Article Archive 

Prejudicial Distribution of the HPV Vaccine

July 2, 2011

[1] Release of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine on the market sparked controversy: Teen girls, sex, politics, religion, and cancer intersected in the push to inject the vaccine into arms. The focus of this paper is the mythology of the vaccine, and the means in which various standpoints have created a...

Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women: Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-Consumerist Critique

May 1, 2011

[1] From the moment of its release, David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club has provoked a great deal of theorizing about gender both inside and outside of academia. Such a cultural event, interesting wide swaths of the movie-going public, media pundits, and academics is rare enough, but when the topic...

Cross-cultural Identification, Neoliberal Feminism, and Afghan Women

April 1, 2011

[1] Soon after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, the abject figure of the burqa-clad woman awaiting freedom was publicized by the State Department as a major justification for the war. This recycling of a familiar nineteenth-century colonial narrative of saving brown women was accompanied by the renewed popularity...

(The) Bikini: EmBodying the Bomb

March 1, 2011

“As no doubt we all know, no single instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by that [atomic] speed race.” – Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics The history of (the) Bikini [1] An...

Situational Lesbians & the Daddy Tank: Women Prisoners Negotiating Queer Identity and Space, 1970-1980

Feb. 1, 2011

I think I hear at least every other day: “You’re not normal!” You only like women because you’re in prison!” –Karen Batton, personal correspondence [1] Prisons in the United States regulate the ways in which people in them can build a home and construct intimate, sexual, and family lives. These...

Letting Men Off the Hook? Domestic Violence and Postfeminist Celebrity Culture

Jan. 2, 2011

Introduction [1] Contemporary celebrity culture allows for the configuration of certain discourses about male violence against women. By paying attention to this form of culture, changes in the cultural landscape, particularly in relation to the emergence of new forms of social media (such as celebrity gossip blogs and websites), are...

Manufacturing Hysteria: The Import of U.S. Abortion Rhetorics to Poland

Dec. 1, 2010

[1] When I first heard about the Post Abortion Syndrome (also known as Post Abortion Stress Syndrome) as a strategy used by American anti-choicers, I did not give it much thought. There were by far greater issues to worry about in my own backyard. Poland, the Central European state where...

Getting The Girl: Wittig and Zeig’s Trojan Horse

Nov. 1, 2010

Introduction: Situating Monique Wittig [1] Following Monique Wittig’s sudden death in 2003 there has been a flurry of criticism paying homage to the importance of her work, rightly situating it as a crucial contribution to gender and sexuality studies. In 2007 GLQ produced a special issue entitled “Monique Wittig: At...

You Have Not What You Ought: Gender and Corporeal Intelligibility in Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband

Oct. 1, 2010

[1] Eighteenth-century court records and periodicals provide glimpses of the bodies of women who cross-dressed and married other women, the so-called female husbands whose bodies challenged emergent categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. Mary East, a woman who identified herself as James How for most of her adult life, lived...

Boys and Girls Come Out to Play: Gender and Music-Making in Hamilton, New Zealand/Aotearoa

Sept. 1, 2010

[1] This article addresses gender and popular music-making in the city of Hamilton, New Zealand, a moderately prosperous provincial city (population 130,000) which services a large rural sector (the Waikato). Starting from the observation that few women enroll in tertiary commercial music courses in Hamilton, I aim to examine both...

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