…a member of M.I.A.’s camp, speaking Sunday night from the Super Bowl host city of Indianapolis, said M.I.A. was struck with “a case of adrenaline.” “She wasn’t thinking,” said the source, who requested anonymity but was with the artist at Lucas Oil Stadium. “It wasn’t any kind of statement. She was caught in the moment and she’s incredibly sorry.” [link]

So, it wasn’t a political statement – she was caught in the moment. She has yet to issue an actual apology. The song itself, as I mentioned before, is pretty lame and a brown middle finger was the highlight of that tune. The full SuperBowl halftime show was, on the other hand, pretty awe inducing.

As for M.I.A. and her brown finger. Well, everyone is stumbling to point the blame finger at someone else.

NBC has apologized for airing footage of M.I.A. flipping off the cameras while delivering the line “I don’t give a shit” during Madonna‘s Super Bowl halftime show. “The NFL hired the talent and produced the halftime show,” NBC said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “Our system was late to obscure the inappropriate gesture and we apologize to our viewers.”

The NFL have also issued an apology for the incident, but placed the blame on NBC’s censors. “There was a failure in NBC’s delay system,” spokesman Brian McCarthy said in a statement. “The obscene gesture in the performance was completely inappropriate, very disappointing, and we apologize to our fans.” [link]

How bad was it? Compared to Janet Jackson’s flash or the controversial kiss between Madonna and Brittany Spears, I’d say pretty insignificant. And compared to the misogynistic SuperBowl commercials, I’d say it was refreshing to have M.I.A.’s rebellious voice (finger?) heard (seen?). I like what Sasha had to say about it:

Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a remnant of the fifties we haven’t shaken. Unless somebody was handing out Xanax with the foam fingers, Lucas Oil Stadium was ringing with the music of profanities last night. More to the point, television viewers were submitted to ad after ad that likened women—negatively—to sofas, cars, and candy. Mr. Winter didn’t have anything to say about that, so I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny. [link]

M.I.A. Flipping the Camera and Back Up Dancers with Their Crotches Up

In her one-woman show Unladylike: The Pitfalls of Propriety, comedian Radhika Vaz tackles subjects like “proper” female behavior, modern relationships, and the ubiquity of bikini waxes. Having recently returned from touring India, Vaz will be performing Unladylike at the The Producers Club in New York City on Friday, December 9 (more details below). I recently had the chance to ask her a few questions about the show.

What inspired you to write Unladylike?

I had been doing improv for a really long time and then I started writing monologues. I always wanted to do a one-hour show on my own for a few reasons. I was auditioning for parts and wasn’t getting anything. You know, I am practically 40. I am Indian with an Indian accent, I’m not even an Indian with an American accent, so I wasn’t fitting into any of the roles. Writing the show was what really pushed me out there.

Stories about your husband and family often appear in your work. Have any of your relatives ever told you that something was off-limits?

No, they haven’t. I definitely do believe that I have to at least show them the piece before I post it to my blog. Most of my pieces start out on the blog, I usually post it before it is performed.

I remember I posted something once and my husband was like, “You really should have shown me this before you posted.” If it is something related something like alcohol abuse or anything embarrassing, I show it to them. When writing about my friends I change names a lot.

Do you consider Unladylike to be a feminist show?

I hope it is. I am certainly not the first person to talk about these things, but I definitely hope that people look at it that way. To elaborate a little bit, I definitely think that I speak a lot about the wide disparity in the way that men and women are viewed.

You took Unladylike to India this fall. What was that like? Did you have to change the show in any way?

No, I performed the same material I had performed in New York a year ago. A lot of people have asked me if I changed anything before performing in India. I was raised in India, in Bombay, and I moved here when I was 28. A lot of my college friends came to the Bombay show and one of the girls came up to me afterwards and said, “the things that you talked about, they still happen here today.” And that was both funny and a little bit discouraging.

Did anything surprise you about performing the show in India?

I think that with any show of this nature, I was just very relieved I pulled the crowd that I did. Comedy is still very new in India and most of the comedians are men. I wasn’t sure how it would work.

