Author: Virginie Ann

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Student Life

La Grosse Laide: escaping fat phobia through comics

Wear black. Avoid horizontal lines. Put your hair in a bun. Drink tea. Eat less.

Considering weight gain like a plague has made us overlook the fact that comments made non-maliciously can still be traumatizing. Why are we so deeply afraid to become fat? Why are we so afraid of our loved ones being fat?

Six years ago, during a family dinner, Marie-Noëlle Hébert’s father told her that she had eaten enough. It was nothing like saying “you are too fat,” but the cruelty was, innocently, the same. While the then 23-year-old thought she was happy with her body, that comment left her deeply horrified and led to a spiral of doubt and depression.

You have eaten enough.  

Yet, this painful feeling was not unknown to Hébert. This time, she wanted to understand how it all began. She started to investigate her old journals and asked her relatives to share memories regarding her weight.

“I asked my mother when did she first notice that I was fat, but also when she noticed that I started to see it too,” Hébert said. “It was as if I buried, deep down, all these episodes of being ashamed of my body. I had forgotten things and now I wanted to be reminded.”

As a result, Hébert embarked on a journey that led to the creation of her first comic book, La Grosse Laide, a redemption of self esteem and fat phobia. Reading through her old journals might have been inspiring, but it was still very hurtful for her. They were filled with dark and suicidal thoughts with a recurring theme: she considered herself to be a fat, ugly person.

La Grosse Laide. 

The truth is, Hébert is not alone. Fat phobia represents the fear of being fat or seeing fat around you. According to the National Eating Disorder Organization, the phobia is strongly present in girls from ages six to 12, with 40 to 60 per cent concerned about their weight or are fearful of becoming fat. This time coincides with their bodies going through extreme changes, mostly due to menstruation shifting hormone balance. Yet, this time is often received with teasing by family and friends.

“I was surrounded by comments on my body either at home or school — it was inevitable,” said Hébert. “Comments about what I ate, what I was wearing and the infamous culture of shaming pasta-bread-potato. In my family, there are a lot of women; it’s an entire network where you can’t be fat, nor vulgar. You can’t speak too loud or be spontaneous. You had to be feminine and delicate. But these comments were often made as a joke or trying to help, never in a malicious way. Truly, it usually is a reflection of the person’s fear of their own body.”

Is fat phobia intergenerational then? Hébert recalled her father often swimming with his t-shirt on. She realized how his own fight with body image was why he was verbally violent towards her. Undeniably, such vituperation and influence from Hebert’s family is palpable through her soft voice and tender laugh. Her kind eyes tell the story of a long fight against self-shame — an all-too-common look.

La Grosse Laide is not a way for Hébert to shame her entourage; rather, it is an autobiographical testimony. It is a way to finally redeem herself and transform her body issues into something artistic and beautiful. For someone who never published her drawings, it is an incredibly personal project, as the notion of being fat can be.

Indeed, it is difficult to have a single description of what it means to be fat. Categorizing obesity is easier since it falls under body mass index measurements, determined by the Heart Foundation. Body dysmorphia, which usually derives from fat phobia, can’t be calculated and fixed through a scale. A study at University College London showed that the brain believes the body to be two-thirds bigger than it actually is. Becoming comfortable with your body is not a one-day process and can take a lifetime to overcome, according to Hébert.

“While I was working on my comic book, I was living in Montreal with my grandmother, whom I love dearly,” said Hébert. “She is proud of her appearance and has always been obsessed with her image and weight. Living with her, I saw where [my own obsession] came from. At 80 years old, she was still hating her stomach. If there is a fight that I will drop, it is this one. I don’t want to find my old self still saying ‘goddamn stomach!’”

Ironically, while creating La Grosse Laide and working full-time for the STM, Hébert recognized having gained weight. As her comic book comes as a critique of fat phobia, she now finds herself having to tame and love her 29-year-old body. Yet, when she draws, she doesn’t think about her body rolls. Her focus is not on her physique anymore. There is no weight-loss plan in her life, no obsession.

There is only her graphite pencil and her drawings to achieve body reconciliation.

La Grosse Laide is available at XYZ Edition. 

