Like so many things in life, my sexuality makes so much more sense in retrospect than it did when I was in the stages of “figuring it out”. I now know I have been bisexual all my life. I either just didn’t know it earlier on, or didn’t know what it entailed.
Last month there was a minor kerfuffle in the internet spaces when Boris Johnson said he would not support expanding the definition of hate crime to include misogyny. This was mildly controversial, with some protesting that it was a crucial step to aid women.
“White women need to learn how and when to follow — not lead. They need to do their part to uplift, learn from, follow and support Black and Indigenous women in dismantling white supremacy. But again, not lead.” Amanda Svachula.
Living Rent was founded in 2014, as part of ACORN International, and is a mass-membership tenants union serving communities all over Scotland within the private and social rented sector. I was really excited to interview Meg Bishop, the organisation’s national secretary who addresses grassroots activism, organising and housing as integral parts of the feminist struggle.
There are some people out there who are blessed to know exactly what they want to do from a young age. Luckily for us, Grace Payne-Kumar is one of them.
In the UK, history textbooks often reflect a deep unwillingness to acknowledge the full story of our blood-soaked colonial past. Consequently, very little is said to challenge the racism and injustice which forms the backdrop to our present day…
I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a while now. For many years now, it has been a staple rhetoric of the queer liberation that nobody ‘chooses’ to be gay: a backlash against those who call it a ‘lifestyle’, who try to push conversion therapy and deviant labels on us.
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview with Trisha Mendiratta, Politics Editor…
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview with Izzy Hodgson, Poetry Editor
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview with Robyn Barclay, Communications Officer
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview with Peggy Mitchell, Graphic Designer
As my time at university comes to an end, I look back at moments that changed my education. From relative deprivation to conflict theory to homegrown vs lone wolf terrorism, the first year of university would hold lessons I’ll carry with me all my life as a politics enthusiast. But nothing could prepare me for the lessons of the summer of Roman*. This was my first brush with heartbreak and politics of the real world.
Don’t you just hate it when you’re looking at a piece of art in a gallery and there is no writing to explain what on Earth the art means? You just stand there, perplexed, wondering how much of an idiot you are for the kinds of interpretations you’re coming up with.
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview with Lucia Villegas, Graphic Designer
September. Autumn. A new season has begun. As I look to the year ahead, I realise that things have changed, and I consciously try to reorientate myself to a new reality.
Here in the UK, life appears to be returning to at least some semblance of normalcy. Pandemic restrictions in England are gone; in Scotland, whilst masks remain, there are no limits on gatherings. Nightclubs are opening up again. Students are going back to universities.
I’m sitting, staring at my emails as the ninth rejection of the week pings into my inbox. There is perhaps no task more tedious and ego-destroying than the relentless post-graduation job-hunting grind. I’m currently in the ether space.
first thought that came into my head when I realised I was non-binary was fuck, I don’t want to chop all my hair off. This was swiftly followed by a succession of minor panics: I don’t have the face for short hair, I don’t have the shoulders for androgyny, and everyone knows that my arse is simply too big to pass as anything but a woman. These thoughts accompanied thousands more over the next few months as I embarked on an excruciating – but ultimately liberating – internal journey.
Have you ever told someone about a problem you’ve been having, and had the always-infuriating response, “Oh, that’s all just in your head”? Have you ever been told that by a doctor?
When I was fifteen, a woman from a feminist organisation visited my school to have a discussion with us about equality. I don’t remember much of what she said, but I do remember that she started the discussion with the question “who here is a feminist?”
When we decided that this month’s theme at Clitbait should be heat, I wanted to write a love letter to the sun. I wanted to write about how nourished I feel by its warmth. My world comes alive when it is illuminated and dripping in sunlight.
A couple of months ago I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw the same post come up again and again on people’s stories. Repeated posts are not unusual, but there was something about this one that deeply chimed with me.
Here I am again, I thought. Unanchored, unmoored.
Another break up and I felt lost. Where before there had been plans, dreams, ideas stretching ahead into the distance– a trip to Berlin, going to that new restaurant together, maybe a move abroad for our respective careers –there now was …nothing. Everything I’d envisioned and hoped for vanished overnight.
To Ovid’s Metamorphoses and back. ‘I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities.’ So starts the Roman poet Ovid’s canonical text about Greek and Roman myth, the Metamorphoses. An epic poem that informs most of what the western world views as ‘classical’ myth, the work is one of many fantastical transformations. It is often considered equally united by the theme of metamorphosing as it is by love.
Amartya Sen recently outlined the structural impacts Britain had on India throughout its longstanding rule, hoping to unpack the illusions of the empire’s legacy through a historical dive into India’s past. As Sen opens with, power is widely agreed to have been established by British forces in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey by defeating Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and beginning a 200-year rule that ended with Nehru’s famous words in 1947 – ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to light and freedom’. This monumental moment in global history is thought to be the start of a process of decolonisation stretching into the 1980s.