Posts from Memory Lane: How Feminists Can (and Should) Use Righteous Anger

These posts were written during the summer while I was in Bangladesh, in preparation for the upcoming academic year. Long story short: when I looked back at the archive, I didn't have the desire or the time to put them up. But now, since I'm coming back to the blog, I decided that some of them aren't half bad. Read on!

In the newspaper while I was in Bangladesh, a health official claimed that women who requested maternity leave would just "keep on making more babies" and that they should just leave their jobs because it wasn't what they needed to be doing anyway. They were, as he put it, baby-making machines. As you can imagine, we were more than a little upset.

From this article, my sister and I had a (loud) conversation over lunch about how feminism looks in Bangladesh. We know how sexism looks, clearly, but what about the response to it?

The Value of Controlling and Using Anger

(Emoticon courtesy of Link3Kokiri on DeviantArt)

Anger is an emotion that I have lived with forever, and many times I have felt consumed by it. When I fail to complete a small task or end up late at a meeting, I feel the anger reflected inward towards myself. When I view injustice towards women, Muslims, and other groups, I feel a sort of unfocused anger outwards to the world.

The first type of anger, I have worked to control for many years and in the process have stifled the second type of anger, the outward kind. Recently, however, I’ve heard a new perspective on outward-directed anger: that it can be utilized for social change and need not be stifled, just directed.