A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones is a memoir of motherhood and disability, of bodily presence and difference depicted by talent that is both staggering and undeniable.
Author: Alison Lanier
Alison Lanier writes about the intersections of gender and media, which is the focus of her current studies at MIT. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appear at BUST, Bitch, Origins, and elsewhere.
The Pioneering Black Sci-Fi Writer Behind the Original Wakanda
MIT rarely allows Hollywood films to be shot on their campus. So it was a surprise when an email went out in 2021, alerting students that a film titled Summer Break would be filming at the school. Turns out, this was the working title of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
But something else was special about Wakanda Forever’s filming location. The MIT scenes were shot a stone’s throw from where, a century before, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins worked at the Institute. Hopkins is credited with inventing the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn’t widely known.
“She was a powerhouse, an innovator and an intellectual dynamo.”
Crunk Feminist Collective’s Feminist AF: Essential Reading for Young (and Not-So-Young!) Feminists
Feminist AF, the newest title from the Crunk Feminist Collective, is a fierce and intelligent guidebook for young adulthood that meets the reader at her level. Invoking the energy of hip-hop generation feminism, the authors spell out a crystal-clear conversational index as a toolbox for their readers to set out with.
Decoding Sex in the Humanities: Five Key Findings from MIT’s Gender/Novels Project
In an intense two-month sprint, the DH Lab at MIT hit the ground running with the Gender/Novels project. Their mission? To teach a program to deliver meaningful data about gender from a truly colossal number of books on a sentence-by-sentence level of detail—and to establish their new lab as a force on campus. This is what they learned.
Let Us Now Praise Brutal Women
Suddenly, massive blockbusters resolve around the power of a woman’s body, to a greater degree than its sexualization. These brutal women are the wickedly, unapologetically powerful characters redrawing the genres that so long excluded them—and doing so not as novelties, but as icons.
Daisies in the Age of Trump
The two Maries seem precisely the opposite of all the fear and worry that I’d felt in the Women’s March.