Archive - Topic - Gender and Identities

“Redneck Aliens Take Over Trailer Park.” —Weekly World News (2006) [1] The gothic, a pan-media mode that migrated from novels to drama and poetry and then to film and television, has a long history of engaging the binary construction of gender and race as well as class (see, for instance,...

“Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings.” –Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (24). “Neither Charlotte nor Emily Bronte was, at the time of writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, in a position to experience or even anticipate actual motherhood.” –Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in...

“I cannot continue to use my body to be walked over to make a connection.” –Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, xv There is “[n]o sense talking tough unless you do it.” –Estrella, Under the Feet of Jesus , 45 [1] In her 1980 preface to This Bridge Called...

[1] KLEIN: In your book WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota you chronicle the history of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a woman’s art collective and gallery based in Minneapolis. In the introduction, you write that “thirty years after the founding of the WARM collective no studies about...

Indeed if one is to be a man almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. -Norman Mailer, The White...

Figure 1 MOORTI: Private Lives, Proper Relations offers a new lens through which one can understand some key late twentieth century African American women’s fiction. Your book primarily argues that the hidden arena of intimacy is thoroughly politicized for African Americans, that the black domestic sphere is shaped by interlocking...

Work, play, art, science, literature, sex, education … digitization leaves nothing untouched. Social relations are being transformed by the development of telecommuting, hypermedia systems, and the new world of on-line information. In particular, everything in the vicinity of sex, gender, and sexuality is being dramatically rewired (Plant,Babes in the Net).I...

[1] The experience of fitness by women in our culture is ideologically inflected by assumptions about gender and biology, with the frequent result that many women are active primarily for extrinsic motives—to satisfy our own and others’ ideas about feminine attractiveness—rather than intrinsic ones such as a heightened sense of...

[1] Steven Soderbergh, director of both experimental films and big-budget genre films, has been unusually candid about racism in Hollywood. In a June 2003 New York Times profile of African American actor Don Cheadle, Soderbergh bluntly states that Cheadle would have advanced further at this point in his career if...

If the humanities have a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense...