envelopetide:

quixotess:

Image description: The star of the article, Abdel-Magied, kneels between two fancy-looking bright red cars that I can’t ID for you because unlike her I am cars-ignorant. She is dressed in black with a light blue hijab and has a huge grin on her face. End of image description.

wtfhellokitty:

promotingpeace:

Fired up to be the first female, Muslim F1 driver.

AS DREAMS go, Yassmin Abdel-Magied has one that is peculiar and very particular - to be the first female, Muslim, formula one racing driver.

“Everyone thought it was a phase,” she says with a laugh. It wasn’t. She got the bug for fast cars while watching a movie about six years ago and hasn’t stopped dreaming about them since.

Ferraris are her favourite but any muscle cars will do. The 1960s Corvette Sting Ray, for instance. Anything fast, really.

“I just became enamoured with these beautiful machines, the capacity they have. It’s just fantastic,” Ms Abdel-Magied says.

She admits people are sometimes surprised to hear this kind of blokey passion from a conservatively-dressed Muslim woman who arrived from Sudan with her parents as a toddler and spent her early years at a Brisbane Islamic school.

But Ms Abdel-Magied seems to revel in breaking stereotypes.

“I’ll pop up some random quote about cars, and people are like, ‘Hang on, she knows what she’s talking about’.”

Now 19, and about to enter the final year of a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Queensland, she projects all the infectious - and at times daunting - enthusiasm of her generation.

The Young Queenslander of the Year in 2010, she coaches a soccer team for Muslim girls called “Shinpads and Hijabs”.

She is a member of the Queensland Design Council and at 16 set up a network for community-minded teens, Youth Without Borders.

“I never get eight hours of sleep at night,” she says. “But I’m all right with it, I enjoy being busy, I enjoy helping people … when you want to do things, you find time for it.”

Ms Abdel-Magied was born in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum to parents who put a great store in education. Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother an architect.

But in Australia her parents’ professional qualifications were mostly not recognised, so it meant they had to start over. It’s an issue many new migrants must confront, Ms Abdel-Magied says.

“You see a lot of people coming from various countries with amazing qualifications, but they have to start again. There is a lot of wasted potential,” she says.

“There is one guy who was essentially the Kerry O’Brien of Sudan - I mean he’d written books, he was a journalist - but he had to start anew. He was driving taxis for five years.”

But Ms Abdel-Magied has clearly thrived and learnt to traverse cultural boundaries. During high school, she switched from the Islamic school to a Christian college, becoming the first girl at the school to wear a headscarf.

This made her something of a de facto ambassador of her faith not long after the September 11, 2001, attacks, meaning lots of questions from fellow students.

But the experience also broadened her view of Australia.

“I’d gone to Islamic school for so long, it was a conscious decision for my parents - those sort of values were inbuilt in me, and in terms of my beliefs being shaken, that didn’t really happen,” she says.

”I knew who I was and I knew what I stood for.”

Life now stretches out before her, with a year of university to go - and the prospect of an internship with a car company in Britain next month.

After that, she says, who knows.

“I’m planning to buy a whole bunch of tools and work on my own vehicle.”

The fast track beckons.

She sounds way cooler than Danica Patrick and her bikinis.

Holy crud awesome.

FUCKING BRILLIANT!

karnythia:

ladyatheist:

thisgingersnapsback:

goblinhoarder:

nessfraserloves:

ipomoeaandthestarstealers:

today:

Military mom ‘proud’ of breast-feeding in uniform, despite criticism
National pride, or disgrace? A photo gone viral of two servicewomen breast-feeding their children while in uniform has added a new layer to the debate over nursing in public.

If you think this is a “disgrace”, just quit following me now.

^^^

man i have so many words about how stupid all this backlash is and i’m so infuriated but i think (i hope) you all can just UNDERSTAND mmKAY?!

what.

There is backlash against two people feeding their children. I have no faith left in humanity.

If someone says breast milk dishonors the uniform, but blood does not? I will lose my damned mind.

muckrakingiswomenswork:

marshmallowmegamama:

muckrakingiswomenswork:

awomansplaceisinthestruggle:

“A people whose women fight alongside men – that people are invincible.” Fidel Castro

always the heart, soul, and strength of any revolution…too bad the corrupt white poisoned patriarchal government decided all my fierce fighting hermanas needed to be relegated to 5th class citizenship as soon as the revolution was over…as always.

