Tag
Feminism
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“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”: Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism
“I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society.”
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Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist …
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We See You, Race Women
When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At almost no time did auditoriums or classrooms pour out with chatter about the scholarly intervention we’d just witnessed. Instead, fellow students talked…
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Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential …
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Famous and Unfamous Feminists
Meg Wolitzer’s new novel is enjoyably, inescapably “timely,” with its focus on modern feminism and its attention to collegiate rape culture, skirmishes in …
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B-Sides: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Lolly Willowes”
The year 1936 was a watershed for Bloomsbury fellow traveler Sylvia …
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From “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker”
Reading writers’ letters is the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and …
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The Sisters Grimm
Can a centuries-old literary tradition tell us anything useful about modern life? The continuing vitality of the fairy tale in contemporary culture would suggest an emphatic yes. And the vast portfolio of fairy tales revised and reimagined by feminist writers highlights the genre’s particular relevance to ongoing questions about gender, difference, and power. Carmen Maria…
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Swinging: The Double Life of Anaïs Nin
In 1937, Henry Miller predicted that the autobiographical oeuvre of Anaïs Nin would one day “take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius …
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When Secularism Fails Women
When it comes to the work of what Kati Curts recently called “categorical quickening,” Joan Wallach Scott is an exceptional midwife of the body politic …
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The Misfit Resistance
What is a misfit? In Lidia Yuknavitch’s definition, the term refers to those of us who “do life weird or wrong,” who literally miss fitting in with normative models of linear progress. Childhood trauma is often the connective tissue between misfit experiences: poverty, abuse, racism, violence, and war are all familiar elements in misfit life…
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Love in a Broken World
There are now, it seems, more ways than ever for a woman to reach or ruin her own potential. Mainstream feminism today hinges upon a vision of woman as rational actor capable of logically and authoritatively plotting her own course through life. Of course, it’s not that simple: women run up against intractable barriers, broadly…
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The Big Picture: Women Voters, Left and Right
Trump won the presidency despite being recorded saying “grab ‘em by the pussy,” and despite numerous accusations that he had sexually abused women over a period of decades. There is misogyny at the core of Trump’s persona. So it isn’t surprising that, in office, he has championed policies that would harm millions of women in…
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Good with Her Hands
Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her first since 2010’s prismatic, prescient Pulitzer winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, may surprise you. In Manhattan Beach, Egan’s virtuosic skills are devoted to verisimilitude …
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Women’s Suffrage @100
The woman suffrage amendment passed in 1920, the culmination of what Juliet Mitchell called “the longest revolution, ” because it took 80 years of activism for American women to win the right to vote. What could better illustrate the depth of resistance to sex equality? But for two reasons, 1920 was not the decisive year. First,…
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Virtual Roundtable on Engaged Scholarship and Teaching
With political divisiveness and gaps in access to higher education intensifying, the imperative for universities to interact meaningfully with local and global communities has perhaps never been greater …
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Claire Messud’s Noble Lie
In the bouquet of novel typologies—the picaresque, the Künstlerroman, the Zeitroman, the novel of ideas, magical realism, hysterical realism, “experimental” anything—the bildungsroman is the least …
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Aslant to the Flâneur: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin
Early on in Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse the author offers up an imaginary definition …
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Ferrante’s Secret Mirror
Last fall’s noisy dispute around Elena Ferrante’s biographical identity ignited a wealth of contrasting yet instructive reactions. Whether troubled or newly admiring or indifferent to the apparent divergences between the empirical author’s life and that of her character Elena Greco, readers and critics did not venture to question the assumed existential parallel between the two.…
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Shirley Jackson’s Two Worlds
Starting in the late 1970s, Revlon (in)famously peddled its fragrance Enjoli to working women by asserting a woman wearing this scent could not only …
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The Book That Made Me: Belong
As a literature student, I’d wanted words to fix me. But it was images that pieced me back together …
