Gender Justice: Bodily Autonomy beyond Gendered Islamophobia

About the event

With the overturning of Roe V. Wade in the United States, to protests against patriarchal state violence in Iran, to PREVENT targeting Muslims across the health sector in the UK – this event will bring together different ways in which muslim bodies are controlled, surveilled, policed, and violated. Women, nonbinary, and trans community members are at the forefront of abolitionist movements across the globe. We are fighting for safety for ourselves, our families, and our communities. We are fighting for our bodily autonomy.

Sahar and Farzana will share excerpts from HEART’s newly released Sex Talk Book and draw from their personal and professional experiences navigating gendered Islamophobia at multiple levels. The conversation will bring together how knowing our bodies is essential to resisting surveillance of our sacred bodies and building bodily autonomy.

Bring your babies, besties, and Daadis for chai and light treats for this important and grounded discussion. Copies of the Sex Talk Book will be available for purchase and to use for the event itself.

About HEART

HEART works to promote sexual health, uproot gendered violence, and advance reproductive justice by establishing choice and access for the most impacted Muslims. We envision a world where all Muslims are safe and exercise self determination over their reproductive lives in communities they live, work, and pray in.

About Healing Justice LDN

Healing Justice Ldn (HJL) builds community-led health and healing to create capacity for personal and structural transformation. We work on a community, structural and movement level to repair and build the conditions for health and healing justice that dignify and support all of us to be well. Using a multi-layered multi-systems approach and cultural strategy, we work to disarm the cycles of harm, ill-health and chronic unsustainability that oppression reproduces in our communities and social justice movements. We nurture cultures towards futures free from intimate, interpersonal and structural violence.

About Sahar Pirzada (she/her/hers)

Sahar Pirzada is the Manager of Movement Building at HEART Women and Girls. She co-anchors the Gendered Islamophobia Working Group in the Muslim Abolitionist Futures Network and works to uplift Muslim narratives around abortion in the United States. She is a Pakistani American Muslim woman from the Bay Area, currently living in Los Angeles with her two kids and husband. Pirzada is also a Co-Founder and Steering Committee member of Vigilant Love, where she organizes against Countering Violent Extremism programs that target mental health workers as extensions of the surveillance state. Her work with HEART and Vigilant Love has been featured in NowThis, Teen Vogue, NPR, KPCC, Fusion’s “Sex.Right.Now,” and “#GoodMuslimBadMuslim.”

About Farzana Khan

Farzana is the Executive Director and Co-founder Healing Justice Ldn. Her practice works on building community health, repair and self-transformation rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice working with communities of colour and other marginalised and underrepresented groups. Farzana has over 10 years of background in Youth and Community work particularly focused on arts-based education projects both in the UK and internationally. Farzana is the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake, bringing together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. She ran this working at Platform London, a climate and social justice organisation working across arts, education, research and activism.