Feminism Archives - Public Seminar

Sports

Feminism, Sports, and Football in North Korea

Women’s football is one of the very few areas in which North Korea can display excellence to international audiences

February 3, 2026 • by Jung Woo Lee

While North Korea's political doctrine displays a revisionist character that combines nationalism with communism, traditional socialist feminism still influences its gender policy. The key tenet of socialist feminism includes the emancipation of women from economic dependency on their male counterparts and their liberation from confinement to household duties (Mojab 2015). ...

Feminism, Sports, and Football in North Korea

Film & Performing Arts

The Art of Change: A Libretto

Opera 0.2: A Prelude

September 18, 2025 • by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Chiara Bottici and Matteo Procuranti

Synopsis: A community decides to pursue its revolutionary dream by adopting the principle of accelerated change, and applies it to every aspect of social life. The result is a utopian (or dystopian) world that may (or may not) turn out to be ours. Event 1. Prologue Flutist in dialogue with video projections ...

Body & Mind

Mothers Resist!

Why communal care must be at the heart of feminism

September 12, 2025 • by Maggie Wyss

Privatized parenting asks individuals to do the work of a village and then punishes them when they can’t keep up....

Feminism

Enemy Feminisms

Feminism is so capacious that it comprises its own mortal enemies

April 8, 2025 • by Sophie Lewis

Let’s be brave and swallow our bitter medicine. Feminists across the political spectrum have taken pains to define their troops as chaste and untainted by lust (especially interracial lust); not to mention maternal, i.e., pure, straight, removed from the realm of productive work; and “natural,” that is, not artificial, not ...

Feminism

Yes, Some of Our Enemies Are Feminists

A conversation with Sophie Lewis on her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses against Liberation

April 8, 2025 • by Natasha Lennard and Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis, feminist scholar and author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022), reckons with Western feminism’s problematic history in her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025). In a conversation with Natasha Lennard, Associate Director of the Creative ...

Podcast

No More Girl Bosses

Episode 69: A conversation with Serene Khader about her book Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop

February 28, 2025 • by Claire Potter

On October 12, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was sworn in for her testimony before the Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee. If you were a Democrat and a feminist, it was a galling moment for so many reasons. First, the United ...

Feminism

No Sex With Men

The South Korean radical feminist movement 4B arrives in the United States

February 5, 2025 • by Iman Sultan

The night of the election, when it had become clear Donald Trump was winning the race, a call to action reverberated across the internet. “Ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that ...

Health care

Her Choice

Honor Moore discusses the decision that shaped her life as a woman and a writer

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore and Elide Vincenti

In 1969, Honor Moore was a 23-year-old graduate student at Yale School of Drama when she made the profound decision to end an unintended pregnancy—an experience that would shape her life and work. In her memoir A Termination (Public Space Books), Moore reflects on this pivotal moment while embarking on ...

Feminism

Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

Why do women bleed milk?

November 25, 2024 • by Chiara Bottici

I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s ...

Gender

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

On making music for girls

October 9, 2024 • by Shelley Martin

When Courtney Love popped up in my Taylor Swift–heavy Instagram explore page, I rolled my eyes. Like almost everyone on the internet, I’ve been inundated with posts on Swift’s love life, feuds, and new releases. It turned out that, in an interview with the Standard, Courtney Love had declared, “Taylor ...

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

Feminism

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

October 8, 2024 • by Madeleine Adams

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...

Gender

The Furies Reconsidered

A review of Elizabeth Flock’s new book on women and vengeance

June 3, 2024 • by Gregory Laski

Read as a book about how institutions disempower women, The Furies makes the kind of actions that the three characters take seem not only reasonable but necessary for their survival. ...