“The Business of Birth Control,” a 2021 film directed by Abby Epstein and executive produced by Ricki Lake, tells a selective history of contraceptives in the United States and aims to “empower” women (and persons with uteri generally) to make knowledgeable choices about their choice of preventative methods.[1] However, as previous critics of the film… Read more →
Category: Reviews
Maintenance Phase: A Podcast that Wants You to Talk about Fatness
In an episode about Angela Lansbury’s fitness book-video-combo, Positive Moves, Maintenance Phase co-host Aubrey Gordon observed that “it is really difficult to disentangle our motives for weight loss from our attitudes towards fat people.” This small statement captures a central thesis of the incredibly popular podcast. That is, our cultural imagination of “fatness” – or… Read more →
The Women of The Gilded Age Are Here to Run the Show
This essay discusses the first two episodes of The Gilded Age. In what is by now a classic essay, historian Elisabeth Israels Perry argued that “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” lamenting the lack of attention historians gave to women beyond their role in reform movements.[1] Women were relegated… Read more →
CODA, Reviewed by a CODA
CODA, the 2021 film directed by Sian Heder, tells the story of Ruby Rossi, the only hearing person in her otherwise Deaf family. Ruby is a CODA, a child of a Deaf adult. CODAs grow up with Deaf culture, community, and using sign language as their primary method of communication. But because they’re hearing, they… Read more →
Run Away with Us to Virgin River. It’s Harmless Enough.
This essay contains spoilers for Virgin River. Have you ever wanted to run away from your life and go to a place where no one knows you? You could leave the big city for a small town. Change your fast-paced job for a simpler one. Find a nice, hot guy who wants to drive you… Read more →
Narrative Privilege and the Power of Pose
This post contains spoilers for the full series of Pose, including the series finale. Dorian Corey began her career as a dancer in the Pearl Box Revue sometime in the 1960s. By the late 1970s, she was the mother of the House of Corey, strutting the runway in underground drag balls and performing in shows… Read more →
Reproductive Designs and the Stories Behind Them: A Review of Designing Motherhood
Today almost all IUDs (intrauterine devices) look like the letter “T,” with arms that slightly droop and a string that dangles from its trunk. When inserted, the arms press against the walls of the uterus to help prevent pregnancy, and the string dangles down into a woman’s vagina as a way to check that the… Read more →
Mare of Easttown: Not Just Another Dead Girl Show
The HBO crime drama Mare of Easttown captivated viewers, who flocked to social media with theories about who killed Erin McMenamin. The show follows detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) as she investigates this and other cases in Easttown, a suburb of Philadelphia. Billed as “an authentic examination of how family and past tragedies can define… Read more →
Honor to Us All: What Trans Men Gained and Lost in Mulan (2020)
My parents took me to see Mulan for my ninth birthday. Appropriately for someone raised as a girl, they bought me a Mulan doll that featured prominently in my playtime (as I’ve written before, I could never honestly tell my gender therapist that I hated dolls). Later, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” became… Read more →
Portraying Abortion in Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Film and TV portrayals of abortion in the last decade have become both more prevalent and complex. Take the different abortion storylines over the course of HBO’s series Girls (love it or hate it). In Season 1’s “Vagina Panic,” Jessa is scheduled to have an abortion when she conveniently has her “period” in a bar’s… Read more →