[1] Ever since the showing of The Dinner Party in the late 1970s, exhibits of Judy Chicago’s artwork have repeatedly elicited vehement public debate. Her defenders laud her as a groundbreaking feminist whose methods and works challenge the patriarchal structure of the art world. Her critics accuse her of producing...

[1] It is possible now to speak of a triumph for women in the register of philosophical aesthetics, especially since this word identifies precisely what aesthetic thought has always denied them. We are well aware that Western philosophy has been notoriously gender-biased, despite claims of universality in its premises and...

Could the commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we...

[1] This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism–black and white–in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the...

[1] JAGOSE: On the pink-jacketed cover of The Trouble with Normal are a rank of plastic male dolls, alternately dressed in a groom’s formal white dinner jacket and black bow tie or a leatherman’s motorcycle cap and bondage chest straps. No one could mistake them for a couple yet, as...

[1] Over the past two decades, British artists Gilbert and George have made enormous and colorful photographic art works depicting nude or semi-nude men alongside multiple self-portraits. Large pictographs from the 1980s show vivid cartoon-like penises; larger-than-life-sized images from the 1990s depict the artists themselves, stripped nude, mooning the audience...

[1] Most critical treatments of Jazz take some account of jazz's role in the novel, yet pay only marginal attention to its running commentary on the blues. But Morrison's approach to what the blues and jazz mean in the larger cultural context of early twentieth-century African American urban culture is...

"The physical body symbolically reproduces the anxieties of the social body." -Mary Douglas [1] The tattooed seaman. The image is so deeply embedded in the collective American psyche that the men can hardly be separated from the ink. The habitual naturalization of this connection intrigues me. Today the linkage is...

[1] When I graduated from college I was barely twenty and unused to living on my own in the world. A foundation was willing to pay me to continue reading books, always a great pleasure for me, so I set off for graduate school at the University of Chicago, entering...

Editor's Note: This essay received the Florence Howe Prize, a national award given annually for the best essay in feminist theory and criticism. [1] In a famous passage in her unfinished autobiography "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf described her revulsion at seeing herself in a looking glass, and...