‘Can You Really Be a Queer Muslim?’: Intersectionality and the Complexity of Identity

Calling All My Lipstick Lovers: Janelle Monae’s Sexy New Song is a Black Queer Bop
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

Calling All My Lipstick Lovers: Janelle Monae’s Sexy New Song is a Black Queer Bop

I have listened to Lipstick Lover by Janelle Monae over 100 times. If you didn’t know, I am a massive lipstick lover (in all ways), so you can trust me when I say that Janelle Monae’s latest song is the sexy summer anthem for femme queers everywhere – especially Black femme queers. If you haven’t heard it yet and watched the music video, I suggest you change that…

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‘According To Some Documents, I Don’t Exist’: Embracing a Queer Identity That Doesn’t Tick Boxes
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘According To Some Documents, I Don’t Exist’: Embracing a Queer Identity That Doesn’t Tick Boxes

Most of the time, I feel like our society is making progress: we learn more about ourselves every day and slowly become more comfortable with LGBTQIA+ identities. Then I’ll be handed a form to fill out, my eyes will scan the identifying terms from which I am to choose, and I am reminded that some still seem very uncomfortable with identities that fall outside of LGBT…

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‘Childless, Socially Inept and Hopeless in Relationships’: Who The Messy Woman Is and Why She Isn’t Our Favourite Feminist
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘Childless, Socially Inept and Hopeless in Relationships’: Who The Messy Woman Is and Why She Isn’t Our Favourite Feminist

I question how and why this narrative of self-destruction, avoidant emotion and boundary-less sex became the romanticised, singular experience for modern women, and why they are only presented as heterosexual and white. How can these narratives encapsulate an entire women’s experience and be titled ‘feminist’ when they are far removed from intersectional storylines?

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‘I’ve Always Loved Period Pieces, but Never Felt I Had a Place in Them’: How Queen Charlotte’s Bridgerton Spin-Off Has Broken Down Barriers for Black Viewers
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘I’ve Always Loved Period Pieces, but Never Felt I Had a Place in Them’: How Queen Charlotte’s Bridgerton Spin-Off Has Broken Down Barriers for Black Viewers

Everything it offered and all of the unsaid promises meant a great deal to me, and I am glad to say that it did not disappoint. In fact, I have a flatmate who has already begun rewatching it! I am sure you will love the series; and after reading this, hopefully you will have a better understanding of the barriers that are being torn down, the narratives that are changing, and why the show means so much to black women globally…

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‘Our Liberation Is Mutual’: Examining the Limitations of White Privilege in Protecting the Female Body and Why Our Feminism Must be Intersectional
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘Our Liberation Is Mutual’: Examining the Limitations of White Privilege in Protecting the Female Body and Why Our Feminism Must be Intersectional

So many exclusionary powers have been systemically fused together, so the fight for equality must address them all. It bears self-examining our own failures at inclusion and considering who benefits from that exclusion. Do the powers and privileges we trust actually have our best interest at heart? With whom does our solidarity lie, and will they reciprocate?

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La Herida Colonial: How Becoming an Immigrant Revealed My Ever-Open Colonial Wound
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

La Herida Colonial: How Becoming an Immigrant Revealed My Ever-Open Colonial Wound

I’m happy about how the job interview is going. Of course, they don’t offer me a contract; it is a freelance thing, which is just fine. I’m ready to leave, but just before getting up the older white man looks at me and asks if I can write in Portuguese, and not in ‘Brazilian’. He even adds, ‘You Brazilians with these gerunds are killing the language.’ And laughs…

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‘I Thought I was the Only One Whose “Dad” was a Woman’: Overcoming Internalised Homophobia After Growing Up in a Same-Sex Household
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘I Thought I was the Only One Whose “Dad” was a Woman’: Overcoming Internalised Homophobia After Growing Up in a Same-Sex Household

As time went on the reactions to my ‘fact’ changed, and so did my wording of it. While one probably catalysed the other, I am not entirely sure in which direction this was. In secondary school, the amazement I was used to receiving turned to more questions and often even accusations. I would get, ‘So… you are too?’. I wasn’t certain how to answer this – they meant the gay thing…

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Babes with Big Feelings: It’s Time to Embrace Empathy and See Being ‘Too Sensitive’ as a Superpower 
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

Babes with Big Feelings: It’s Time to Embrace Empathy and See Being ‘Too Sensitive’ as a Superpower 

