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General News

What happened in August 2021?

South Kurdistan: Yazidi women who were detained by IS seven years ago are still fighting for justice. The Iraqi government passed legislation that qualifies IS’s treatment of Yazidis as genocide. The Yazidi Female Survivor Law, meanwhile, demands the Iraqi government to compensate Yazidi female IS survivors. Afghanistan: Since the Taliban retook control in Afghanistan, women […]

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Debate General

Rape Culture: In the Netherlands

Written by Melike 1 in 10 female students in Dutch Universities (11%) have been raped, sexually penetrated against their will, during their studies at a University (Amnesty International, 2021). Shocking? Well, think about the fact that this doesn’t even include sexual assault, harassment or sexual violence. Unbelievable? Not really. A study by De Haas in […]

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General

Influential Ecofeminists

Written by Juliette Roussel Françoise d’Eaubonne (France) Françoise d’Eaubonne is a very important figure of feminist movements in France. She was born in 1920 and died in 2005. First, she’s well known as a talented self-taught roman writer since she stopped her education at the baccalaureate. During the Second World War, she joined the Resistance […]

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Academic Corner General

#MeToo and the ‘continuum of male sexual violence’: A Review of Liz Kelly’s Concept

Written by Matisse Lefebvre In her influential 1988 work Surviving Sexual Violence, Liz Kelly introduced the concept of a ‘continuum’ to describe male sexual violence against women. This concept was originally based on two dictionary definitions. The first one denotes ‘a basic common character that underlies many different events’ and the second a ‘continuous series […]

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General

What happened in July 2021?

Ukraine: Female soldiers are forced to march in heels instead of military boots for a military parade happening on the 24t of August. This decision caused a lot of discontents and many people were expecting apologies. Spain: All non-consensual sex is now defined as rape and street harassment became a crime. They also have the […]

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Academic Corner General

Legal contraceptive sterilization in France, or yet another trap of the French bureaucracy

The exceptional legislative measures taken by the French government since the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate the country’s procreative social norms: parents have been intensely supported, guided and assisted during the crisis. Not surprisingly, although procreation is addressed as a public issue, the right not to procreate has mostly been repressed. Sterilization as a definitive contraceptive method was legalized in 2001 in France, following intense debates on sexual and reproductive rights. However, does the reality of the sterilization process illustrate the straight-forwardness and accessibility of legal texts? Through a focus group I organized, participants showed otherwise: gynecologists are complicit to the pronatalist French government, which manipulates its population into procreating to activate generational renewal. This illustrates a highly complex and layered system in which culture, health and education, amongst others, intertwine with each other, striving for the accomplishment of political goals.