Photo courtesy of Marie-Noëlle Hébert

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Briefs News

World in brief: Justice for Rafi, death of ISIS leader and a third extension for Brexit

Sixteen people have been sentenced to death for setting a 19-year-old girl on fire after she accused her teacher of sexual harassment in Bangladesh. The verdict came after the country was left in shock, protesting for justice. It was one of the quickest sentences to be pronounced in such cases. Nusrat Jahan Rafi was murdered in April by classmates who urged her to retract her complaint. They lured her onto a rooftop 11 days after she came forward to the police with accusations of sexual harassment, as reported by BBC. Bangladesh has an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence. According to UN Women, more than half of Bangladeshi women have experienced some form of sexual violence from their intimate partner in their lifetime.

On Sunday, Trump announced the death of one of the most wanted terrorists, Islamist State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Several media outlets reported that he died in a raid conducted by American troops in northwest Syria, on Saturday night. It was later confirmed by Trump that al-Baghdadi ran into a dead-end tunnel with three of his children, where he detonated a suicide vest. Yet, people are reluctant to link his death to the end of ISIS, as the terrorist organization is most likely to name a successor. Talking about a possible ISIS resurgence in a TIME article, Michael Downing, former head of the Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau for the Los Angeles Police Department said: “Now is one of the most dangerous times, when you injure an animal, that is when it is most dangerous.”

A new Brexit deadline has been granted to Boris Johnson’s government after the Prime Minister was forced by the parliament to request a further extension. On Twitter early Monday morning, President of the European Council Donald Tusk referred to the setback as a “flextension” – meaning if a deal was to be made before February 2020, Britain could still have the opportunity to leave the EU. Johnson has repeated many times that a Brexit deal would happen by Oct. 31, but it has become increasingly difficult to reach a consensus with a minority government. Brexit, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, was first voted for in 2016 and has been extended three times since.

 

Graphic by @sundaeghost

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News

Understanding the federal election: what happened?

On Oct. 24, Concordia organized a conference where six political analysts discussed the outcome of the 2019 election and how we got here. 

Three days after election night, six panelists took the D.B. Clarke theatre stage one after another to analyze and debate key aspects of the campaign. The panelists were Harold Clarke, Rachel Curran, Lawrence LeDuc, Kevin Page, Carole McNeil and Jean-Pierre Kingsley.

While most polls put Andrew Scheer ahead of Justin Trudeau, it might have come as a surprise that the Conservatives did not do as well as anticipated. To truly understand the outcome of the election, Clarke argued that people need to look at the three main drivers of electoral choice.

Firstly, social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion usually get a lot of media attention. But, it is actually how the political party performs, in terms of what Clarke referred to as valence issues, that will drive the voter’s final decision.

“These are issues that everybody agrees on the goal,” said Clarke, a professor at the University of Texas in Dallas and veteran of Canadian elections studies. “Issues such as the economy, or healthcare, education, security, and now climate change as well. It’s hard to find people who want bad healthcare and so on.”

Accordingly, the fact that the vast majority of people want a healthy economy strongly played in favour of Trudeau, explained Clarke. Indeed, the latest Statistics Canada survey, released on Oct.11, showed that today’s economy held a steady 5.5 per cent unemployment rate, the lowest in 40 years.

“It’s a big plus. Prosperity is a big plus,” Clarke said.

The second driver in the electoral choice, which explains surprises such as the NDP losing seats, is partisanship. Partisanship in Canada tends to be quite fluid and people are more than willing to leave their favoured party. According to Clarke, this creates situations where there are always possibilities for last-minute, large scale change.

Last, the third electoral driver proposed by Clarke is the leader image, which he believes played a major part in this election.

“Scheer simply didn’t make the impression he needed to make to win,” Clarke said.

Theme of the election 

While affordability ended up being the main theme of this year’s election, issues put forward by the parties were somehow irrelevant, argued Curran, Former Director of Policy to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“The measures [the political parties] were offering were very cynical and very shallow vote line efforts, at best,” Curran said. “What the parties ignored was the much bigger issues that we need to grapple and resolve as a country.”

