Category: Ms. Magazine

• April 16, 2014

  Top Girls is Top Notch Feminist Theater

  Few women playwrights have garnered as much praise and generated as much controversy as Caryl Churchill. Her work has been called feminist, post-modern, post-colonial, Marxist, experimental, irritating, innovative, ludicrous and brilliant. She has worked with feminist collectives such as Monstrous Regiment and at establishment institutions such as the Royal Court Theatre, where she was the…
• March 13, 2014

  “Love Alone” Takes on Malpractice, Grief and Gay Rights

  ‘Tis the season when theaters across the country announce their 2014-2015 seasons. Two plays continue to dominate the boards, just as they did last year: David Ives’ Venus in Fur and Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. These shows played off-Broadway in 2010 and 2012, respectively, both transferred to Broadway and both…
• March 10, 2014

  Binders Full of Women and People-of-Color Playwrights

  Originally posted at Ms. Magazine At a recent panel on diversity in Southern California theater, several of the artistic directors on the panel trotted out familiar platitudes about their commitment to diversity, their willingness to challenge their audiences with plays about people that don’t look like them and their desire to build a more diverse…
• March 7, 2014

  A Feminist Light in the Piazza

  Originally posted at Ms. Magazine The great Southern writer Elizabeth Spencer wrote her most famous story, “The Light in the Piazza, ” while living abroad. She had left the small town in which she grew up, Carollton, Miss., on a Guggenheim Fellowship for Italy. There she also wrote The Voice at the Back Door, about race…
• February 14, 2014

  Women’s Bodies in Oscar Nominated Films

  Originally posted at Ms. Magazine Jake Flanagin at Pacific Standard and Victoria Dawson Hoff at Elle recently floated an interesting idea: The Oscars should be entirely segregated by gender. Their proposal would create categories such as Best Female Director and Best Female Writer in addition to the already segregated acting awards. Though this would lead…
• December 16, 2013

  How Much Do You Know About “Women’s Lib”?

  Originally posted at Ms. Magazine During my years as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I took as many classes as I could in their well-reputed women’s studies department. When I was required to take a sociology class, I took “The Foundations of Feminism.” For my philosophy requirement, I chose…
• November 18, 2013

  A Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part Five: The Blood of Carrie

  Originally published by Ms., Sociological Images, and The Huffington Post Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality. Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women’s Liberation implied for me…
• October 21, 2013

  Attacking Rape Culture with Gallows Humor

  Originally published by Ms. TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of rape and rape culture … When Jessie Kahnweiler started talking about making a comedic short film called Meet My Rapist about her personal experience with rape, everyone from friends and family to Hollywood insiders to feminists wary of offending victims urged her to rethink the idea. A P.R.…
• October 17, 2013

  A Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part Four: New Beginnings

  Cross Posted at Ms. When the film industry finds an idea that works, they tend to use it again and again. And again. And again and again. In the realm of horror, once a franchise has spawned seven or so sequels, filmmakers continue to capitalize on name recognition by simply going back to the beginning…
• September 16, 2013

  All-Woman Shakespeare: A Dying Tradition?

  Originally posted at Ms. Sarah Siddons did it. Charlotte Cushman did it with pants on. Sarah Bernhardt did it in prose. Eva Le Gallienne did it with Uta Hagen. As long as it’s been legal for women to appear on stage, they’ve been playing Hamlet. Next week the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company will become…