I am blessed in that I have a tribe, a tribe of wonderful women who do not hesitate to call themselves my friends. We are spread all across the world and I am very thankful that the internet makes keeping in touch nearly as easy as it was when we were mostly all in the…
The notion of ‘tough love’ in social policy drives me up the wall. It seems to stem from the idea that if we are sufficiently hard on people they will stop doing things that we think are wrong. I think this a pretty flawed approach to policy and one that is certainly not backed up…
I am not including a link because really this despicable piece does not deserve any traffic even from those who are hate reading it. I have copy pasted it below with a some commentary: Two decades ago, sitting on the balcony of my Da Nang hotel room in central Vietnam, I studied the traffic below.…
I have been thinking a lot lately on the relationship between stigma and violence. When bad things happen, for example: an abortion clinic is bombed or a gay person is beaten for being gay, those who preach intolerance are very quick to deny responsibility. They claim that preaching intolerance and stigmatising marginalised populations is not…
In a few short weeks I will be 28 years old. 28 is a complicated age for me. When I turn 28 I will have lived as many years on this earth without my mother as I have with her and sometimes that is a difficult thing to bear. As I get older my relationship…
As I have reached my late twenties and I and many members of my social circle inch closer to 30 I am noticing a common theme. People mourning reaching the end of this period of life, people beginning to get anxious about each subsequent birthday that takes them further away from the alleged golden years…
It’s a strange thing when you have been with someone for seven years, living, growing, changing, entangling yourselves in each other to suddenly be without them. We talk every day but suddenly there is a space between us that has never really been there before. With that space comes appreciation. They say that absence makes…
I crossed an ocean when I was one year old. I don’t remember it; it was on a plane that took me 10,000 km from the country where I was born. That ocean was a boundary, a boundary between new and old between native and immigrant. A shoreline of my life, if you will. Often,…
I often tell people that I hate Wellington and they laugh, I mean who hates Wellington? It is a charming town, full of art and culture and good food. People normally think that I’m joking, but I’m not. For me, it was like a shoe that looks so pretty and seems to fit nicely in…
Sometimes I am amused by the shape that public discussions take when immigration is the issue. It is always, “they are stealing our jobs”, “they don’t assimilate”, “if they don’t like it they can go somewhere else” blah blah blah. Over and over again around and around in circles. Always a crucial factor is ignored…
Boycott on club urged after DJ’s racial slur – National – NZ Herald News. From the article: “The Facebook post by DJ Neill Andrews, who owns Wellington’s Famous nightclub, sparked outrage.It read: “Just because we don’t let groups of creepy Indian rapists into the club doesn’t make us racist, they also don’t buy alcohol.”Probably so…
I have been thinking a lot about love lately, as evidenced by my last couple of posts. I have been thinking about how conventional models of love are so limited and strained. I am expected to love the people who created me and raised me because our blood ties act as a magic elixir of…
At the end of 2012 I moved countries again, that made it it three countries and four cities within five years. That is a lot of big moves for two people. My partner, without whom none of this would have been possible has remained staunch in his support of me. It was not the first…
In have learned more about from the internet than I did at university. While I am grateful to my university education for providing me with a framework, a theoretical perspective that changed the way I think and has added depth and nuance to my analysis of the world, the real meat of my feminist education…
A Human Story 