As a matter of fact, this can explain the low voter turnout of 65.95 per cent. None of the leaders actually addressed the true underlying causes of issues such as why some Indigenous communities still have no access to clean water or why cellphone charges are extortionate, Curran pointed out.

Curran also believes that the inability and, perhaps even more, unwillingness of the parties to take a clear stance on issues such as the climate crisis, led to a problematic outcome; deep, regional division.

Canada has actually been sending various, very divided messages which resulted in broken national cohesion on election night.

“How do we reconcile resource development with environmental protection if we are in the business of fossil fuel, how do we address climate change in a credible way?” asked Curran. “And if we are not in the business, how do we fill the revenue hole and replace the hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs linked in the energy sector, particularly in Western Canada?”

Accordingly, we saw how cacophonic broadcasted debates were. It was arguably more of a who-can-talk-the-loudest contest than discussions on meaningful issues. It led to questions raised by a lot of media outlets as to whether the broadcasted debates are to be changed and how much impact they really have.

Jagmeet Singh was almost unanimously declared the winner after the CBC debate on Oct. 7. Yet, the NDP only won 24 seats last Monday night.

“I think we should, when evaluating the debates in the electoral campaign, avoid separating them from all the other things that we talked about in the context of the election,” said Leduc, professor at the University of Toronto. “Because even if Singh benefited from the debates, he only benefited from them being one of the several elements in the campaign.”

Leduc and Clarke both argued that the current form of debates won’t be seen again. A single debate between the two leaders of the main parties remains the innovation argued as the best.

Going Forward

Historically, minority governments never lasted more than two years. And before the evening was over, the panelists all took turns, gambling the durability of this one.

Interestingly, Clarke pointed out that Scheer might not be around that long, and the process of replacing him is going to take a while. Curran gambled that it will last at least two years.

Therefore, Trudeau is actually in a good position to hold power for a little while. Yet, losing 27 seats showed that his government needs to do better with Canadian issues.

“Climate change, healthcare and going forward with affordability, these are going to be the defining issues going ahead,” concluded CBC journalist McNeil.

 

Feature photo by Cecilia Piga

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Briefs

World in brief: Deadly protests in Chile, Catalan pro-independence activists sentenced

Protests against the cost of living have now taken 11 people’s lives in Chile after a weekend of on-going demonstrations. The vandalism and violence were originally prompted by the rise of transit fares announced two weeks ago, which has since been suspended by President Sebastián Piñera. Yet, the initial reason was only a reflection of a deeper national frustration against growing economic inequalities. As reported by The Guardian, the state of emergency declared on Oct. 19 led to more than 10,000 military troops taking over the streets of Santiago, imposed curfew in major cities and the interruption of subway services. Such interventions haven’t been seen since the end of Pinochet dictatorship back in 1990.

Tensions in Spain have been rising as the Supreme Court sentenced nine pro-independence activists up to 13 years in jail. The sentenced leaders were judged on their role in the 2017 Catalan referendum which was backed up by more than half of the 5.5 million voters but deemed illegal by Spanish courts, reported Global News. The decision, which came on Oct. 14, led to an entire week of extreme protests by separatists. As more than 300 people have since been detained by the police, Catalan President Quim Torra, who initially called for civil disobedience, is now open for talks with the Spanish Government.

The White House finally backtracked and dropped plan after announcing that the next G7 would be held at Trump’s golf resort in Miami. The initial move was considered by many to be further evidence of the President using his office for personal gain. CBC highlighted that Trump was the first administration official to praise one of his properties for hosting the international summit. While it comes as one of Trump’s rare reverse decisions, his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said that he knows people think it looks lousy.

 

Graphic by @sundaeghost

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News

Humans, sex and robots: integrating technology into our sexuality

Concordia research aims at understanding individual attitudes and perceptions towards artificial erotic agents.

In the past weeks, Concordia students might have stumbled upon an unusual request glued to various bathroom stalls; research on sex robots looking for participants.

As with any subject confronting our sexuality, mixed with the feared and misunderstood rise of technology, the expected reactions are strong, ranging from laughter to repulsion.

“I think it is eerie because it is kind of disrupting the process of individuals getting to know their bodies at an intimate level whether it is with a partner or by themselves,” said Georgette Ayoub, Concordia Political Science student.

