Sex & Gender Archives - Page 12 of 15

Public Health

Flash Count Diary

Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

October 17, 2019 • by Darcey Steinke

1 Night on Fire 2:11 a.m.: I wake, heart thwacking, as heat flows up from my stomach, courses behind my face, and radiates out through the top of my head. I watch a lamp with a pink shade drift out of my neighbor’s window and hover over my darkened backyard. An hour ...

Sex & Gender

The Reckoning of Junot Diaz

October 8, 2019 • by Lucy Marx

As a lifelong feminist, I knew the #MeToo movement was important and long overdue. Moreover, I was strongly inclined to believe the accusers. But I kept coming up against my own resistance to the possibility of Díaz being fired. I’d been pleased when, soon after he joined MIT’s writing program, Díaz ...

Feminism

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

An excerpt from the first radical feminist novel

October 7, 2019 • by Alix Kates Shulman

It was always the same story, in subways or suburbs. From my beginnings in Baybury Heights, a nice neighborhood where we moved because it was “safe,” it was always the girl who was kept in the house after school if a boy molested her, never the boy. Ostensibly she was ...

Sex & Gender

We Were All Ex-Prom Queens

Alix Kates Shulman on sexism, consciousness raising and the re-issue of a classic feminist novel.

October 7, 2019 • by Claire Potter and Alix Kates Shulman

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Alix Kates Shulman [AKS]: In 1968, the first national demonstration of the women’s liberation movement took place on September seventh in Atlantic City. It was the protest against the Miss America Pageant. And as we were marching for hours and hours carrying ...

Europe & Central Asia

Varieties of Gendered Populism

The case of Poland

September 17, 2019 • by Elżbieta Korolczuk

These developments suggest there is a tight connection between right-wing populism and opposition to gender equality and sexual democracy. Just like there is a clear pattern of gendered nationalism, there appears to be also a trend towards gendered populism. As Ruth Wodak pointed out in her seminal book Politics of fear, ...

Feature

My Butch Career: An Interview With Esther Newton

Resisting gender conformity, coming out in the nineteen-seventies, and fighting for world liberation.

September 9, 2019 • by Theresa Smalec and Esther Newton

I interviewed Esther Newton about her new memoir, My Butch Career on June 20, 2019. Newton earned her PhD in 1968 and published Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), the first major anthropological study of a gay-identified community in America. Though she researched drag queen culture and desired women sexually, Newton resisted the norms of ...

Feature

Commitment to the Bit

On Andrea Long Chu

September 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

The way to have the most fun with the writings of Andrea Long Chu is to read them as satire. Most of her texts work by taking some familiar habits of thought and pressing them to extremes, to the point where they disintegrate. Their virtue, as texts, is what Chu ...

Race

White Women are Not My People

“White women” is a demographic category — not a political group

July 31, 2019 • by Laura Briggs

I recently got asked to sign a public letter in which I was supposed to pledge “as a white woman” that now that I had watched Ava DuVernay’s film series “When They See Us,” I would object to Linda Fairstein (who oversaw the prosecution of the Central Park Five as ...

Sex & Gender

Why Aren’t More Women’s Texts Translated into English?

A lack of attention from male translators, publishers and critics keeps literary fiction by women barely visible in English.

March 20, 2019 • by Dorothy Potter Snyder

In a U.S. market where over 70% of all books published in translation are by men, our compromise seemed necessary. It also felt a bit dirty. For women writers and their translators, our individual experiences of bias are supported by statistics. According to the 2017 VIDA Count, our texts compete in a ...

Sex & Gender

Invitation to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Miss America Protest

50 years ago Women’s Liberation protested the Miss America Pageant and threw

August 22, 2018 • by Carol Hanisch

We invite you to participate in an online version of this event. What do YOU want to toss into the 2018 Women's Liberation Freedom Trash Can? On September 7, 1968, more than 100 women descended on Atlantic City in New Jersey to protest the Miss America Pageant, that American ideal of femininity ...

Invitation to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Miss America Protest

Feminism

Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

A Female Gaze

July 2, 2018 • by Hannah Simpson

Petra Collins is the most celebrated, most talked about female identifying photographer/director of my generation. Throughout her career her style has been attributed to the rise of what some are calling “the female gaze”, as an alternative to the one typified by Laura Mulvey in her essay “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative ...

Sex & Gender

A Feminine Imaginary Without the Eye

Audio Pornography and Representational Politics

June 15, 2018 • by Kiyomi Ren Mino

Pornography follows us everywhere. What was once confined to stashed magazines and adult stores now streams freely on our laptops and phones. Motivated by what the freedom of pornography means for women’s liberation, I provide a commentary to Drucilla Cornell’s chapter, “Pornography’s Temptation” from her book, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography & ...