“Your skills are not what we need at this time.” Five years ago, my boss, Laura, not her real name, terminated my employment with these words. Face-to-face in an office the size of a coat closet, sat this middle-aged white woman, Chief Development Officer at the foundation, and I, former Director of Cause Marketing and […]
Culture
Holding Myself Together
Gina Prince-Bythewood: Feminism Frame by Frame
by Jennifer Gauthier
Four minutes into The Old Guard, released this summer on Netflix, Charlize Theron’s character Andi savors a piece of baklava and pinpoints exactly where it came from: “Hazelnut, not walnut. The Black Sea. Rosewater. Pomegranate. Eastern Turkey?” She’s right, of course – anyone who has eaten baklava for 6,000 years has learned a thing or […]
6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
by Kara Donovan
Before going to Korea, I hated being Asian. Growing up in a very white community didn’t help either. I grew up where we rarely learned about other cultures, and when we did, I was beyond anxious. I thought of myself as being white, and when someone brought up my being Asian, I would be so […]
The Tender Satire of Gregory Barnes’ The Touch of the Master’s Hand
by Emily Brown
Gregory Barnes’ The Touch of the Master’s Hand is a Mormon movie, a twelve-minute short about a young missionary ashamed of his masturbation habit. It premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the Short Film Jury Award for U.S. Fiction. Despite its look into the cultural oddity of Mormonism, the film is relatable […]
Feminist Flashback: The Woman’s Film
by Jennifer Gauthier
I can’t remember precisely the first time I saw The Woman’s Film, a collaborative short documentary made by San Francisco Newsreel in 1971, but I do remember being struck by its boldly feminist mode of address and content. It has stuck with me for years and now I use it in class anytime I can. […]
Moxie’s Militant Millennial Feminism
by Jennifer L. Gauthier
In 1913, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst famously said, “You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs.” The protagonist of Moxie, Amy Poehler’s new film on Netflix, doesn’t break any eggs, but she does smash the principal’s “Best Principal” trophy, en route to “smashing the patriarchy.” Vivian (Hadley Robinson) learns this phrase – and goal – from her […]
Scarcity and Other White Lies
by Ilse Hogan Griffin
We—white folks with financial privilege—are bloated with excess and resistant to messages of our own abundance. Scarcity, the quality or state of being scarce, means, or should mean, a legitimately low supply, not enough of something. Scarcity, legitimate and illegitimate, drives and modifies behaviors. The scarcity myth, which often seems inherent in white people, especially those with considerable […]
The Killing Thing Between Your Teeth
by Sophia Kaufman
Weeks before the inauguration, I started a screenshot collection of viral tweets or other social media posts comparing the relationship of the U.S. with Trump, Mitch McConnell, and/or the GOP to an abusive relationship. I eventually gave up because there were too many and they were all so similar and it was depressing. Most of […]
Kiran Bhat in Conversation with Aruni Kashyap
Aruni Kashyap is a writer, editor, and translator. He has published two works of fiction in English (The House of a Thousand Stories, Viking/ Penguin Random House, 2013 and His Father’s Disease, Westland, 2019), one work of fiction in his mother tongue, Assamese, (Noikhon Etia Duroit, Panchajanya Books, 2019) and he has edited an anthology […]
The Lie You Buy: An Interview with Koa Beck, author of White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind
by Sophia Kaufman
Koa Beck is the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel and co-host of “The #MeToo Memos” on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Previously, she was the executive editor of Vogue.com and the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com. For her reporting on gender, LGBTQ rights, culture, and race, she has spoken at Harvard Law School, Columbia Journalism School, The New […]