Yet, Simon Dubé, the man behind the research and Ph.D. student in Psychology, Neuroscience and Cognition of human sexuality at Concordia, says these reactions are quite natural.

“These are first impulse reactions,” said Dubé. “It’s not unique reactions with sex robots. We had the same with video games, with pornography. It used to be the same thing even with radio, people used to think it would lead to the destruction of society. It’s always blurred out of proportion.”

Indeed, there is a climate of moral panic when it comes to technology. Are robots going to replace affection, or even love? Such reasoning can be explained by the fact that only a few studies have been done so far, and most of them are done on human interaction with computers; none have dug into erotic interaction.

Therefore, the research is interested in people’s reception towards emerging artificial agents, such as virtual erotic partners, virtual chatbots and of course, the infamous sex robots. Dubé hopes to further the understanding of their impact on our society and the relationship humans can develop with E-robots.

And for everyone wondering, no, the research doesn’t actually include having sex with robots. When students register to participate in his study, Dubé, who works with the Concordia Vision Lab, uses a number of different techniques, such as questionnaires, to track people’s responses to images, videos and audio related to erotic machines.

While technology has taken over a huge part of our lives, it only makes sense that it now arises in our sexuality. Dubé argues that his research only comes at a time where there is a cluster of all technology coming together to enable these erotic machine interactions.

“The idea of having sex or an intimate relationship with non-living objects has been here for thousands of years,” said Dubé. “I think at this point, it’s a matter of the technology emerging right now related to artificial intelligence, such as sex robots, computing or augmented virtual reality. These are all achieving a level of interactivity and immersivity that is starting to become interesting for people, to use them in their relationship or intimacy.”

Arguably, the fear of including robots in our intimacy or sexuality derives from pop culture-producing fiction. Just think of the utopic, robotic cold-hearted world created in almost every episode of Black Mirror. The picture is always a classical one, where an apocalyptic world is shown as a result of what could happen if we start including these technologies in our day to day lives.

Dubé warns us of the danger of such misconceptions, arguing that this discourse is at the very root of why they have such trouble doing research on something that could be beneficial for a lot of individuals.

“People have really polarized ideas on what these technologies can do, but for some people, it can be super helpful,” said Dubé. “It can be part of their sexuality with their spouses, their partners or alone. Yes, humans develop problems with all kinds of technology, people get addicted to video games per example, but artificial erotic agents could help people with trauma, or anxiety related to sexuality or intimacy. It’s always the same music that plays over and over again, but here we just need to do the right kind of research.”

What Dubé means by the right kind of research could result in positive applications of these erotic technologies in health and medical research, and even Sex Ed. It could be used by people who’ve experienced sexual trauma to help them reintegrate sexuality into their lives, or by people having a hard time finding partners, dealing with their own orientation or simply out of curiosity.

“The key message I want to get across, is that it’s simply not gonna be an apocalypse or a robot utopia or virtual reality utopia where everything is going to be beautiful or dark,” said Dubé. “It’s going to be somewhere in the middle, for some people, it’s an amazing experience and it’s an integrated part of their sexuality and for others, they might have a problematic dynamic with these technologies. But we need to overcome this idea it will be all black or all white.”

Either way, with erotic technologies, we are now standing at the beginning of a new sexual revolution.

 

Graphic by @joeybruceart

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Briefs News

World in brief: deadly typhoon, Iranian women’s victory and religious violence in Burkina Faso

Oct. 10 became a historic day, as Iranian women were allowed into a football stadium for the first time in 40 years. The decision came after FIFA threatened to suspend Iran over their male-only policy that has been governing the country for decades. The Guardian reported that the death of Sahar Khodayari earlier this September had a major impact on the FIFA directive. The 29-year-old woman set herself on fire in fear of being jailed after dressing up as a boy, trying to attend a football match. Her tragic death fueled a national outcry, but resulted in more than 3,500 women finally obtaining their first ticket to a football game.

