Tag Archive for "feministing readz"

Posts Tagged feministing readz

Feministing Reads: Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill

Near the end of his new history of the birth control pill, Jonathan Eig writes, for the first time, about the curious shape of the medicine’s dispensers.

By Alexandra Brodsky • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Tales of Two Cities

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Sheila Bapat.

Economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century emerged as the most prominent work addressing wealth inequality and the problems of capitalism this year. Capital provides data to demonstrate that the chasmic wealth inequality of today is unprecedented and is poised to only grow worse.

Piketty’s book, and works like it, satisfy the need for hard evidence of the problem of wealth inequality. They also satisfy the left (and by left I mean analytical) side of our brains. And that’s important — the notoriety of Piketty’s work positions the book to help influence dialogue about the problem of inequality as well as generate broader public awareness. A dispassionate work like ...

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Sheila Bapat.

Economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century emerged as the most prominent work addressing wealth inequality and the problems of capitalism this year. Capital provides ...

By Juliana Britto Schwartz • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Daisy Hernandez’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed

As soon as I finished the last page of A Cup of Water Under My Bed, I pulled out my phone and searched the words “card reader” into Yelp. Then I tried “mãe de santa,” then “candomblé” then “santería,” but none of the terms really summed up the kind of guidance I had brushed up against through my mother, my cousins, my aunts. In her book, Daisy Hernandez reminds us that often, we do not know how to name or thank the women who shape our journey. The women her parents sought out for spiritual support were referred to as simply “las mujeres que saben,” in her house, the “women who know.”

I eventually found a woman named Yolanda ...

As soon as I finished the last page of A Cup of Water Under My Bed, I pulled out my phone and searched the words “card reader” into Yelp. Then I tried “mãe de ...

By Ava Kofman • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Kim Gordon’s Is It My Body?

Rock star and role model Kim Gordon is best known for her band, Sonic Youth, but she’s also always been a visual and performance artist. For those who know Gordon primarily as a musician, “Is it My Body? Selected Texts,” a collection of her writings on art and performance published this past May by Sternberg Press, is intriguing. At the same time as Sonic Youth was reshaping the New York art scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gordon was writing, in a refreshingly flat prose style across multiple genres, about the liminal spaces between art and music, object and performance, pop sensibility and post-medium/post-punk formations, masculine and feminine. Some of her texts are ...

By Syreeta McFadden • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Bad Feminist gives us permission to be complicated with our feminism

When Roxane Gay’s essay “Bad Feminist” first appeared in the September 2012 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), we were sitting at brunch somewhere in Brooklyn losing our mind over the coming zombie apocalypse and the fallout of the Citizens United decision and its very visible impact on electoral politics, sipping mimosas and occasionally nodding our heads to the break beat of a Kanye song. Kanye brought back the boom bap with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, mixed with all kinds of problematic lyrics. Autumnal equinox brought about a cool gentle breeze after a summer of ridiculous rhetoric from GOP–some dude tried to make a distinction between legitimate rape and rape; a Republican candidate for VP claimed that rape is ...

By Isabel Ortiz • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Dorothea Lasky’s Rome

These days, it seems like wound talk is everywhere. Throughout the blogosphere, feminist writers have explosively reopened public discussions of how to articulate and theorize their pain. In April, Leslie Jamison sketched an expansive topography of wounded women of poetry and prose, challenging the frequent dismissal of female pain as condescendingly lumped into the genre of “confessional.”

Though Jamison’s essay was a viral sensation upon its release, she is not the first writer to grapple publicly with the problem of writing woundedness and womanhood. As early as the 1970s, Toi Derricotte confronted the belittlement of her candid poems on black identity as a reaction against “what is real and what people do not want to hear.” Beginning with Emily Dickinson, spanning ...

By Ava Kofman • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Insel

You could probably count on one hand the number of novels that have taken up great platonic male-female friendships as their theme. The republication of Mina Loy’s Insel, by Melville House Publishing’s Neversink Library this past May, is a refreshing, challenging, and brilliant addition to this intimate pantheon.

Loy’s only novel, Insel is the portrait of a starving German surrealist, as told by his patron and friend, Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones is the quasi-fictional avatar of Loy herself; Insel, a loose construction drawn from Loy’s strange and euphoric friendship with the German painter Richard Oelze.

A luminary of transatlantic modernisms, Mina Loy worked across as many media as she did cities. Her itinerant artistic career occupied the capitals of the turn ...