There’s Blood on Your Binary

The social and corporeal costs of gender dualism

“We are only ever better when we are many and varied.” Anna Julia Cooper A Voice from the South, 1898. More than a hundred years after they were written, Anna Julia Cooper’s words are both timeless and timely -- and yet the message has still not been received. Our world is one where we ...
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There’s Blood on Your Binary

Social Construction Theory and the Transgender Turn

An Enlightened Conversation

In the introduction to her groundbreaking book Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective of Sexual Difference, Patricia Gherovici states: “Trans people’s experiences may force us not just to re-evaluate our notions of gender, but also to reconsider how we think about other forms of difference as it unravels identity as a construction.” ...
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Social Construction Theory and the Transgender Turn

Recognitions and Company

Reviewing Brittney Cooper’s ‘Eloquent Rage’

My feelings, for their part, go on strike against me all the time, showing up with picket signs that scream truths I’d rather not hear, all while demanding that I renegotiate terms. —Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage, 204) What might one want when reading a personal narrative, a memoir, a story with multiple ...
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Recognitions and Company

Why Can’t Women Bridge the Left-Right Divide?

Reflections on the 1984 Indianapolis Anti-Pornography Ordinance

When did coalitional organizing between feminists and conservative women become impossible? I’m not sure, but as a feminist there is one place and time that I remember vividly: Indianapolis in the spring of 1984. There, led by Mayor William Hudnut, III Republican politician Beulah Coughenour and local movement conservatives, that city ...
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Why Can’t Women Bridge the Left-Right Divide?

Elections Turn On Policy, Not Public Relations

To win back the House, Democrats need to show how they will make change

My liberal and left-wing friends continue to puzzle over a single, unanswerable question: why do white, working class people vote "against their interests"? Perhaps the reason that this is an unanswerable question is that it is the wrong question. I would like to suggest that they don't vote against their ...
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Elections Turn On Policy, Not Public Relations

Understanding Conservative Political Incorrectness

A brief, and incomplete, intellectual history of identity politics on the right

How do we understand the contemporary conservative pride in political incorrectness? One of the core principles of contemporary conservatism today is that identity -- race, gender, sexuality -- should neither entitle anyone to rights, nor imprison them in an ideology. Identity, conservatives argue, is something that liberals use to create constituencies ...
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Understanding Conservative Political Incorrectness

Gender and the Politics of Secularism

A conversation between Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler on Scott’s latest book Sex and Secularism

An excerpt from Joan Wallach Scott’s latest book Sex and Secularism can be found here. Judith Butler: Shall we start the interview? I am wondering whether you could describe the decision to work on a book on sex and secularism. What led up to that decision? How does this book follow from your The Politics ...
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Gender and the Politics of Secularism

Sex and Secularism

An excerpt from Joan Wallach Scott’s latest book

An interview between Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott can be found here. As I have studied it here, secularism is not an objective description of institutions and policies but rather a polemical term whose meanings change in the different contexts in which it is deployed. In this book I have ...
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Sex and Secularism

In Between Her Legs

Theorizing feminine space

“There is no getting round the fact that each man and woman came out of a woman.” -- D.W. Winnicott, 1964 In her recent book Feminine Law: Freud, Speech and the Voice of Desire, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Jill Gentile puts forth a call to name the vagina. Through rigorous analysis ...
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In Between Her Legs

Using Memes to Extinguish Sexism in Poland

A look at Marta Frej’s feminist artwork

The feminist memes by Polish artist, Marta Frej, feature women of all ages including school girls, grannies, athletes, and mothers engaging in ordinary tasks. But don’t be fooled, the messages included in the memes are powerful and revolutionary. Sleeping Beauty hangs a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, female firefighters ‘extinguish sexism for ...
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Using Memes to Extinguish Sexism in Poland