A new law has been introduced into Western Australia’s state parliament that would require Muslim women to remove their burqas or niqabs to prove their identity, if required. It would also apply to hats, scarves and other headwear or clothing that obstructs the ability to identify an individual. The law was drafted in response to…
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Like countless other young women, the “war on women” during the 2012 American presidential election campaign was a shock to my system. It can seem so easy to take our rights for granted in a time and culture where post-feminist discourses tell us that we can “have it all”; where Beyonce’s power-femininity dominates the all-American-male…
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I really must give a shout out to one of my dearest social networking sites, Facebook. What a challenge it can be, every day to connect into the hearts, minds and walls of so many friends, colleagues, and often strangers whom you’ve befriended and now know many of their private details. But despite the potential…
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Joumana Haddad is a truly a remarkable woman. Born in Beirut in 1970, she speaks and writes in several different languages, is an advocate for women’s rights, is studying for her doctorate on the Marquis de Sade and also teaches Italian at the Lebanese-American University in Beirut. I was so inspired after I read and…
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I’d never really thought about it before, until I started reading Joumana Haddad’s Superman is an Arab, but Superman really is a disastrous invention. I’ve never been drawn to the character or the stories surrounding him and have never seen the movies, but still, why doesn’t it raise more eyebrows that Clark Kent is only…
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One of the things I value most about my life is that I have options. I have the luxury of choosing what I want to do, where I want to live, who I want to date, in a way that many people around the world don’t. But the trouble with having choices is having to…
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