Like many, I was glued to Democracy Now’s live broadcast on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 21, from 6 p.m. until shortly after 11:08 p.m., the time that Troy Davis was killed by the state of Georgia, where I reside. Suddenly, the students’ essays that I was supposed to be grading or the dinner I […]
Author: Erica Williams
Erica Lorraine Williams is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. She completed her Ph.D in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University, and her B.A in Anthropology and Africana Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on the relationships between "sex tourism" and the marketing of Afro-Brazilian culture as an eroticized tourist commodity in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She is currently working on revising her dissertation, "Anxious Pleasures: Race and the Sexual Economies of Transnational Tourism in Salvador, Brazil," into a book manuscript. After participating in the Ms. Magazine Workshop for Feminist Scholars in May 2010, she decided to try her hand at feminist blogging!
SlutWalk, Bahia-Style
Early this summer, I was in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, directing a five-week study-abroad program for Spelman College students when I began to hear buzz about the upcoming Marcha das Vadias, or SlutWalk. The first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, Canada on April 3 as an outraged response to a Toronto police officer’s comment that, in […]
Listening to bell hooks and Gloria Steinem
On September 20, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall[1] facilitated a conversation between bell hooks and Gloria Steinem before an overflowing auditorium at Spelman College. These feminist icons courageously shared their aspirations, anxieties, joys, and valuable life lessons. bell hooks stated, “Integrity is congruence between what you think, say, and do.” Here are some take-aways about how to live a life of integrity:
Blonde Beauties and Black Booties: Racial Hierarchies in Brazil
Ironically, while scouts search Southern Brazil for women of European descent to fit into the standard of beauty, European and North American men travel to the Northeast of Brazil seeking sex with women of African descent who they imagine as hypersexual.