Tag: Death

"White Torture": Why We Must Oppose Solitary Confinement

“White Torture”: Why We Must Oppose Solitary Confinement

Narges Mohammadi, vice president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran, has been held in solitary confinement on and off from 1998 and 2020 for her human rights advocacy. On Tuesday night, Mohammadi was arrested by Iranian security forces during a ceremony honoring a victim of Iran’s deadly response to November 2019 protests. She was taken to the notorious Evin prison.

Since her release in October 2020, Narges has tried to draw attention to the practice of “white torture”—a form of solitary confinement—in Evin and other Iranian prisons. That is the topic of this article—the first she has written in English.

Céline Sciamma's "Petite Maman": A Unique Meditation on the Bond Between Mothers and Daughters

Céline Sciamma’s “Petite Maman”: A Unique Meditation on the Bond Between Mothers and Daughters

In Céline Sciamma’s newest feature, “Petite Maman,” for the first time, mother and daughter speak the same language and play the same games—perhaps discovering that they understood each other all along.

[This is one in a series of reviews from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), during which I focused on films directed by women.]

abortion pill supreme court lisa montgomery death penalty women

The Feminist Case for Ending the Death Penalty

Feminists have every reason to be suspicious of capital punishment. Death penalty laws in the U.S. were enacted by legislatures dominated by men; death sentences are sought by prosecutors who are predominately men; juries that condemn defendants to death have historically been mostly male; and judges who sentence defendants to death are overwhelmingly male.

They Don't Teach You How to Grieve as a First-Generation, Only-Child American

They Don’t Teach You How to Grieve as a First-Generation, Only-Child American

As the only child, only daughter to immigrant parents coming from strong Latin and Middle Eastern cultures, I was taught many things of life in this “new” world. COVID-19 showed me that I was never formally taught one constant emotion amongst all of humanity: grief.

Just when I start to learn to process one traumatic event, another hits, and another, and the next—all while grieving a nation I love and a democracy my parents sacrificed to attain.

Lisa Montgomery Aileen Wuornos

How Misogyny Drives the Marginalized to Kill

With “Requiem for a Serial Killer,” does Phyllis Chesler leave us feeling that it was acceptable for Aileen Wuornos to kill those men? Not at all.

What she does is leave us feeling that the whole world needs to know the full realities of all kinds of abuse of children, the way it often leads to prostitution, and the forms of abuse to which some johns subject the women they pay for sex. We need to be determined to make such abuse stop.

lisa montgomery the Only Woman on Federal Death Row

A “Prisoner of War” Story: The Life and Captivity of Lisa Montgomery—The First Woman To Be Executed by the Federal Government in 68 Years

Early Wednesday morning, the U.S. government executed Lisa Montgomery after a flurry of legal efforts failed to outlast a Trump administration that was determined to put a lifelong victim of torture and severe mental illness to death.

Here, find an investigation of Lisa’s life, from a childhood of pain to motherhood behind bars—the story of a woman failed by every layer of our society, including, on the last night of her life, the United States Supreme Court.