Clik here to view.
Dorrie Glenn Woodson
Dorrie Glenn Woodson, 1956. Photograph by Harold Feinstein. I was encouraged to reach out to pianist Dorrie Glenn Woodson by her first husband, the photographer Harold Feinstein, and she and I met in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Road to Harburg
Mom Smoking, C- Print, 30’ x 40’, 1969. Courtesy of Marilyn Minter. The passenger looked down at the map in his hands, printed on the back of an exhibition invitation. “I haven’t seen her in more than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Filling the Silence: An Interview with Marie Chaix
To call Marie Chaix’s work autobiographical would be incomplete, though most of her books tell and retell the stories of her life. Her writing is porous and breathes memory, attesting to memory’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Grrrl, Collected
A few years ago, I started a collection at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections to document the feminist Riot Grrrl movement in its formative and most active years, from 1989 to 1997....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nothing Is Alien: An Interview with Leslie Jamison
When Leslie Jamison and I met outside the Glass Shop, an airy café in Crown Heights, I noticed her left arm was sporting a wide, wordy tattoo. It was in Latin, and she spared the embarrassment of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New Candor
Rebecca Mead, Jill Lepore, and a new direction for biography. A portrait of George Eliot by Frederick William Burton, 1864. Feminism, Paula Backscheider explains in Reflections on Biography,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beards
An early illustration of Saint Wilgefortis. If you had asked me two days ago if there existed any Catholic-themed YouTube video stranger than the one where G. K. Chesterton battles a cartoonishly evil...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More Than Mere Brotherly Love, and Other News
Nicolaus Knüpfer, Bordeelscène, ca. 1650. If you were a rake headed to Philly in the 1840s, you wanted to have this pocket guide with you—it lists all the brothels in town, with some helpful...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Freedom to Fuck Up: An Interview with Merritt Tierce
Photo: Michael Lionstar In Merritt Tierce’s debut novel, Love Me Back, life does not go as planned. A Texas high school student named Marie becomes pregnant on a missionary trip when she’s only...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New Lovers: An Interview with Paul Chan
Paul Chan is best known as a multimedia artist, writer, and activist, but in 2010 he added publisher to his long list of achievements when he founded Badlands Unlimited, an imprint with a mission that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
2: “I Had Been Working My Tits Down to Nubs”
From “Martin Wade Leaves a Party” through “Sekopololo,” pp. 29–55 This is the second entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along. “My God, that’s awful!” This was, by her own account, Elsa Rush’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
3: “Blasts and Lurches”
From “A Fête Worse than Death” through “A Great Reckoning in a Little Room,” pp. 59–71 This is the third entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along. In their opening salvos to this celebration...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Feminist Fumes
Anicka Yi’s miasmatic art. Anicka Yi, Grabbing at Newer Vegetables, 2015, plexiglas, agar, female bacteria, fungus, 84.5" x 24.5". Courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal. Photo: Jason Mandella In...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Teaching Twin Peaks at Sweet Briar
Remembering a momentous semester as Twin Peaks turns twenty-five and Sweet Briar closes its doors. The Sweet Briar House. In 2012, I taught a freshman comp class called Myths About Women. The primary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plus Ça Change
A portrait of Charlotte Brontë from The Brontë Sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë, ca. 1834. From Charlotte Brontë’s letter to her friend Ellen Nussey, April 2, 1845. Brontë and Nussey exchanged...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Death of The Dying Swan
Ballet at the movies. A still from The Dying Swan, 1917. In the 1980s, Hellman’s launched an extensive campaign to rebrand its mayonnaise products as health conscious. Between shots of garishly pink...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sing It, Walt! and Other News
Whitman at age twenty-eight, 1848. After seventeen years, Judy Blume is publishing a new novel—for adults. “In so many of Blume’s books, her main characters’ bodies insist on their inherent, primal...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It’s Not a Bean, It’s an Oil Bubble, and Other News
Karmay’s suspiciously Kapoor-ish new sculpture.Plenty of adjectives are fit for Norman Mailer—insecure, misogynistic, overrated—but the one people seem to settle on, as a kind of euphemism, is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Everyone Loves a Good Citation Scandal, and Other News
How an early twentieth-century French artist thought women firefighters would look.Today in the thrill-a-minute world of annotation: well before Genius began its quest to annotate the world (or at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nancy Drew in Starlight
Who is Nancy Drew, really? The instability of the girl detective.An illustration from The Mystery at Lilac Inn.The writer Bobbie Ann Mason once described the Nancy Drew novels as sonnets, or “endless...
View Article
