By Zara Barlas This post was originally published here Marvel Comics has recently announced that the new Ms. Marvel will be a Muslim teenager living in Jersey City. Ms. Marvel will be Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old whose family hails from Pakistan. This will be the first time that Marvel has introduced a female Muslim superhero as…
Category: Blogposts
Until there is no “next time”
by Terese Jonsson This post was originally published here This is a talk I gave at the Critical Diversities conference (10-11 July at Southbank University), as part of a workshop Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg, Sharlene Khan and myself ran titled "Radical politics, critical academia: talking the talk, but walking the walk?". ~~~~ Feminist academia in Britain has…
Ending Child Marriage – Tackling stereotypes through quotas and motivating governments through regional peer review
This post was originally published here Ahead of Girl Summit 2014, LSE’s Alice Evans discusses campaigns to end child marriage. To mobilise support against child marriage, the UK is hosting the ‘Girl Summit’ on 22 July. It will bring together governments, international organisations, civil society and the private sector in a bid to amplify existing…
I Say It, Therefore It Is
by Umlolidunno This post was originally posted here I recently saw a 3 minute video entitled “Your Behaviour Creates Your Gender”, wherein Judith Butler summarises the notion of ‘gender performativity’. It’s possibly her most famous contribution to feminist academia: There are remnants of a good working definition of Gender here that most of us broadly…
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Flapper Feminism
by Sarah Parker Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was one of the most famous poets of the twentieth century. From her early success with the long poem ‘Renascence’ (which earned her a scholarship to study at Vassar in 1913) to her later appearances within the pages of Vanity Fair and her sensational public reading tours…
What’s-her-name: The Most Dangerous Woman of the 1890s
by Tine Hreno This was originally posted here THE coming and going of Ann O'Delia Diss Debar are mysteries for there is no record of her birth and no trace of her death, but the "in between time" furnished Inaterial enough for an entire book rather than a single chapter, and gave her sufficient opportunity…
Marie Lloyd -The One and Only- The Queen of the Music Halls
By Essie Fox This post was originally published here Recently the VV was invited to take part in a spectacular event when, as one of 32 Londoners, she gave a talk on the London Eye. Her event was based on Marie Lloyd, a superstar of the London halls and theatrical entertainments, whose career spanned the later…
‘All the worlds a prison’ – 19th century career girls
by Jade Barber This post was originally published here Whenever I think of the phrase ‘Victorian lady’, a certain image comes to mind straight away; corsets, parasols and stern faces in sepia tinted photographs. Generally, I’ve always thought of most Victorian women as stay at home wives and mothers; subdued and restricted by the strict…
Barbara Eaton, Yes Papa!: Mrs Chapone and the Bluestocking Circle
by Meredith Miller Falmouth University Barbara Eaton, Yes Papa!: Mrs Chapone and the Bluestocking Circle Certainly, not enough work is done on the bluestocking circle. They were both an intellectual circle which played an important role in the public sphere discourse of eighteenth century Britain, and a group of individual women whose biographies and literary…
‘Feminism would be a lot more popular if…’: Unpacking a misogynist fallacy
by Lisa Kalayji Not long ago, while sitting across the table from a friend and her new husband at a charming Italian café, I found myself pulled into an unanticipated conversation about feminism and its legitimacy. As so often occurs when feminists find themselves in dialogue with non-feminist (or outright anti-feminist) people, I was…