66 stories by "The Feminist Spectator"
I’m guest-blogging on the Symposium Magazine site this week, in relation to my essay there on feminist pleasure in pop culture. Â Today’s post addresses Kerry Washington…
I’ve been traveling throughout the month of July and will spend the next week or two catching up with “The Feminist Spectator.” Much to discuss, including: The Emmy Award n…
Moe Angelos and Marianne Weems of The Builders Association have created a mesmerizing new media performance from the recently published diaries of Susan Sontag. The spoken text is ada…
So here's the thing about Diane Paulus and how she directs musicals: She takes song-driven, narrative-lite titles like Hair and Pippin and makes them practically irresistible. She's …
I've been reading around in the blogosphere, catching up on current debates and controversies. I noted with interest Laura Linney's remarks, on the occasion of her Crystal Award for wome…
Can't Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) be hired to host all of the televised award shows? Good thing he's already lined up to do the 2013 Emmy Awards in June. If the producers of the Oscars…
Noah Baumbach's films are typically quirky and off-beat. Rather than detailing extensive narratives of modern life and relationships, he focuses on the smaller, episodic moments of inter…
Hello Friends, I’m finally returning to this blog, after too many months of other obligations that took me too far away. As I begin posting again, I also want to call your attention to…
Watching this William Inge play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, through the lens of 21st century America offers some interesting frisson between past and present. All the sexua…
Laura Marks' incisive new play, given a lovely, spare production by the Women's Project, in residence at City Center, considers the stakes in a faltering economy for those middle-class worke…
The status of women directors has received relatively less airtime and press space compared to the perennial woe expressed over the paucity of women playwrights represented on Broadway (or O…
Although I hadn't yet seen it when the Oscar nominations were recently announced, I was already miffed that Kathryn Bigelow wasn't among those listed as Best Director contenders for her movi…
In another excellent Playwrights Horizons production, director Carolyn Cantor and playwright Amy Herzog create a beautiful mood piece about memory from Herzog's latest play, The Great God Pa…
I'm not a Les Miz person. That is, I don't know all the words to the show; I can't keep the characters straight; and I didn't see the Broadway production until well into its run, when th…
There suddenly seem to be a number of recent films that boast a revised view of white male masculinity, from Your Sister's Sister to Jeff, Who Lives at Home, to Liberal Arts. I'm not ref…
I came out as a lesbian in Boston in 1977, into a subculture of women's bars, women's music, women's theatre, and feminist newspapers and political activism. To my relief, I became part …
In this sweet, small indie, Melanie Lynskey plays Amy, a heart-sick, recently divorced woman who moves from New York back into her parents' house in Westport, Connecticut, because she can't …
During a fall semester so busy that I haven't been able to blog for almost eight weeks, one of my guilty television pleasures has been watching Nashville (ABC), which is now on hiatus until …
Josh Radnor wrote, directed, and stars in Liberal Arts, a lovely film about an emotionally "stunted" 35-year-old man who visits his alma mater and realizes he's never really grown up. Bu…
Katori Hall's 2011 play takes on the difficult task of theatricalizing the haunting national trauma of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda by considering the children of Hutu militia born after thei…
Lisa D'Amour's Detroit was a finalist for last year's Pulitzer Prize, which ultimately went to Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes's more earnest Water by the Spoonful. Detroit is instead a rather v…
Written and directed by Leslye Headland, based on her play of the same name, Bachelorette is like a car wreck from which it's difficult to look away. That the movie is good is part of th…
This lovely film directed by Behn Zeitlin and co-written by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, based on her play, Juicy and Delicious, received superb reviews when it opened earlier this summer, a …
Chely Wright is a country music singer who debuted in 1994 and achieved her life's dream by becoming part of the Grand Ole Opry tradition, recording several Top 40 and number one song…
Just to apologize that The Feminist Spectator has been on hiatus this last month. Â Although I’ve not been posting, I’ve been writing. Â Palgrave Macmillan is publishing sele…