Castro’s Disrespect for Women’s Rights at 9:07 AM Friday, March 9, 2012 A must-read by Yoani Sanchez in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/cuba-womens-rights_b_1333587.html

At times with good intentions — other times with not so good — someone tries to silence my complaints about the machismo in my country, telling me, “Cuban women don’t have it so badly… those in some African nations, where they are subjected to ablation, are worse off.”

As an argument it’s a low blow, it hurts me in the groin, connects me to the cry of a defenseless teenager, mutilated, subjected to that ordeal by her own family. But the rights of women should not be reduced only to the power to maintain their physical integrity and to defend their biological capacity to experience pleasure. The clitoris is not the only thing we can lose, there is a long list of social, economic and political possibilities, which are also snatched from us.

As I live in a country where the paths of civic protest have been severed and demonized, I dare to offer in this blog a list of the violations that still persist against women.

-

They do not allow us to establish our own women’s organizations, where we can unite and represent ourselves. Groups that are not channels of transmission from the government to the citizens, as sadly happens with the Federation of Cuban Women.

- When they speak of women in the political class, it’s clear that they don’t have any real power but are there to fulfill quotas or assignments by gender.

- The icon of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) — the only organization of this kind permitted by law — shows a figure with a rifle on her shoulder in clear allusion to the mother as soldier, to the female as a piece of the warring conflict cooked up from above.

- The absence in the national press of reporting about domestic violence does not eliminate its real presence. Silence does not stop the aggressor from hitting. In the pages of our newspapers there should also be these stories of abuse, because otherwise we are not going to understand that we have a serious problem of assaults, silenced within the walls of so many homes.

-

Where can a wife go when she is beaten by her husband? Why are there no shelters or why doesn’t the media publicize the locations of these refuges for battered women?

Buying disposable diapers is almost a luxury in this society. Most new mothers still have to spend a good part of their time washing baby clothes by hand. Every emancipation needs a material infrastructure of freedom, otherwise it will remain so only in slogans and mottoes.

- The high prices of all the products needed for motherhood and pregnancy are also a factor that influences the low birth rate. A crib with mattress costs the equivalent of $90 U.S. in a country where the average monthly salary doesn’t exceed $20.

- The child support that a father must provide for his children after a divorce — as stipulated by law — doesn’t exceed, in many cases, the equivalent of $3 monthly, which leaves a woman economically powerless to raise her children.

- The extremely high prices of food relative to wages keep Cuban women chained to the stove while performing economic pirouettes to put a plate of food on the table. It is the women and not the political-economic system that performs a daily miracle so that Cuban families eat, more or less well or more or less badly.

After so many slogans about emancipation and equality, we Cuban women are left with a double workday and dozens of cumbersome bureaucratic tasks. It’s enough to go outside to see the effects of this excess load: most women over forty have bitter faces, make no plans for the future, do not go out with their women friends to a bar, and have no escape from their family and the tedium. When a woman decides to criticize the government, she is immediately reminded who wears the skirt; they accuse her of immorality, infidelity to her husband, being manipulated by some male mind, and call her “prostitute,” “cocky,” “hooker,” as many discriminating cutting insults as they can imagine.

You can’t try to liberate a specific social group in a society gripped by the lack of rights. To be a woman in the Cuba of today is to suffer these lacks twice. In short, we want to have a clitoris and rights, to feel pleasure and to speak our opinions, to be known for our skirts, but especially for our ideas.

thank you so much for this—it reminds me of how chicanos tried to manipulate soldadera/adelita imagery/mythology in the 60s as a way to keep chicanas in line (you have to support your man—your “war” is supporting us! you’re soldaderas for “la causa”—which is *us*!!!

i appreciate a lot of the pictures like the one above—there’s similar pictures of chicanas (the brown berets, specifically, and there’s one of the women in columbia that is circulated a lot)—but i always sorta pause and almost never reblog them because there’s never any context. yes, we all look hot as fuck being tuff and bad ass—and that’s awesome—but the story is *always* more complicated. and i want the complication, not the bad ass stuff. (deleted cuz it wasn’t saying what i wanted to say quite the way i wanted to say it)

i was in the same spot this is like the 5th time it’s come across my dash in a few weeks…loving my people in the image but unwilling to co-opt them and reblog them like a fashion graphic with no acknowledgement of truths they live…the only way to resolve it for me was this way because like you i wasnt able to say what i wanted they way i wanted and Also Yoani’s dedication, bravery and real love para el pueblo de cuba made centering her voice the right thing. Living in the US I can only be an ally to my people on the island and never a voice of authority on their lived experiences…s’all i can stomach to listen to US based cubans and anyone else not living it talk like fucking white colonialists about the island and our people. so yeah. i really appreciated your perspective on this - thank you.