History, Ann Stoler showed, is not just political action, disconnected from daily domestic acts. Intimate relations are worthy of serious study.
Tag: Gender
Why Play to Regret?
Videogames that demand female protagonists commit—and receive—violence may be captivating, thoughtful, and moral. But they are not fun to play.
Can Novels Make Amends?
Novelists from George Eliot to Mary Gordon ask readers to confront our lives as ethical dramas that run only once, and with great consequence.
Good Teachers Know That Bodies Matter
Students must choose to do the work that will facilitate learning, so teachers must give them reasons to make that choice, again and again.
Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Looks to the Night Sky
“There are two ways of reading Black invisibility and one of them is futuristic.”
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos
Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani reveals the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity. Is her taboo breaking worthy of praise?
Beyond the Objectivity Myth
It is no exaggeration to say that Evelyn Fox Keller and her compatriots made possible not only my work but entire generations of scholarship on science.
This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past 20 Years
I am tired of catalogues and catalogue poems, and of surveys and surveillance—though I appreciate a bird’s-eye view of the terrain as well as anyone.
The Metalyrical Moment
Three recent poetry collections have cemented the rise of what we might call the “metalyrical”: poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression.
What Would a Feminist City Look Like? Talking with Leslie Kern
“What we build and how we build influences the kinds of families and relationships that we can have or can even imagine.”
Ferrante Breaks the Frame
A defaced family photograph—with an ancestor cut out—reveals to Ferrante’s new protagonist how women are erased by the words and deeds of men.
Pornography Porn
The explosion of porn signals the widespread uptake of questions of objectification, the politics of looking, and the relation between power and enjoyment.
The Spy Who Read Me
Women writing about women spies who are, themselves, writing. What’s next for women’s espionage writing?
B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
Nancy Hale, at Last
Hale’s stories reveal that the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night.
What Next for MeTooLit?
What happens when a woman’s words are believed? And what doesn’t happen? Two years have passed since the viral hashtag #MeToo carried the intersectional movement to end sexual violence to a global ...
How Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” Misses the Mark
When in December I heard an interview with Greta Gerwig on All Things ...
The Lyric Me, Too
“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” ...