Rainbow After the Stormy

sincerelysarita:

Nineteen-year-old Tarikuwa Lemma is a survivor, of an international adoption scandal. When she was 13, she was effectively sold from her native Ethiopia to an American family. The corrupt “adoption agency” convinced her father, who was a widow, that Tarikuwa and her younger sisters were headed to the U.S. as part of an educational exchange program, and that they would return home every summer and on holiday breaks. Little did he know, his daughters had been placed with adoptive couples in the U.S., never to return. Tarikuwa’s name was changed against her will, and she was forbidden by her American “family” from speaking her native language. The issue of transnational adoption, its evangelical Christian component, and the exploitation of communities that sometimes results, is the subject of the book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce, who appeared, along with Tarikuwa, on last Sunday’s “Melissa Harris Perry” show on MSNBC. Below is Tarikuwa’s satirical look at the “rescue” of children from her home country, to “better lives” in America.

clutchmag:

Stop ‘Rescuing’ African Children Through Corrupt Adoptions

Tarikuwa Lemma appearing on Melissa Harris Perry Show April 28, 2013.

From The Grio — Nineteen-year…

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Doesn’t seem to matter the background of the child, the methods of colonialism and assimilation haven’t changed.

(via fuckyeahfeminists)

May/19/2013 | 3816 notes | Reblog this

"For a constructed vagina to be considered acceptable by surgeons specialized in intersexuality, it basically just has to be a hole big enough to fit a typical-sized penis. It is not required to be self-lubricating or even to be at all sensitive, and certainly does not need to change shape the way vaginas often do when women are sexually stimulated. So, for example, in a panel of discussion of surgeons who treat intersexuality, when one was asked, ‘How do you define successful intercourse? How many of these girls actually have an orgasm, for example?’ a member of the panel responded, ‘Adequate intercourse was defined as successful vaginal penetration,’ All that is required is a receptive hole."

— Alice Domurat Dreger (2004) “Ambiguous Sex”—or Ambivalent Medicine? (137-153) In Health, Disease and Illness. (via pipipiripiripi)

(Source: kno-ur-onionz, via bookishboi)

May/19/2013 | 4567 notes | Reblog this

fuckyeahfeminists:

reuters:

A beach for everyone: physically handicapped individuals took part in the “Praia para Todos” (Beach for Everyone) project on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil last week.

The project, run by volunteer physical therapists and students, offers a weekend at two of Rio’s beaches to the physically handicapped, many of whom don’t have the means to reach the beach, let alone swim in the sea.

Learn more: http://reut.rs/ZN2Ita

this is great.

May/19/2013 | 5221 notes | Reblog this

bessibels:

Dear aces who accuse other people of being special snowflakes or crying oppression:

…Really?

Those accusations don’t seem familiar to you?

Policing other people’s identities and relationship definitions by using the exact same shitty shaming techniques that are regularly used on asexual people does not help our community. It hurts us. It perpetuates the same wrong-headed ideas that are used to dismiss us. And silencing other people is not going to win you the favour of the people who dismiss you; there is no right kind of asexual, there’s no rulebook you can follow to make people not hate us. Bullying others is not going to empower you.

If we don’t use our experiences to be compassionate toward each other, we are no better than the people who hurt us.

May/19/2013 | 26 notes | Reblog this