Two people were killed and nine remain missing as a result of the biggest typhoon to hit Japan in decades. Since the hit on Oct. 12, more than one million people have been urged to leave their homes. While Japan is frequently hit by typhoons, BBC has described Typhoon Hagibis as the worst storm in 60 years. It was reported that 270,000 homes have since lost power caused by flooding from the heavy rains. The last typhoon to have caused serious damage was back in 1958, killing over 1,200 people.

Sixteen people were shot dead while attending prayers in a northern Salmossi village mosque in Burkina Faso.  As reported by Al Jazeera, the armed gunmen who are yet to be identified entered the mosque on Friday evening and opened fire. It resulted in an ongoing climate of panic as citizens started to flee the area. For the past few years, the region has been struggling with ethnic and religious tensions advanced by armed groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. More than 500,000 people have been forced to leave their homes since January due to extreme violence, the United Nations said on Friday.

 

Graphic by @sundaeghost

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News

The influence of memes and bots in the electoral campaign

“Right now, we are not seeing a lot of positive Trudeau memes,” said Associate Professor Fenwick McKelvey. “So, will it influence the vote? That is something we walk in with an open mind, saying this could be totally meaningless. But then at the same time, it is an important part of how people understand and engage in politics.”

The lack of investigation of the role of memes in Canadian politics led McKelvey, from the Department of Communication Studies, to look at the content being shared on social media. While memes are usually regarded as harmless, humoristic tools, McKelvey argues that they are actually an important part of shaping public opinion and representing all the different political party leaders.

“I think the humour part is important because people look at these images and it helps them laugh or make a joke,” said McKelvey, “and then they identify closer with that party or with the people who created the joke.”

According to the research, which McKelvey is doing with the help of undergrad students, there is currently a tendency towards counter-Trudeau memes. And it is not only a right-wing phenomenon, but memes are also used by all parties to campaign with generic, negative messages.

The research identified 30 Facebook groups posting memes about the election, each focusing on different issues. It can be observed that from the left-wing, climate change is a recurring theme while the right promotes corruption-related memes. Yet, Trudeau’s various scandals, such as SNC-Lavalin and his Brownface incident, prevail above all.

On Sept. 27, in a meme-tweet style, Trudeau announced his latest environmental promise to plant 2 billion trees if he was to be re-elected. “We’ll plant 2 billion trees over the next ten years. That’s it. That’s the tweet.”

This tweet, which McKelvey argues was orchestrated by his campaign staff, was an attempt to adopt the meme trend and ended up backfiring on him. It was received more as a joke than anything, said McKelvey.

“It’s interesting to see the varying reactions, I mean at least from the students,” said McKelvey. “No one took it seriously. It came across as a joke.”

The research comes after McKelvey co-wrote a paper with Elizabeth Dubois on the role of bots in politics. Simply put, bots are the loose word to describe any automated accounts on social media that behave or pretend to be a human.

In politics, the worst scenario could be where bots push for a story to become more popular than it should be, whether false or not, impacting public perception directly. It can become terrifying knowing that, according to a study by the University of Southern California and Indiana University, nearly 50 million Twitter accounts are run by bot software.

Although, under the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, political parties worldwide have now agreed to obey a code of conduct that states full disclosure on their use of bots.

Yet, while Jagmeet Singh and Andrew Scheer took the pledge, neither Justin Trudeau, Elizabeth May nor Maxime Bernier’s names can be found in the online agreement.

What about their roles in spreading false information?

Since the 2016 United States election, the existence of online-interferences from automated agents is not a secret anymore.

In fact, parts of McKelvey’s research on the role of bots was to recognize the capacity of bots to manipulate the content on social media, but also acknowledging that bots can serve important public functions, along with the public interest.

“We have the CBC using bots to help people understand how disinformation spreads online,” said McKelvey. “We also have a bot that is called the Parity Bot. So, whenever someone tweets something negative or abusive to a woman in politics, it will automatically tweet something positive. It’s a way to counter interact negativity online.”

And when it comes to memes, McKelvey argues that analyzing false information being spread through them doesn’t look at how people share information they know to be false but believe anyway. Instead, he believes in trying to think about this sharing process more as social identification; how people come to understand themselves and politics.

