Ms Informed Newsletter

Listen to Berliners talk about their sex lives and send an email to fight for democracy!

This weeks podcast recommendation

Check out Madhvi’s new audio essay, in which South Asian migrants reveal how moving to Berlin has affected their sexuality.

These audio clips are part of an entire magazine centering the voices of migrants from all over Europe, so give the whole magazine a read — free online or you can order a physical copy.

This week’s distraction

This week’s distraction is the exhibition ‘The Second Glance: Women’ at the Bode museum.

“Women” is the second integrated exhibition in the series The Second Glance, and was produced in collaboration with the organisation Frauentreff Olga, a drop-in and counselling centre for drug-using women, trans women, and sex workers. The show analyses the traditional gender roles and challenges the functions ascribed to women in society – for example, as goddesses, heroines, prostitutes, saints, queens, academics – and on the role of women in society. In six themed paths featuring 62 objects dating from the 4th to the 18th century, these women are situated within their own historical contexts and also discussed through the critical lens of the 21st century.

To this day, art history continues to be framed by a male perspective, and this perspective also defines the art-historical canon. The influence and histories of women were long ignored in Western museums. The invisibility of women continues to be a common feature of virtually all museums and collections of the so-called “Old Masters”.

More Information here

This week Madhvi read

This week Madhvi read the whole MigraVoice Magazine, which includes stories about Romanian women who work as house help in Italian homes, and are often abused, a story about how Nigerian pastors are involved in human trafficking, and how the housing crisis in Lisbon is affecting migrants — oh and my own story about migrants from the Indian subcontinent in Berlin. Give it a read!

This week Rina read

This week Rina read ‘Bad Feminist’ by Roxane Gay. This is the next book for our feminist book club meeting April 28th at 8pm! Its been such a pleasure to meet with these amazing women every week and I cannot wait to discuss this book with them all.

This week’s Inspiration

This week’s inspiration is democracy!

In Berlin, four activists are facing politically motivated deportations. We do not have a democracy unless we have freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and democratic laws are followed by those in power. This is illegal, and a form of bullying and intimidation. The current powers are testing the boundaries of the law to make it so that if you have a political view that they do not like (anti-genocide), they can deport you and take away your dual citizenship. These are EU and US citizens — not to mention Palestinians who have already been deported and sent to Greece by the German authorities.

Now is the time to write an email to your representatives in Germany and the EU.
Thank you to all those activists who have already created email templates in German, English, Spanish, French and Greek for you to copy, paste and send to your representative. This will take 10 minutes of your day, and I know we are all short of time, but this is important for our voices, for our democracy, and for justice.

Link to all email templates and email addresses here.

Thank you!