Lastly, you write a lot about female grooming and your routine on bikini waxes in particular seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people. Why do you think that is? And on a scale of 1 to 10, how evil are bikini waxes?

They are at 10, pretty much. They represent everything that’s wrong with the culture. I mean, that’s the last f—ing place, you know? That’s probably why everybody responds to the piece. Look, I get them from time to time, and I have friends who get them all of the time. But it’s in that weird category like plastic surgery, that everyone has to fit in the same box.

Tickets to see Unladylike can be purchased online at www.unladylike.eventbrite.com. Sepia Mutiny readers can enter the discount code MOUSETRAP to receive a $5 discount off of the online price. You can also follow her on Twitter @radvaz, become a fan of her official Facebook page, or check out her official website radvaz.com.

Photo credit: Katarina Kojic Photography and Design.

I kind of the dug the sound above. Then I started finding her other videos. And then, well… I’ll let you be the judge of that. Here’s her latest with Andy Milonakis. And since it’s with Milonakis, you better know it’s NSFW.

And then there’s this video. With the Desi languag-ed hook and the (overused) multi-handed dance move.

Her interview does make her seem pretty normal and girl next doorish – which paired with her crude lyrics and “Imaflirt.com” tattoo makes me fascinated. Who is this girl? Wonder if I could get her to come come by my next Oakland Art Jam. What do y’all think about her sound? Does she toe the line or cross it too far?

Today is National Coming Out Day and when I used to live in L.A., I’d join the annual parade of South Asians walking down Pioneer Blvd. chanting, “We ‘re here! We’re queer! We’re on Pioneer!” As you can imagine, the South Asian community is not quite so accepting of ‘The Gays” in the community. I supported as an ally because I wanted to be a supporting Desi face even when their family members couldn’t be.

But sometimes, coming out to your family may not be right for everyone. I came across a touching story from Nancy Haque titled Coming Out About Not Being Out from the Western States Center. It addresses the complexities of understanding your parents enough to know when and what to share with them. Despite the fact that mainstream LGBTQIA community may encourage coming out, it may not be the best thing for every family, particularly immigrant Desi parents.

I’m not out to my parents – the gold standard of being out. I haven’t done it and don’t actually plan on doing it. The truth is I have a very complicated relationship with my parents. I’m not particularly close to them and haven’t been since early childhood. I’m the youngest of four and was raised by my sister and two brothers as much as I was by my parents. I came out to my siblings 14 years ago and have always been supported by them. I love and respect my parents, but beyond my sexuality, they don’t understand the work I do, don’t know my hopes and dreams, don’t know the majority of my friends, and have never visited the home I purchased three years ago.

Yet my relationship to them is important. It’s important for me to be able to go home. I know in my heart my parents can never accept me having a female partner. It’s beyond their life experience to understand it. It’s not because they’re bad people, it’s just the way it is. I don’t feel like I’m living a lie because I’m not. Yet by not telling my parents, I’m taking a very unpopular stance in the general queer community…. I know that I’m not alone, that we all find our own ways to navigate our lives. I know that being queer and being raised Muslim is who I am, and it’s a complicated way to be. That’s why it was important to me to share my story… [westernstatescenter]

You can read the rest of her essay here. I could empathize with her essay – there were many things that my parents didn’t know about me or my personal life even to this day. But even though Western society dictated I should tell my parents every aspect of my life, in some ways it was just easier to play to their Desi narrative whenever I was home. It was dysfunctionally functioning for hyphenated surviving. And like for Nancy, it was just fine.

You can watch Nancy share her story (along with other LGBT APIA stories) in the video above from the Our Families campaign. Please take a listen. Power to the people struggling through this important day.

Sanghvi, who didn’t use a computer regularly until college, went on to launch such features as News Feed, which defines the user experience for many people on Facebook. Her rise at the company from when she was one of the first 10 engineers hired illustrates the potential and possibilities for a bright young engineer in the tech field. Given her vantage point and success, her impressions and suggestions stemming from her experiences carry a certain weight.

Sanghvi is from Pune, India, and studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, where she got used to working in a nearly all male environment.

Sanghvi said she was used to being the odd woman out — she was one of five female students out of 150 in a course in the Electrical Computer Engineering department — and at Facebook, she again found herself on a team with only a handful of female engineers.  

