Category: Women’s History Month

August 10, 2021

Mongolia’s Women Writers

By Simon Wickhamsmith

Since the Soviet-backed 1921 revolution, Mongolia’s writers have worked to find responses both to traditional genres and themes and to the Russian and Euro-American styles, and the three women writers whose work is translated in Suncranes and Other Stories—S. Udval...

May 13, 2021

Q&A: Minae Mizumura on An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura is one of Japan’s most respected novelists. Published in 1995, her An I-Novel— a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s—radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. In this Q&A, Mizumura...

March 29, 2021

Q&A: Kathleen Cummins on Herstories on Screen

Kathleen Cummins is a film professor in the Faculty of Animation, Arts, and Design at Sheridan College. She is also a filmmaker whose work has been broadcast and screened internationally. In this Q&A she discusses her new book Herstories on...

March 17, 2021

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020): The Villain We Deserve and the Hero We Need?

By Terence McSweeney and Rebecca Cohen

Arriving at the end of a year in which cinemas around the globe had spent much of the time with their doors closed,  Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) was one of only a few American superhero films even released...

April 2, 2020

Comedies of Catastrophe, Contagion, and Self-Quarantine: A Spectral Playlist for the Impromptu Apocalypse

One of my favorite books to have worked on from the past few years is Maggie Hennefeld’s  Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes. In this post she offers a list of comedies featuring women who focus on societal catastrophe,...

March 31, 2020

Book Excerpts! Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?, By Lynne Huffer

As part of our celebration of Women’s History Month, we are featuring Foucault’s Strange Eros, a modern consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics. by Lynne Huffer. In this forthcoming book, Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet and shows how...

March 30, 2020

Sapphic Foucault

By Lynne Huffer

“Foucault’s Strange Eros challenges its readers to describe aptly, to touch delicately their seeking, mortal, embodied selves. The book elicits and sustains their interest. It rejoices on some pages to weep on others, but it is animated throughout by generous reading...

March 25, 2020

Book Excerpt! Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers, By N. Harry Rothschild

 “With painstaking research, unerring insights, rich prose, and a sense of humor, Rothschild lavishly illustrates the political genius of Wu Zhao, China’s only female emperor. Indicating her keen political instincts and expansive knowledge of China’s cultural traditions, Rothschild adeptly...

March 23, 2020

5 Ways That China’s First and Only Female Emperor Wu Zhao Reimagined Traditional Female Roles to Invent a Novel and Unique Vision of Emperorship!

Wu Zhao (624-705) was the first and only female emperor in Chinese history. Given the predominantly patriarchal and androcentric confines of medieval China, her singular ascendancy was wildly improbable. Even stranger, perhaps is one of the strategies she employed to...

March 17, 2020

Kawashima Yoshiko and Yukawa Haruna: The Connection Between a Manchu Princess and a Japanese Hostage

By Phyllis Birnbaum

In the time that has passed since I finished writing Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy, I’ve been surprised at how many times I’ve thought of Kawashima Yoshiko, the subject of this biography. She is with me on my return trips to...

March 16, 2020

It’s Not About the Beards

By Lexi Jamieson Marsh

“The Bearded Lady Project is a necessary novelty. It’s snarky, beautiful, and increasingly powerful in the evolution of its message: Don’t ever assume you know what a scientist looks like. These essays—critical, poignant examinations of societal and historical perceptions of genius—remind...

March 14, 2020

Book Excerpt! Sex and World Peace, By Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett (chapter 1)

“This is an important, well written, and informative book that will serve a wide audience of graduate and undergraduate students, academics, and policymakers, as well as the interested public.” ~Helen M. Kinsella, Ethics and International Affairs We are excited to...