By David Coussens Though its achievements continue to bear wild and interesting fruit, feminism (as both a set of aspirations and an intellectual position) faces today a more vicious and well-organised opposition than at any time in its modern history (1). An inter-generational alliance of middle-aged white men and disgruntled millennials seeks to roll back…
Category: Blogposts
Teaching stereotypes: more on stereotypical images in high school textbooks
By Elin Weiss A few months ago, I wrote a piece called Teaching “one-way love” and coercion in school: High Horse´s Courting that discussed traditional gender stereotypes and the questionable content of a story used for teaching English to high schoolers. According to the curriculum used by the school in question it is supposed to…
Pain, Voice and Logos in Scarry’s ‘The Body in Pain’
By Tim Huzar On September 11th, I presented at the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association 2015 Biennial Conference Everyday Encounters with Violence: Critical Feminist Perspectives. Here’s what I said. In this paper I want to think about the relationship between pain and voice, and I want to do this via Elaine Scarry’s classic text The Body in Pain (1985). I’m interested in…
Middle-Aged Heroines: Locating Ageing Women in Victorian Fiction
By Sarah Ross “Old age” was as ambiguous a term for the Victorians as it is for us. Where should one draw the line: between 40.9 and 46, the midway points for average life spans from 1838 to 1900?[1] 50, that modern magic “mid-life crisis” mark? 65, the eventual date of forced retirement and pensions…
Mary Jane Watson and her Amazing Friends: Marvel Movies, Heroic Women and Postfeminist Culture
By Miriam Kent Feminism and superhero movies have been a hot topic for the last few years, with both fans and cultural commentators drawing attention to the lack of heroic women in a genre which is by now a staple of the blockbuster seasons. Since the beginning of the superhero boom in the early 2000s,…
Attachment parenting: A rather Feminist upbringing?
By Jennah Evans Attachment Parenting (AP) is a method of nurturing and socialising children which has often attracted the scrutiny and scorn of the Feminist lens. After all, what could possibly be empowering about fostering a state of complete co-dependence between a parent and child? It has to be considered that, overwhelmingly it is still…
Sex-differences and ‘domestic violence murders’*
By Karen Ingala Smith *intimate partner homicides What could we do if we wanted to hide the reality of men’s violence against women? Firstly, we might have a ‘gender neutral’ definition of domestic violence. Maybe like the UK government which uses the following definition: “any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between…
Women as horror writers
By Anila H Today I am going to talk about a very sensitive topic, but I felt the need to discuss it with you, my dear bookworms. Everyone has had their fare share of complaining about how women are not seen as good as men in horror writing. I do not want to complain, because…
The Importance of Female Queer Representation on Television
By Esther Nassaris Finding any queer women on television was once like searching for a needle in a haystack: difficult, annoying, and rarely worth it. Even if you did get lucky, chances are the writing would have been terrible and the representation would be ripe with negative stereotypes. Luckily things are changing now. In fact…
Rants of a Feminine Feminist
By bringitonbeach "Wait, who’s a feminist?” “I said I am a feminist.” “Oh. But you’re not the butch kind so you’re not really a feminist.” Feminism is one of those words that literally no one understands. Those who disregard feminism likely do so because they think that being a feminist is akin to any number of man-hating,…