Beautiful Suffering: Women must be beautiful and desirable even when sick

The entirety of the breast cancer awareness movement revolves around warrior women and how they fight breast cancer. And encouraging people to beat cancer and showing that you're their for them any way that you can is a great thing. That's not what I'm questioning. I'm questioning why women and the movement can't talk about the days where they're to tired to fight

The days where they can't keep food down and don't leave their beds
The days when its to exhausting to smile

Why does disease, breast cancer, depression, have to be beautiful for people to  have marches about it? Why are women expected to only have a hopeful attitude even when they are literally dying?

Everyone knows the image of the strong warrior women who fight breast cancer. They are seen in commercials, TV and movies. We are obsessed with these strong glorious women and what they represent. The documentary Pink Ribbons Inc. talks about while its good to inspire people, this movement around the warrior-ness of cancer patients pushes out the people who are suffering from it(Pool, L., & Din, R. (2012). Pink Ribbons, Inc. First Run Features.). They may have stage four or be having a bad day but they don't feel like warriors fighting cancer. They feel like what they are sick people doing their best against a horrible situation. Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals also brings up a good point(Lorde, A. (1997). The cancer journals: Special edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.). She is visited by a women directly after surgery. This women attempts to get her to wear a false breast which isn't her size or skin color. The women wasn't evil or attempting to be cruel but the beautification of breast cancer means that no one can know that you're suffering. That means that if you have had a mastectomy then no one can know that you did because that's not beautiful. Even you can't know, the woman with the fake boobs kept saying that 'you won't know the difference'. What she was actually saying was you won't mention the difference because it ruins the image.

Depression is also not represented accuratly in the media(https://www.everydayhealth.com/depression/depression-in-the-media.aspx). It is another disease that is beautified especially in women. In TV shows and movies women with depression demurely refuse to eat while maintaining a healthy weight and draw or write beautiful things. They sleep and don't care about their appearance but are clean and effortless beautiful with no dark circles or bed head. This just isn't true. Depression is devastating to the person and effects their lives in every way. Also if the depressed person commits suicide or tries to its used as not a cry for help but as a way for everyone else to heal. Thirteen Reasons Why has come under a lot of criticism for this exact thing(https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/opinions/13-reasons-why-gets-it-wrong-henick-opinion/index.html). Hannah is used a a plot device in her own depression, which is never actually called depression, and suffered beautifully even after death to make life better for other people. Men with depression are also beautified on TV. Their angsty artists who have witty one liners. But for both men and women with depression this beautification ignore their struggles. It ignores the wasting away or eating to try to fill avoid. It ignore the sleeping all day or not being able to sleep. It ignore the pain and numbness and the rough un-beautiful emotions. It ignore the whole truth opting instead for the beautiful one.

Disease and suffering are not beautiful things but we make them especially when women are the ones with the disease and are suffering. Because women in our society are supposed to be beautiful and not have emotions except for happy and helping. Disease and suffering makes it almost impossible to be happy and helping so we ignore it and tell everyone the disease shouldn't win and change you. But It does, like any experience does. So let it change you. Let it make you feel shitty and unsure because you can feel those things and no one should stop you from feeling the way you need to. From fighting in your own un-beautiful way

When medicine fails us, women's voices offer us a way to fight back

What do you do when the medical world and the doctors who took an oath to do no harm fail you?
What do you do when they don't tell you everything or are forced not to tell you things?

Many people probably never even think that this can happen to them. It happens to other people and when it does those people did something wrong. They didn't ask the right questions. They didn't follow the doctor's instructions.

But if you look at the histories of medicine and procedures, it does happen even when you follow the rules.

It happened with the IUD, and with thalidomide in Europe and countless other times that have been pushed under the rug. In The Global Biopolitics of the IUD, Chikako Takeshita talks about how women were the ones who took back their power from the doctors and Neo-mathlusians by saying that they wanted the IUD taken out because it didn't fit their lifestyles. Women also were the ones who got the Dalkon shield recalled. They all told their doctors and voiced their problems with the Dalkon shield and got loud enough that they couldn't be ignored. Thalidomide was prevented from coming to the US by a woman using her voice as well. Frances Oldham Kelsey worked at the FDA and refused to approve thalidomide because the researchers didn't have enough research into the side effects. Because of this many babies were saved from having severe birth defects and even potentially die from this medicine(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/woman-who-stood-between-america-and-epidemic-birth-defects-180963165/).

