feminism Archive
Feminism and Tillie Olsen’s SILENCES
Though Tillie Olsen published very little in her lifetime, her body of work had a great impact on the women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. She was a champion of underrepresented writers. Olsen’s book, SILENCES, became a classic feminist text, and her works of fiction were met with
All the Lives I Marched For: Alana Massey’s Second Stories
I learned I am a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths. From the onset, Massey probes how society shapes or punishes women based on how we talk about or dismiss them. She writes with as much empathy about the women we mock as she does the women we
Empowerment can start in the kitchen: Eudora Welty’s DELTA WEDDING and THE OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER
By focusing on women in a kitchen, Welty seems to shrug the mantles that keep her marginalized—regional and gendered—subverting expectations for canonical American literature as public or inhabited by important men.
Notes From A Feminist Killjoy : An Interview With Erin Wunker
Erin Wunker teaches and researches in the fields of Canadian literature and culture. She is chair of the board of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe.
The Self-Policing Female Gaze in Emma Cline’s “The Girls”
Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, is an unabashedly feminist novel that freely acknowledges the presence of patriarchal forces in our society.
The Art of the Twitter Essay
Twitter is maybe one of the most ideal places to watch a draft shape itself into a finished essay—a public place for us to learn the bones.
Feminism by Way of Tragic Misogyny in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
In social justice activism, offensive rhetoric is considered a form of toxic pollution. Language shapes our culture, society, and schema for thinking about different groups, and so can never be considered harmless.
The Collective Action of Swan Maidens
Last month I sat through five productions of Swan Lake, five days in a row. Despite a lifetime of ballet—and having danced the role of a swan in the ballet’s second act—I was hazy on the story’s ending. As perhaps I should be, as I’ve found evidence of nine
Fifty Shades of Heathcliff: Why WUTHERING HEIGHTS Isn’t a Love Story
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is often considered one of the great Victorian romances, mentioned in the same breath as classics like Pride and Prejudice and her sister Charlotte’s most famous work, Jane Eyre. But where Jane is a love story through and through, from the early meet-cute to
The Best Poem I Read This Month: “A performance for intimate space with strangers” by Saretta Morgan
Saretta Morgan participates in “text-based writing,” and currently attends the interdisciplinary graduate writing program at Pratt Institute. Additionally, she’s a member of the Belladonna* Collective, a feminist avant-garde group founded in New York City. These affiliations begin to orient lenses and traditions through which to read her work; but