My Butch Career: An Interview With Esther Newton

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

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 ...
Read More

Commitment to the Bit

On Andrea Long Chu

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 ...
Read More

White Women are Not My People

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

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 ...
Read More

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.

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 ...
Read More

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

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

Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

A Female Gaze

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 ...
Read More
Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

A Feminine Imaginary Without the Eye

Audio Pornography and Representational Politics

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 & ...
Read More
A Feminine Imaginary Without the Eye

Social Construction Theory and the Transgender Turn

An Enlightened Conversation

In the introduction to her groundbreaking book Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective of Sexual Difference, Patricia Gherovici states: “Trans people’s experiences may force us not just to re-evaluate our notions of gender, but also to reconsider how we think about other forms of difference as it unravels identity as a construction.” ...
Read More
Social Construction Theory and the Transgender Turn

Spinoza and Feminism Question the Structures of Domination

Is the mind-body problem a gender problem?

Traditional theory on the mind-body problem has been mostly conceptualized by men. The historical debate found its most heated moment in the seventeenth century between Rene Descartes and Benedict De Spinoza; the first advocating for the superiority of the mind over the body, and the latter with his characteristic Monist ...
Read More
Spinoza and Feminism Question the Structures of Domination

In Between Her Legs

Theorizing feminine space

“There is no getting round the fact that each man and woman came out of a woman.” -- D.W. Winnicott, 1964 In her recent book Feminine Law: Freud, Speech and the Voice of Desire, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Jill Gentile puts forth a call to name the vagina. Through rigorous analysis ...
Read More
In Between Her Legs

Revisiting Bartky on Foucault

The production and discipline of femininity

In “Femininity and Domination,” Sandra Lee Bartky examines the underlying causes and effects of women’s subjugation in contemporary society. Though women are generally understood to have equal rights, oppression, she argues, does not have to involve “physical deprivation, legal inequality, nor economic exploitation” in order to have a systemic and ...
Read More
Revisiting Bartky on Foucault

Fighting for a Better World

The fight for abortion access is up to us

“Life is winning in America.” Mike Pence’s words echoed across the national mall, where thousands of anti-abortion activists (antis) gathered for their annual March for life in January 2017. Since those early days in office, the Trump administration has delivered on its campaign promises, such as allowing states to deny Title ...
Read More
Fighting for a Better World