Section
Feminism
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China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities.
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The End of Feminism? Far From It
The first explicitly feminist campaign I worked on took place during my sophomore year in college. At Brown University, the 1984/85 academic year saw successful campaigns around nuclear war and racial justice, and somewhat less successful but still important ones around needs-blind admissions and sexual orientation. By Spring Weekend, the women who had led these…
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Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with the branded Dora the Explorer and Mermaid Ariel gear sported by fellow toddlers frolicking on the shoreline. Unlike her…
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Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. I lunched with the Vice President for Global Centers three days ago and told him, only half in…
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The New Self-Help
Now that self-help personalities Helen Gurley Brown and Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, are gone, who will the new generation of millennial readers look to for advice? Some surprising frontrunners are not therapists or professional writers, but television comediennes, such as Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and Amy Poehler, whose autobiographies offer counsel on subjects…
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A Riot Grrrl Zine in the Modern Age
A personal explanation: I grew up in a small town, and when I say that, I actually mean miniscule—exponentially smaller that most would assume when one describes the phenomenon of a small, rural town. 1200 people small, to be exact, and located smack dab in the heart of Texas. Land of exceedingly right-wing conservatives and…
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Transatlantic Feminism Post–DSK Affair
Autumn 2012 in Paris, la rentrée, and a host of new books dealing with the aftershocks of summer 2011’s biggest political scandal are piled up on bookstore tables. A novel by Stéphane Zagdanski, Chaos brûlant (Burning Chaos), is particularly sensational, featuring the spectacular demise of former International Monetary Fund (IMF) director Dominique Strauss-Kahn as seen…
