Culture
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“Expat-ism, Culture and the Inevitable Tide of Consumerism.”
The vat of pasta water boils as wine is opened and passed between my aunts, Silvo’s daughters, and me. Huddled around the table I’m quickly enamored by the fact I’m eating lunch with someone within five years my age and speaking English in this tiny faraway place. As the conversations switch to Italian I tune…
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Finding the Female Gaze
Several pictures of a young woman dressed in trendy, bright, and patterned clothing flash across the screen. Above them is a caption: “me before I stopped dressing for the male gaze”. New pictures appear, this time the clothing is earth-toned, less fitted, and softer. A new caption: “me when I started dressing for the female…
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Don’t Worry Darling and The Sexual Politics of Sci-Fi
In Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives, and its many adaptations, Joanna Eberhart, a housewife living in Connecticut discovers a dark secret about the other wives in the neighborhood: the women are being replaced by robots built by their husbands. The novel has been described as a “feminist horror” exploring themes of submission and dominance,…
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Does this Op-Ed Pass the Bechdel Test?
Long before it became trendy to splice movie clips together on TikTok based on whether or not they “pass the Bechdel Test”, Virginia Woolf described the following on how women are portrayed in fiction: “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I…
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“Dogs Out” The PPE Extravaganza
At that moment I began to write. The weekend grew upon its moments like a tidal wave. I did quite understand it at its inception per se. Nor appreciate the beautiful manner in which it unfolded, until the moment. The moment the band started to play. For that was the unifying catalyst, a Saturday…