Over the summer while I was in DC, I was in a relationship with a White woman. While we spent time together, we experienced a series of unsettling interactions with White men. We were repeatedly sneered at, muttered at, and most frighteningly, once glared at by a White man who made a point to turn
Tag: issue 2 fall 2017
What does it mean to be outside the boundaries of normative gender categories? By normative, I mean masculine and feminine and how these structure the way we dress and act, but also dictate whom we are attracted to, what we find to be attractive, and the limits that we place on desire. Desire is a
“Mixed babies are so cute.” I have heard this weird comment many a time in my life, sometimes made by White people, but most of the time by my fellow South Asian peers. There’s an obsession in our community with being fair-skinned, and when you have a child with someone who is White, you’re more
The familiar ringing of an outgoing FaceTime call travels through the room. The vibrations of its sound waves are felt strongest near my heart, but maybe I’m just nervous. The ringing stops and my screen explodes with my mother’s face—she really needs to learn that she doesn’t have to be an inch away from the camera
In my grandparents’ house, a statue of Ganesh, one of the many deities in Hinduism, sits proudly on the mantle. Its bronze coloring echoes the pillows and other decorations in the house, invoking the spirit of their Indian culture, a myriad of bright colors and elaborate designs. My grandparents speak to each other in Hindi,
Each day of my childhood, at seven in the morning, my White mother would wake me up and bring me into our living room. On the coffee table sat a series of combs next to her steaming cup of coffee with the morning news playing softly in the background. What followed was a ritualistic tugging
On September 26, Boston voters sent a clear and powerful message to the city’s political establishment: change is coming. Primaries in city council districts saw two women of color advance to Election Day—a marked shift from almost a decade ago—when no woman of color had ever sat on the council. In District 1, which is
bitters Alexandra Benjamin The other day I began to wonder if you were an acquired taste like black coffee and red wine or sometimes both at once I wonder because it certainly took a year of circumstance and random chance to circle back and finally stop feeling like the word re-try meant waste
Turning the corner onto Powder House Boulevard as you walk from campus to Davis Square, you will have two options: the continuation of a paved road or an extended dirt curve. This curve slopes up a non-uniform sprawl of hill right into the center of campus. It is one of the many desire lines that
Content warning: sexual assault, sexual violence The Monument Quilt is a traveling and fluid work of art by survivors of sexual assault and sexual violence, many of whom would not consider themselves artists. As the project grows, so does the quilt. Red squares of fabric, some featuring long paragraphs or small drawings, others with simply
CW: transphobia In 2016, the Campus Pride Index named Tufts a “Top 30 School For LGBT Students.” Their criteria include resources like an LGBT Center, counseling for LGBT students, and policy inclusion. What it doesn’t include is access to and availability of all-gender bathrooms. Had their rankings included this, Tufts’ five-out-of-five-star score might have been