 

Graphic by Victoria Blair

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News

Climate crisis: change is coming

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, and representatives from different Indigenous groups led the march against climate change in Montreal last Friday.

Around 500,000 people were gathered at Sir-Georges-Étienne-Cartier monument on Parc Avenue to trek to Bonaventure Parc, where Thunberg addressed the crowd.

“You are a nation that is allegedly a climate leader and Sweden is also a nation that is allegedly a climate leader,” said Thunberg during her speech. “In both cases, it means absolutely nothing because in both cases it’s just empty words. So we are basically the same,” she added, jokingly.

Photo by Laurence B.D.

The Swedish activist sailed  across the Atlantic on a zero-carbon emission sailing boat back in early September to take part in a United Nation climate summit. She spoke in front of the committee, condemning the inaction of world leaders.

“I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” she said during her UN speech. “Yet you all come to us, young people, for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams, my childhood with your empty words.”

She continued stressing the consequences of climate change, such as the extinction of complete ecosystems and the loss of individual human lives.

“We are at the beginning of mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth,” she said with an emotional, assertive tone.“How dare you.”

Alongside Montreal, hundreds of cities worldwide joined the march on Sept. 27, in solidarity against climate inaction.

In Montreal, a historical association of 21 organizations, including Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundation and the various branches of La Planète s’invite au Parlement, all came together in the creation and promotion of the protest.

“We are climate justice seekers,” said Jacob Robitaille, Concordia Geography student and internal coordinator for La Planete s’invite à l’Université (LPSU). “We want to have a just, equitable and equal transition. We are trying to develop a firmer, anti-colonial stance because we believe that the environmental crisis has everything to do with the abuse of Indigenous people; the constant oppression and taking away of lands. These issues are very much interconnected and we want to bring forward the message to regular people.”

Photo by Alex Hutchins.

It is therefore a question of education, said Robitaille. The LPSU’s fundamental goal is to educate the general public, from the bottom up, and incite policy change from the governmental institutions.

“Being a geography student, I know the climate crisis is driven mainly by diet,” said Robitaille. “People don’t grasp that issue enough. If you stop eating beef one week at a time, it has a significant impact on your CO2 emission, your water use and land use. It is really as simple as that.”

The LPSU, a student climate activist mobilization, started being more active last February, as an answer to Thunberg’s global cry. The movement has been overwhelmingly picked up by youth, as people want to get involved at a younger age. The people who are the most organized in this movement are the high schoolers, Robitaille said.

“They are fed up,” said Robitaille. “They don’t have a voice politically, they don’t have the means, there are so many barriers for them to get their voice heard; people don’t take them seriously. So, our movement is founded on that. We want to push a ground-up change.”

Indeed, according to François Geoffroy, a spokesperson for La Planete s’invite au Parlement, more than 200,000 students were given permission to strike on Friday.

And as Montreal saw 500,000 citizens walk down its streets on Friday, one can only imagine the impact of such a movement on the upcoming Federal election. The potential of leading this energetic youth to vote for a party that offers an environmental platform is undeniably massive.

Photo by Jad Abukasm.

Yet, the LPSU remains an apolitical organization. Instead, Robitaille said they believe in flipping the entire script around and are more than willing to denounce the nonsense and lack of policy from the Conservatives and Liberals.

On Sept. 24, three days prior to the march, 10 Quebec universities, including Concordia, united to declare a climate emergency. CTV News reported that they all recognize the need for social change and have vowed to become carbon-neutral by 2050, to finance more research on climate change, and to increase the number of environmental and sustainability-related academic programs and other resources.

The impact of the Global Week for Future, the series of international protests asking for climate justice, is yet to be seen. But the conversations are changing and there is currently a momentum building, according to Robitaille.

“At the end, we are just a group of students that don’t want to die,” said Robitaille.

 

 

 

WATCH:

The Concordian talks climate change, veganism, and the federal elections with participants of Montreal’s

Jad Abukasm contributed to this report

Feature photo by Alex Hutchins, photos by Jad Abukasm, Laurence B.D., and Alex Hutchins, video by Thomas Quinn

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Briefs News

World in brief: Impeachment, leaders at the UN and rescued Nigerian captives

A formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump was officially made on Sept. 24. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the inquiry will investigate whether the President abused his presidential powers and sought help from the Ukraine government to undermine Democratic candidate Joe Biden. The Associated Press reported that the allegations came after a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which you can hear Trump asking for help finding incriminating actions by Biden’s son.

