Sex & Gender Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Music

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

June 4, 2025 • by Mikayla Emerson

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...

Literature

Blurb Me

Promotion uber alles in Ada Calhoun’s Crush

June 3, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

Crush is a book about promoting a book. Author Ada Calhoun opens the novel (Viking, 2025) with an explanation: The unnamed narrator has always had crushes that have never made her stray from her marriage, a quality that also has served her well in her work as a ghostwriter. A ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sex & Gender

After David

Why not get together for coffee?

January 23, 2025 • by Catherine Texier

Logging on the site is like stepping into a candy store. Or walking into a party and waiting for someone to talk to you, some swaggering dude with a joint in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Except he is the only one you’re waiting for. All ...

Interviews

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

An interview about After David

January 23, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre and Catherine Texier

An older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it's looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome. In After David (ITNA Press, 2024), Catherine Texier explores these themes ...

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

Body & Mind

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

December 10, 2024 • by Hannah McIntyre

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville. The ...

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

Podcast

How We Fight

Epidosde 64: A conversation with Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger about why the campaign for reproductive justice is also a struggle for our collective future

December 4, 2024 • by Claire Potter

Why Now? host Claire Potter interviews Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger about abortion in the United States today....

Activism

The New Urgency of LGBTQ+ Pride in Paris

A celebration or a rebellion?

October 7, 2024 • by Marko Vuorinen

"We are transfeminists, radicals, and afroqueers,” marchers shouted. “Get used to it!" Their call echoed through a crowd of 28,000, gathered in the heart of Paris to advocate for the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Summer is Pride season around the world, and Paris is no exception. The main event ...

The New Urgency of LGBTQ+ Pride in Paris

Media

From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

Why are my friends talking like incels?

October 7, 2024 • by Jake Neuffer

“Been gymmaxxing lately,” my friend quipped as he made a protein shake. “Proteinpilled too,” I said. My generation is speaking a new slang—new to us, anyway. Not quite ubiquitous, but familiar to that contingent of chronically online youth (and is that phrase not becoming a tautology?). These are phrases borrowed from incels, ...