Zadie Smith’s latest offering is a bit of a departure for a woman best known as a novelist. The Wife of Willesden is a dramatic adaptation/translation (from Chaucerian to North Weezian) of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Unlike Chaucer’s version, Smith’s includes an introduction where she provides an…
Tag: Feminism
Exercise in the Age of Self-Isolation
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
The Photographer as Remembrancer
I take my grandmother’s story as a parable of photographic practice. It prompts me to ask of the photographer: does memory really ever fade? Or is that just the excuse we give as we engage in erasure by selection?
TPL, TERFs and Pen Canada
So what is all this kerfuffle around the Toronto Public Library (TPL) renting space to Meghan Murphy? And why should it matter to someone like me, a cisgendered, middle-aged white male i.e. the ideal symbolic stand-in for privilege in all its manifestations?
Church and the Second Sex
My ongoing novel research—trying to get inside the head of a Catholic feminist liberationist grad student—has taken me to Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex, first published in 1968, then reissued in 1975 “with a new feminist postchristian introduction by the author.”
The Nipple Revisited
More than a year ago, in a post titled “The Nipple Exposed,” I wondered why our public morality has grown increasingly prurient in its fascination with open displays of nipples.
Righteous White Anger and FGM
Nothing stirs up controversy like debates about female anatomy, especially the bits to do with reproduction and sexuality. We saw this in Canada with last year’s induction of Dr. Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada.
The Nipple Exposed
In our household, the division of labour is allocated so that, among other things, I do the laundry. This has given me considerable exposure to fashion trends in women’s undergarments — moreso in the last three or four years as my daughter has become conscious of such things and has demanded that our fashion shopping habits keep her in pace with her friends.
Whatever Happened To Feminism
My daughter has always enjoyed sports. Growing up, she’s gone through phases. There was a gymnastics phase which lasted for three or four years. When that phase ended, I breathed a sigh of relief (gymnastics parents are some of the most tightly wound creatures on the planet). Then there was the trampoline phase which lasted for another three or four years. That sport had its ups and downs too.
The Magdalene Moment, by Joanna Manning
In 1975, feminist theologian Sheila Collins noted that it was only five years earlier that women “began to take their own experience seriously as the basis for doing theology.” By her reckoning, half the human species has had roughly thirty–six years to play catch–up with the other half in this business of theological reflection – or at least the sort of reflection that emerges without compunction to adhere to male forms.
Obscenity
Just as I was ruing the plight of the human mind at the hands of publicly instituted censors, I received this delightful piece of unsolicited advertising in my mailbox. “You’ll do anything to protect your kids from inappropriate content.”