The Garret

This moment is defined desires for dominance: over bodies, resources, political life. PSVI fights, on multiple fronts, to tackle the root causes of violence by cultivating the political voice of those most deeply impacted by it.

Trigger: A Moment of Violence

  • We know that gender determines vulnerability to violence.

  • We know that violence is a political act.

  • We seek to understand the political impact of this violence.

Guernica Magazine Female Fighter Series

The knee-jerk response to militarized women is dismissal and condemnation. Instead, the founder of V-Day argues, it is time to reexamine their stories and understand their wrath.

 

Adi Magazine

Violence breeds narrative.
A conscious control with violent intent.

 

PSVI continues to work to produce to dismantle the dominant narrative through Adi Magazine , a literary journal to rehumanize policy.

As the Myanmar army advanced on the bodies of Rohingya women, Tawda Aye Lei writes for Adi Magazine, “the more wicked and unwanted the spirits, the longer and harder you have to beat.” K Za Win, in his final poem before he was killed by security forces penned:

“The Revolution won’t materialize / out of your mere thoughts. / Like blood, one must rise.””

Our pages lay bare, through fictionalized tales the very real relentless violence of poverty and gender in places like the favelas of Brazil, 

“The burden she carried in her belly would make the man and the woman happy. Somehow, the child that would come out of her body would be theirs. She was ashamed of herself, and of them.”

— Conceição Evaristo

In the post-Taliban frenzy, a familiar refrain took hold: What would befall Afghan women? Politicians who had preached human rights while ignoring civilian deaths wrung their hands at the thought of the women the US had not yet “liberated.” In a pattern we’d seen before, the Afghan Woman became a pawn, a pretense, a screen on which to project American assumptions and warped fantasies.

Adi asks you to listen for the polyphony, centering Afghan women in their multiplicity and complexity. At immense personal risk, the writers articulate their predicaments in raw, subtle, and passionate ways, each transmitting vital political critiques. 

“There are those who, predictably, hate the woman state. Envy fevers the face. How they’re dying to taste the woman state.

The journey is always brief. Low winter hills. The sky red As wrung flesh. Bonechill. Still, I celebrate the woman state.”

— 22nd Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith