Tagged: UK
Film Review: “Pride”
Now available online: a short review of the recent UK hit film, Pride, which was originally published a few months ago in Red Pepper magazine.
I note that, despite some critics’ discomfort with Pride‘s feel-good tone, the filmmakers successfully make a few salient political points. It offers lessons on solidarity-building beyond identity-based justice organising, and an indictment of recent attempts to depoliticise LGBTQ rights movements. All of which, I believe, is worth celebrating.
MA Thesis Film Available Online
I completed my MA Visual Anthropology documentary in late 2009, but didn’t make it widely available, at the request of the primary research participants. Now, five years later, the protagonists have all moved on with their lives to a place at which they feel able to share this film. We hope that you find it insightful, and informative. Thanks to the women of WAST for their support. (Click below to watch)
Out of the furnace, into the fire? Article on Uganda & LGBT asylum seekers in the UK
In March 2014, the vindictive, incendiary Ugandan tabloid “Red Pepper” published the details of 200 people it deemed to be “homosexual,” in what appeared to be a gleeful celebration of the recently passed Anti-Homosexuality Bill. As a commissioning editor for a long-standing UK leftist magazine also named Red Pepper, I wanted to take the opportunity of a spike in website visits to post an article, co-authored by Prossy Kakooza, on the topic. We are responding to the AHA and the international outcry it prompted, and posing a reality check to the British government that they need to back up their condemnation of Ugandan law with action at home: Life in the UK for those LGBTQ people who have fled persecution overseas is far from comfortable.
Click ‘More’ below for the Red Pepper (UK) statement on Red Pepper Uganda. Continue reading
Article on the UK Marriage (Same-Sex) Act 2013
My latest article for Red Pepper, “Married Strife” written in response to the UK government passing the “Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013” back in July. It would have been better published immediately after, but that’s the beauty/frustration of print magazine journalism. In many ways, this debate is regarded as old news. Critiques of state-endorsed marriage and how LGBT-rights campaign groups decide their priorities remain valid, however, as they have done for over forty years. Continue reading
Reflections on IUAES Congress 2013
This summer, my alma mater the University of Manchester played host to the 17th Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographic Scientists (IUAES). I was fortunate enough to attend, and found it exciting and unusual for a number of reasons, all of which were pleasantly surprising and unusually progressive for a conference of this size, scope and prestige.
Continue reading
Article in defense of Thatcher “Death Parties”
Glasweigans celebrating Thatcher’s death
Being a lefty British woman in DC, I tired quickly of people offering me their condolences and/or offering me their opinion on Thatcherism after the grand old Dame passed away last week. More exhausting–and frustrating–was the commentary in the British press running along the lines of: “These death parties are grotesque!” In reality, they served a hugely important service. They will not undo Thatcher’s legacy in terms of party influence (on Labour as well as Conservatives). They will forcefully prevent, as I claim in my article, the history books from “cannonizing a monster.” I’m quite glad about that, so I wrote about it. Read the full piece here.
