Gabriel Leão
Bio:
Gabriel Leão is a journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil. He has previously written for Vice magazine and holds a master’s degree in communications.
There has never been a female winner of Formula 1 (F1) racing — the most prestigious category in the motorsport. But 13-year-old Juju Noda wants to change that.
Women Under Siege spoke with Dr. Maxine Margolis about the three religious fundamentalist communities she observes in her book Women in Fundamentalism: Modesty, Marriage and Motherhood and the role of gender in their ideologies.
15-year-old Tanyaradzwa “Tanya” Muzinda is a motocross champion. The Zimbabwean teenager began competing in the dangerous sport at five years old with the support of her father, a former biker himself.
The Helms Amendment and has caused damage to women all over the world by limiting U.S. funding for family planning all over the world.
In the beginning of August, 18-year-old Khadijah Mellah from Peckham, Britain, became the first jockey in her country to compete while wearing a hijab. She also won the race, which was the Magnolia Cup at Goodwood — a charity event supporting the organization Wellbeing of Women.
In the recently published book There’s No Crying in Newsrooms, award-winning journalism scholars Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace investigate how gender has shaped the experiences of female journalists.
Women Under Siege spoke with Lisa Wade, PhD, an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College and author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, to better understand the relationship—and long history—between white supremacy, masculinity, and the American image.
There is a potential solution to climate change that is as unexpected as it is potentially effective: girls' education.
Lockey is part of Open Bionics’ arms project, which employs cutting-edge 3D printing technology to make bionic arms.
One of Donald Trump's first acts as president was to reinstate and expand the global gag rule. This conservative policy hurts people in developing countries that already have to endure systemic obstacles to access health care.
Charlie Martin is a British racing driver who was set to become the first trans woman to race as a support race in the world’s oldest sports endurance car racing contest: the 24 Hours of Le Mans, also known as “Grand Prix of Endurance and Efficiency.”
Nigerian teenage activists Kudirat Abiola, 15, Temitayo Asuni, 15, and Susan Ubogu, 16, created It’s Never Your Fault, a nonprofit organization that takes a stand against child marriage, which is legally allowed to continue due to a loophole in the country’s constitution.
Brazil has maintained its place as first among countries with the highest murder rate of trans and gender-diverse peoples. In a country that remains deeply conservative and religious, and under a president who has openly targeted the LGBTQ community to "rescue our values," Brazil's trans community especially is fighting to exist, freely, openly, and safely.
The six members of the Brazilian hip-hop group Quebrada Queer are young, black, queer, and from the impoverished outskirts of São Paulo — identities that are relatively rarely represented in Brazilian mainstream media, despite the fact that 54 percent of the country’s population is of African descent.
Anime is one of Japan’s main cultural exports and a large part of its cultural identity, but feminists have pointed out that the genre has long had a problematic relationship with gender and racial representations. The site Anime Feminist, founded by U.K native Amelia Cook, analyzes diversity and representation in this art form.
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, two out of three girls are harassed and one in four girls are sexually assaulted by the age 18.
In 2018, Fabiano Contarato became the first openly gay man to be elected to the Brazilian Senate. The 52-year-old senator, who represents the state of Espírito Santo, was elected in the midst of a shift in Brazil’s political climate toward extremist and fundamentalist views; the president elected in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro, has consistently made racist and homophobic remarks and has been called “Trump of the Tropics.”
Recently, reports surfaced of an 11-year-old girl from a rural area in Argentina who got pregnant after being raped by her grandmother’s partner. Mariela Belski, Executive Director of Amnesty International Argentina, told the FBomb more about this case and how Argentinian girls and women are fighting for justice thanks to the Ni Una Menos (Not One [Woman] Less) movement.
Teens around the world are protesting for action on climate change. Some of the most prominent young activists doing this work are those involved in the group Zero Hour, which was founded by 17-year-old Jamie Margolin in 2017.
Serbian astrophysicist Dr. Mirjana Pović told the FBomb about how her experiences have helped her understand the struggles impoverished people face, and how individuals from marginalized communities can develop skills in fields like STEM.
In March 2019, the first private African satellite will be rocketed into space, thanks to a group of school girls based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Siblings Hannah and Charlie Lucas, who are 16 and 13 respectively, decided to use technology to do something about the teen suicide epidemic: They created the notOK app, which aims to help those in need of mental health assistance by summoning family, friends, and a network of peers for users in need of support.
