Feminism Archives - Public Seminar

Body & Mind

Why communal care must be at the heart of feminism

September 12, 2025 • by Maggie Wyss

Privatized parenting asks individuals to do the work of a village and then punishes them when they can’t keep up....

Feminism

Feminism is so capacious that it comprises its own mortal enemies

April 8, 2025 • by Sophie Lewis

Let’s be brave and swallow our bitter medicine. Feminists across the political spectrum have taken pains to define their troops as chaste and untainted by lust (especially interracial lust); not to mention maternal, i.e., pure, straight, removed from the realm of productive work; and “natural,” that is, not artificial, not ...

Feminism

Yes, Some of Our Enemies Are Feminists

A conversation with Sophie Lewis on her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses against Liberation

April 8, 2025 • by Natasha Lennard and Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis, feminist scholar and author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022), reckons with Western feminism’s problematic history in her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025). In a conversation with Natasha Lennard, Associate Director of the Creative ...

Feminism

No Sex With Men

The South Korean radical feminist movement 4B arrives in the United States

February 5, 2025 • by Iman Sultan

The night of the election, when it had become clear Donald Trump was winning the race, a call to action reverberated across the internet. “Ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that ...

Body & Mind

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

December 10, 2024 • by Hannah McIntyre

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville. The ...

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

Feminism

Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

Why do women bleed milk?

November 25, 2024 • by Chiara Bottici

I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s ...

Feminism

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

October 8, 2024 • by Madeleine Adams

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...

Feminism

The Barbie Curse

Can a girl’s first icon of can-do power ever be good enough?

August 30, 2023 • by Honor McConnell

Barbie is the most popular doll in the world, and the most hated....

Feminism

Barbie in Herland

Greta Gerwig meets Charlotte Perkins Gilman

August 30, 2023 • by Sandrine Bergès

What is perhaps most striking in both stories is the discovery that the Real World and Ourland are both barbaric places dominated by murderous men....

Feminism

Am I a Heteropessimist?

Four years since we learned the word, what does heteropessimism look like today?

April 19, 2023 • by Josephine Houman

Evidently, I am far from alone in the befuddlement I feel about my heterosexual relationship, nor am I the only one noticing the fact that, even though so many of us feel similarly, heteropessimism (and its attendant inaction) persists. ...

Activism

Beyond Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Binaries

An excerpt of Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights

February 6, 2023 • by Camilla Fitzsimons and Sinéad Kennedy

Abortion became illegal in Ireland in 1861 as part of the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s Offences Against the Person Act. But while abortion might not have been talked about much in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was happening. ...

Feminism

Being a Bad Feminist

I can’t stop shaving—and it makes me feel like a fraud

January 23, 2023 • by Amalie Thieden

Here’s my confession: for years I’ve felt ashamed. Ashamed of spending more money than I’ll ever want to count on hair removal products, and ashamed of all the times I haven’t worn what I wanted to because I didn't have the time or energy to shave. I was ashamed of ...