Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged feminism

Women of Color and Feminism

If many postmodern feminists would have it, colour or “race” wouldn't be of primary concern in theorising oppression; a woman would be seen as much more than her race, class, and sexuality. In other words, every woman's experience of oppression is nuanced, different.

The Heretics

The Heretics: Stories from a Feminist Collective premiered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) during the first two weeks of October, 2009.

Side Dishes: Latina American Women, Sex, and Cultural Production

Side Dishes, at times more tasty, original, and irresistible than “the main dishes,” is a delightful, playful, and innovative work about Latina, Brazilian, and Spanish American women writers, filmmakers, cartoonists, and science fiction producers.

Perfect Chemistry

I can pinpoint exactly where I fell for the charms of Simone Elkeles’ Perfect Chemistry due to the disappearance of my “reflective” notes in the margins: Chapter eleven. Page sixty-seven. The initial sixty-seven pages were rather laborious, as my first reaction was that it was going to be another predictable American teen novel and—to an extent—it was. Boy meets girl at school. They both proclaim their hatred for one another. Boy makes a bet to woo said girl.

Good Karma Pendant

The Good Karma Pendant from The Pretty Peacock is an interesting metaphor for my current relationship with feminism. At some point during my teenage years, I discovered the identifying term while reading Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, which I'd found in a secondhand bookstore that I frequented.

Football Under Cover

I encountered one major problem with Football Under Cover very early on: it wouldn’t play either on my U.S. regional DVD player or through a few of the many video players on my computer. Eventually, I managed to get it to run in Windows Media Center and sat down to watch. The earliest scenes were so well done, I started to doubt my own memory.

The Women's Room

Marilyn French’s The Women's Room, first published in 1977 and republished this year (a re-release ironically in the works before French’s death last May), has been touted as one of the most influential novels of the second wave of feminism. The book reads like a combination of a personal journal and a traditional novel.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown

I read Cosmopolitan. I have even been known to love it. I am the very working professional who Helen Gurley Brown addressed in her endless array of public statements about and to women. Now these ideas are wrapped in a new, critically written package. I am thankful, through Jennifer Scanlon’s recovery of Brown, that my infatuation of Cosmopolitan doesn’t make me unfeminist. Where Gloria Steinem and others once tried to take over Brown’s offices at _Cosmopolitan, _declaring her and the magazine anti-feminist, Scanlon is reclaiming Brown and her space in history as an ally of feminism.

Clit Fest (8/7/2009)

Clit Fest Los Angeles: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I didn’t know what to expect leading up to the event, which featured bands and documentaries on day one and workshops and more bands on days two and three. I obsessed about it for weeks: what if the ladies present thought I wore too much makeup and perfume; what if they were feminists that looked down upon that kind of thing? How would they treat the male friend accompanying me? Would he feel unwelcome?

The Mosque in Morgantown

Reading the official synopsis of The Mosque in Morgantown, I quickly got the impression that it was a documentary film that revolved around the battle between journalist-activist Asra Nomani and “the extremists” in her hometown Morgantown, West Virginia.

Old World Daughter, New World Mother

Taking us from her childhood to the present, Maria Laurino explores what it’s like to be an Italian American woman through the lens of identity, feminism, ethnicity, motherhood, pregnancy, and economics in Old World Daughter, New World Mother_. Laurino unveils the restrictions she faced as a feminist daughter, as well as all that a traditionally Italian upbringing entails.

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan by Doris Chang offers a compelling history of the recurrent feminist movement in Taiwan’s imperial and post-war eras.

Personal Politics

The Feminism 101 dictum “the personal is political” has been writ large across third wave feminist founder Rebecca Walker’s work since she published her first book, the 1995 anthology To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism—her generation’s response to second wave feminism. Since then, she has written memoirs and edited anthologies that explore her own biracial identity (_[Black, White, and Jewish: Au

On Joanna Russ

Last summer, in an effort to learn more about female writers of speculative fiction (SF), I read Charlotte Spivack’s Merlin’s Daughters. While the majority of the book was a rather boring summary of what the aforementioned "daughters" had written, the introduction posited that all speculative fiction has subversive possibilities. After all, the author is imagining a new world and probably one structured by a new social order, right?

My Electric Family

Bachelorette is the electronic dream pop project of New Zealander Annabel Alpers.

