Liza Featherstone Archives

Sex & Gender

The New Sex Wars: A Roundtable

Debating Liza Featherstone’s “Moving Beyond Misogyny: Why do they hate us?”

December 31, 2019 • by Claire Potter

Needless to say, perhaps, a lot of feminists – often younger men as well as women – were pissed. Although there were a number of appreciative responses, the reader had to wade through a mountain of outrage to get there. The essay was a “bizarre and a really frightening misreading of previous feminist movements,” ...

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 ...

Divining Desire

The rise of the focus group

February 24, 2018 • by Christopher Howard-Woods

On February 15, 2017, our Executive Editor Claire Potter met with journalist Liza Featherstone to discuss the launch of her new book, Divining Desire, about the development and legacy of one of the great curiosities of our culture: focus groups. We livestreamed their conversation on Facebook, which you can watch here. If ...