Gender Archives - Public Seminar

Gender

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Elections have empowered a strongman government—and police and military are back to banning music

June 25, 2025 • by Rachmi Diyah Larasati

Sukatani, a punk band from Central Java, are known for critiquing the interconnected violence of police, military, and religious institutions. I like to play their music in my Minneapolis house—and share it on my Instagram—to protest the return of fascism in Indonesia and globally. So early this year, I was ...

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Gender

The Blessings of K-Pop

What could be more divine than a real human who inspires and comforts without ever having to meet you?

January 23, 2025 • by Abha Deshmukh

As a child, I engaged in religious rituals out of obligation. Over time, the black thread tied around my ankle came off, the excitement of choosing a clay Ganesh and decorating its shrine slowly dulled, the prayers that I had spent hundreds of hours memorizing evaporated from my memory, and ...

Gender

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

November 11, 2024 • by Ever Osorio

This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico's democratic history. As ...

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

Gender

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

On making music for girls

October 9, 2024 • by Shelley Martin

When Courtney Love popped up in my Taylor Swift–heavy Instagram explore page, I rolled my eyes. Like almost everyone on the internet, I’ve been inundated with posts on Swift’s love life, feuds, and new releases. It turned out that, in an interview with the Standard, Courtney Love had declared, “Taylor ...

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

Gender

The Furies Reconsidered

A review of Elizabeth Flock’s new book on women and vengeance

June 3, 2024 • by Gregory Laski

Read as a book about how institutions disempower women, The Furies makes the kind of actions that the three characters take seem not only reasonable but necessary for their survival. ...

Art & Design

HE 2 SHE: Artist Pippa Garner Hacks Her Gender

The neo-conceptual oracle of West Coast transhumanism gets her New York minute

April 15, 2024 • by Abby Merrick

Pippa Garner is a fabulous, mercurial artist with an extrasensory attunement to cultural shifts, a habit of self-mythologization, and a taste for absurdity. ...

<em>HE 2 SHE</em>: Artist Pippa Garner Hacks Her Gender

Body & Mind

The Hunger Artist

Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein conveys the simple terror and intoxicating asceticism of anorexia

March 4, 2024 • by Josephine Houman

“I watched my body shrink in the mirror,” Clein writes, “proud to discover how powerful my mind was.” I know the feeling....

Gender

Eau du Easy Mark

An excerpt from Lucky Dogs: A Novel

June 8, 2023 • by Helen Schulman

My natural scent could be called “eau du easy mark,” an odor only vermin can detect, a spicy mélange of paralysis perfume with prior-history-of-abuse essence....

Gender

Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work

An excerpt from Elena Shih’s probing book

April 18, 2023 • by Elena Shih

Commercial sex in Bangkok, broadcast through tourist networks, now links the city in many minds with human trafficking—following the global tendency to conflate all sex commerce with sex trafficking. ...

Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work

Gender

Why Women Are Still Second-Class Citizens in the United States

As Women’s History Month begins, let’s start with the present

March 8, 2023 • by Claire Potter

Without access to affordable, safe, child care, women have less access to work. Period....

Why Women Are Still Second-Class Citizens in the United States

Gender

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

October 11, 2022 • by Skye C. Cleary and Luis Jaramillo

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

Gender

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

September 13, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Since I hadn’t been able to get Angela to talk about what trial lawyering may have done to her sense of herself, her “identity” as a woman, I shifted to a different lens: Did she feel, I asked, that the presence of more women lawyers was humanizing the criminal law?...