I spent a long time refusing to identify as a feminist. I repeated the arguments I’d absorbed from the culture around me about what feminism was, a movement gone ‘too far’ led by a crew of hysterical hairy-legged harridans. But I still believed that women didn’t have equality, that we needed to fight for the […]
Tag: social justice
Language Matters: Language Matters, But It’s Not the Most Important Thing
I love talking about language, and I do so all over the place, and all the time. I adore language. I like talking about words and word origins and I am also interested in exclusionary language structures, in how slurs creep into daily life and are used thoughtlessly and with little awareness. I talk about […]
Social Justice Matters: Protections for Transgender Prisoners
One of the things I bring up over and over again in my discussions about prison reform is that if we are going to claim that we are imprisoning people to protect society, we owe them protection in turn. People in prison are human beings and they deserve human rights. They deserve to not be […]
Social Justice Matters: Solitary Confinement
Solitary confinement is one among many tools used for social control in the US prison system, but it’s something that bears particularly close examination because it is perhaps one of the most clear examples of how prisoners are abused in the name of ‘maintaining order’ and ‘keeping prisons safe’ and it is considered by many […]
Escaping Exploitative Labour Practices
Inevitably, in discussions about our complicity in exploitative labour systems, people start talking about how to be ethical consumers. How to make purchases that don’t rely on exploitation of our fellow human beings, whether we are buying fruit or pants. A lot of issues come up as people start discussing these issues, perhaps not the […]
Pink is the Colour of Exclusion
October is the pinkest month. Every year, I dread October, and every year, it rolls around regardless. October is breast cancer awareness month, which means my world is about to be awash in a sea of pink as people compete to demand my money, my time, my energy. Every year, I rage about the framing […]
Faith and Respect
I’ve noticed more and more lately that there’s a trend in a lot of liberal and social justice circles to make disdain for religion as clear as possible. I speak not of out atheists talking about their atheism and challenging assumptions about people who don’t follow a religious faith. I’m talking specifically about treating faith […]
Pushback, Prejudice, and Ignorance
There’s something I have been mulling over since Tasha Fierce wrote ‘But You Have Such A Pretty Face‘ in response to the pushback she was getting at Bitch Magazine. Before I delve into what I’ve been mulling over, a brief thumbnail, for those who haven’t been following ‘Size Matters,’ Tasha’s blog at Bitch (if you’re […]
Social Justice Matters: Health Care and the Prison System
As a society, we have collectively decided that it’s important to put people in prison when we have decided they have done bad things. In previous posts in this series, I’ve discussed the structural inequalities that contribute to certain classes of people being more likely to end up in prison than others, regardless of guilt, […]
Savage Inequalities: Building Injustice From the Classroom Out
There are a handful of books I’ve read in my life that have had a profound impact on me. One of them was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a book on the education system in the United States. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend that you do so, because it contains some rather […]