Get Me out of this Forest!: A Feminist Critique of Into the Woods
Guest Blogger Alex Ketchum is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at McGill University.
Audiences and critics alike appear enamored with director Rob Marshall’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical Into The Woods. However, no one seems to be talking about the misogyny within its plot.
...read moreVLOGGING – Can Virgins Have Oral Sex?
From outside, it probably seems we quit the Feministe vlog after just 4 months of vlogging. In actuality, despite scepticism from professors, we’ve been labouring for 4 months behind the scenes to reboot the vlog, brainstorming ways to deliver content with appeal beyond the feminist blogosphere. Frankly your mates and ours might need this more than you, if they never got sex education in school. So come, judge what we came up with. For one thing, it involves Call of Duty…
...read moreThe march backwards
Guest Blogger: Thilde Knudsen, Head of Marie Stopes International’s Europe Office
Women’s sexual and reproductive rights at risk: Spain is about to criminalise abortion; politicians in the UK repeatedly attempt to reduce the 24-week limit and today (Apr 10) in Brussels, a Parliamentary hearing is discussing a European Citizens’ initiative that if successful would block European Commission (EC) development funding for maternal health.
...read more“Mirror, Mirror”: Primetime Television, Pop Culture, and the Implications of the Anti-Hero
Guest Blogger: Rachel Glasser
Through their fictional narratives, each show points directly at a corrupted government system, a racist society, and a gender stratified world in a way that is impossible to ignore.
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“Strength” of Character: How the Silver Screen Perpetuates Gender Stereotypes
What do we mean when we define a female character as “strong”? When an actress is the protagonist, her conflict is decidedly different than the average male protagonist’s: In literary terms, we often see the female protagonist engaged in a “man vs. self” struggle, while male protagonists wrestle with outside forces. The point is not at all that any one iteration of female “strength” is more admirable – more worthy of depiction on-screen – than another, but rather than our female characters consistently demonstrate one kind of strength while our male characters demonstrate another. Furthermore, when our female characters demonstrate stereotypically “male” strength, they do not win the awards.
These complications of storytelling are all exacerbated by Hollywood demographics :
...read moreMore Emphatically Pro-Choice with Every Pregnancy
Guest Blogger: Molly Westerman
It’s interesting to me to hear how individuals’ gut feelings and beliefs about reproductive justice–and specifically about abortion and fetuses–are affected by personal experiences of pregnancy.
...read moreThe return of regular guest posts
You may have noticed we’ve fallen down on the job of publishing guest posts over the last few months. It seems each of the editors was hoping that the others would pick up the slack, and it just didn’t happen. Apologies to all who have sent a submission to us and not heard back.
...read moreSex + Cookies 2.0 | Episode #5: Tampons vs. Virgins
“How come I can stick a tampon in myself, and still be considered a virgin? I understand a non-virgin is someone who’s had a penis penetrating a vagina before. But if penetration is that important, how is being penetrated by a tampon any different? It’s like sexuality only counts when it’s involving penises or something.”
...read moreSex + Cookies 2.0 | Episode #6: Rape Myths vs. Guns
So begins a miniseries for the next couple months on rape culture and the finer points of victim-blaming illogic, as part of an effort to stray from tried-and-true topics and cover more divisive subjects that typically attract online harassment and rape threats. Afterward we’ll talk next semester’s plans and ask how you’d grade Feministe’s first attempt at vlogging this year. But first, here’s our last episode of 2013, as of this writing…
...read moreA Portrait of Jane Austen
I am a serious fan of Jane Austen’s books and of her ironic observers’ take on women and Regency society. She did not describe her characters very much, and was far more interested in their personalities and interactions than their looks.
...read moreBeyoncé’s Break from the Shell of Respectability
As one blogger asked, where were you when Beyoncé’s self-titled album was dropped on December 13, 2013? The world was shell-shocked when the Beytomic bomb exploded on the musical landscape. After this initial shock and awe, fans of her music have been able to digest her masterpiece in all its glory. We can surely talk for days about her more explicit sensuality. Or her refined ratchetness. Or how this coincides with her shift in musical expression. I’d like to explore the latter of these two. And what it means for her as black woman who grew up middle class in the south. They are these intersections of race and class—not to mention gender, which has already been talked about a good bit in feminist spaces—that make Beyoncé so fascinating and, as one of my homegirls and Melissa Harris Perry (my homegirl in my head) put it, will doubtless be the album that launches a thousand woman’s studies papers.
...read moreThe Hidden Truths of Major Weight Loss
Content Note: Some images in this post may be considered NSFW
Julia Kozerski lost 160 pounds, exactly the way that fat people are encouraged to. She changed her diet, she built in exercise, she stayed constant. Her goal was to change her body, and she succeeded. She went from weighing 338 (fat women can always tell you the exact number) to about 180. She’s also a photographer, and she has documented the experience extensively.
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