TV
When Tyra Met Naomi: Race, Fashion, and Rivalry
One of the last places I expected to hear an engaging antiracist and feminist critique of the fashion industry was on The Tyra Banks Show. But on a January 2006 episode, there was Banks, sitting couch-to-couch with supposed archnemesis and fellow supermodel Naomi Campbell, discussing the forces... Read more »
Weighing Reality: Who's Really the Biggest Loser?
"Obesity," declares Charlotte Cooper, author of 1998's Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size, "is just a word used by people to medicalize fat." Extra weight, once considered a genetic short straw, is increasingly characterized as a crisis threatening the physical, political, and moral health of our... Read more »
Period Pieces: The Last Taboo of Reality TV
Detailed discussions of diarrhea (Survivor). On-camera vomiting (The Bachelor, The Biggest Loser). Extensive cosmetic surgery (The Swan). Endless hot-tub makeout sessions (take your pick). On reality tv, no subject is too personal to reveal, no biological function too intimate to discuss—... Read more »
Compromising Positions: Gender by design on <em>Merge</em> and <em>Mix It Up</em>
Mass media, particularly so-called family television, from Bewitched to Everybody Loves Raymond, has long portrayed the home as women's domain, an ultra-feminized realm in which housewives bustle and cluck while their hapless husbands do little more than hand out spending money and retreat to the... Read more »
Fan/tastic Voyage: A Journey Into the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fan Fiction
A journey into the origins of slash fanfiction.
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O is for the Other Things She Gave Me: Jonathan Franzen’s "The Corrections" and contemporary women’s fiction
As every tabloid reader knows, it’s a short step from a celebrity marriage to a publicity-filled divorce. When Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, The Corrections, was published this fall, critics waxed hyperbolic over its wedding of character-driven family drama and up-to-the-nanosecond cultural... Read more »
Bad(ass) Brains: An Interview with Filmmaker Marina Zurkow, Creator of the Web's Freaky, Fiesty Cerebelle du Jour, Braingirl
I met Marina Zurkow in 1986 on the set of a horror film called Matt Riker: Mutant Hunt. I was the art director. She was hired to be my assistant. It was an entirely inappropriate crewing decision, typical of the low-low budget B-movie genre. I’d never studied art, never been on a film set,... Read more »
The Buffy Effect: Or, a tale of cleavage and marketing
In the early 1990s, vampire mythology, horror revival, teen angst, and kick-ass grrlness congealed in a new figure in the pop culture pantheon of the paranormal: the vampire slayer. Not just any vampire hunter, mind you, but Buffy, the Valley-dwelling teenage slayer.
Before Buffy, vampire stories... Read more »
Editors' Letter: Issue 10: "How Do You Feel About Porn?"
When we put this question into our reader survey, we expected a wide variety of responses. And we got them.
"I write it/act in it": 6 percent
"I like to look at it": 36 percent
"It's ok for other people, but it's not my bag": 30 percent
"I don't like it, but what other people do is their... Read more »
Scrambled Signals: Rivka Ketzel Solomon reflects on a childhood defined by her parents’ activism, Ms. magazine, and TV
When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, it didn't matter that my parents were some of the earliest feminist leaders on the East Coast, that I grew up watching their activism from up close, or that I saw them live (not just profess) equality between the sexes. It didn't matter that I was a girl... Read more »
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