It is grim irony that today's #WorldCup final is being played today, Dec. 18, which in 2000 the UN General Assembly proclaimed International Migrants Day. At least 6,500 migrant workers died in #Qatar to make #Qatar2022 possible. feministgiant.com/p/essay-footba…
Some workers plunged to their deaths building the city that did not exist but which has hosted #QatarWorldCup, some died in the hellish heat of Qatar’s summer (a heat the footballers & fans were spared by the unprecedented decision to hold this World Cup in November and December
Others, men who left their home countries healthy, died a few years after repatriating from conditions directly related to the abusive work conditions they endured in Qatar.
The families of those men who died to make this men’s World Cup possible have not been compensated.
And many of the migrant workers who survived after making #Qatar2022 possible haven't been paid what they were promised because host-nation Qatar, which has spent a gobsmackingly astronomical record $220 billion to make this WC possible has not coughed up the money #WorldCupFinal
Fifa knew and didn't give a fuck.
Message from Fifa: regardless of outcome of #WorldCupFinal, the winners are greed, corruption, and an absolute monarchy with money to burn but not on the very workers who made this spectacle of a vanity project possible. feministgiant.com/p/essay-footba…
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#Argentina just won the mend’s #WorldCup. It’s the first men’s World Cup I have not watched since the 1978 tournament held in Argentina that I followed with my dad and brother from our living room in London. feministgiant.com/p/essay-footba…
That 1978 World Cup was held in a country ruled by a military dictatorship which held thousands of political prisoners in clandestine detention centres across the country theguardian.com/football/in-be…
This men’s #WorldCup represents the apotheosis of #Fifa fuckery. The more we let Fifa get away with, the lower it dragged our moral bar with it until we arrived here, the Qatar World cup, the apotheosis of fuckery and the nadir of a moral standard. #FIFAWorldCupFinal
Authoritarianism: check. Misogyny: check. Homophobia: check. And yes all that checked for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. I am guilty of playing along with sportswashing. I claim no higher moral ground here.
Qatar WC took that fuckery & plunged further into that nadir because even for those who play whataboutery game, for whom no country is free of sin, the 6,500 migrant workers who died while making this WC possible was our loudest moral alarm bell & collectively we failed the test.
This Sunday, a projected 1.5 billion people will watch the men’s #WorldCup final between cupholders France and Argentina. I will not be among them. I explain in my latest essay why this is the first men’s World Cup I have not watched since 1978,l.
Football is never just about what happens on a pitch for 90 mins between 22 players. It’s a microcosm of a greater story in which we each find a place to stand.
“Time remains a central concern for all women writers. It is not simply a question of finding time to write–one also writes against time, knowing that life is short,” bell hooks, who was 69 when she died Dec. 15, 2002
From “women who write too much," in Remembered Rapture.
“Annie Dillard urges us to ‘write as if you were dying.’ A large number of black women writers both past and present have gone to early graves. To know their life stories is to be made aware of how death hovers."
“My writing was an act of resistance...,” bell hooks wrote in a chapter called “class and the politics of writing.” in Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work.
To see an Asian woman in her 50s ponder her other selves & the lives she could have had,is subversive. During a time when pandemic bigotry & violence in the U.S. targeted Asians, esp women & elders, a film that centres Asian woman in her 50s is subversive feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-me…
Talking of older women and subversive, disappointed that Good Luck To You, Leo Grande didn’t get more nominations so far. feministgiant.com/p/the-fuck-it-…