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According to Ishika, South Asian women are often left out of conversations on reproductive justice. Cultural and patriarchal oppression can make these conversations taboo, so discussions either happen privately, or not at all.
From hushed conversations about periods to domestic violence, the lack of sex education to post-partum depression, maternity leave to exploring desire, cultural norms in South Asian communities can impede the possibility for solidarity and shared knowledge between women. Through STREE, Ishika wanted to encourage a space where those who identify as South Asian women can safely and bravely find community through storytelling.
In Ishika’s Words:
“The South Asian women I personally know have described their experiences with short maternity leaves, menstruation stigma, insufficient sex education, postpartum depression, teen pregnancy, and other reproductive justice issues. Being a South Asian woman in America often means your identity and sense of belonging are constantly in flux, especially since both aspects of your identity are already marginalized in the general sphere of representation. Issues that South Asian women face in the world of health and politics are often disregarded because they do not fit the majority.
The medical and pharmaceutical worlds tend to put fewer resources toward and less accurate research on women’s health issues.
Even looking more broadly at race-neutral women’s issues, the medical and pharmaceutical worlds tend to put fewer resources toward and less accurate research on women’s health issues. It is just now that companies have started testing pads with actual blood – imagine that! When the lens of race/ethnicity is added to this, the issues become more specific, complex, and numerous due to cultural and bodily nuances.
In a class I took in college, I learned about the idea of intersectional feminism as well as reproductive justice. Reproductive justice goes beyond reproductive rights or the idea of being pro-choice. It looks at the whole life and health of a woman/person with a uterus.
Reproductive justice is:
- the right not to have a child;
- the right to have a child; and
- the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.
The discourse we had around this led to the theory that reproductive justice should include every aspect of a woman’s health and life because it is really about more than just whether she has or does not have a child. It is more inclusive of aspects like the environment she is raised in, what resources and education she has access to, what her community and support system looks like, how she is treated at school, work, and in the home, and much broader encompassing factors.
STREE, at its core, is a community-building project, a project to dig deeper into our own stories and empower ourselves and others to tell them.
Learning about the reproductive justice framework in a college class of mine helped fuel my passion for sharing this broader framework with my community and expanding it to include cultural nuances that tend to get left out. STREE, at its core, is a community-building project, a project to dig deeper into our own stories and empower ourselves and others to tell them.”
Project Overview
Through her project, Ishika facilitated online intergenerational conversations between South Asian women of different backgrounds, including both women who were born in the States and women who migrated to America from South Asia. STREE allowed these women to discuss a plethora of taboo issues, dig into their own biases and internalized oppression, and explore how disrupting these biases can change how South Asian women exist in the United States and in their own bodies. STREE created a network of those who identify as South Asian women as a basis for learning, sharing, and empowerment.
Some of the topics discussed in the series were reproductive justice, privilege, periods, bras, sexualization of feminine clothing, sex education, desire, female pleasure, fairness, beauty, internalized colonialism, social pressures, endometriosis, PCOS, marriage, interracial friendships and relationships, domestic expectations, representation, conception, pregnancy, maternity leave, post-partum, mental health, caste, gaps in the healthcare system, and much more.
At the conclusion of the series, Ishika provided participants with a resource packet full of the topics discussed, main ideas of note, media recommendations, and culturally specific resources. From here, Ishika encouraged participants to lead similar conversations in their own circles, and is looking forward to the ways in which this project will ripple throughout her community.
Updated August 2024
