‘Being a Slut Really Means You Are Untouchable’: On Shame, Power and the Reclamation of Words

My Uterus was the Government’s Possession: Danish Neo-Colonial Control of Greenlandic People’s Reproductive Rights
Commentary Megan Willis Commentary Megan Willis

My Uterus was the Government’s Possession: Danish Neo-Colonial Control of Greenlandic People’s Reproductive Rights

In the spring of 2022, Naja Lyberth broke 46 years of silence when she told the Greenlandic magazine Arnanut that a Danish district doctor had forcedly fitted her and other girls from Maniitsoq with an intrauterine device (IUD) in 1976 – when they were 14 years old. The foreign object ‘felt grotesquely misplaced inside me’, Lyberth said, ‘like knives penetrating me’…

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‘Being a Slut Really Means You Are Untouchable’: On Shame, Power and the Reclamation of Words
Commentary Megan Willis Commentary Megan Willis

‘Being a Slut Really Means You Are Untouchable’: On Shame, Power and the Reclamation of Words

I thought about the connotations I associated with the word ‘slut’ – sexually promiscuous or scantily clad, and only ever directed towards women. All I had been doing was standing on the street laughing at my friend, wearing an outfit that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a children’s television presenter. Perhaps ‘slut’ had been picked out of the ether. But why?

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