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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Our Broken-Windows Approach to Sexual Misconduct
In 1957 Clifford Kirkpatrick and Eugene Kanin published some of the first work on “Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus.” Their survey of college women found …
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The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
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The Bingewatch: We’re All Fired
Liberal grief in the wake of Trump’s election has occasioned binges galore: binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-weed-smoking, and not least …
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Join the Mutant Resistance!
The real world just got a lot more like a superhero comic, and not in a good way. I write on November 13, 2016; one of the many things that came up in my panicked, angry, sometimes despairing social …
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Carolee Schneemann’s Unforgivable Art
There’s this old joke. The set-up is always the same: two guys walk into an exhibition catalog. Here’s one version, as told by Carolee Schneemann to Kenneth White in spring of last year, about Happenings and Fluxus, the Harald Szeemann–curated 1970 exhibition in Cologne: So one morning we were sitting around the lunch table, where…
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Charlotte Brontë’s Anger
You might think that a museum show about an iconoclastic Victorian author would, in these postelection weeks, constitute a kind of escapism. Not so when that author is Charlotte Brontë. An Independent Will, assembled by the Morgan Library for the two hundredth anniversary of Charlotte’s birth, provides a lesson in the righteous application of anger. Like other…
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Lin-Manuel Meets “Moana”
Disney’s new animated film, Moana, with songs by Hamilton genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, arrived last weekend to great expectations. Would it keep Disney’s musical franchise afloat? Would it continue …
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A Storm of Words
Imagine a world where the hottest degree was an MPA, a Masters in Poetry Administration. Where a single poem could send global financial markets into a spin, where poets were the envy of all, and instead of shopping for material objects people ran out to buy poems to hang on the walls of their parlours. This…
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A Handmaiden’s Tale
A hit at this year’s Cannes film festival and when it opened in Korea over the summer, The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) is now in limited release. This stylish and twisty Korean thriller remains true to the oeuvre of its director, revenge-plot master Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, 2003; Lady Vengeance, 2005), and to its source text, the novel…
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Workplace Romances
Do what you love. Most American 20- or 30-somethings have heard this helpful tidbit of career counseling at one time or another in the course of our lives. Like many adages, this one is dangerous: it places a burden on young people to invest emotionally in what is, for many, a matter of survival. Consequences…
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The Heartbeat of Chattahoochee Forest: Dahlonega, GA
This piece, marking the release of Bledsoe’s new novel, A Thin Bright Line, is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Urbanites joke about rural hicks. Rural Southerners, especially, are the butt of jokes about their dogs, guns, and ignorance. But anyone traveling—with their eyes and hearts…
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Rape Culture Syllabus
I just start kissing them. Just kiss—I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. —Donald Trump The video was released on Friday, October 7. At the presidential debate two days later, when CNN…
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Clever Man Outs Female Author: A Drama in 3 Acts
This month, we witnessed a contemporary version of a drama that we might call “The Female Author’s Disclosure.” It features the following dramatis personae: • The Heroine: a female author who decides to publish under an incognito. • The Confidantes: friends or associates who know her real identity, and are begged to maintain the…
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Of Men, Monsters, and “The Fall”
Misogynistic torture porn? Or the most feminist show on television? The jury is divided on The Fall, Allan Cubitt’s take on the now prevalent female-detective-hunts-serial-killer drama. Critics condemn its camera’s fixation with beautiful female bodies, from the protracted pornographic shots of naked victims to the voyeuristic return to the top button of Detective Superintendent Stella…
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The Taming of the Bard
We still take our Shakespearean directives from London, and this year’s news has been welcome: it was the summer of women and Shakespeare. The long reigns of Artistic Directors Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole at Shakespeare’s Globe have ended, and with them went the pursuit of “original practices” that left female performers out of the…
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Sex and Socialism
Three recent books tell the stories of four women whose lives both absorbed and propelled the vast, multifaceted socialist movement in Britain from 1870 to 1920: Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel Lester, and Eleanor Marx. While all of them played roles in the struggle for equality of class, wealth, and opportunity, and all of their…
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The Cult of Girlhood
Is girlhood a cult? Emma Cline’s new novel draws on the history of the Manson Family to explore how girlhood and cults both depend on rituals and intimacies. The Girls seems to tell the story of how one man—Russell, the Manson figure around whom the cult centers—can drive girls of “a different species” to commit…
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Feminist Auteurs
“Dialogue memorized, scenes recalled: we became our own insular world of reference and repetition. If you didn’t know the films, you didn’t know us.” This is protagonist Carrie Wexler’s description of her intense adolescent friendship with Meadow Mori in Dana Spiotta’s powerful new book, Innocents and Others. With it, Carrie throws down a challenge to…
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The Thread
1 Sometime during my senior year of high school, my mother went on a laundry strike. Her goal, as I understood it, was to get my father to pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor, carry them to the hamper, and eventually wash them. She made my brother and I promise not to help…
