Archive for ‘Interviews’

November 16th, 2010

Meet Haleh Esfandiari

Haleh Esfandiari is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She is an expert on women’s issues and democracy in the Middle East, as well as contemporary Iranian politics, and she has also worked as a journalist. A dual citizen of Iran and the United States, in 2007 she spent 105 days in Tehran’s Evin Prison, accused by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence with espionage and “endangering national security through propaganda against the system.” In My Prison, My Home: One Women’s Story of Captivity in Iran (2009, Ecco Press), Esfandiari recounts her experience while setting it within the context of Iran’s recent history.

What is it that you think you’ll never forget about those months in prison?
Prison leaves its marks forever and little things keep triggering your memory. For example, if I see the moon I always remember that the third time I saw it from the bars of my cell I knew that I had been in jail for three months or every time I see a butterfly I remember that one day, when I was walking on the small terrace of the women’s ward, I saw a white butterfly and I thought to myself ‘I am stuck here, what are you doing here?’ I will never forget being blindfolded during my interrogation for days and weeks and months, I will never forget being interrogated for eight, nine hours a day, I will never forget the day I was released, I will never forget the day my mother passed away and I wasn’t there.

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November 11th, 2010

Meet Annie Griffiths


To be in the right place at the right moment brought the 25 years old photographer Annie Griffiths from the local Worthington Daily Globe in her home state, Minnesota, to travel around the world for National Geographic. Since that hailstorm hitting the region and her answering the phone and being asked by one of the most prestigious magazines in the world to take some pictures of the damages provoked, time has passed. Griffiths, always concerned with environmental issues, one year ago founded Ripple Effect Images, a photojournalists’ association documenting programmes that help women of emerging nations dealing with the effects of climate change. She is also part of the National Geographic Speakers Bureau and still works for the magazine. Griffiths is the author of “A camera, two kids and a camel” (National Geographic Society, 2008).

When you started working at National Geographic you were one of the first women and the youngest in the editorial team. Did you experience any difference in treatment because of that?
No, I think it was a benefit to be a woman because the director of photography was really trying to broaden his team. He had too many American white guys and really wanted to reach out and have a more diverse group of photographers. I really felt supported.

How old were you when you started bringing your children with you?
I was 36 when my first child was born and 39 when the second one arrived and even during my pregnancy they were always with me when I was travelling. Now they are 20 and 17 years old.
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October 23rd, 2010

Meet Marta Sanz Solé

Professor and member of the research group on Stochastic Processes at Barcelona University, Marta Sanz Solé was recently elected as president of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) for the 2011-2014 period. It is the first time both that a Spanish person and a woman holds the position.

What does it mean to you to be the first woman holding this position (if something?)

It means the challenge implicit in a position of responsabilty. I live the fact of being a woman with naturalness, maybe because even if inside the profession women are not the majority at all at the high levels, they are though well represented at middle and students levels, at least in Barcelona, where they are almost 50% of the total. I don’t focus it as much in what the position represents as a woman but in what it does as a math professional.

But I guess being the first one in doing something might give a special feeling, isn’t it so?
Well, yes, it is undoubtedly a differential element and although I don’t perceive gender discrimination in my environment (I have always gained the same salary as my male colleagues) where this is true, it might be an example that I guess can help to show things can get much better. Anyway I don’t like to put myself as a paradigm, probably because I am a discreet person, but yes, the fact that I am a woman can be useful as a counter example.

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October 8th, 2010

Meet Suraya Pakzad

We shall prepare the path for you and your children

We shall fight now so that you shall survive

We shall die now so that you shall live.

Suraya Pakzad

Suraya Pakzad grew up during the years of armed resistance against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. Fearing for their teenage daughter’s future, her parents arranged for her to marry at the age of 14. At 15, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter. Her father and her husband were both educated men, and neither of them stopped her from studying. But she hid her marriage from classmates and teachers, since school rules prohibited wives from studying alongside unmarried students.

