Perhaps the hardest lesson we have to learn in life is – nothing is ever safe. Think about the things you take most for granted. The streets where you live. The job you have. The possibility of a future. All these things – they can be revealed as illusions in…

In 2011. During my first year at the Market theatre laboratory (school for performance). I auditioned to be in the South African production of a play called “Emotional Creature” by Eve Ensler. I was an angry, bitter child. I was nineteen years old, had no language to describe what had…

I guess to a lot of people, it would have seemed impossible for me and my friends to take part in One Billion Rising. All over the world, a billion women have gone through physical or sexual violence, and every February 14th, we rise up against it, across the planet,…

This is the story of how a group of women who were shunned and abused and regarded as worthless came together – to transform the laws of their country, and save the lives of many more women like them. By 2005, I had been working in Mexico for more than…

If you saw me in the street, you might recognize me, but I guess you wouldn’t know where from. I’m the person who served up your Happy Meal in McDonald’s. A few years later, I waited on your table at Red Lobster. A few years after that, I brought over…

When did I become a feminist? There are lots of moments in every woman’s life that make her stand up for herself and her sisters, and there were many in mine. But the first one that comes to mind is the day I was told I couldn’t take a seat…

Dance can set you free. It can liberate your body and liberate your mind. That is what I have learned in my own life and that is the lesson I remember while working with women who have been taught through violence to see their bodies as disgusting, shameful, or ruined….

Two years ago, I stood in front of a crowd of thousands of people at the One Billion Rising in Santa Fe, and I told my story. The air was crisp and clean and I felt I didn’t need to eat, or drink – there was enough to nourish me…

I was fourteen years old when my mother and grandmother announced that I was going to have my clitoris, my labia majora, and my labia minora cut out. They said if I resisted, I would be a coward. In my culture, the worst thing you can ever be called is…