Though she looks back fondly on her time at Facebook and describes it as “one of the best companies to be working at right now,” she said her male co-workers enjoyed a certain camaraderie that she could not match or fully penetrate.

“It was difficult to break into the boys’ club,” Sanghvi said. “I wish that females had a similar culture or support network.”  

Sanghvi said the male engineers on her team created a “brogramming page,” presumably only for the Facebook “bros” who were programming. She recalls having to change her working style to adapt to the “aggressive” environment, a shift she said affected how she was perceived.  

“Engineers are either aggressive or passive aggressive. You need to just dive straight into it, and sometimes there are social repercussions because of it,” Sanghvi explained. “The impression that people had of me was that I was really harsh, hard-edged, brusque and to the point. All of that happened because I am a woman, and I was acting in that kind of environment.”

She had more to share on the topic of mentors and role models, advice for women to be proactive, and praise for the tech industry’s culture of rewarding ability. Read the full profile at Huffpost.

Related: The next Mark Zuckerberg, Happy Engineer’s Day in honor of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya

(Image: Flickr photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexf96/)

I met Prerna Lal last summer at Netroots Nation in Las Vegas. I quickly learned that she was a quite the firecracker. Desi via Fiji, Prerna is a founder of DreamActivist, a current law student, a writer, a SAALT Changemaker, queer, an activist and… is undocumented. Her journey as a struggling youth trying to navigate the broken immigration system is one she is very vocal about sharing, whether on blogs or on twitter. Her tenacity is one to be admired and bravery is one to be inspired by.

Just a few months ago, Prerna was served deportation papers – but being who she is, she’s not leaving without a fight. Here’s what she had to say.

Taz: What made you tweet this?

Prerna: It’s how I feel on most days. We are always asked to prove our worth to our countries. But I have yet to have America prove its worth to me.

T: What is your legal status?

P: Out of status, allegedly accruing unlawful presence that could lead to a 10 year bar from the United States if deported.

T: Where are you from? How did you end up in the US?

P: Fiji Islands. Father brought me here when I was 14, kicking and screaming.

T: Your grandmother is a citizen, your parents are greencard holders and your sister is a citizen. How is it possible that you are considered undocumented?

P: That’s simple. I aged out at 21. You see, when a visa petition is approved, a family has to wait many years to actually get a “priority date” in order to immigrate legally. I was 24 by the time my parents received their priority date. Regardless of the fact that my name was on the original visa petition filed for my family, I was automatically castigated and separated from my family. My parents were no longer considered my “immediate relatives.” I find it morally repugnant, but I’m sure there are many young adults who have experienced the same horror of family separation due to an arbitrary age out of our control.

T: What hurdles have you come across in your attempt to be documented?

P: I received admission into several prestigious institutions out of high school but either the cost was prohibitive or the universities rescinded their offer after finding out about my status. I don’t have access to any financial aid so I went to community college and state schools instead and while they were much cheaper, I had to work full-time. After classes would end for the day, I would clean office buildings till the wee hours of the morning to afford my college tuition and make ends meet. I also don’t have the privilege of federal loans like other law students who can borrow up to $75,000 per year so I have to continue working while also carrying a full-time law school course load. Due to lack of identification, there are other struggles like inability to travel, inability to work legally and inability to drive legally, that people in my situation face. It is like a physical and emotional impairment at times. I avoided bars and night-clubs for a long time because it was too much of a pain to carry my passport everywhere.

T: How do you feel about the immigration debate being framed as a Latino/Mexican issue?

P: I have a parenthetical status in the immigration debate as someone of South Asian descent. Sometimes reporters are unwilling to interview me due to their own internalized racism — they want a Mexican-American or Latino. Other times, people automatically assume I am from Mexico and tell me to go back to Mexico. Once I saw a picture of mine floating on the internet where I had been given a Latino male name — Palacio. I found it quite offensive. That said, I have more Latino than South-Asian friends and realize that due to the border we share with Mexico, immigration is an especially volatile issue for Latino communities.

T: Do you pay your taxes?

