Tag: feminism
Sara Ahmed and the Joys of Killjoy Feminism
Books & the Arts
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February 21, 2024
Sara Ahmed and the joys of killjoy feminism.
To be a feminist killjoy means celebrating a different kind of joy, the joy that comes from doing critical damage to what damages so much of the world.
Reading Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook comes as a great relief—and not just to me: Upon reading it, my friends report
The Dubious Feminism of the Natural Childbirth Movement
Pregnant women are everywhere, but in a way it’s hard to see them. The pregnant woman’s body is shrouded in a veil of symbolism, made an object of our anxieties and hopes in a way that’s distinct and intense even when compared with the various other ways we objectify woman. When people look at a pregnant person, they often don’t see a human being so much as a series of abstractions related to pregnancy: “maternity,” “nature,” and “creation” in all … Read more
How Financial Strength Weakened American Feminism
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, many Americans had already opened their wallets to protest. In the approximately 24 hours after the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked early, the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue raised $12 million, and Reproductive Freedom for All’s donations increased by 1,400 percent. According to one researcher, more than 300 crowdfunded GoFundMe campaigns drew in nearly $3.2 million in the seven months between the
Why Barbie Must Be Punished
My childhood Barbies were always in trouble. I was constantly giving them diagnoses of rare diseases, performing risky surgeries to cure them, or else kidnapping them—jamming them into the deepest reaches of my closet, without plastic food or plastic water, so they could be saved again, returned to their plastic doll-cakes and their slightly-too-small wooden home. (My mother had drawn her lines in the sand; we had no Dreamhouse.) My abusive behavior was nothing special. Most girls I know liked
The Muddled Feminism of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”
What Susan Sontag Wanted for Women
A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she find the ideas expressed in them relics of a distant, less enlightened past. But the essays and interviews in “On Women,” a new collection of Susan Sontag’s work, are incapable of aging badly. Though the pieces are around fifty years old, the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius. They contain no ready-made ideas, no
What the Hand-Wringing Over a “Backlash” to Feminism Gets Wrong
The Tragic Misfit Behind “Harriet the Spy”
There is a certain alchemy by which canonical characters, especially the figures of children’s literature, come to exist outside of history. Stripped of their initial contexts, and cleansed of any outdated particularities, they seem to endure in an eternal present tense. Take, for instance, the nineteen-sixties’ most iconic underage sleuth, Harriet M. Welsch, a.k.a. Harriet the Spy. In 1996, Nickelodeon transported her out of the mid-century, with a goofy live-action film starring Michelle Trachtenberg. Animation lends itself more readily to
The Radical Women Who Paved the Way for Free Speech and Free Love
Anthony Comstock may be the only man in American history whose lobbying efforts yielded not only the exact federal law he wanted but the privilege of enforcing it to his liking for four decades. Given that Comstock never held elected office and that the highest appointed position he occupied in government was special agent of the Post Office, this was an extraordinary achievement—and a reminder of the ways that zealots have sometimes slipped past the sentries of American democracy to
The Strange Revival of Mabel Dodge Luhan
“Now don’t you keep going on to me about introverts and extraverts and insides and outsides,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1924. Instead, he continued, she should wash the dishes until she could keep up a rhythm “with a grace.” At the time, Luhan was reading up on mysticism and Jungian psychoanalysis, and she