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Soraya Lisa Catherine Chemaly (born 1966 in Florida) is a Bahamian-American author, activist and feminist. She became famous in Germany with her book Speak out! The Power of Female Anger.
Soraya Chemaly was born in Florida in 1966. Her parents are Edward and Norma Chemaly of Nassau, Bahamas.[1] She descends from Bahamians and Arab Christians who emigrated from Jordan and Lebanon to Haiti in the 1920s.[2] She grew up a strict Catholic in the Bahamas, where her parents owned a chain of gift shops.[1]
After she graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, she began studying Catholic theology, history, and women's studies. As a student, she founded the feminist magazine The New Press. She graduated Magna cum laude from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1988. By the time she left the university, she said she was a "feminist atheist".[3] Chemaly was inducted as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
In the 1990s, she worked at the Gannett Company media company in Washington, D.C..[1] Until 2010, she worked as a marketing consultant in the media and IT industry.
As a freelance journalist and author, she has written for The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, Huffington Post and the feminist magazine Ms., among others She deals with the topics of freedom of expression, gender, women's rights, sexualised violence, media and technology. She is also the director of the Women's Media Centre Speech Project, an initiative to promote women in political fields.
Soraya Chemaly has been married since 1992.[1] She lives in Washington, D.C. Her mother-in-law, Patricia Bleecker Jones, served as president general of the Colonial Dames of America.[1]
In 2015, Chemaly won the "Donna Allen Award" for feminist advocacy and the "Secular Woman Feminist Activism Award" from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.[4] In 2014, she was named one of the 25 most inspiring women to follow on Twitter by the magazine Elle.[5] In 2016, she received the Women and Media Award from the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP).[6] She was a co-recipient of the 2017 Mirror Award from the Newhouse School of Public Communications for the best individual feature of 2016, an investigative report on free speech and moderation of online content.[7]
Chemaly's first book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger was published in 2018 and was reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others.[8][9] The New Yorker devoted an in-depth essay to the topic of the book. Chemaly presents an in-depth examination of the causes of female rage.[10] The book was published in 2019 in French,[11] Italian, Spanish and Dutch translations. It was published in German translation by Suhrkamp Verlag in May 2020 under the title Speak out! The power of female rage.
In it, the author works her way "through all the current variants of discrimination against women"; as a Woman of Colour, she "always thinks about racist discrimination, as well as the discrimination of queer people", wrote Susanne Billig in Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She moves "thrillingly" back and forth "between gripping reports of experience and impressive research into psychological, sociological, biological and political science studies."[12] Susan Vahabzadeh (Süddeutsche Zeitung) read the book as "alternately a flaming manifesto, a report of self-experience and a derivation from studies". Most women would agree with Soraya Chemaly from experience: Anger is not welcomed in women.[13] In the TAZ, Helen Roth concluded that Chemaly's book "puts an end to the myth of women as abrupt and vengeful xanthippes", she develops "an image of women that has the power to reshape society into a free and more open one."[14]
Books
- Monografie
- Rage Becomes Her. The Power of Women’s Anger, Atria Books, NYC, 2018, ISBN 978-1-5011-8955-5
- Speak out! Die Kraft weiblicher Wut, aus dem amerikanischen Englisch von Kirsten Riesselmann und Gesine Schröder, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-518-46946-0
- The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth after Trauma, Atria/One Signal Publishers, NYC, 2024, ISBN 1668079135
- Sections
- Constructing the Future. The Believe Me Internet, in: Jessica Valenti, Jaclyn Friedman (Hrsg.): Believe me: How trusting Women can change the World, Basic Books, New York 2020, ISBN 978-1-58005-879-7, S. 93–110
- Demographics, Design, and Frei Speech: How Demographics have produced Social Media Optimized für Abuse and the Silencing of Marginalized Voices, in: Susan J. Brison, Katharine Gelber (Hrsg.): Free Speech in the Digital Age, Oxford Univ. Press 2019, ISBN 978-0-19-088359-1, S. 150–169
- Dresscodes or How Schools Skirt around Sexism and Homophobia, in: Katie Cappiello et al.: SLUT. A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence, Feminist Press at City University of New York, 2015, ISBN 978-1-55861-870-1, S. 229–236
- Slut-Shaming and Sex Police: Social Media, Sex, and Free Speech, in: Shira Tarrant (Hrsg.): Gender, Sex, Politics. In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century, Taylor & Francis, London 2014, ISBN 978-0-415-73783-8, S. 125–140
Chapters and forwards
- "Free Speech in the Digital Age" (chapter)
- "The Good Mother Myth" (chapter)
- "Gender, Sex, and Politics" (chapter)
- "Nevertheless We Persisted" (chapter)
- "Slut: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence" (chapter)
- "Life in Post-Roe America" (chapter)
- "Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Save the World" (chapter)
- "Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Antifeminism" (foreward)
- "Unravelling Bias" (foreward)
Articles
- Trump’s Attacks on Congresswomen Are Racist and Sexist. Ignoring That Is a Mistake We Can’t Afford, Glamour
- How women and minorities are claiming their right to rage, The Guardian
- What Men Should Understand About Sexist Microaggressions, DAME
- Campus Protests Are Part of a Critique of White Male Privilege, TIME
- In Orlando, as Usual, Domestic Violence Was Ignored Red Flag, Rolling Stone
- Washington Post Appointment Emblematic of Media Industry’s Persistent Marginalization of Women, Women's Media Center Feature
- Why we need to take street harassment seriously, Washington Post
- Reddit row: The symbiosis of online sexism and tech’s gender gap, New Scientist
- What Should High Schools Do? 44 Percent of Sexual Assaults Happen Before College, Huffington
- Rachel F. Seidman: Soraya Chemaly. Writer and Activist, Director, Women's Media Center Speech Project, Washington D.C., in: dies.: Speaking of Feminism, The University of North Carolina Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-4696-5307-5, S. 113–121
- Ask a Feminist: Soraya Chemaly Discusses Feminist Rage with Carla Kaplan and Durba Mitra, in: Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Ausgabe 45, Nr. 3/Frühjahr 2020
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