P: There’s sales taxes that every immigrant pays. I also pay business taxes to the state of California. My family pays several thousands in taxes each year when property taxes are taken into account. They are subsidizing the education of American citizens while their own daughter cannot get any federal loans to go to college.

T: You are a big advocate on behalf of the Dream Act. What are you advocating for and why is it important?

I think i said it best in this post for SAALT:

” …I’m queer and undocumented. Along with undocumented youth from across the country, I’ve worked to rip the DREAM Act from the clutches of the non-profit industrial complex, to queer the immigrant rights movement and to create a culture of radical dissent and accountability….

I hope no one is waiting for the DREAM Act and other pro-immigrant legislation to pass. It’s erroneous to think that incremental reforms like passing a single piece of legislation would change our lives dramatically. Our movement is not about passing a piece of legislation. It is about creating and fueling spaces for dialogue and resistance, building structures and networks that work for those who have been historically disenfranchised and castigated, and becoming our whole selves again. It’s not about waiting for change or for the right time to demand solutions but demanding change and creating our own solutions. It’s about being undocumented, unafraid, unashamed and unapologetic — and that includes not blaming our parents for alleged transgressions, not feeding into the military industrial complex and not serving as part of the grand narrative that seeks to criminalize other immigrants.”

T: Last month you were awarded the Changemaker Award by SAALT and you wrote a really touching blog post afterwards. How did it feel to get that award, as a Fijian-Indian-American?

P: Surprised and shocked. I don’t necessarily identify as South Asian. I used to keep my distance from other Indian people and my own Indian identity. Once bitten, twice shy. As a teenager, I remembered them as friends who had laughed and ridiculed my gayness, family members who would belittle me despite my various successes and people who denied my Indian-ness by pointing out that I was from Fiji. I couldn’t relate to the women who would hold fasts for their husbands, the women who would suffer in silence or the women who caved to family pressure. Sometimes I thought there was nothing remotely desi about me besides the way I looked. My queer identity grew in opposition and direct denial to my Indian one.

Then one day I was getting recognized for my LGBT and immigrant rights work, in front of a room full of South Asian people, some of them who were queer themselves. I never thought I could feel whole in my lifetime but I was wrong. I like to think I’m evolving now and coming full circle. Right now, I’m more concerned about unearthing my own queer South Asian diaspora roots than belonging to any white gay politics masquerading as human rights for all, especially when it is white colonialism that repressed the various modes of sexualities in our cultures.

T: Do you identify as South Asian? What was life growing up in Fiji?

P: A lot of my consumption of Indian-ness comes from Bollywood and that is true for whether I was living in Fiji or America. But I’m not an Indian-American. I’m a Fiji-Indian American. To deny the Fijian part of me is to deny the history of my ancestors as indentured servants who were taken by the British to Fiji, away from their homes and families and compelled to build a new home for themselves in a completely foreign place. They were subjected to all sorts of abuses and finally compelled to leave the country after a hundred years of contributing to the social, economic and political fabric of the country. It’s not unlike what the United States is doing to me now — kicking me out of my home — only I have more rights and privileges than my girmitya great-great grandparents who crossed the Kala Pani.

T: You are a long time blogger and have written on change.org and your own site. How/why do you feel blogging/telling narratives is important to advocacy?

P: I think our stories are our best weapon against a system that suppresses and denies our truths. It is said that history is written by victors and I take that to mean that if I am writing my own story, I’m probably also victorious. At the same time, we have to be mindful that our personal narratives of pain and trauma, love and joy don’t conceal other narratives such as the subjugation imposed by neo-liberalism on our lives and bodies.

T: You’re getting hella educated and have lots of degrees under your belt. What do you want to do with these degrees?

P: Honestly, I actually want to write books, as in novels and maybe some non-fiction but I also don’t want to be known as yet another person of South Asian descents who writes those novels about painful and traumatic immigrant experiences. How contrived and cliched. One day, I want to be a tenure-track professor but personally, I’m just looking for love in my life.

Aren’t we all? To follow Prerna on her journey for love and justice, visit her blog www.prernalal.com, her tumblr The Queer Desi, her online art installation documenting stories of the South Asian diaspora, and her RedHotDesi twitter account. Keep dreaming.

