Feminist

My earliest reading memoryMy first language is Bangla, and I can remember my father reading Tagore’s short story Kabuliwala – about a refugee who longs for his daughter – and trying to figure out the letters.My favourite book growing upThe Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone, starring Sesame Street’s Grover. It has it all – an unreliable narrator, a great buildup of suspense, and a twist at the end.The book that changed me as a teenagerI read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath when I was only 12 years old. The scene…

How to describe Talk to My Back, a classic collection of graphic stories by alt-manga’s feminist star, Yamada Murasaki? These tales of thwarted-ness and domestic ennui were written in the 80s, but Japan being what it is – only last month it was reported that when abortion pills are finally made available to women in the country, partner consent will still be required – their atmosphere often feels much closer to that of the 50s or early 60s. At moments, it’s almost as if Murasaki has set out to fictionalise Betty…

Smashing the Patriarchy is very different from your debut. How did you decide these were stories you wanted to tell? I think of myself as a literary nomad and storyteller. I started off as a novelist, then wrote short stories and poetry, then moved on to non-fiction. I like to experiment with the written word, creative forms and structures. Gender and sexuality have been running themes in my writing and research career. My novel Kaleidoscopic Reflections told the tale of five generations of inter-caste Tamil women,…

Image via Universal Pictures OG Jurassic Park producer Kathleen Kennedy has a feministic infatuation for Laura Dern’s character Ellie Sattler. Sattler, a young doctor of paleobotany when she debuted in 1993’s Jurassic Park, impressed Kennedy with her “strength and agency.” Moreover, as Kennedy told Variety, it was the line “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth” that was particularly moving. “ was independent, willful and able to confidently say a line like that. was this incredible paleobotanist who…

The Cannes film festival's red carpet was the scene of a staged protest, with members of the feminist movement Les Colleuses unfurling a long banner and holding up smoke flares. The banner featured the names of 129 women who have died in France as a result of domestic violence since the last film festival. It was a protest against femicide, the murder of women by men…

New Delhi: Google on Thursday paid a tribute to popular Malayalam and English writer and poetess Kamala Das with a colorful doodle to mark the date of publication of her autobiography, Kamala DasMy Story (Ente Katha). Fondly known as Aami, and Madhavikutty, she is known for daring writing about women sexuality and marital problems at a time when they were considered a taboo. Born into an aristocratic Hindu Nair family, Aami converted to Islam when she was 68 years old and came to be known as Kamala Surayya. In over 20…