Natalie Wilson's Posts

A New “Fright Night”: What a Difference a Female Screenwriter Makes

Debates about whether women’s writing was uniquely female or if there was a “feminine voice” permeated much femininist theorizing in the ’70s and ’80s. While I tend to be wary of claims about difference grounded in biological determinism, I do think that for many female writers their experiences as women, or as what Simone de [...]

Blowing the Whistle on “Peacekeeping” Sex Traffickers

The book version of The Whistleblower provided a harrowing, page-turning account of sexual trafficking in post-war Bosnia, revealing how the private military contractor DynCorp, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department were complicit in hiding, as well as perpetuating, the global sex trafficking industry. The film adaptation now out in theaters, with an original [...]

The Terrible, Awful Sweetness of The Help

If Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help was an angel food cake study of racism and segregation in the 60’s South, the new movie adaptation is even fluffier. Like a dollop of whip cream skimmed off a multi-layered cake, the film only grazes the surface of the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender and geohistory. Let [...]

White Cowboys and Alien Indians

Given that the new film Cowboys and Aliens is the structural and symbolic equivalent of “Cowboys and Indians,” I went to see it in order to discover if this newfangled Western-Alien mash-up is marred by the same racial representations as the majority of its Western film predecessors. And yes, for the most part, it is. [...]

Smurf Girls Are Easy … and Love To Shop!

In her classic 1991 article, Katha Pollitt named the tendency in media where “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined” the “Smurfette Principle.” Twenty years later, this principle is still all too common–including in the new movie The Smurfs. In the film, Smurfette–the first and usually only female Smurf–is [...]

A Feminist Visits Comic-Con

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 [...]

7 Feminist Take-Aways From the Final Harry Potter Movie

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. [...]

Will the New Hermione Please Stand Up?

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 [...]

Super 8’s ‘Super Pussy’

“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 and Ellen: Making the F Word and the L Word OK for the Masses

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 [...]

« Previous Page — Next Page »