“The president must be held accountable,” Pelosi said. “No one is above the law.”

Global leaders met on Sept. 23, in New York for the 74th session of the UN General Assembly. Discussions on the climate crisis and a possible armed conflict between the United States and Iran were among the headlines. French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stood against the U.S. and Iran conflict, urging them to resume negotiations over the ongoing tensions in the Middle East, reported Reuters. Greta Thunberg also made a heartfelt plea, but towards the inactions of leaders regarding the climate crisis. She arguably dropped her most powerful quote yet with “how dare you” in a video that was shared more than 50,000 times.

On Sept. 26, more than 300 captives were rescued from a building that housed an Islamic school in northern Nigeria. Many reports described the survivors mostly as children, boys aged around 5 to their late teens, walking in chains. Police declared that seven people, teachers at the school, were arrested in the raid. Such schools are known to be abusive, yet parents lacking financial resources often opt to leave their children in the hands of the school boards. CBC reported that earlier this year, Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a Muslim, was planning to eventually ban the schools. It is still unclear how long the children were retained.

 

Graphic by @sundaeghost

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Historical climate protest in Montreal: Quebec is standing up

On Sept. 27, millions of Canadians took to the streets across the country to protest inaction on climate change.

“Today, we are nearly 500,000 people gathered here in Montreal, but there are also 52 protests everywhere across Quebec,” said the spokesperson of La Planète s’invite au Parlement (LPSP), François Geoffroy.

In a historical association of 21 environmental organizations, including the David Suzuki Foundation, Pour le Futur and Greenpeace, LPSP took on the responsibility of planning the massive strike. It took place at the tail end of a worldwide cry that took place between Sept. 20 and Sept. 27, during which over 150 countries protested the climate crisis.

According to Geoffroy, more than 200,000 students were given permission to strike on Friday. The growing youth movement taking over the climate crisis led school boards across Canada to cancel Friday’s classes in support of their students’ decision to demand more from the government.

“We want laws, we want specific plans which will force our government to reach the objectives set by scientists, in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees,” said the LPSP organizer, to an energetic crowd. “We want to make this transition everybody’s business. We want to build it with workers, communities that are currently struggling with their dependency on polluting industries. We want to build it with the most vulnerable; they need to be part of the solution. We need to build it with First Nations because they have a lot to teach us and for once, we should listen to them.”

Photo by Alex Hutchins

Beginning at Mont-Royal, the protest was symbolically opened by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, alongside Indigenous youth. “To the front lines for Mother Earth” was the first banner you could see them holding as they travelled through downtown Montreal, chanting and calling for action.

Prior to the march, Thunberg met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where it was reported by various media that she told him he was not doing enough to protect the environment. Indeed, the past few weeks have seen a rise in critiques towards Trudeau’s environmental speeches and his government’s decision to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline.

“If people in power won’t take their responsibilities, then we will,” Thunberg said at the end of the protest. “It should not be up to us, but somebody needs to do it. They say we shouldn’t worry, that we should look forward to a bright future. But then, they forget that if they would have done their job, we wouldn’t need to worry. If they had started acting in time, then this crisis wouldn’t be this crisis, it is today. The climate and environmental crisis are beyond party politics.”

Friday’s event was beyond historical. It was not only Quebec’s most important protest yet, but also the largest climate strike during the Global Week for Future, a series of international protests asking for climate justice.

For whatever reason people decided to protest, it demonstrated the power of union. No one was in school or at work, because this is an emergency and we will not be bystanders, Thunberg said during her final speech.

“The people have spoken and they will keep on speaking until our leaders listen and act. We are the change. And change is coming.”

 

Feature photo by Alex Hutchins

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Healing and empowering women through music

When it comes to violence against women, we might understand it, but how do we heal from it? On Sept. 17, Sandi Curtis revealed her research of more than 20 years on feminist music therapy, at Concordia’s 4th Space.