In October, disabilities activist Mara Gabrilli was elected to the Brazilian Senate at the age of 51. Many saw her victory as a sign that although a lot of extremism and hatred has been expressed in Brazilian politics over the past few years, it’s possible for this nation to elect figures aligned with a progressive agenda.
A new documentary, Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped by Boko Haram, follows the lives of the 276 Nigerian schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. The film also features interviews with girls who had been previously taken from their homes by the same group.
Greece is experiencing a refugee crisis — and over half of these refugees are women and children waiting in camps to reunite with relatives or have asylum status approved by the Greek government. The Azadi Project teaches female refugees expertise in jobs related to multimedia communications and storytelling in order to promote their integration into the local labor force.
The Safe Schools for Girls Project, created by Care International, takes place in 174 Rwandan schools after regular classes end and aims to address issues related to gender-based violence through education.
Priscila Gama, a 34-year-old Brazilian architect and entrepreneur from wanted to do something to help women in the face of pervasive violence. In 2016, she and a team launched the Malalai app, which enables women to let pre-authorized friends follow their routes when moving around the city by any means, whether by foot, car, or public transportation.
Suplicy, who is now 73, served in Brazilian politics for years. But even before her political career, Suplicy brought discussions of important issues straight to Brazilian homes through a television show called TV Mulher, during which Suplicy gave sex advice to female viewers in a political era of dictatorship.
Rape "jokes" made by a YouTube star are stirring controversy in Brazil, where a rape takes place every 11 minutes.
Brazilian author PJ Pereira tells the Fbomb about how his best-selling trilogy of books about the Orishas, gods that are part of the indigenous Yorubá tradition, are helping the belief system be re-examined in Brazilian culture.
A video of Brazilian supporters harassing a Russian woman during the Soccer World Cup shows the ugly side of machismo.
An average of more than 2500 people were murdered per year between 2008 and 2011 in Juarez, and female residents of the city have particularly been the targets of femicide, or killing women because of their gender. Yet experts estimate that only one out of every four cases of murdered women in Juarez are even investigated by authorities, and criminal charges were only filed in 2 percent of those cases.
Brazilian TV star Barbara Thomaz says she was fired after taking maternity leave and reporting harassment by one of her superiors. Her experience isn't unusual.
Operation Condor, a France and U.S.-endorsed campaign of torture in South America, is long over. But the brutality it wrought still echoes today.
By 17 years old, Brazilian swimmer Joanna Maranhão had already broken her country’s record by taking fifth place in the 400 meters at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Four years later, memories of the sexual abuse Maranhão suffered at nine years old at the hands of a former swim coach had come back to haunt her.
Kunumí MC is a teenage rapper calling attention to the struggles Indigenous people face in Brazil.
First Match (2018), the first feature film by writer-director Olivia Newman, tells the story of Monique a girl who competes on an all-boys wrestling team while simultaneously juggling the foster care system, school, and getting back in touch with her absent father.
Medeiros is the supervisor of the wrestling program at São Paulo’s Training and Research Olympic Center (Centro Olímpico de Treinamento e Pesquisa or COTP) in Brazil. She is also the first African-Brazilian woman to serve in this role.
When in August Brazilian writer and feminist activist Clara Averbuck refused the advances of an Uber driver, he physically threw her out of his car, leaving her bruised and with a black eye. He then sexually assaulted her as she lay on the ground.
On December 14, 2016, 23-year-old feminist activist Débora Soriano de Melo was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in a bar in São Paulo, Brazil. There was evidence that the young activist suffered sexual abuse that same night. Detectives suspected Willy Gorayeb Liger, a manager of the bar, in the assault and called for his arrest on rape charges.
Within the first few days after Sandra Moreno’s daughter, Ana Paula, disappeared in 2009, Moreno reached out to a TV crew a few blocks from her home in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Carapicuíba, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo.
In May, a 16-year-old girl reported that she had been raped by at least 33 men armed with assault rifles and handguns in a favela, or slum, in the western part of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The girl said she believed she was drugged after she went to a party with her boyfriend on May 21. She woke up naked and wounded in a house, she said, surrounded by more than two-dozen men. The attack was so vicious it ruptured her bladder.