by Mandy Van Deven
-USA-

When I began to understand the immensity of the world, I felt a visceral inclination to discover all that it possessed – or at least as much of it as I could. There was, however, the problem that I grew up poor in rural Georgia, and travel was prohibitively expensive. Even now, after class jumping to the American middle, it is all I can do to pay the price of visiting family living only a few states away.

In recent years the global expansion of the Internet has allowed people to make connections across geographic borders and cultural boundaries. It has expanded our ability to go beyond old models of foreign exchange and create new ways of interacting as global citizens. One website facilitating these interpersonal interactions is CouchSurfing.

by Mandy Van Deven
-USA-

An unfortunate oversight of the recent media attention on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) bullying is the advocacy potential that decades-old legislation has to prevent gender-based harassment in schools. Title IX of the Education Amendment is the federal civil rights law passed by the United States government in 1972 that prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funds.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Asma. Rukhsana. Zakia. Duaa. Fereshteh. Somayeh. Heshu. Samera. Amneh, Zahra. Semse.

As an investigative journalist, Rana Husseini had no intention of shifting careers to become a human rights activist until she was given an assignment in 1994 to cover the intentional death of Kifaya, a sixteen-year-old girl in Amman who had been poisoned by her older brother after being raped and forcibly married. The town’s ambivalent response to Kifaya’s murder shook Husseini to the core, and so with the backing of her editors at The Jordan Times, she began to investigate such deaths in order to expose the unconscionable crimes to what she believed was a willfully ignorant public. Ignoring threats of violence that followed each of her published stories, Rana Husseini became the voice of the dead.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Barker is aware of her own complicated position as a colonial outsider in the bittersweet story she shares, and smartly uses her power to leverage an increasing awareness of the challenges faced by this small South Asian country that has been persistently ravaged by conflict and a recent natural disaster that stunned the world.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Anyone who has ever sat through the frequent and painstakingly choreographed musical numbers in a Bollywood film can tell you that dance is an integral part of Indian culture. From Bhangra in the Punjab province to Kathakali in Kerala, each part of the country has its own distinctive combination of body movement, facial expressions, and hand positions which form the regional style. But nowadays in urban India, dance is not simply used as a form of cultural expression. Women of means are being seduced by a type of dance that is a little more, shall we say, exotic.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Known for its bawdy sexual humor, over-the-top characters, and underlying social criticism, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales set the stage for the satirical theatrics which came to be known as burlesque. During its 700-year metamorphosis, burlesque has utilized various styles of music and performance to poke fun at issues spanning social and political themes, particularly conventional gender roles and sexual scripts. Combining the fundamentals of classical burlesque—parody, double entendre, and risqué sexuality—with elements derived from their own ethnic traditions, New York City’s Brown Girls Burlesque (BGB) is a 21st century incarnation of Chaucer’s magnum opus. Founded two years ago by AuroraBoobRealis, BGB is drawing a new audience to this old art form by blending women of color’s experience and artistic aesthetic with this historically Caucasian craft.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Unlike the abundance of exploration into the many dilemmas of motherhood by feminists in the West, in India the subject is so under-examined that it might as well not even exist. In fact, the magnitude of the topic is so daunting that my initial approach to Veena Poonancha, the Director of the Research Centre for Women's Studies at Mumbai's SNDT Women’s University and a contributor to the newly published Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment?, yielded much apprehension. Veena was worried our interview wouldn’t be sufficient to do justice to the surplus of issues needing to be addressed—and honestly, she was right.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Taking the lives of 75,000 women each year, cervical cancer is the leading cause of death for women in India. This number accounts for a third of all cancers that affect women in India and a fifth of the total cervical cancer related deaths worldwide. With 132,000 new reported cases in India annually, this disease is having catastrophic effects on the developing world.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

What do former U.S. Senator Larry Craig, women in Victorian England, and transgender activists have in common?

Toilets!

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Couched in a story from Indian mythology, Deepa Mehta’s newest feature film, Heaven on Earth, blurs the line between reality and fantasy to provide a nuanced and authentic look at the struggles of a young Punjabi woman who has immigrated to Canada from her homeland for what turns out to be an abusive marriage. Never one to shy away from heavy and complex issues, Mehta’s film addresses arranged marriage, Indian family dynamics and expectations, domestic violence, and love.