Ikhtyar is a collective of young Egyptians who want to awaken the queer feminist consciousness. That’s what brought us together from diverse points of departure. We share a dream and want to see it come to life.

The Young Feminist Wire interviewed Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice activist and author of Saying Abortion Aloud: Research and Recommendations for Public Abortion Storytellers and Organizations. Bracey Sherman talks about online harassment and how she dealt with it when she started writing and talking about her abortion publicly.

As I reflect back on my experiences as a girl and woman, and what living in a deeply patriarchal, prejudiced, sexist, racist, ableist and ageist society means, I wonder often about what influenced my [feminist] politics. Was it the ostracizing? The unjust beauty standards for women? The countless times I heard and lived stories of surviving violence? These all added up. But the ability to look at different struggles and forms of oppressions and draw connections strengthened my feminism, as did my willingness to empathize (and not sympathize). These are all elements of “breaking the silos,” building solidarity and forming a sense of sisterhood.

We are feminists because we have consciousness, because we collaborate to raise other women’s consciousness, and above all because we know that the feminist movement, with all of its ups and downs, has since long ago been fundamentally about solidarity.

Earlier this year I attended a Digital Security workshop organized by Association for Progressive Communication and Point of View in Mumbai, India. This was my first workshop on digital security and, like most others in the group, I was clueless about my expectations. I was generally aware of the larger issues of surveillance, politics of big data and other issues of concerns in the digital world. However in my mind, these were hardly issues that would ever affect me. For a very long time, I thought that digital security does not concern me because there was hardly anything of relevance from my digital existence that was of any potential significance.  

With the expansion of Internet access and the increasingly widespread use of social networks, the occurrence of crimes of violence against women on the Internet has been grown exponentially. Online activity aimed at attacking women — by publishing offensive comments and name-calling, by the unauthorized sharing of personal photos and by threatening virtual assaults — is an increasingly common practice. According to an UN report, about 73% of Internet users have been exposed to some kind of cyber-violence.

#Lifeinleggings is a story about untold stories. Barbadian feminist, blogger and creator of the hashtag Ronelle King took to social media with the support of her best friend Allyson Benn to share their stories.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Port-au-Prince as a part of a Global Fund for Women (GFW) delegation to learn about the current situation of women in Haiti and to learn how we can best support women’s roles in decision-making throughout the reconstruction process

Young women today are feeling the effects of fundamentalist movements differently than their mothers did--and they are uniquely positioned to challenge fundamentalisms' impact.

Young feminists are pushing back and forging new paths in global resistance, but they need financial support and personal security to achieve real gains.