Post-Backlash Feminism

As she addressed the Tea Party convention this week, it became apparent that Sarah Palin is the talkin'-est woman in politics. Not to mention confused, mean-spirited, and kinda dumb. From cribbed answers on her hand to mangled grammar to Miss America hair, the woman embodies a movement grounded in ignorance and backward thinking.

Palin endorses a movement proud to call for a return to Jim Crow laws, that places spunk above political experience, and sees truck ownership as a ...

It's the end of the semester, time to return to the writing I love. Thought I would share a bit of the novel I am working on, The Fanny Banks Mysteries.

River is confused as only anacademic can be. Torn between a worldly and dangerous graduate student, Jake, andher ground-breaking work: “The Woolen Bodice: A Study of Knitting, TruckFarming and the Victorian Wool Trade,” she faces an impossible choice: finishher manuscript in time for Promotion and Tenure r...

Last week I was honored to spend a wonderful day with Women's Studies-affiliated women and men at IPFW. My visit was intellectually stimulating, enlightening--and a whole lot of fun.

The chair of Women's studies and her staff arranged a luncheon book talk and an evening key note. At both events folks from the university and the Ft. Wayne community gathered to discuss not only my work, but also issues concerning us all, like breast cancer awareness, violence against women on...

"Rethinkbreastcancer.com" had a great idea: get men to care about breast cancer by filming bouncing breasts. I'm not kidding.

In a public-service-announcement style video published on the website, young (ostensibly cancer-less) breasts are fetishized and marketed as toys for men.

First breast cancer awareness gets pinkified, with cancer victims and survivors infantalized and obscured behind giant pink bows and teddy bears.  Now this.

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According to Jamie Oliver, Huntington, WV overflows with fat, unhealthy people who don't know enough to feed themselves properly. Oh, but don't worry, the snooty Brit doesn't think we're "ignorant" or "stupid." Imagine our relief.

Seriously? The reality TV star comes here to film a show that has made him rich and famous, he arrives fully cognizant of this town's status as most overweight in a country where we rank among the poorest states, and he feigns alarm on ...

The dynamic between men and women on American campuses tends to be, as a friend recently put it, "thoroughly ensconced in pre-feminist thinking." The American Academy is a sexist world and women must relentlessly lobby for themselves and their female students against the misogynist advances of academic policy in general, academic men in particular.

Trained in the wake of the Political Correctness movement, my academic career has occurred along side d...

Reading feministing.com today I came across a blog post and series of reader comments that offer more examples of post-Backlash style woman-on-woman aggression, where feminism is divided into narrower and narrower camps until the movement itself is all but lost.  This kind of rhetorical t...

Here we sit watching television in a house we may be booted out of very soon. The economic disaster has eviscerated my husband's small business, and we cannot keep the house on my salary alone. By "eviscerated" I mean ended. Can't make payroll, can't pay bills, gotta close up shop. 

 I now know someone who has lost his "life savings." My h...

This week I celebrate my 45th birthday, so I am thinking of middle things: mid-life, mid-ness, being mid-way. The  first time I encountered the notion of a mid-life crisis, I was 13 years old and my father, who was 41at the time and had recently grown a beard, came home one day with a perm. It was 1977 and we lived in a rainy mid-western city where Dad worked as an underwriter for a life insurance company. Somehow that perm had made perfect sense to him. My mother was encouraging, keepin...