A couple of weeks ago I cleared out a lot of perfumes sitting in our bathroom cabinet. The cabinet is actually a tall, vintage piece, originally for a dining room. It has drawers in the bottom where we keep towels and sheets, and shelves in... > Read more
In 2019, local activists hosted a feminist performance piece titled “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. First brought to life by feminist art collective LasTesis from Chile, the performance involved hundreds of women, who shuffled and chanted a chorus that would become a powerful global feminist anthem: “Y la culpa no era mÃa / ni dónde estaba / ni cómo vestÃa.” (And the fault was not mine / nor where I was / nor how I was dressed). The performance, which ends with the refrain: “El violador eres tú.” (The rapist is you), went viral and has spread to cities like Chicago and New York City.
“As a long-time feminist and activist, I felt immediately called to organize this performance in L.A.,” said Inger Flem Soto, a graduate student from Chile studying in Los Angeles. The performance was a partial response to the protests in Chile that began in October 2019 when students evading subway fare increases grew to large-scale demonstrations denouncing economic precarity and inequality in the country. In response to statewide protests, students were met with police repression that included sexual harassment and violence. For Chilenas like Soto, organizing the performance in Los Angeles was a way of supporting protests in Chile while raising awareness about gendered violence on a global scale.“Thankfully, I had other Chilean and American comrades that were eager to make it happen, and it was a beautiful and powerful day for all of us,” she tells Refinery29.
As rage boils over about the unrelenting wave of femicide and gender violence in Latin America — specifically surrounding women along the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum — people in the United States have organized demonstrations in solidarity with protests unfolding across the region. These demonstrations and actions are helping generate awareness about gender violence abroad and locally. It’s a display of cross-border feminist solidarity denouncing gender violence, economic precarity, and state violence impacting women on a regional scale.
A year after Mexico’s largest-ever march for International Women’s Day in Mexico City, feminist protestors painted the names of feminicide victims on metal barriers erected around Mexico City’s national palace last month, while thousands gathered across the country to protest femicide that included a historical national women’s strike. Puerto Rican organizers, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, gathered in San Juan in a comparsa afrofurista to center Black struggles for liberation of the past and present. Protestors also gathered in other Latin American cities, including Buenos Aires in Argentina, San Salvador in El Salvador, Quito in Ecuador, and Managua in Nicaragua, among others. These efforts have poured over into the U.S., with protests happening in El Paso, Texas and Los Angeles, California.
These demonstrations draw attention to the outsized gender violence in Latin America that’s recently reached a tipping point. Earlier this year, Puerto Rico declared a state of emergency over the alarming number of women murdered, as activists report that at least 303 women were killed in the last five years. In Argentina, the number of women killed reached a 10-year high last year under coronavirus lockdown, according to La Casa del Encuentro, a Buenos Aires-based feminist group. In February, the murder of 18-year-old Ursula Bahillo pushed thousands into the streets of Buenos Aires to protest femicide in the country. Nearly one million women joined a massive protest in Chile to mark International Women’s Day in 2020 and in Honduras, a woman has been killed every 36 hours so far this year. Violence against women in El Salvador has only been exasperated during the pandemic. In Mexico, at least 939 women were victims of femicide last year.
Meanwhile along the U.S.-Mexico border, women are protesting the convergence of state violence, gender violence, and racism. In Tijuana, Mexico, the organization Espacio Migrante held a virtual protest for International Women’s Day last month, sharing selfies of migrant women and advocates holding up signs denouncing racism as well as misogyny when protesting violence against migrant women. “Everybody wants to fight against machismo and femicides because we have all experienced some sort of violence, but we also need to talk about racism, anti-Blackness, and discriminaton,” said Paulina Olvera Cáñez, the director and founder of Espacio Migrante. “If we’re really talking about feminism, those voices need to be included.” Many of the women who participated live in the city’s migrant shelters, including some from Espacio Migrante’s shelter for migrant families, which opened in 2019.
“Many of these women are single moms and many are fleeing from sexual violence from their home countries and have experienced sexual violence on the journey to Tijuana, and in Tijuana,” said Olvera Cáñez.
“Let’s not forget that differences can and must be made at micro-political levels, too.”
This week, outrage grew in Mexico and El Salvador when it was confirmed that Salvadoran migrant Victoria Esperanza Salazar was murdered by police officers in Tulum. Mexican authorities announced that Salazar died in police custody after they broke her neck. The office of the attorney general of Quintana Roo stated that the prosecutor of Mexico’s public ministry is pursuing criminal action against the police officers involved. This is just one of the ongoing horrific murders that are sparking these cross-border demonstrations.
Soto, who’s currently in Chile but said she looks forward to returning to Los Angeles this year, said that although the pandemic has meant a retreat from public protest, it’s important to keep acting against gender violence. “We can and must stay active, wherever that may be: online, in our work and study spaces, in our daily lives. Let’s not forget that differences can and must be made at micro-political levels, too,” she urges.
Here are 3 spring dresses making me smile right now! I might not be traveling anywhere warm for spring break, but these dresses from Amazon are all perfect for travel. I can't wait to wear them this summer!
JavaScript is currently disabled in this browser. Reactivate it to view this content.
Sure, every wedding has that one guest who gets a little too emotional and starts crying and ranting to anyone who will listen about the one that got away. But for one *lucky* couple that got married in Florida last weekend, that emotional partygoer was former president Donald Trump. And the rant was actually a wedding speech about his one that got away: the 2020 election.
