Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer ...
Tag: Gender
“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen ...
Unsex the Lab
Kit Owens, the protagonist of Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand, is a postdoc in the research lab of academic rock star Dr. Lena Severin; Severin has just received a prestigious research grant when Kit’s ...
Toward the Black Girl Future
To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in ...
The Revolution’s Failed Promise to Women
On a recent research trip to Tbilisi, I stayed with a retired math professor and master storyteller named Tsiala in the communal apartment she’d remade ...
Muslim Fashion Is Now Mainstream
Modest Fashion is having a moment. From London catwalks, which hosted the first branded “Modest Fashion Week” in February this year, to gyms and running ...
Purgatory Is for Real
If heaven, as the Talking Heads lyric puts it, is a place where nothing ever happens, it has nevertheless powered numerous books up American best-seller lists. In the past decade, several titles have ...
Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential ...
Toxic Masculine Cosmology
Cosmologists are obsessed with origin stories. We are the physicists and astronomers who take on the task of explaining why spacetime and its ...
Keep Out, Or Else: Girls’ Diaries in Comics
Comics and the diaries of teenage girls don’t at first glance have that much to do with one another. After all, the latter tend to invoke the pastel ink of pens used to ...
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 ...
Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control ...
B-Sides: David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox”
The publication of David Garnett’s first novel, Lady into Fox, shot the author into literary stardom, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate ...
Queers Growing Old and Young
Do queers ever grow old? Do their ideas stiffen and their sensibilities melt? Do they fret over finances and retirement accounts, the state of their kitchen plumbing ...
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 ...
“The Shape of Power Is Always the Same”
What does your dream of female empowerment look like? You may have wistfully imagined that such a situation would result in more empathetic politics ...
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 ...
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 ...
Trans Like Us
When Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender in 2015, many commentators praised her bravery for claiming a truth that had been denied her at birth. At roughly the same moment, the story of Rachel Dolezal, the 37-year-old …
The Big Picture: Confronting Manhood after Trump
If it were fiction, it would have been dismissed as preposterous. America ...