[1] Although a prolific professional writer and perennial breadwinner for a large household, Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) has not been easily claimed as a proto-feminist. Her tremendous industry and independence stand in contrast to the conservative critiques she sometimes published in her frequent contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine, such as “The Anti-Marriage...

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’m sorry. This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that...

[1] At first she looks like a transient, slouching in an alley. Her hair is disheveled, her face dirty, and her clothing in disarray. But the sudden flashing of a photographer’s bulb suggests otherwise. The Manhattan alley in which she poses looks too clean and the people ambling by her...

[1] Feminist fiction emerged in both the United States and Great Britain during the height of the second wave feminist movement, marking its entrance with demands for female autonomy, sexual and reproductive freedom, and a cautionary perspective on institutionalized heterosexuality. While feminist activists were at the same time encouraging a...

[1] On 27 March 1995 Nigel Hawthorne did not win a Best Actor Oscar for his role as George III in Nicolas Hynter’s The Madness of King George (1994). In an interview with the American magazine The Advocate a week earlier, he had discussed his openness about his homosexuality and...

[1] The author of five novels (the first of which was published in 1978) and numerous stories, essays, and articles, Jane DeLynn has had a respectable, if not prolific, literary career. She has attracted little critical attention, however, even in the specialized field of queer literary scholarship—three of her novels,...

[1] Scholars have recently begun to create theoretical models that help us to register important differences within contemporary transgendered identifications. In 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble denaturalized norms of gender and sexuality, performing a critique of prior feminist work on gender that not only influenced subsequent directions in feminist studies...

[1] In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was quick to assimilate the terror attacks into a simplistic binary opposition of good and evil, absolving the U.S. of any foreign policy role in triggering the anger which prompted the attacks. As in the buildup to the first...

Recent gender studies about criminality have tended to focus on the decriminalization of same sex relationships or on controversies about a woman's right to choose an abortion. While these issues are important, their implicit legal and political contexts have been considered narrowly. How are these issues reframed when we include...

“Stop aw this homophobic shite: it’s a total drag” –Welsh, ‘A Smart Cunt’ (245) [1] ‘Drag’, the practice of cross-dressing and performing as the opposite gender, can be homophobic, suggests an against-the-grain reading of this quote from Irvine Welsh. Such a notion disturbs and complicates the stereotypical association of drag...