Images of Prerna Lal found on her blog at www.prernalal.com

First, below you see a simple plot of female vs. male literacy by Indian administrative unit. There’s a strong linear relationship, where variation in male literacy explains ~75% of the variation in female literacy. But again I’m a little wary of unweighted plots like this, since urban areas are not representative of the Indian society as a whole. So I also generated a bubble plot in R, where the size of the bubbles is proportional to the total population surveyed.

It seems that the lower the average literacy the bigger the gap between males and females. Some of this is due to the fact that above you can’t get above 100%, so there’s going to be natural convergence at the tails of a distribution. So:

1) I converted the literacy proportions to log values. This rescales it somewhat so that extreme values don’t converge as much.

2) Then took the ratios of the log values. Concretely, I did the following for Kerala, for example:

(log male literacy)/(log female literacy) = ratio

Then I plotted the ratios against the log value of female literacy. You can see the results below:

Meghalaya is the outlier. It has an OK literacy rate, but relative balance between male and female values. Why? Those of you ethnographically aware will not be surprised:

One of the unique features of the State is that a majority of the tribal population in Meghalaya follows a matrilineal system where lineage and inheritance are traced through women. The Khasi and Jaintia tribesmen follow the traditional matrilineal norm, wherein the “Kha Khadduh” (or the youngest daughter) inherits all the property and acts as the caretaker of aged parents and any unmarried siblings. However, the male line, particularly the mother’s brother, may indirectly control the ancestral property since he may be involved in important decisions relating to property including its sale and disposal. In the Garo lineage system, the youngest daughter inherits the family property by default; unless another daughter is so named by the parents. She then becomes designated as ‘nokna’ meaning ‘for the house or home’.In case there are no daughters, then a chosen daughter-in -law (bohari) or an adopted child (deragata)comes to stay in the house as well as inherits the property. The tribal people of Meghalaya are therefore a part of what may be the world’s largest surviving matrilineal culture.

The last part is probably wrong. I think that the Minangkabau are the most numerous people who still engage in matrilineal practices, though readers can illuminate as to how pervasive the old customs are in Kerala and neighboring regions. In any case, the point is that culture matters, and that economics alone does not explain everything. Sometimes there is gold to be found in the residuals….

For the record, I have no issues with being impolitic on the substance of matters. But thread-jacking as occurred below when there’s so much low hanging fruit to discuss is not acceptable. Speaking of which, in response to S. R. Datta’s mooting of the issue of hepatitis as the reason for sex ratio distortion in China, that hypothesis seems to have been rejected, including by the scholar who originally forwarded it. Obviously that may not be true generally, though let us note that sex ratio imbalances are well known from the historical record, and they often vary as a function of time and class (e.g., medieval European nobility seemed to exhibit son preference, while peasants did not, at least as adduced from the ratio of the sex of buried infants). I think the Trivers-Willard hypothesis may explain some of these trends across human history.

End Update

Several readers have pointed to the recent, unfortunately predictable, story coming out of the Indian census, Selective Abortions Blamed For Girl Shortage In India:

Dr. C. Chandramouli, India’s census commissioner, says the numbers don’t lie: The girls are missing.

Among children under 6 years old in India today, there are only 940 girls for every 1,000 boys. Worldwide, it’s around 986 to every 1,000.

Chandramouli says this is a continuation of a trend that was first seen clearly in the 2000 census — but the new figures show the problem is spreading.

“It has to be said that what was predominantly a North Indian phenomena of a few states has now spread across the country, and we see a uniform decline all over the country, so that is what is more distressing,” he says.

First, in the short term economic development can lead to the spread of practices through emulation of dominant elites. But, in the long term one can see a reversal of the preference for boys to girls. In Japan the shift occurred 20 years ago. In Korea the change is happening now. One hopes that the same switch will occur with China and India, though it seems unlikely that these nations will become as wealthy on a per capita basis as Japan or Korea in the near future, so it would have to be driven by non-economic factors as well (the drop in fertility in some nations preceded economic growth, to the surprise of demographers, so it can happen).

