Thursday, January 23, 2014
Little acts of defiance in the war against the feminine
There are some days I don’t want to live in this world.
I woke up to a torrent of opinion about a sports journalist who covered a story of a newly developed putter. He gradually came to understand that its inventor was a transsexual woman, and this discovery became the focal point of the story. The woman concerned begged him not to out her as a transsexual, and he ignored her.
And then she killed herself.
Endless articles all over the internet condemning the journalist concerned; a few defending him.
What haunts me is the suffering of the woman concerned: of the fact she loathed herself so profoundly for being transsexual that she was prepared to die rather than live to see the fact disclosed.
And I think of yesterday’s murder - a transwoman in Venezuela whose skull was cracked open by a heavey stone (http://www.lapatilla.com/site/2014/01/17/asesinan-travesti-a-pedradas-en-la-petare-guarenas/).
I wonder where today’s will be.
And I think of the massive growth in the incidence of female genital mutilation in the UK (http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-big-problem-female-genital-mutilation/17515); I think of the case of the young woman in Birbhum, West Bengal, gang raped by up to 15 men as punishment for having entered into a relationship with a young man the village elders disapproved of (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/23/court-gang-rape-indian-village-birbhum)
That one gave me a special shudder of recognition because I have been there. It was a village in that district I visited and then used as the back drop for my Light In The Village in which a young woman was raped by the rich man in the village to punish her for not knowing her subordinate place in the world.
And I think of my translation of Bintou, Koffi Kwahulé’s beautiful and angry play about a young girl bleeding to death after a clitoridectomy inflicted on her to curb her rebellion.
These are all such tiny acts of defiance in this terrible war against the feminine; acts which count for so very little but which I somehow cling to.
Cling to because somehow they nourish tiny seeds of hope.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]