By the time she earned her literature degree at Kabul University in 1992, Suraya already had three daughters. In 1998 she began to help Afghan women in Kabul by setting up covert schools for girls under the oppressive rule of Taliban. She started in her home in defiance of them, who banned females going to school or being educated.  Pakzad was the first to register a woman NGO in the post-Taliban era and quickly got the attention of international donors for her work. “Then I never looked back and was able to build a core team of not highly qualified but dedicated people that helped me a lot to support vulnerable women and families”.

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September 23rd, 2010

Meet Tishani Doshi

Poet and dancer, Tishani Doshi was born and lives in Madras (India). Her first book of poems, Countries of the Body, won the 2006 Forward prize for best first collection. She was also winner of the 2006 All-India Poetry Competition.

If you had to describe in few words your art to someone who doesn’t know you, what would you say?

My work, I think, has to do with simple explorations: the body, beauty,
geography, space, time, love, loss, leaving and the return. I think the main
thing I’m trying to achieve is a sense of musicality and sensuality, whether it’s in poetry, fiction or dance.

In your web page you say how you becoming a dancer in Chandralekha’s troupe at the age of 26 “seems like a mysterious force of the universe” at play to you and you talk about your relationship with her as the most important relationship of your life. What made this relationship so important?

It was important for many reasons, but perhaps the most important was that it made me understand beauty. Beauty on so many levels – the beauty of being an artist, of performance, of transformation, of being a woman, of being in love, alive. There was something very immediate about the way Chandra lived her life – it was against compartmentalization, against mechanization and aridity – and I suppose I found it a very attractive alternative to what I had seen around me. She often said to me that a woman was nothing unless she had a sense of politics and sexuality, and I think she embodied that perfectly.

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September 16th, 2010

Meet Julia Suryakusuma

Currently known as one of Indonesia’s leading and most outspoken opinion-makers, Julia Suryakusuma – columnist, author, activist, feminist, cultural critic – is hard to pigeon-hole. Being Indonesian, but born in India and raised in Europe (UK, Hungary, Italy) following her parents who worked as diplomats, she was always a foreigner abroad and a stranger in her own country, which made it possible for her to constantly look at things from different perspectives.

As a columnist (writing for the Jakarta Post, the International Herald Tribune, The Daily Yomiuri, NRC Handelsblad, among others), she always tries to “generate a debate” on the most pressing social, political and cultural issues affecting Indonesia.
She is the author of “Sex, Power and Nation: an Anthology of Writings, 1979-2003 (Metafor, 2004), and “Julia’s Jihad” (Prunsoop, 2009, in Korean, and Mizan, 2010 in Indonesian; in English, forthcoming in 2011), and lives in Jakarta.

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August 4th, 2010

Meet Carol Greider



Carol Greider, Professor and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the John Hopkins University,  co-discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984 when she was a graduate student of Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research on the mechanism through which telomeres (DNA sequences repeated at the end of chromosomes which allow genetic information to be copied integrally every time the cell divides, formed by telomerase) protect chromosomes from degradation has been awarded last year with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The two women shared it with Jack W. Szostak. Greider leads a “curiosity driven” lab of ten people (3 men and 7 women including her) researching the role of telomeres and telomerase in chromosome maintenance and stability.

Is it true that you went to the first press conference after being announced the winner of the Nobel Prize wearing big glasses and fake moustache?

Yes, it was part of the fun.

Why did you do that?

There’s a famous picture of Barbara Mc Clintock after it had been announced that she had won the Nobel Prize (1983, for her discovery that the genetic material is not fixed but fluid) wearing Groucho Marx’s glasses so, as a joke, I wore them.

It was the same press  conference where you brought your children. Why did you bring them?

They were just so excited I had won the Nobel Prize that they wanted to come with me, and they thought the day was wonderful. Everyone wanted to share everything with them, so they got to be with me the whole day, do everything they liked and got to miss one day of school.

