Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a flight of gender fantasy written as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West who, along with her husband, Leonard Woolf, anchored Woolf’s emotional and amorous life.Orlando is something of a feminist classic, the story of a young nobleman who inexplicably becomes a woman half-way through a life that extends across hundreds [...]
I seem to be about 10 steps behind the zeitgeist, coming to the Larsson trilogy and now Suzanne Collins’ young adult dystopian novels later than most. I stumbled onto The Hunger Games, the first in the series, just as Mockingjay, the final installment, was making its debut, and I’m now almost through the second book, Catching Fire. [...]
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Holly Hughes has been plying her particular brand of solo performance for over 30 years now, experience that provides her authority and refreshing, admirable self-assurance in her latest, The Dog and Pony Show (Bring Your Own Pony), which ran for two, too short nights at Dixon Place during their recent “Hot” Festival. [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on AUGUST 5, 2010 · 5 COMMENTSAfter I posted my own blog on the film, I read several other responses from queer bloggers and LGBTQ folks in mainstream internet outlets —Jack Halberstam on Bully Bloggers, Kate Clinton at The Huffington Post, and Mark Harris at Entertainment Weekly, for only several example—and wanted to add an addendum to my [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 30, 2010 · 2 COMMENTSIn addition to being the best movie about lesbians I’ve seen in a long time, The Kids are All Right is a beautifully written and filmed, evocative, deeply funny, and deeply felt story about relationships in general. To say the film is about a couple who “happen to be lesbians” would completely miss the point, even though [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 14, 2010 · 3 COMMENTS[Spoiler alerts inevitable here . . . ] I just finished the third book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series and have to report that I’m already mourning the loss of what turned out to be a fascinating and compelling cast of characters. Motoring through The Girl Who Played with Fire and then the last book, I found [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JULY 8, 2010 · LEAVE A COMMENTWinnie Holzman, who wrote the libretto for the blockbuster Stephen Schwartz musical Wicked and the 1990s television show My So-Called Life is back on tv co-producing with her daughter, Savannah Dooley, ABC Family’s summer show, Huge. The story, based on Sasha Paley’s book of the same name, is set in a summer camp for overweight kids (what used to [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 30, 2010 · 2 COMMENTSThe second season of this Showtime series continued to showcase the remarkable talents of Edie Falco and a terrific supporting cast. Writer/producers Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius (who are themselves recovering addicts) risk putting together a story based on the trials and tribulations of a drug addict who also happens to be [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 22, 2010 · LEAVE A COMMENTWendy Wasserstein’s 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning play has become a history piece, representing her view of the progress of American feminism from its beginnings in the late 60s to its solidification and—by her lights—waning in the mid- to late-1980s. Seeing the play through a 2010 vantage point makes me feel more generous toward Wasserstein [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JUNE 14, 2010 · LEAVE A COMMENTI’m late to the bandwagon of Stieg Larrson, but I can see why so many people are reading this translated Swedish thriller trilogy. I just finished the first novel, I’m 50 pages into The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second, and I’ve been promised a lend on the third.
Part of the appeal is that [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 30, 2010 · LEAVE A COMMENTAs she says in the program notes, playwright Chloe Moss based This Wide Night on women she met during a volunteering stint at Her Majesty’s Prison in the UK. Performed stories by or about women in prison have become their own genre, popularized in the US by Rhodessa Jones’s The Medea Project, for only one example, [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MAY 19, 2010 · LEAVE A COMMENTThe Good Wife finishes out the season next week with a finale that promises to launch Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) back into the center of corrupt Chicago power, while Alicia (Julianna Margulies), his very good wife indeed, suffers her own moral turmoil over using her husband’s connections to bring clients to her money-hemorrhaging law [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on APRIL 22, 2010 · 3 COMMENTSThe latest season of Damages on FX ended with a 90-minute finale that somehow managed to wrap up all the season’s loose narrative threads and even some of last season’s, for good measure. With rumors that Damages has been losing viewership and might not be renewed, the finale might be the last time we’ll see Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 25, 2010 · 9 COMMENTSFirst to state the obvious: Gabourey Sidibe, the young actor from Precious: Based on the Novel Pushby Sapphire, would have been a better choice for Best Actress at the 2010 Academy Awards. Her transformative performance in a role that showed both toughness and tenderness, that took her character on a journey from abjection to determination, required the [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on MARCH 10, 2010 · 3 COMMENTSI didn’t see the Academy Awards extravaganza on tv on Sunday night which, I read in the Times, lasted for three-and-a-half hours. But reading the news the next day, I was delighted by several awards: first, that The Hurt Locker won for Best Picture over Avatar; second, that Kathryn Bigelow won as Best [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 22, 2010 · 6 COMMENTSI don’t usually write about speakers in The Feminist Spectator, but last week, listening to self-described gay conservative Catholic Andrew Sullivan deliver an important public lecture here at Princeton, my ire was raised (not to mention my gorge) enough that I feel compelled to share a few thoughts.I don’t read Sullivan regularly, either on his [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 13, 2010 · 2 COMMENTSIn writer-director Nancy Meyers’ latest ode to the empowered, later-middle-aged woman, Jane (Meryl Streep) is placed in the supposedly happy position of being a post-menopausal divorcée suddenly sought after by two men, one of whom happens to be Jake, the husband who left her 10 years earlier. Played by Alex Baldwin as a [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on FEBRUARY 1, 2010 · 9 COMMENTS[Spoiler alert! This post is written assuming that readers will have seen the film, or won’t mind learning key plot points. Enjoy—the FS]
Many of the December and January holiday season’s most popular films seemed strangely woman-centered, or perhaps just old stories suddenly told from what seems to be a woman’s perspective. InUp in the Air, for example, [...]
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by THE FEMINIST SPECTATOR on JANUARY 31, 2010 · 1 COMMENTSilver Stars is a community-based, devised theatre piece by an Irish theatre company called Broken Talkers, who create work by mining people’s stories about their lives and knitting it into coherent evenings of theatre. The play, which I saw performed at the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater on January 16, collects narratives from [...]
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