The exercise of visualizing modernity in cities often leads one to picture skyscrapers, grandiose bridges, and urban housing developments with tall glass windows. These have become the urban living infrastructures we know to be modern — those we crave, value, and race to build. Yet, there is an increasing cluster of African architects, designers, and engineers who are contesting these images of modernity as being neither desirable nor fit for public spaces in our African citi

The 2023 Global Femicide Report, released jointly by UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, recorded a staggering 51,100 intentional killings of women and girls across the world that year. These killings were found to not only be overwhelmingly carried out by intimate partners or close family relatives but also to majoritarily occur in no other place than the victim’s home . Being confronted with the deep intimacy of both the home as a place of death and c

Among the many lessons that the genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has exposed us to, a poignant one is the realization that wherever prolonged warfare exists, women suffer war wounds that only their bodies can speak to. From the trauma associated with resorting to period-delaying pills to escape the scarcity of wartime menstruation to elongated bleeding after giving birth, the women of Gaza are our living reminders that we are answerable to what happens to women

Over the last three months, we have borne witness to Palestinian men carrying the shredded pieces of their relatives’ bodies with their bare hands, mothers crying over their children’s dead remains, and caught sight of bodies being buried in mass graves. If one was not familiar with the image of a skull crushed under the rubble or had not looked at steel torn through human flesh prior to October 7, it is likely that they have an intimate relationship with such sights today. B

In 2007, a Dolce & Gabbana advert was released depicting a woman being pinned-down by an oily, shirtless man while four other men looked on. This scene quickly sparked international debate for portraying images of impending gang rape while simultaneously eroticizing violence against women. And while that is question enough about the incentives that drive our purchasing habits, there is no question here about the likelihood of such an occurrence under a patriarchal society wit

In 2022, Ferdinand Omanyala, 26 — also known as Africa’s fastest man — secured his U.S. visa a mere 24 hours before the start of his race at the World Athletics Championship in Eugene, Oregon. This given story sparked the kind of international debate that brought passport inequality out of the shadows where it resided and straight onto our doorstep. But Omanyala’s story is no singular story. It is also the story of South African runners stranded in Italy because of visa prob

For the patriarchy to exist at all, it must exist not only in how we think of and structure the societies we live in, but first in how we think of and structure ourselves. We have absorbed patriarchal teachings in our conceptualization, speech, and communication way before we could apply it to interconnected threads within a system that determines access, value, opportunities, or pay for a given gender within it. The patriarchy lives here— in the mind and in the mouth— before

Among all the rights and liberties righteously afforded to an individual within a given society, none survive without the unconditional liberty of bodily autonomy. It is the ownership over one’s body to act and move as one desires that renders social activity possible in all its forms. Simply put, if one does not own oneself first— one then owns absolutely nothing. So when the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24th 2022, effectively ending a 50-year

Shadowing the interconnected nature of happenings in the political sphere and those in one’s personal sphere of life has been a successful strategy in sustaining the idea that one’s personal experiences purely result from personal choices. In denying the existence of an inherent interconnectedness between the political and the personal, we forget that the policy choices enacted in the former mold the reality of the latter. Carol Hanisch coined the phrase the personal is poli

Our cultural scripts for heterosexual intercourse are acquired from the intricate process of socialization that molds us into the beings we are. Because this process is guided by notions of a gendered social hierarchy, we both experience and engage in sexuality in relation to social factors such as anatomical (mis)understandings, gender roles, and embedded power dynamics. Subsequently, these cultural scripts convey an understanding of sex as needing to revolve around penetrat

A single act of sexual violence already represents an atrocity so deep that it becomes virtually impossible to think about it existing in plurality, engaged in purposefully, and used on a mass-scale. Yet, this is a reality that has been with us for a long time now as wartime sexual violence has been both a consistently present and persisting feature of our history. Militaries, armies, and rebel groups alike have used sexual violence as a means of repression, terror, and contr

At the forefront of the collective of social norms that inform how a woman is to move through society is a deeply embedded expectation of care-taking for which the family home is a microcosm. There, the deep feminization of domestic work has informed the role of women and girls for centuries now. At the very bottom of our economy, women and girls around the world, especially those living in poverty and from marginalized groups are performing 12.5 billion hours of domestic wor

Patriarchy, a system in which men hold the social power, is deeply ingenious for letting us believe that its means for fighting a war on emotional expression is precisely by breeding individuals devoid of it. Should we look closer, we would see that men, the agents in question, are to be devoid of emotions by instead channeling power, anger, courage, strength, and confidence . In the process, they ought to reject affection, care, sensitivity, vulnerability, and empathy. And,

In her 2020 memoir, Untamed, author Glennon Doyle speaks of the profound martyrdom that women endure through motherhood. She talks of motherhood as being marked by martyrdom done in our children’s names, living as if “she who disappears the most, loves the most.” A deep conditioning that she defines as being as old as time, leaving us to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist. This is a fate we know too well. If we have not been her ourselves, we then know well the woman w

A defining feature of the effort to control women’s sexuality is its ability to birth traditions, cultural practices, and religious beliefs that serve as a means to that end. And, while those methods have evolved across historical decades, perhaps no one method has been as effective in accomplishing that goal than that of virginity. We commonly understand virginity to be the state of never having had sexual intercourse but despite having a seemingly broad definition, its real