I cry a lot. But I also smile big. I smile when I see a cute dog. When my friends give me a hug. When it’s a sunny day. I laugh too hard at simple jokes. I have high highs and low lows. My emotions feel big – sometimes uncontainable – yet also normal and natural. Whenever I try to be less sensitive, I end up feeling a huge nothingness: to compress my feelings is to compress my entire being…

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The Complexities of Pressed Purple Flowers: A Reflection on Alice Walker’s Anti-Semitism and Choosing Love Over Hate 
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

The Complexities of Pressed Purple Flowers: A Reflection on Alice Walker’s Anti-Semitism and Choosing Love Over Hate 

I finished reading Living by the Word – I only had one essay left – but each sentence no longer carried the same inspiring vitality; the words fell subdued, dampened and flat in my mind that ran with a cacophonous array of thoughts. The purple tones of the pressed flowers seemed to be more faded than they once were. I could, and would, never look at Alice Walker the same, read her work in the same way or perhaps even read her work at all…

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‘Change the World Instead of Changing Who We’re With’: Learning to Embrace Life and Love as a Woman Loving a Woman  
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘Change the World Instead of Changing Who We’re With’: Learning to Embrace Life and Love as a Woman Loving a Woman  

There were many challenges to loving a woman as a woman. I couldn’t hold her hand everywhere. I couldn't introduce her to my family: I could lose certain people, or I could be rejected from some of the many communities I was in. With a man, my life would be like everyone else’s. Everything I had a chance to observe growing up – everything I am familiar with and not scared of – would be there…

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‘Man, I Feel Like a Human!’: How Coming Out As Non-Binary Made Me a Better Feminist
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘Man, I Feel Like a Human!’: How Coming Out As Non-Binary Made Me a Better Feminist

I can now see more plainly the gatekeeping that can happen when trans folks want to dive into the personhood they know is theirs, and yet are sometimes told or made to feel as though they’re somehow lacking. Womanhood can be a wonderful, equalising thing – so why are we wasting time denying it to human beings who know who they are? Isn’t womanhood diverse and wonderful enough to allow its ranks to swell beyond the ideas of yesteryear?

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The Loneliness of a New City is Bittersweet: A Love Letter from London to Mumbai
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

The Loneliness of a New City is Bittersweet: A Love Letter from London to Mumbai

London felt lonelier. To invoke Laing once again, ‘Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost’. Without a lover to call this city mine I was alone in a visible manner. On days I felt I wore it on my coats…

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‘I Didn’t Know I was Black Until Fourth Grade’: Growing Into My Blackness After a Blurred Sense of Racial Identity
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘I Didn’t Know I was Black Until Fourth Grade’: Growing Into My Blackness After a Blurred Sense of Racial Identity

I learned that I was black during recess. Kids told me that ‘I was the whitest black person they’d ever met’ and that ‘I talked so white’. This was extremely confusing at first. Where I grew up was the hub of any and every race that you could think of, and everybody was friends. So, when I became labelled as a white-black person, it didn’t make sense to me…

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(Un)Settling In: Building a Home Away from Home as a Foreign Student
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

(Un)Settling In: Building a Home Away from Home as a Foreign Student

Graduating as a foreign student and settling in as a new immigrant is a unique transition experience. One has the opportunity to carefully construct a future yet embrace the challenges that come with being away from home. I can describe this journey as being aboard two boats with one leg in each. The expectations, values and dreams from home sail parallel to the hope, joy and excitement for a new land…

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‘Palestinian is an Ethnicity, Not a Political Statement’: Coming-of-age as a Palestinian in Diaspora
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘Palestinian is an Ethnicity, Not a Political Statement’: Coming-of-age as a Palestinian in Diaspora

There comes a sense of separation from our physical environment. Through our blood, we inherit love and care for our country, but we are born into a space where people hardly know what Palestine is. To care so passionately for a struggle that we cannot interact with while being surrounded by people who know nothing about it is frustrating and isolating. From this stems feelings of guilt. Being submerged in a world that cares little about the Palestinian struggle can feel like an act of betrayal…

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‘Feminism Isn’t Feminism Unless It’s Intersectional and Representational’: How Japanese Literature Reignited my Feminist Flame
Identity Megan Willis Identity Megan Willis

‘Feminism Isn’t Feminism Unless It’s Intersectional and Representational’: How Japanese Literature Reignited my Feminist Flame

Some people think that because we had a female prime minister and it’s generally frowned upon to catcall, we live in a post-feminist era. A worrying number of people seem to agree women are more equal than they were before (yes, in some parts of the world) and so feminism is no longer a pressing issue. Immersing myself in the world of contemporary Japanese women helped me realise just how far we have to go to achieve genuine equality for women everywhere…

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