Most of us read “serious books” about feminism in high school and college, but how many of us have gone back and read The Second Sex as adults? Stephanie Staal recently revisited the writers that made her start thinking differently about the world when she decided to take a college course on feminist theory at Barnard. She even includes the reading list in her book, Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life and will deliver excerpts from it tonight at Book Court in Brooklyn. The following are some of the books Staal explores in her studies, as well as a few others worth considering.
A sweeping survey of one of the most influential female artists of the past 50 years, Christopher Lyon’s Nancy Spero: The Work packs a powerful social and visual punch.
A feminist art movement pioneer, Spero promoted the notion of woman-as-protagonist, exposed the horrors of the Vietnam War, gave birth to expressive text-and-image art, and investigated issues of pain and torture in her innovative works on paper and daring installations. Mining the past while addressing her time, Spero put history into art and women into history.
A prolific sculptor and printmaker, New York-based artist Kiki Smith is renowned for her feminist works that present the female form in vital ways.
Mining myths, fairy tales, stories of saints, and concepts of self as subject matter, Smith creates visual narratives that express the poetic nature of life, death, and regeneration. A master at manipulating materials — particularly ink, paper, bronze, and glass — she is seemingly without artistic limits.
Two twenty-something, upper class, educated, Jewish girls traipse around the United States looking for the feminism of a new generation, and once they find it, one of them kills herself. That’s not exactly what the back cover of Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism reads, but that’s one version of what happened. Best friends since 1997, Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein decided to take a road trip and talk to a cross section of young women about the F-word. They met 127 women — including a sex shop clerk, a Bible college student, a witch, a future nun, a former Air Force worker, a 28-year-old mother of six, and an anarchist — to find out why some woman love feminism with a fierceness and why others don’t relate to it at all.
Erik Gandini‘s new film Videocracy depicts present day Italy as a country where there is little separation between media and government; Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the richest man in the country and owns over 90 percent of the broadcast media. This means that the television channels are state controlled in a country that purports to be a democracy, not a dictatorship.
I was about to write the editors of Jezebel to get them to rant about this new Ben Lee track I unfortunately just discovered… But then I wrote a post-length rant myself in the email, and figured I might as well share it with y’all. Here’s hoping the Jezzies do still weigh in. The offense: a song entitled “I’m a Woman Too,” which you can find on Lee’s MySpace player, the 11th track, last I checked. In it, he saccharinely professes his solidarity with women around the world by casting off the oppressive shackles of, well, gonads, and proclaiming (over, and over — there are precious few other words in the tune) that he’s a woman, too. Read More »