A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

Preeminent feminist Buddhism scholar Rita M. Gross’ A Garland of Feminist Reflections is an indispensable collection of her best collected writing from the past forty years. Drawing together theory, philosophy, and religious exploration, Gross’ self-selected anthology is deeply thought provoking and can serve as an introduction to her vital scholarship, or a necessary refresher on important concepts and ideas.

Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Issue 9

What a journal! Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Issue 9 is a beautiful and inspiring electronic resource. Thinking about Goddesses is this edition’s theme. Editors Lise Weil and Hye Sook Hwang present fourteen articles made up of personal essays and poetry complete with moving artwork and pictures. What is Goddess worship?

Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels

Romance is a huge market, the most popular kind of fiction—and one of the most maligned.

Subversive Art Star

Artist Jerilea Zempel turns brutal machines of war into “warm and fuzzy” sculptures through her subversive crochet projects. She achieved brief Internet stardom via The Colbert Report when Stephen Colbert called her “a dangerous returning American”—aka an artist who crochets covers for SUVs and tanks—after she was detained by U.S.

Men and Feminism

First off, when you see the cover of Men and Feminism you'll notice that this book is part of the Seal Press Studies series. But do not freak out! While this book can easily be in a Gender & Women's Studies course syllabus, I also believe this is an excellent book for anyone to pick up in order to know more about how men have fit into the feminist movement. What's that? You don't think that men have been a part of the feminist movement?

Eat First--You Don't Know What They'll Give You: The Adventures of an Immigrant Family & Their Feminist Daughter

Normally the books I get pitches for are new and about to come out. Today I present you with a book that is now ten years old, but is better than most memoirs at your local big box bookstore. Eat First--You Don't Know What They'll Give You is actually more of a family memoir than a personal memoir. Most notably, Sonia is one the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Doppelgänger Alert!

Coming onto the hipster scene in Germany just one year ago, Missy Magazine looks at pop culture, fashion, art, sex, and music through a feminist lens. Missy is being called the "little sister" of Emma, the country's leading feminist magazine known for its serious journalism (think Ms.), but Missy doesn't need anyone to watch over her; she's standing on her own two feet, out of the shadow of her so-called older sibling.

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

Let me begin this review by professing my support for Jessica Valenti's overarching purpose in The Purity Myth: to expose the trope of sexual purity as deeply entrenched in American culture and to demonstrate the harmfulness of this trope on young American women.

Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies

Feminist and Queer Performance is a collection of eleven previously published essays by Sue-Ellen Case, a Professor of Theatre and Critical Studies at UCLA. Exploring topics as diverse as butch-femme aesthetics, cyber-minstrelsy, W.O.W.

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming

As I opened this collection, I had just finished shaking my head at a picture a man I know well posted of himself grinning vividly, arms around a young woman clad in a chain mail bikini top at a gaming conference. This “booth babe” photo rests comfortably within the confines of his MySpace page. I cracked the spine of this volume considering how I felt about the girl, the picture, the medium, and my own experiences as feminist scholar who is also an avid gamer.

Bodies

In Bodies, Susie Orbach, best known for her continuous thread of psychoanalytic discussion of the body particularly as rooted in eating disorders and feminism, offers up a broader discussion of bodies in our time.

Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies: Activism in the GirlZone

Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies follows the short life GirlZone, a nonprofit in Central Illinois. Founded by two women living in Urbana-Champaign, GirlZone offered nontraditional workshops and other hands-on learning opportunities for girls in the area and its outskirts.

Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl

As a feminist who was raised within the Christian fundamentalist paradigm, I was immediately drawn to this memoir. Though Susan Campbell and I come from different flavors of fundamentalism, all of the experiences she writes about ring true.

Ani DiFranco (03/18/2009)

At the Ani DiFranco concert in Pompano Beach, FL, a woman next to me hadn’t heard Red Letter Year. But she wouldn’t have missed the show: “If it’s Ani, then I’m there.” I confess. I’m the same. I don’t have the new album. But it’s Ani. So I was there. Allie Evans, who works on Ani’s tours, talked about the audience response: “The economy may not be strong...

The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New & Selected Poems

The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems presents compositions drawn from Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's extensive oeuvre and includes five new pieces. A native of Greece, Anghelaki-Rooke was the winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize. Her poetry is lusty; corporeal; and rooted in flesh, color and tactile sensation. Verse and prose both vibrate with descriptions of a lush and living Greece.
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