Nanfu Wang feels safe in New York. Surveillance, that essential preoccupation of the documentarian in America, is a chokehold from which she has been temporarily released. From her Brooklyn apartment, the Chinese filmmaker prepares for the release of her debut feature documentary, Hooligan Sparrow.
The author behind ‘The First Paradise of Fang Siqi,’ a novel that Han described as ‘a young girl falling in love with her rapist,’ has sent shockwaves through Taiwanese society.
On April 27, aspiring Taiwanese author Lin Yi Han committed suicide, leaving behind only her first, and sadly last, novel. The story, entitled “The First Love Paradise of Fang Siqi,” concerns the mental struggles of a young girl who is raped by her teacher.
The work of South African artist Mary Sibande tells the tale of her alter-ego Sophie, a domestic worker who finds refuge in dreams where she emancipates herself from the ghoulish realism of an ordinary existence, cleaning other people's homes.
Exploring the construction of identity within post-apartheid South Africa, Sibande's work probes the stereotypical contextualisation of the black female body.
V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money, and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), and sex slavery.
Drama Queens Ghana's “MoonGirls” is an Afrofuturistic graphic novel series. Through an Afrofuturistic lens, “MoonGirls follows the adventures of 4 African "supersheroes" with varying superpowers to save the world from a diverse range of forces; from patriarchy, rape culture to pollution and global warming.
"Stand Up, Sisters" tells the story of a rural girl who journeys to Beijing for a family visit, only to be deceived and forced into prostitution, suffering unthinkable hardships. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, these women are rehabilitated. The narrative reaches its peak with her and her younger sisters' victorious achievement of self-reliance.
Beyoncé delivered an intensely, unapologetic celebration of Black and HBCU culture at the Coachella Festival 2 weekends in a row. Not only were her performances some of the best live performances to date but they sent a pretty significant message to the world.
Here are some assessments of this beautiful demonstration of Blackness and Black Girl Magic:
From BBC News:
In 2013, and again in 2014, PCI Media Impact partnered with Professor David Gere and the UCLA Art & Global Health Center, to design and facilitate a 5-week communications workshop, entitled Soap Operas for Social Change. Throughout this intensive course, students designed and produced an Entertainment Education (E-E) serial drama in response to the growing concerns about sexual assault on campus.
The Women Are Heroes project has various steps in Africa, in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Sudan.
In January 2009, 2000 square meters of rooftops are covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, in Kenya. Most of the women have their own photos on their own rooftop and for the first time the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season.
grrrRoar! Ecology is sexier when you focus on women and fanged beasts. Fashions in leopard print help us make that connection globally and online. Polluters at least pause at the reminder that nature isn't dead yet and in fact stirs the same passion as the woman you just met who's saying something about "Fanged Wilds"!
On February 1st, 2014, approximately 600 participants, convened in 31 locations in six countries to edit Wikipedia articles on women and the arts. During this day, at least 101 new articles were created, and at least 90 articles improved.
Hobby Lobby is a chain of arts and crafts stores that has recently come under fire for denying its employees affordable access to contraception. Jasmine Shea redecorated many of the craft supplies in one of their stores to "troll" them by rearranging letters to spell out "pro choice" and "all women deserve birth control"
Between the late 1960s and 1970s numerous alternative printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left.
Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members, all artists - but action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin described the collective's mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”
“Badass Indian Pinups” is a series of paintings by Indo-Canadian artist Nimisha Bhanot, that features paintings of Indian women being confident and sexually liberated.
“Girl’s Day” in China was supposed to be a way for boys on college campuses to show the girls how much they care. This year it went too far.
Have you heard about “Girl’s Day?” It’s a big holiday for Chinese college students. Every year on March 7, students throughout the country celebrate the day as a campus version of International Women’s Day.
When people think of feminist protests of the 1960s, they most often think of bra burning at the Miss America pageant. This is super lame because bras weren’t even burned at that protest, just discarded into a trash can. It’s hard to imagine why this trope has persisted over the decades. Bras are an investment, so I have a hard time believing that any of my friends would willingly burn expensive (and sometimes really fun) garments.
Colorful portrait of a Muslim woman wearing an American flag colored head scarf. Image on back of a woman with a rose in her hair in black and white with text that states, "We are resilient. We are indivisible. We are greater than fear. We will defend dignity. We will protect each other." -- "The We the People campaign aims to restore hope, imagination, curiosity, and creativity into our country’s dialogue.
The video DON’T COVER UP, STEP UP is a public service announcement raising the issue of gender-based violence. In the video, a vlogger teaches her fans how to cover up bruises with makeup after she has been beaten by her husband. There is a twist in the story as the husband enters the scene at the end of the video.
A series of creative workshops for sex workers, including a 7-day workshop modeled on the C4AA Art Action Academy. The workshops enabled sex workers to tell their own stories, and shift the narratives and stigma around sex work, and videos created during the workshop have been shown at festivals in New York and Berlin.