Lynne Murray says: Debbie pointed out this Washington Post blog by Delia Lloyd about “plus-sized” Swedish department store mannequins and the storm of interest in them: Let’s face it. Part of the mannequins’ viral appeal was no doubt the illusion that they came from Sweden, that Nordic bastion of pushing-the-envelope cultural fare that brought us [...]

Debbie says: I doubt there is a better analysis anywhere of the lack of female road narratives than this amazing piece by Vanessa Veselka. It is not a pretty story: By 2004, so many women had been found dead along the interstates that the FBI started the Highway Serial Killers Initiative to keep track of [...]

Lesley A Hall is an archivist at the Wellcome Library, London and a historian who has published extensively on issues on gender, sexuality and bodies in the nineteenth and twentieth century UK. Her most recent publication is Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, 2nd edition (Palgrave, 2012). Check out her website and [...]

cross-posted on Feministe Laurie says: RISE (Racism Still Exists) is an anonymous artist group putting up powerful posters in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It’s a very long time black neighborhood and is now rapidly gentrifying. I used to visit a good friend of my grandmother’s there years ago. It sounds like I wouldn’t recognize much of [...]

Debbie says: Tomorrow, December 1, 2012, is the 24th Day without Art, in commemoration of World AIDS Day. For the first eight years of the Day without Art, many museums and galleries would shut their doors to honor and remember the artists who have died of AIDS. In 1997, however, the initiative shifted to a [...]

Laurie says: Riese from Autostraddle curated this remarkable and thoughtful collection of lesbian portraits for June’s Herstory month. As an artist who does portraits, I am very impressed with the sense of personality that imbues many of these photographs. They run from Victorian times til the present and also give a vivid sense of the [...]

Debbie says: I’ve been back a little more than a week from a ten-day trip to Paris, much of which was spent in art museums. Of course, artistic representations of bodies are everywhere: bodies in painting, bodies in statuary, bodies in sketches. I can’t find any photographs on the web of a piece that particularly [...]

Debbie says: Post-traumatic stress disorder as a publicly recognizable syndrome was first formally named when I was almost 30. I can remember the first time a friend told me she had it, and how it sounded kind of clunky and unreliable in my ears; I can trace the progression from there to now, when I [...]

Debbie says: I’ve had this bookmarked to write about for over a month, and I’m still thinking about it. Larkin Callaghan at Sociological Images says: The gendered notions of this ad are clear, as it makes sure to emphasize that these issues of emotional eating are befalling women. ‘Him,’ we are supposed to assume, is [...]

Laurie says: Many of the feminists I’ve worked with in Japan have been doing activist work for years with Korean feminists on the issue of the World War II Korean sex slaves. (The Japanese called them comfort women.)) So I learned from them a lot more about the horrors that were perpetuated on these women. [...]