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 […]
Essays
6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
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 […]
Sell Outs: 1970 – Love Story: The Year When a Screenplay-turned-novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
by Kirk Sever
Welcome to Sell Outs: 50 Years of Bestsellers, the feature where we pore over the best most popular fiction in America from the last half-century, one year at a time. * For our first installment, we visit an all too familiar setting: a United States fed-up-with and angry about government ineptitude and civil rights inequalities. […]
The Po’ele Box
by Kirby Wright
I SWEATED IT OUT on the floral-print couch between Troy and our mother. We were waiting for my old man to get home. My brother gnashed his gum. Jenny was visiting her friend Heidi Bathen and I was glad she was gone. I saw our reflection in the living room mirror—we had looks of impending […]
“The Sores of War” and the Surprising Legacy of Robert E. Lee
by Carla Bell
“…to separate and destroy families and friends… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world” – Confederate General Robert E. Lee, excerpt from a letter to his wife (1862) History remembers Confederate Army General Robert Edward Lee and his defeat […]
Margaret Sanger and Me: (F)actual History and Its Plan for the “Fit” and the “Feeble”
by Carla Bell
What was Important to Me Then What was important to me back then was happy hour and high heels, Dooney & Burke, free entry at the club before ten, office hook-ups and rumors of office hook-ups, my hair, my money, and my time. I was twenty-nine years old and a paralegal in the premiere intellectual […]
Race Against Time: How White Fear of Genetic Annihilation Fuels Abortion Bans
by Carla Bell
Editors’ note: The following article was reprinted with permission by the original publisher, YES! Media. In its original publication, the word “patriarchal” was added to the following statement: “White patriarchal control over the lives of people of color and their procreation isn’t new…” The author remains committed to the language of her original work: “White […]
Bike to the Future
by Krista Foss
Image courtesy Kelly Sikkema The scrap yard at the north end of my long city street hummed like a dystopic anthill, the day I drove up in my 15-year-old compact car, parked in front of a heap of flattened wrecks winking in an oily sun, got out, and made my way to a busy […]
Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda
by Gerry Canavan
Academics who study science fiction have typically been fixated on what they see as its privileged relationship with futurity. By imagining a possible shape for the future that will someday arise out of the present—however prescient, realistic, or patently ridiculous a particular author’s imagination of that future might be—science fiction narratives help restore to us […]
