Archive - Topic - Gender and Identities

(part of a series in Issue 35: Masculinity and Labor Under Capitalism – Edited by DONALD MORTON) “[The] organization of power – that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic – haunts the exonomic and nourishes political forms of repression...

[1] Video games have emerged as a dominant form of cultural expression in the new millennium. As a cultural and economic force, they have surpassed the Hollywood film industry in terms of total revenues, and they are a major source of technological innovation and creative imagination. Because of their unparalleled...

[1] The objective of this study is to articulate a revisionary reading of Frida Kahlo's "What the Water Has Given Me" ["Lo que el agua me ha dado" 1 ] (1938, Fig. 1), a reading that will argue for the painting's central importance for an understanding of Kahlo's œuvre in...

[1] In 1979 Barnard College sponsored “The Scholar and the Feminist VI: The Future of Difference,” a conference whose proceedings were anthologized into a volume called simply The Future of Difference, which, its post-preface proclaims, “has become something of an underground classic” (Eisenstein and Jardine, xiii). What is striking to...

[1] The continual recurrence of liberal visual and textual representations of Afghan women sensationalize their plight and conflate third world women “over there” with third world women “over here.” Such presentations compel me to reiterate critiques put forward by Chandra Mohanty (1991), Gayatri Spivak (1999), Umma Narayan (1997), and Lata...

[1] Ever since the showing of The Dinner Party in the late 1970s, exhibits of Judy Chicago’s artwork have repeatedly elicited vehement public debate. Her defenders laud her as a groundbreaking feminist whose methods and works challenge the patriarchal structure of the art world. Her critics accuse her of producing...

[1] This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism–black and white–in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the...

[1] Most critical treatments of Jazz take some account of jazz's role in the novel, yet pay only marginal attention to its running commentary on the blues. But Morrison's approach to what the blues and jazz mean in the larger cultural context of early twentieth-century African American urban culture is...

"The physical body symbolically reproduces the anxieties of the social body." -Mary Douglas [1] The tattooed seaman. The image is so deeply embedded in the collective American psyche that the men can hardly be separated from the ink. The habitual naturalization of this connection intrigues me. Today the linkage is...

Editor's Note: This essay received the Florence Howe Prize, a national award given annually for the best essay in feminist theory and criticism. [1] In a famous passage in her unfinished autobiography "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf described her revulsion at seeing herself in a looking glass, and...