But it must be remembered that regional differences persist, as is evident in this map:On a personal note, my extended family in Bangladesh has been shifting to a norm of one or two children. My mother has also observed that in general my cousins are now expressing a preference for the first child to be a girl in case they only have one child (some of them are starting their families rather late in life).

This can’t of course explain what’s going on in Punjab, which has a relatively low fertility (though Haryana’s is not so low). But one aspect of the Indian dynamic which I wonder about is the noted pattern of bringing women from poorer areas to rebalance the adult sex ratio. This may be serving to block the eventual cultural equilibration of sex preferences which is necessary for a functioning society.

You occasionally read about the persistence of sex selective abortions in Asian Diasporic communities. I am curious though as to the prevalence of the practice, as well as inter-cultural differences. Does the intra-Indian variance persist in North America and Europe? I would bet it does, but I don’t know. Certainly a lot of economic background issues are collapsed in a relatively affluent consumer society with generous old age pensions. Finally, Diasporic communities oftentimes preserve the more archaic elements of the culture of origin due to an artificial stasis (e.g., foot-binding was last practiced among the Chinese of Malaysian Borneo in the late 1970s). It would not surprise me if, for example, the Punjabi communities of Vancouver retain the norms of “Old Punjab” longer than Indian Punjab itself does.

Last week, interviewed at his Institute’s second annual U.S.-Afghan women’s conference (video above), former President George W. Bush said that he and Laura worried about the U.S. leaving Afghanistan because if it did women would suffer again under the Taliban. In contrast, consider these comments from a senior official in the Obama administration involved in Afghanistan policy, as reported by Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

“Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities. There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” (The Washington Post)

Pet rocks were a 70s fad thought up by an advertising exec. Women’s issues, in Afghanistan or anywhere, are far from a fad or special interest, and it’s more than a little disturbing to hear a senior official in the Obama admin refer to them that way, even in an analogy.

You can read the rest of Chandrasekaran’s article for more about the U.S. shifting its approach to women’s rights in Afghanistan since last year. AP coverage offers more details about the Bush Institute’s conference on Afghan women.

Governor Nikki Haley’s inauguration last Wednesday felt like a glimmer of light in a political landscape darkened by the recent tragic mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Republicans, Tea Party supporters, Mama Grizzlies, crack-the-fiscal-whip types, Haley’s family, friends and community–all these people and others had reasons to feel happy on the occasion of her inauguration. But what made my day was seeing the young girls who braved the freezing weather in Columbia to see the first-ever inauguration of a woman and minority governor in the history of South Carolina, a history that spans at least four centuries.

Two girls in matching pink striped hats showed up for the inauguration, and lined up afterwards with other young and bundled-up people to meet the charismatic new governor in person. Parents held their blanketed daughters up in the bitter cold to see and hear this moment. Maybe they wanted their children to see what was possible, to feel that they could dream big and really achieve their dreams too. Those kind of dreams were cut short for the youngest victim of the Tucson shooting, nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, a student council member with a budding interest in politics who was attending a local “Congress on Your Corner” event organized by Arizona Congresswoman Giffords the day she, Giffords and several others in attendance were suddenly shot.

You may have read about Green or heard the President speak about her at the Tucson memorial service, which also took place last Wednesday. With her loss still fresh on my mind, the otherwise ordinary actions of parents taking children to see a historic swearing in felt like moving acts of courage and hope. Haley’s own parents were nearby as she took her oath of office, and in her inaugural speech the nation’s youngest governor (age 38) described how her mom had inspired her own dreams when she was growing up.

The future governor of the state and her grade-school classmates in Bamberg, South Carolina.

You see, my mother was offered one of the first female judgeships in her native country, but was unable to serve on the bench because of the challenges of being a woman in India. Now she sits here today watching her daughter become Governor of South Carolina, the state she proudly calls her home. When you grow up with a mom like that, the word “can’t” is not in your vocabulary.

I will always be the proud daughter of immigrants. I will always cherish our family’s experience. And I will always strive in my actions and in my words to make South Carolina a place where all of our children, regardless of race or gender, know that unlimited opportunities for happiness and success await them.

Full text of Haley’s speech. Video. Photos of the inauguration, open house and gala.