Reconciling URL and IRL Feminism
I first became acquainted with Miranda July through her fiction. My friend, Scarlet, recommended her critically acclaimed novel, The First Bad Man, which I have since lent to my mother, boyfriend, and best friend. July’s novel is a story of humorous eroticism, habitual patterns, and the search for
The Woman of the Perfume Ad
The woman of the perfume ad is a complex construct. The advertisers who create her are geniuses of manufacturing desire, of finely chiselling models into shape with slogan and sign. Perfume ads come with tropes: her armpits are hairless; no blemish taints her skin; her hair is slicked back with seaw
Moda de las Cholitas
Recognisable by their long black braids, colourful skirts, and wide-brimmed hats, cholitas – as the indigenous women of Bolivia are called – seemed to be the wheels powering each rural village I visited in Cochabamba, one of the nine departments (states) of Bolivia. Whether teaching classes, sel
Ode to Joy
When I first began to touch myself it wasn’t “masturbation”—it was nothing but an expressive action. Its implications and attached politics were unknown to me. I was unencumbered by any words or conversations that may have inflected my private action with shame or disgust. I was, at least fo
India, unafraid.
tw: mentions of sexual assault, violence, rape 16th December 2012 – a day that started like any other, but which now marks a turning point in the struggle for women’s rights in India. In South Delhi, 23 year-old physiotherapy intern Jyoti Singh climbed aboard a bus with her male friend. They
Women of the Left Bank
Paris in the 1920s: bohemian, artistic and sexually liberated. This impression of the ‘les années folles’, as the French call it, is a well-established one and ingrained in our conception of Modernism. Even today, the idealised myth continues in popular culture. The success of Woody Allen’s f
What does the “yes” vote mean for women in Turkey?
As the last votes of the Turkish referendum were counted in April, and they watched President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan celebrate his victory, many Turkish women feared for their homeland. Turkey had become a twisted orchestra, as a chorus of “yes” campaigners roared for Erdoğan’s new-found execu
My Sister Says the Strangest Things
Press play to listen the accompanying music as you read… Where was I? On the top of the night bus, coming back home. Pretty empty, in fact basically empty, which usually makes me nervous – you know? – like remember that story that used to go round school about the kid who got ruffied by [&
Modern Femininity at Oriel
Georgia Robson explores what it’s like to be a women at—Oxford’s last college to accept female undergraduates .