At a Mar-a-Lago ceremony in celebration of John and Megan Arrigo’s marriage, Florida Man Donald Trump jumped at the opportunity to rag on Joe Biden’s performance as president. “They’re telling me about the border, they’re telling me about China, they’re telling me about Iran. How are we doing about Iran?” he asked. “The border’s not good. The border’s the worst anybody’s ever seen it.”
At one point, Trump just said: “So it’s a rough thing, and I just say, do you miss me yet?” The guests erupted into cheers.
Trump finished his speech by finally acknowledging the newlyweds. “A lot of things happening right now. I just want to say it’s an honor to be here,” he said, and then, “You are a great and beautiful couple.”
Although he hasn’t been leaving Mar-a-Lago too much these days, this might not be Trump’s last wedding appearance. This week, he launched a website that allows his supporters to invite him and former First Lady Melania Trump to events and engagements. The same site allows people to request specialized greetings and messages from the Trumps and share messages and thoughts. But this isn’t uncommon — the Obamas have a similar website, as does George W. Bush. Somehow, though, it’s difficult to imagine Barack Obama — or anyone else, really, other than your friend’s inebriated great-uncle — grabbing the mic at a wedding and rambling about election fraud.
Since he’s been forcibly removed from his social media platform of choice, Trump has had to find creative ways to speak his mind (and, more often than not, regurgitate lies about a “stolen” election). He spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, and he’s also appeared on Fox News and dropped the occasional statement via DIY presidential letterhead. “I hope that everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t president, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” he wrote several weeks ago. “I hope everyone remembers!”
Through these dispatches, we’ve been able to see that Trump is definitely having a very seamless adjustment period into no longer being president. “We did get 75 million votes. Nobody’s ever gotten that,” he said at the wedding on Saturday. (As a reminder, Biden got 81 million votes.) “They said, ‘Get 66 million votes, and the election’s over.’ Well, I got 75 million, and you saw what happened. 10:30 in the evening, all of a sudden they said, ‘That’s a strange thing, why are they closing up certain places?'”
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
On Wednesday, Travis Barker‘s daughter, 15-year-old Alabama Luella Barker, posted a makeup tutorial featuring the former Blink-182 drummer she calls dad — and the result is blowing up online.
The Instagram video shows Alabama using the new TikTok-famousKVD Beauty Good Apple Skin-Perfecting Foundation Balm to cover Travis’s face tattoos. “My dad let me give him a makeover,” Alabama captioned the clip, adding a preview of the finished product. “The coverage of this formula had us both shocked…” she wrote.
Alabama started by finding Travis’s shade match, settling on Light 015. As she blends the foundation into his skin, covering up the ink just below his eye which reads “Blessed,” she asks her dad about his favorite tattoo. “Probably the one you just covered,” Barker replied.
Next, Alabama went in to cover a tattoo under his other eye, a small anchor on his right cheek. “Okay, now we’re going to get this little handkerchief,” she says, before Barker lovingly corrects her. “That’s an anchor, babe,” he tells her.
After the foundation was dabbed and set, Alabama included closeup before-and-after photos — and the transformation is legitimately impressive. Not only is the KVD foundation an excellent color match to Travis’s skin tone (props to Alabama for that), but it completely concealed any evidence of ink underneath.
Thanks to TikTok, the KVD Beauty Good Apple Foundation is hard to come by at the moment; it sold out everywhere in most shades after people praised the buildable balm for its formidable coverage. If covering face tattoos isn’t proof of just how full-coverage this stuff is, we don’t know what is.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
This week, yet another gender reveal stunt turned deadly after a small plane, with an attached sign reading “It’s a girl!” abruptly crashed into the Caribbean Sea. On Monday, the plane’s two passengers were both found, but one was already dead; the other died of injuries while receiving first aid. The incident took place off the coast of Mexico, about 40 miles from Cancún, and is currently under investigation by Mexican aviation authorities, according to The Daily Beast.
In a video shared by the New York Post, a group of family and friends are heard cheering from a boat as the plane, a Cessna 206, flies overhead. One attendee even jokes that a plane crash would be terrible, just moments before the aircraft nosedives into the water. “It’s all good as long as it doesn’t end up crashing into us!” they are heard saying.
Even the more harmless gender reveal parties add an unnecessary emphasis on the gender binary and, more often than not, stereotypes. They often end badly, even if they don’t end in death. And this week’s party gone wrong is just the latest example of how dangerous these gimmicks can get. In 2019, another plane crashed after dumping gallons of pink water onto the ground. The same year, a woman died after she was hit with a piece of metal from a pipe bomb that an expectant couple accidentally created. And then, the very next day, another couple set off an explosion that started a minor earthquake in Iowa.
Jenna Karvunidis, the blogger who threw the first known gender reveal party, has expressed several times that she regrets the phenomenon she inadvertently started when she filled a cake with pink icing. “It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally — guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby,” she wrote in a 2019 post. “Who cares what gender the baby is? I did at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t know what we know now — that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs.” She also added that her child, the subject of that original gender reveal party, frequently opts to buck gender norms.
Karvunidis spoke out again after a 2020 gender reveal started a major forest fire in California, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate. “Oh my god NO. The fire that evacuated parts of California is from a GENDER REVEAL PARTY,” she wrote on Facebook. “Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis.”
There’s a lot to celebrate about pregnancy, and a lot of ways to do it. But igniting wildfires, crashing planes, and causing freak accidents in the name of announcing an unborn child’s genitalia is at once strange, harmful, and life-threatening. There’s nothing wrong with a normal baby shower.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