Medicine is seen as intangible. Its unaffected by politics and by the doctor's personal biases. But medicine is a very political thing. What gets funding to be research is effected by whose in control of the government and/or money.  

There's are international gag rule that prevents doctors from telling patients about abortion and preforming them. This was just reinstated under the Trump presidency(https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/14/trumps-mexico-city-policy-or-global-gag-rule). This means that its even harder for women to talk about abortion and issues they face about birth control.

But women's voice are the one thing that we can and have used to stand up against the failings of the medical world. Women started talking about the issues they faced using the Dalkon shield and then the doctors said something. Women started saying that medicine need to be safe and effective for pregnant women and that a drug like thalidomide can never happen again. Women's voice are so powerful, just look at the #MeToo movement, and our biggest asset against medical failures.

If your medicine is going wrong or making you feel bad, tell people. Tweet about it, post on Instagram and Facebook. Because history shows your probably not alone. And when we all say something at once, we get stuff done.

Picture 1: https://www.piac.asn.au/legal-help/public-interest-cases/dalkon-shield/
Picture 2: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/2018/01/18/students-must-harness-momentum-from-metoo-movement

Why education is an important part in combating gendered violence of migration

Everyone knows that refugee camp aren't a nice place to live or visit even. And I knew that there was violence in these camps. I was imagining looting, and other forms of violence that I generally associate with events where people are put in desperate situations and have to survive by any measures. However in reading articles like From Outrage to Courage by Anne Firth Murray and Medical Outcast by Roxane Richter, I discovered that I was wrong.

SO wrong

While I'm sure some looting happens, there is also a lot of gendered violence such as rape, forced marriage and trafficking. The women in these camp have very little power as they are not only refugees but women. These women are forced into a system where there are many people around them who could take advantage of them and very few people to report this to. These women know very few people in the area as they had to leave almost everything they knew behind, so how can they turn to someone and say that they were raped or abused by their husband or someone else in the camp?

In Murray's book she discusses all the violence that women can experience in these camps. And it is an extensive list including rape, abuse, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, sexual slavery and trafficking. Its horrible to read especially when specific examples are given such as when she talks about sex for survival. She discusses how women would trade sex with them for food just to survive and how some of those women ended up trafficked into the military to be a sex slave. If the women in those trafficked situations said no they would be beaten until they said yes. Murray through out her book is advocating for people to get involved and do something to stop this violence. One idea was to allow women to make the camp. They would be able to position their houses and public places so that a minimum amount of women would be hurt.

Richter used women's stories to articulate a similar problem. She focuses more on the medical aspect of gendered violence due to migration than Murray does. Most of Richter's stories deal with women who are seeking medical care but are afraid to due to their undocumented status or racism. As I mentioned above women who are migrants don't always know their rights or who to turn to if they are treated poorly. They are powerless because no one is watching their back. One woman in South Africa, Fungayi, went to the hospital and was turned away for being Zimbabwean. And so many other women shared similar stories of racism and malpractice, some also Zimbabwean in South Africa and other Mexican in Texas. It horrifying to think that this still happens here in the US or anywhere.

Before reading these articles I had no idea any of this was going on, that there was still such blatant racism in medical facilities. The racism I know is making someone wait longer than normal for MRI and giving them less than stellar pain meds or sending them home earlier than recommended. I don't live in an environment where many people get sent away without receiving any medical treatment. Its hard to believe. But what scares me even more is that its so hidden.

No news articles are talking about this or at least not in away that reaches the general public. And I'm not even sure where the conversation would go if the media did have these articles. It would probably become bipartisan issue and have some people screaming that we need to pay attention to our own nation while others would, wisely, say we need to help these women.

However, before these conversations can even take place we must learn about these issues, let the public look behind the curtain and see the gore that's been covered up. We need to start researching, which is understandably hard as most of these refugees aren't trusting of people in power and move around making tracking their lives hard. We need to start see how the world is shaped by certain institutions even when we don't mean it to be and change it so everyone can be safe and happy.

And all that starts by getting the information out to the people who want to listen.