Objectify This

I’m too busy reading and writing my thesis and listening to Radiohead’s In Rainbows to write a whole post today. But you should consider reading Gloria Steinem’s piece, Women Are Never Front-Runners, in today’s New York Times’ Op-Ed section, in which she discusses the gender power dynamics being enacted by Democratic presidential candidates Obama (do [...]

Today I went to the Mercado de Hecheria in La Paz and admired all of the components of local witchcraft – live lizards, jaguar skin, statues of the earth goddess Pachamama, llama fetuses, etc. This reminded me that playing at witchcraft is one of the ways that little girls gain certain kinds of agency that [...]

Spending all of that time (22 hours now) lying on floors and sitting in chairs and lying across chairs trying not to fall asleep because I needed to listen to the loudspeaker announcements in the Viru Viru airport would have been a lot less fun if I hadn´t had people to talk to. Nicole, a [...]

The distinction between the sexes is an important battleground these days. Not only do women demonstrate the capacity to work outside the home, but we have also co-opted behaviors that were previously considered masculine, such as smoking, drinking, and having  (gasp!) sexual relations without necessarily planning to marry our partner or be their baby mama.

So I spent this evening hanging out with my brother watching NBA final game three, and I wound up spending more time thinking about men and masculinity, and how their gender roles confine them as individuals as well. A commentator pointed out that Gibson’s choice to pass instead of shooting made this a game of [...]

So recently, my friend Rishi threw me some great articles about the Pill and the evolutionary context of menstruation (thanks, Rish!). The first is a long but intriguing article from the New Yorker detailing the history of the discovery that women, in general, did not have as many periods in pre-industrial society as they do [...]

There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational. -Albert Ellis (Ironic Curtsy: Irrational Woman) In her essay “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” Elizabeth Grosz writes of the problematic implication of “patriarchal frameworks, methods, and presumptions” in contemporary feminist theory and rhetoric.