she/her. aggressively nerdy. frighteningly prone to injury. charmingly inept at everything else. no, i don't hate you, i just only follow like 20 people and haven't followed anyone new since the obama administration.
Yumna Al-Arashi, Axis of Evil (Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq), 2020
in Leica Fotografie International (LFI) magazine:
"This photograph was made for my first European solo show in Berlin, in the gallery Anahita Contemporary. It's a self-portrait alongside Anahita Sadighi, Moshtari Hilal and Susu AbdulMajid. We are respectively from Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite our different roots I noticed that we all share a similar background, having grown up in Western nations that often vilify the places our families are from.
I also noticed the strong profiles of each of our faces. So I decided to create this portrait with the title Axis of Evil – a play on the term so frequently used to describe our home countries when we were growing up. It also embraces the beauty of our distinctive noses, which are often treated as ugly, something to be changed. I wanted to embrace these qualities of ours in this image, creating something powerful, defiant."
I want to make it clear that all butches look different! There is no one way to be “butch”. There is nothing that makes a butch more “butch” than someone else. Some butches are fat. Some butches are disabled. Some butches have long hair. Some butches wear pink. Some butches wear makeup. Some butches are submissive! Someone butches aren’t always tops! All butches have feelings and deserve to express them however they want to! If you think being “butch” looks one way and make it your job to judge a butch because they don’t hold certain physical trait, please leave us alone until you educate yourself.