More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Numerous English theatergoers considered seeing women on the public stage for the first time a pivotal moment.
The role of Desdemona, the devoted, loving wife murdered by her husband in Othello, wasn’t performed by a woman until 1660—about six decades after Shakespeare wrote the play. This is because when Shakespeare was writing for the early modern stage, young men and boys performed all the women’s parts.
Liberation—running off-Broadway through April 6—offers a timely exploration of feminism, generational divides, and the persistent struggle for women’s rights, showing how much has changed … and yet how much remains the same.
Dispatches from Week 2 of Women’s History Month:
It’s Week 2 of Women’s History Month, and just knowing the federal government might well ban those three words in sequence—along with “gender,” “female,” “feminism” and about 250 others—you can bet I’m feeling extra rebellious as I write this column.
I am back from celebrating International Women’s Day (March 8) at South by Southwest. Among the festival keynotes, Chelsea Clinton urged that optimism is fundamentally a moral and political choice. Remaining optimistic, she remarked, is like “saying we do not have to accept the status quo. … We do accept that we may not be able to do everything all at once, but we can always do something.”
Women’s History Month is a solemn reminder that our reaction—and our commitment to action—also requires that we hold tight to the optimism our foremothers possessed.
As feminist resistance faces a critical crossroads, Suffs and Teeth present two diverging paths: marching forward or tearing it all down.
It is the feminist movement’s challenge moving into a time that will most certainly require vigilance and resistance to consider how to reconcile these two paths forward. Will we keep marching? Or will we lick our teeth?
Much ink has been spilled on the extraordinary series Baby Reindeer, especially its refusal to be reductive in depicting complex and charged sexually subjects and the groundbreaking nature of its portrayal of male-on-male sexual assault and its consequences. What gets overlooked: Baby Reindeer is a vivid, visceral lesson in how to film a rape scene.
The filming of episode four—the construction, the point of view, the relentless focus, the utter absence of sensationalism and exploitation—can serve as a valuable lesson in how to film a rape scene: steering difficult scenes away from the abuser’s point of view, placing them in a space that allows the audience to understand, defend and respect the survivor.
Anyone walking into the bathroom on Capitol Hill Thursday morning found a buoyant dance party in progress: A group of trans artists and activists staged a protest in a women’s restroom in the U.S. Capitol, dancing to the song “Meeting in the Ladies Room” by the all-women pop and R&B band Klymaxx.
“It always starts with things that people feel are insignificant, like public restrooms, but it never stops there,” said Hope Giselle-Godsey, one of the Capitol Hill dancers. “We’re here today to ensure they understand that we will not be erased—one bathroom at a time—or shoved back into the proverbial closet out of deference to the comfort of those who speak to eradicate us.”
Boomerang Theatre Company’s premiere production of Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves by Gina Femia is keenly, tenderly aware of the pain of high school theater and being a teenage girl.
Directed by Scott Ebersold, the play is “a new queer kinda adaptation of Romeo and Juliet,” according to Boomerang’s online program, marking the first-ever production of Femia’s new play.
Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves is running at The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at ART/New York until Nov. 24, 2024.
In her new memoir, A Termination, writer and actor Honor Moore recounts her decision to have an abortion in 1969: “I didn’t think about I’m having an abortion, I just did it. Blasted through fear; I want this life, not that life. … I made the decision by myself. But also with the remote-control help of my mother: ‘Don’t come home pregnant.'”
Abortions are sought by a wide range of people for many different reasons. There is no single story. Telling stories of then and now shows how critical abortion has been and continues to be for women and girls. (Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com.)
This year we commemorate the 51st anniversary of Women’s Equality Day with perhaps more optimistic urgency than ever before.
Amid the buzz, there has been an overt, palpable melding of pop culture and politics. That includes on Broadway, where the two-time Tony Award winning show, Suffs, tells the story of the fight for women’s suffrage—and all the humanity and perfectly imperfect organizing strategies of the cadre of activists who won the right to vote for women—in song.
Black trans femmes are from the future. We exist in bodies that the world has not yet evolved to accommodate. We speak a language that has yet to be written. We claim freedoms that are not yet accessible. But when we create art, we pull pieces of that future into the present—disrupting, reshaping and unraveling the confines of the modern world.