This Saturday is the highly anticipated “SlutWalk” in New York City, the latest installment of a phenomenon that has manifested in over 70 cities, ranging from Toronto to Cape Town, and has been variously called “the most successful feminist action of the past twenty years” and “a capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women.”
Writing in The Nation, Salamishah Tillet, an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Penn, poses some interesting questions about SlutWalk. She begins with a deceptively simple one—What should a woman wear to SlutWalk?—and progresses to a thornier one: What should a black woman wear? Her answers add up to one of the more illuminating explorations of a phenomenon that’s sparked media gawking and feminist debate in equal measure.