Sex & Gender Archives - Page 12 of 15

Sex & Gender

Against Gyno-pessimism

A response to Liza Featherstone

December 31, 2019 • by Jodi Dean

But it’s not just that hate doesn’t explain everything – it doesn’t explain anything. Offered up in the context of a social or political analysis, misogyny is the attribution of a feeling that covers over the absence of an explanation. An event or phenomenon is positioned as the effect of an aversion that is ...

Sex & Gender

What Happened to Desire?

A response to Liza Featherstone

December 31, 2019 • by James Livingston

In classic psychoanalytic fashion, Featherstone doesn’t reduce the political dividends of desire to the consequences of sex as most of us understand and experience it: as “genital fun.” She’s interested in something “more broadly libidinal,” something more dangerous to order and to hierarchy of any kind. In short, she’s interested in what Freud called ...

Sex & Gender

What Does the Idea of Misogyny Really Describe?

A response to Liza Featherstone

December 31, 2019 • by Eli Zaretsky

Often “misogyny” is used to refer to gender-based disrespect or misrecognition; in other w0rds, bad attitudes toward women publicly deployed. Here the term is a species of folk psychology, reflecting the word’s Greek root, hatred of women. Misogyny, in this usage, also signifies that this hatred, translated into action, is a moral wrong. In ...

What Does the Idea of Misogyny Really Describe?

Sex & Gender

Don’t Pop the Champagne Yet on “They”

Cultural milestones are powerful — but is language a substitute for equal rights?

December 21, 2019 • by Jen Manion

In 2017, the popular tv show Billions introduced the nonbinary character Taylor Mason (played by Asia Kate Dillon) who used they/them pronouns in a significant recurring role. It features one of the most incisive scenes in television or film that captures the significance of nonbinary identity. Taylor says they don’t want to ...

Politics

The Equal Rights Amendment is BAAACK!

The Democratic House returns to a long-awaited Constitutional fix

November 22, 2019 • by Jo Freeman

First introduced into Congress in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was intended to do away with the plethora of state laws which restricted women's property rights, disadvantaged them under state family laws, or barred them from holding office or serving on juries. Proposed by the National Woman’s Party, it ...

Sex & Gender

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

October 29, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

But I think the more proper question is: “Whose foot?” It’s not about the foot not “actually” being the size of the sun. It's the fact that there's necessarily a subjective relation that changes from person to person. So I think the place where truth becomes important is not actually ...

Sex & Gender

The Many-handed Hunger of Transsexuality

On T. Fleischmann

October 21, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

What do we do with what’s left over, with what is in excess of bare life, if we have it? Denounce it as privilege, perhaps. I’m not a particularly moral person. Sure, that’s bad. I’m not very moralistic either. That’s probably good. With what’s left over in my life, I’d ...

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, ...