“Tujhe dekh ke goriye, Beyonce sharma jaayegi” – Your beauty, o fair skinned girl, puts even Beyonce to shame. Such were the lyrics to a 2020 Bollywood song, as the Economic Times explained, before popular backlash brought about a re-writing of the lyrics. The director and actors initially attempted to justify their intentions, claiming the… Read more →
Tag: Theater
Shakespeare Knew What Modern Science Tells Us: Disability Discrimination is Fueled by Disgust
Recently, literary scholars have demonstrated how the works of William Shakespeare can serve as a fantastic tool for teaching and analyzing social justice: his plays offer significant commentary on many categories of marginalized personal identity, including gender, sexuality, and race. I am a disabled scholar and teacher of Shakespeare, so I’m interested in the depiction… Read more →
Singing and Dancing Fetuses: Art, Life, and Abortion at “The Appointment”
My earliest days in healthcare were at abortion clinics. First as a counselor and then as a nurse, I cared for hundreds of patients seeking abortion care. At clinics, I learned how to perform ultrasounds with the screen angled away from my patient; I learned how to tell which patients would be relieved in the… Read more →
Back in the Narrative: Hamilton as a Model for Women’s History
Last September, the soundtrack of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-nominated Hamilton: An American Musical became available online to Americans everywhere, and history changed. All right, that might be a strong claim — after all, it’s just a Broadway musical, 47 tracks following the life of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, a hip-hop reinterpretation of U.S. History. But the… Read more →