Through music links that support the writing, this E-book explores not only violence against women, but also the various underpinnings of culture, and how they affect women.

Understanding male violence requires examining the power inequalities between men and women, such as the economic and physical ones, but Curtis also looks at the role culture plays in setting norms on how we approach and deal with such a sensitive subject. According to the American Psychological Association, violence against women is a major cause of reduced quality of life, distress, injury, and death for women. It also has serious secondary effects for families, communities, and the economy. And while the physical aspect of violence is strongly present when we approach the subject, Curtis argues that there are many more levels to it than we consciously think of.

“The book is for everyone,” said Curtis. “Even though the title says Music for Women (Survivors of Violence), we are all impacted [by violence]. It is how we rearrange our lives when we go out at night to keep safe, who we talk to and who we don’t, how we respond, our self esteem in a culture that objectifies women, and then has this very narrow definition of beauty. It’s amazing that self esteem is an issue for all women because of this culture, so it really is for all women.”

In Music for Women (Survivors of Violence), Curtis combines her work experience with women’s shelters and her research to show how effective feminist music therapy can be. Therapy is usually kept behind closed doors to ensure the safety of abused women, but it also means that it can be less accessible. So an online and interactive book is a way for Curtis to offer this powerful tool to other women too, making it more inclusive.

With over 200 songs by artists like Lady Gaga, 4 Non Blondes, and Cher, Curtis visits various themes such as male entitlement, gender inequality, women’s self esteem, fat-shaming, and resilience. Using only female singers and songwriters actually allows the female readers to internalize the content in its entirety, Curtis said.

“The women can hear themselves through songs of others,” said Curtis. “They can look at a big, successful music rockstar and say, well they are singing, they had these experiences and they are successful. Maybe they didn’t deserve [the violence] so maybe I don’t.”

Arguably, the timing of such a publication is also ideal, coming alongside movements like #MeToo and with the growing popularity of diverse female singers. Where women used to freeze in fear of violence, they now stand up and strengthen their voice. Simply look at Lizzo’s latest performance at the VMAs and the empowering message for women of colour and curves behind it.

“I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100 per cent that bitch. Even when I’m crying crazy. Yeah, I got boy problems, that’s the human in me. Bling bling, then I solve ’em, that’s the goddess in me.”  – Lizzo “Truth hurts”

Music for Women (Survivors of Violence) might just be the amalgam of auditory secrets, kept for years and silently used by women to understand and overcome male violence. But the change in society is coming at a time where women need to share empowering tools altogether. With Curtis’s E-book, conventional reading is then brought to another dimension where music and lyrics become feminist allies.

The book is available through Barcelonapublishers.com 

 

Feature photo by Laurence B.D.

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World in brief: Spotlight on the Climate Change and the Kashmir ongoing lockdown

Lockdown in the Himalayan region of occupied Kashmir, claimed by both India and Pakistan, hits its 50th consecutive day on Sept. 23. At the beginning of August, the Narendra Modi-led Indian government revoked the special status of the region, dividing the Muslim-majority state into two territories to be controlled by the federal government. Videos of torture, midnight raids and detentions of thousands of people from the academic elites have led Amnesty International to call for the resolution of the conflict. The NGO reported that more than 8 million people are under extreme lockdown, as cellphones and the internet remain disconnected.

On Sept. 20, American youth took to the streets of New York City to protest the climate crisis. Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that more than 60,000 people attended the march, and CNN reported that 1.1 million students had been excused from class to participate. The movement has gained a lot of attention in the past weeks, as Greta Thunberg called on people worldwide to join this youth-led strike. Over 150 countries have stepped in and are organizing protests from Sept. 20 to the 27th. Montreal is expected to host the biggest protest yet, on Sept. 27.

A year-long study on climate change began on Sept. 20, as an international team of researchers left for the central Arctic. Global News reported that the $150 million expedition will be conducted by over 600 scientists from 19 countries, including the United States, Germany and China. They seek to expand understanding of climate change and develop further models that can predict changes in the weather.  The expedition is described as one of the most complex studies ever attempted in as hostile an environment as the Arctic.

 

Graphic by @sundaeghost

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