Germaine Greer Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

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 ...

Re-Dressing “No More Miss America”

The construction of fashion and feminism as antagonistic has been used to undermine the movement’s goals and to obscure fashion as a liberating political tool

September 9, 2018 • by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

Fifty years ago, over a hundred women gathered on the boardwalk of Atlantic City to protest the Miss America Pageant. The demonstration, which was organized by the feminist group New York Radical Women (NYRW), protested the exploitative and racist nature of the pageant (black women were not allowed to participate ...