All posts tagged: oppression

Christopher Eccleston: “Masculinity shouldn’t be contingent on oppression”

Christopher Eccleston: “Masculinity shouldn’t be contingent on oppression”

Published by Daniella Wilson

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Born in Salford in 1964, Christopher Eccleston made his name in dramas like Cracker and Our Friends in the North. His films range from Shallow Grave to GI Joe, with recent TV jobs including HBO’s The Leftovers and Peter Bowker’s The A-Word. Most famously he played the ninth Doctor in Doctor Who, which he doesn’t discuss outside conventions – his “no Blue Box” rule. Next up is his role as a cult leader in the new Netflix drama Unchosen. What was the appeal of playing a cult leader? What attracted me to Mr Phillips was Unchosen’s writer, Julia Geary. There’s a great trend in drama at the moment for antagonists who are toxic, white, apparently heterosexual, late-middle-aged men. Thankfully, Julia gave him dimension and placed him in a story of tragedy involving the loss of his son and alcoholism. It’s a gift of a role because of the awkward questions it asks of our audience. Do audiences want to understand villains and their dimensions? I’ve had this …

Queer Memoricide and State Sanctioned Oppression

Queer Memoricide and State Sanctioned Oppression

Published by Sam Flores

Tuesday, March 31 was the International Transgender Day of Visibility. This year’s day of visibility came at a bellwether moment as efforts intensified to suppress queer visibility, recognition and memory. Let’s not beat around the bush here. There is evil afoot, and history is repeating itself, despite warnings echoing from our collective pasts. Case in point: President Donald J. Trump has openly adopted policies that directly harm LGBTQ+ people, especially trans and gender diverse people. Through the Make America Healthy Again initiative put forth by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration explicitly targeted trans youth and the supposed “genital mutilation” endorsed by “radical leftists”—health care that is otherwise medically acceptable for gender and social transition affirmation. Far-right efforts like this derived from moral panics and manufactured fears that were circulated by openly anti-trans journalists (e.g., Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, Pamela Paul, etc.) and several media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic, CBS News, Fox News and the BBC. Without going …

The Cost of Keeping the Peace: Relationship Advice and Oppressive Norms

The Cost of Keeping the Peace: Relationship Advice and Oppressive Norms

Published by skeptic

Many of us have probably heard the following pieces of advice when navigating conflicts in an interpersonal relationship. Pick your battles: don’t make an issue out of every problem; let some minor grievances go. Don’t expect your partner (friend, colleague) to be a mind-reader; instead, explicitly articulate your desires and needs before assuming the other is deliberately disregarding them. These suggestions are meant to encourage healthy communication while remaining realistic about the imperfect nature of humans and their relationships.  On the surface, both pieces of advice seem reasonable. In our significant relationships, we are often wise to let some issues fall by the wayside, and we should be able to articulate our needs and desires rather than assuming others know them as well as we do. However, like so many of our interpersonal practices, this advice is built on—and thus serves to reinforce—oppressive, heteropatriarchal norms and stereotypes. In turn, the deployment of this advice is distorted along gendered lines, so that what seems neutral advice becomes a mechanism to reinforce those very stereotypes and norms. …

Leaving the Oppression | Secular Rescue

Leaving the Oppression | Secular Rescue

Published by Sam Flores

[ Adobe Stock | Petr ] Matt Cravatta Jana (an alias) is a twenty-eight-year-old Iraqi ex-Muslim. Like nearly every girl in Iraq, Jana was raised as a Muslim, specifically a Shia. She was forced to adhere to its strictures, teachings, and basic rules—as well as its unwritten ones. Jana followed these beliefs and rules but eventually found her faith waning. She sought to understand what she was taught to believe without question. Muslim children and teens who question their religion receive swift punishment. Islam and the Qur’an are not to be questioned. Jana suffered unprintable horrors as a child, including sexual abuse and regular vicious assaults. As Jana grew up and became a young woman, she continued to be on the receiving end of various beatings from family members. She was even stabbed by her brother. She boldly pushed forward and began to express her doubts. She began to question the Qur’an. “Some things were just not reasonable,” she told Secular Rescue. “I kept telling myself that I can’t have doubts.”  Gender-based inequalities associated with …