Description
We Are Many: Defending Women and Sex Worker Human Rights is an international anthology of resistance featuring comics from the frontlines of Ukraine, Mexico, Sudan, Iraq, and more.
Radical politics, solidarity, and a dogged pursuit for a better tomorrow links the first-hand accounts in We Are Many: Defending Women and Sex Worker Human Rights. With a varied political and aesthetic sensibility, and an equal partnership between comic artists and human rights defenders, the anthology features profiles, reports, testimonies, and voices from the frontlines of Ukraine, Mexico, Sudan, Lebanon, Tonga, and more. A rough, energetic illustration of a sex workers’ collective fighting for legalization in Australia sits alongside a spunky collage of a trans woman rapping about empowerment in Brazil. The muslim women of Sri Lanka speak alongside the voices of unnamed feminists in Iraq. The cause of women’s rights even unites the warring nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
A Cypher Comics anthology curated by Beldan Sezen and Adam Shapiro, We Are Many presents comics as eyewitnesses to grassroots justice movements.
What People Are Saying
“These comics share their wisdom with an intimacy you won’t experience anywhere else.”
—Elana Levin, Host of Graphic Policy Radio
The Editors
Beldan Sezen (1967, Germany) is an artist, writer and M.A. in Political Sciences. Being Turkish by ethnicity, German by birth, and a resident of both the Netherlands and the U.S., allows her to observe society polyangularly. She was awarded with a Global Arts Fund by the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2015), and in 2018 by the city of Amsterdam with a development grant. Sezen is recipient of the 2022 Herzog August Bibliothek Artists’ Book Prize Fellow and has been an artist-in-residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the Artists League Residency at Vytlacil, NY. Her books are collected privately and by institutions, including the US Library of Congress, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and KB Nationale Bibliotheek Van Nederland. As a curator of artists books, she is part of the Booklyn Artists Alliance. She is the co-founder and creative director of Cypher magazine.
Adam Shapiro is Director of Advocacy for Israel/Palestine at DAWN (Democracy For the Arab World Now), leading advocacy efforts on accountability for human rights abuses and to shift US foreign policy in line with international and human rights law. For 10 years, Adam served as Head of Communications & Visibility for the Ireland-based international human rights organization Front Line Defenders. In that role, he was responsible for campaigning with and for human rights defenders around the world. Adam has filmed human rights documentaries in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Europe and the United States. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Publisher of Cypher Comics. and the author of La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico