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July 4th, 2010

Meet Raewyn Connell

Raewyn Connell (1944), born Robert William Connell, is the most influential Australian sociologist. Her research fields go from large-scale class dynamics, poverty and education, sociology of knowledge, sexuality and AIDS prevention to social change and gender relations. Her book “Masculinities” (1995) was one of the founders of this research field. She is currently university professor at the University of Sydney.

In the ILGA Trans Secretariat’s web page it’s written that it’s a paradox that the most important intellectual of masculinity is now a woman. First of all do you feel you are a woman?

No, I don’t feel I’m a woman.  I know it.  I don’t think that’s very different from the kind of knowledge other women have (and men too, about being men).  For transsexual women, of course, the knowledge has definite complexities; yet there are gender complexities at some level in almost everyone’s life.

Do you feel you are a man?

For large parts of my life I tried to live as a man, but always with the underlying contradiction. That is the situation many transsexual women find themselves in. There is no simple resolution of that contradiction, and no outcome without serious costs – including costs to other people in our lives.  It’s not a glamorous situation and should not be romanticised.

Do you think it is necessary to belong either to one gender or the other?

No, it is not necessary for everyone to be subjectively either a man or a woman.  There are some people who try consistently to live without gender commitments.  For instance, they live in de-gendered households, have emotional or sexual relations not determined by gender, present themselves with a mixture of gender symbolism, and demand that the state not classify them in gender terms.  This is a brave project and these people have my admiration.  But their project is incredibly difficult, because gender is a massive social reality, embedded in institutions as well as personal life.   For the great majority of people, having a definite place in the gender order is a routine condition of life, a ground of everyday action.

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June 13th, 2010

Meet Amelia Valcárcel

Amelia Valcárcel (Madrid, 1950) is professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the UNED (National University of Distance Education), Member of the State Council and Vice-president of the Real Patronato of Prado Museum. She is also a consultant in Gender Policies for the United Nations and one of the most prestigious Spanish feminist thinkers.

What did feminism mean 40 years ago in Europe and what does it mean today?

It didn’t have a good reputation then nor it has it now but this is fine, because it means it’s alive.

Really?

Obviously, because otherwise it would be in a museum and wouldn’t scare anyone.

Is it possible to say the same thing about global feminism?

Yes, of course. There are many societies where feminism, I guess, has a horrible reputation. Just think about all those places where women are not considered as human beings.

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May 26th, 2010

Meet Luisa Morgantini

Vice President of both the European Parliament, the High-Level Group on Gender Equality and of the Parliament’s Bureau (2007-2009). Chair of the Committee on Development (2004-2007) and of the Delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council (1999-2004), and member, among others, of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (1999-2009), she is also one of the founders of the international network Women in Black against war and violence (WIB).

Luisa Morgantini (Villadossola, Italia, 1940) is always the first to marvel at the titles she has received.  Citizen of the world, as she defines herself, Morgantini has made it to the highest levels without this being her goal. The one goal she’s always had instead, fighting injustice from below, is something that she continues to struggle with every day to achieve.

What does Women in Black represent to you?

It is my total support. I don’t believe that all the women are automatically for peace and justice just because they have a female body, but there’s no doubt that stating, as women, that war has to be out of history is what unites us the most, once women were excluded from military conflicts and only lived them as victims. Being a Woman in Black means struggling for a culture able to demilitarize not only the states, but also our minds; refusing to be enemies but wanting, instead, to understand the reasons of one another and, most of all, to see the asymmetries.

WIB strongly believes in the importance of “diplomacy from below”. Regarding gender discrimination, do you personally consider that the first big step toward a change should come from there?

I firmly believe in the institution, that’s why I have been an European Parliamentarian, but I also think relations between women from below are basic. As WIB, we set up an International Women Policy and what we said was something that in reality went against the policies of the governments who made the wars.  Getting connected from below shows, also to the United Nations, that from there relations can be built and the image of the enemy can be destroyed, and is one thing we want institutions to make their own.

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