brave New Laws” from Nobody Passes (via derica) |
@avnishnanda: Lazy CBC article on New Delhi's 'Slut Walk' http://t.co/QiOfgSM. No mention of the city's recent rape epidemic http://t.co/GbcG4tw
@anitaatwork: or of amazing #desi activism that pre-dates #SlutWalk. Like India's Blank Noise Project: http://ow.ly/5RyNq #feminism
Last week, when I spoke at the Western Regional LGBTQIA conference at UC Berkeley, a young South Asian woman said she’d been looking for South Asian women who worked in social justice and was thrilled to find me. Well, sister, I started 25 years ago and in those days we were so few that I was already on the job for five years before I had some South Asian colleagues. It’s exciting to be part of a legacy in the U.S. of women devoted to building power with and for communities of color, poor people, and everybody else the government had no idea would interest us when they opened U.S. borders to South Asian professionals in 1965. We benefit from some distinct privilege — most of us have at least one form of elite education, and our position in the racial hierarchy gets us a pass in some settings as the “model minority” — but we do manage to use all that sometimes just to stick it to The Man.
So here’s my list of awesome South Asian women.
Rinku Sen would be on my list. She is really an inspiration.
Chandra Mohanty, Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, Aparna Sen, and Shabana Azmi too.
