Articles
The gentrification of witchcraft: wellness culture and feminist spiritualityWitchcraft has long offered women and gender-marginalized people a language for agency, intuition, embodiment, and collective resistance. In feminist…
How YouTube Beauty Influencers Rework the Makeover MythThe makeover has long been one of popular culture’s most durable stories. A woman enters the frame unhappy, unfashionable, or socially invisible, then emerges…
What the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy Got Wrong About Female ResistanceThe Star Wars sequel trilogy promised a new political imagination. With Rey, Leia Organa, Rose Tico, Jannah, and a much larger ensemble of women than the…
Who Gets To Decide What Professional Hair Looks LikeFor Black women, hair at work is rarely treated as a private matter. A twist-out, locs, braids, an afro, or a protective style can become the subject of…
The Rowling backlash and the cost of misplaced outrageThe public argument around J.K. Rowling is often presented as a story about “cancel culture”: a successful author challenged by an intolerant mob, allegedly…
Why we need more fat female leads in romantic comediesRomantic comedies have long promised that love is available to ordinary people. Yet their heroines are usually ordinary in every way except their bodies. They…
What The Queen’s Gambit Reveals About Women’s Intellectual LabourWhen The Queen’s Gambit arrived on Netflix in 2020, a period drama about competitive chess became a global cultural event. Viewers bought chess sets, searched…
Where Prairie Lesbian Bars Made Their Own HistoryBefore queer nightlife became a searchable category, lesbian social life in the Canadian Prairies was built through memory, trust, and repeated acts of…
Euphoria, Trauma Porn, And The Performance Of Teenage SexualityEuphoria presents adolescence as a crisis of sensation. Its teenagers move through addiction, sexual violence, queer desire, bullying, family instability, and…
The myth of the woman who directs “like a man”When a woman filmmaker is praised for making a movie “like a man,” the compliment is presented as evidence of progress. It suggests that she has entered a…