Salamishah Tillet is the author of In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece and a contributing critic-at-large for The New York Times. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing, the director of Express Newark at Rutgers University–Newark, and the cofounder of the A Long Walk Home, Inc., a nonprofit organization that uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to work to end violence against girls and women.
The recent wave of attacks against women in Tahrir Square reveal that in our global rape culture, women's bodies can be used as both tools of war and casualties of “freedom.”
Serena Williams's initial comments about the Steubenville sexual assault victim reveal a a disturbing truth: they are the logical result of growing up in America’s “rape culture.”
Being pregnant, I get a front-row seat to the gender-policing that happens before a baby’s even born.
For women in politics, sexuality is often a liability. Will two new shows break the mold?
House Republicans want to legislate a hierarchy of victimhood.
There’s a growing trend of criminalizing rape survivors in order to guarantee their testimonies at trial.
What if heterosexual couples voluntarily refused the benefits of marriage that are denied to most of our gay and lesbian friends and family?
For all our talk about the multiracialism of the millennial generation, the lack of interracial social connections is more than a coincidence.
The real problem with the Hollywood obsession with the celebrity baby bump is not what it shows but rather what it hides.
SlutWalk, the anti–sexual violence march sweeping the globe, comes to New York City this weekend. Can the spectacle grow into an effective, multiracial movement?