This weekend, I attended my first ever Comic-Con–the annual comic-book industry bonanza–with my 12-year-old daughter. As always, I wore my feminist lenses, and noticed many things, both good and bad, to report. As my daughter and I wended our way through the crowded exhibit hall, I was glad to find many women artists and editors [...]
The Harry Potter films, after seven installments, come to a fulfilling close with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But the final movie has a special bonus: a number of feminist take-aways. Echoing the seven Horcruxes holding pieces of Voldemort’s soul, I found seven feminist lessons in Deathly Hallows: Part 2. [...]
Don’t hate me, Potterites, but I would have preferred the Harry Potter series had been instead the Hermione Granger series. Sure, Harry is great and all, but, given that men protagonists still vastly outnumber women ones, I wish J.K. Rowling had chosen to frame her saga around a woman character. Thankfully, many recent popular sagas [...]
“Did you notice that everyone in that film was, like, a ‘super pussy’?” Thus joked my 14-year-old son on our drive home from the theater after seeing Super 8. If he notices the problematic use of the word throughout the new film–about a group of young boys filming a zombie movie whose super 8 camera [...]
Tina Fey appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show last week, treating this feminist to an afternoon of giddy happiness–two of my favorite women comedians joking about gender, beauty norms, ageism and the Hollywood machine! If you wanted to convince the remaining doubters that the F word, lesbianism and same-sex marriage are nothing to be scared [...]
Popular culture continues to frame weddings as THE EVENT of a woman’s life, as in all the shows dedicated to getting married (The Bachelor), to planning a wedding (My Fair Wedding), to brides (Bridezillas). They’re followed in short order by shows dedicated to the NEXT EVENT (no, not the breakup)–the baby, as in A Baby [...]
While many discussions of the F word–feminism–have taken place in the feminist blogosphere and in magazines such as Bitch and Ms., it’s nice to encounter smart responses in a surprising venue: GRANTA, a journal dedicated to new literary writing. The summer issue of GRANTA, titled The F Word, showcases well-known authors such as A.S. Byatt, [...]
While the Disneyland ride Pirates of the Caribbean is still mired in sexist and stereotypical representations (as noted in this post), the films based on the ride offer some interesting gender transgressions–especially the most recent installment, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which sees Penelope Cruz swashbuckle her way into the role of Angelica. [...]
In Part 1, I figured out how to be both a good mother and a good professor. Even though being out of the mom closet seems to be more acceptable in academia these days, there are nevertheless those higher up–deans, provosts, presidents–who one hesitates to tell. While society seems to believe a male can do [...]
I did not expect that being a mother would make me more of a feminist. In fact, I feared quite the opposite, worrying that my feminist convictions would wane under the weight of overfilled diaper bags and the expansive responsibilities of caring for an infant. When I had my first child, a son, just after [...]
