Francesca Cassinelli

“One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort. The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17”
― Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

“In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at Irwin County Detention Center, a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Georgia, alleged in a whistleblower complaint that an obstetrician-gynaecologist was performing ‘unwarranted’ and often non-consensual mass hysterectomies on detained women. According to Wooten, ‘everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody”
― Elinor Cleghorn, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World

“Durante la violación, llevaba en el bolsillo de mi cazadora Teddy blanca y roja una navaja, mango negro brillante, mecánica impecable, cuchilla fina pero larga, afilada, perfecta, radiante. Una navaja que yo sacaba con bastante facilidad en esa época globalmente confusa. Me había acostumbrado a ella; a mi manera, había aprendido a usarla. Esa noche, la navaja se quedó escondida en mi bolsillo y la única idea que me vino a la cabeza fue: sobre todo que no la encuentren, que no decidan jugar con ella. Ni siquiera pensé en utilizarla.”
― Virginie Despentes, Teoría King Kong

“The daily papers talk of everything except the daily,” he complained. “What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it?” That’s his deeper question: What about everything else?”
― Rob Walker, The Art of Noticing for Writers: From The Art of Noticing