Since 2016, Polish women have been engaged in a continuous battle against the politicians from Law and Justice, a right-wing populist party led by Jarosław Kaczyński. Today, as the party lost its bid for majority in the Polish parliament, many questions concerning women’s rights start to arise. Is the democratic opposition going to liberalise the abortion law? And how many more women are going to lose their lives until proper legislation is introduced?
Frida Kahlo was a resilient lady. She had plans to become a doctor, a politician, and an artist, yet such plans were tarnished in 1925. Following being impaled by an iron handrail whilst riding on a bus, Kahlo became a patient. However, during her years of recovery, Kahlo created art which exhibited the perspectives of a woman with disabilities.
To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?
On the 3rd of June 1968, Valerie Solanas entered the Decker Building in New York City and fired a single bullet through the body of the famed artist, Andy Warhol. When questioned by journalists as to why she committed such an act, her response was ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am’.
Devlin was born in 1947 to a working-class Catholic family in Cookstown, Tyrone. Tyrone was a predominantly Catholic county, but Cookstown was mixed. She described the tension between Republicans, who believe in a united Ireland, and Unionists, who support British involvement to create a ‘unified’ state.
