Islamophobia

Goodmorning Bitch readers! Here's some feminist news to kick start your day.

• Today’s the last day to tune into the Homonationalism Conference happening right now at the The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York! What’s homonationalism you say? Watch the live stream video to find out! [The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at CUNY]
• A note to white girls who didn’t get into the college of their dreams. [Racialicious]
• Political correctness gone mad! Jezebel straightens things up for those who are completely mystified about when it’s appropriate to compliment a woman.[Jezebel]
• Will immigration reform really exclude newly legalized immigrants from Obamacare? Seriously? [Colorlines]
• Doesn’t look like FEMEN consulted the very women they are advocating for. On Islamophobic practices in feminist movements. [Huffington Post]
• So the DSM recognizes both gender identity disorder and schizophrenia as mental illnesses, but if you have both at the same time, your access to hormones might be compromised. [Autostraddle]

Check out more news tomorrow!

How does a queer atheist go from kicking in church signs to working side by side with Christians, Muslims, and other religious people? Ask Chris Stedman, a humanist chaplain at Harvard and interfaith activist known for calling out Islamophobia and bigotry in atheist communities.

When education systems of "the West" forget their LGBTQ history lessons, it can spell trouble for "the rest."

Some big news broke recently involving the so-called "honor killing" of four women close to where I live, and the media coverage has just been troubling to say the least. A father, his eldest son, and his second wife have been convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of three of their daughters and his first wife.

The fact of Geeti Shafia, Sahar Shafia, Zainab Shafia, and Rona Amir Mohammad’s deaths is an unmitigated tragedy. But its political meaning for the Western states whose resources are being funneled increasingly into surveillance and policing (domestically, through immigration and border services, and through imperial wars) is not self-evident.

Nor, perhaps, is its connection to the topic of youth, sexuality, and education, but let me tell you what I think about that.

There are as many ways of being an American Muslim woman as there are American Muslim women, and the contributors to the recently-published I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim will prove anyone who tells you differently (hello, popular media?) wrong. Edited by Maria M. Ebrahimji and Zahra T. Suratwala, I Speak For Myself, which we're happy to be selling at BitchMart, is an anthology that showcases the voices of 40 American Muslim women who are all under the age of 40, all of whom were born and raised in the US. Through personal stories that portray a vast array of identities, practices, beliefs, and values, this anthology illustrates and celebrates the fact that American Muslim women are, as put in the introduction, "neither the same as non-Muslim American women nor one another."

Image via Colorlines

If you build it, they will come...out of the woodwork.