May 1, 2017
May Day!
Links and resources for May Day—and beyond.
In honor of May Day, a selection of n+1’s writing on work and labor
April 30, 2017
Documentary screening and conversation with Laura Kaplan
Jane: An Abortion Service
Monstrous, Duplicated, Potent
On Donna Haraway
By the end of the book, we’ve learned all manner of detail about the Acacia tree genus, made up of fifteen hundred species, living in climates ranging from desert to tropics and found in ice cream, beer, and postage stamps. We learn about the Pimoa chthulu spider, Haraway’s neighbor in the North Central California redwoods and another inspiration for the Chthulucene. We learn about the history of Premarin estrogen tablets, made out of horse urine, and their effects on both midcentury reproductive politics and Cayenne Pepper’s bladder.
In any case, she’s going about her life, and suddenly this seducer appears.
League of Men
April 1, 2017
A panel discussion in honor of Other Russias
Women-Artists-Activists
March 8, 2017
A Women’s Strike Reading List
What to read on International Women’s Day—and beyond.
Writing on the Women’s Strike, reproductive labor, feminist futures, and more.
March 3, 2017
While the Iron Is Hot
The case for the Women’s Strike.
This is what is meant by the phrase “the feminization of labor”: not simply that men are handed more jobs that seem effeminate in nature (menial, slogging work like data-entry or cleaning), but that men are treated poorly as workers—that is, like women. The more people find themselves indirectly employed, for instance by tech companies and temp agencies, the more they can learn from the women’s labor movements of the past, in sectors once believed to be “unorganizable” such as domestic work. In degrading women’s labor, we degrade all labor.
February 10, 2017
Woman Problems
One moment, walking. The next—am I real?
When my son was almost 4 months old, I was walking down the street with him strapped to my chest. He was big—nineteen pounds—and alert. I was walking slowly, in loping, elephantine strides, trying to take as long as possible, and to walk as securely as possible. It had taken me a long time to get this confident—if that’s what you could call it—walking with him, but the thread of fear still lived in me. I was still anxious. Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t tell if I was real or not. That was how rapidly it happened, and this is what it was like. One moment, walking. The next—am I real?
January 26, 2017
Enter the Pussyhat
On the Women’s March, Disrupt J20, and #IWillGoOut
How much did I have in common with my fellow marchers? Maybe not much. The demands I did see were good—No DAPL, a $15 minimum wage, clean water for Flint, an end to private prisons and mass incarceration, affordable health care, reproductive rights, and so on—but there were too few of them, lost in the sea of vulvas. Still, never in my life have I seen so many women gathered under any political pretext. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t move me.
November 17, 2016
What Women Used Before They Could Use the Law
Or, an incomplete inventory of methods and means to abortion—undertaken with varying levels of success and the ever-present possibility of death—in America before the passage of Roe v. Wade
Hands (made into fists, then used to strike the stomach repeatedly)
Heavy weights (lifted repeatedly or applied to the stomach)
Herbs (picked or purchased, then swallowed or forced through the cervix and into the uterus)
November 11, 2016
What Can Feminists Do?
Paradoxically, the front lines of feminism tend to look like its tail end.
Feminists can use the resources at our disposal to safeguard the institutions that protect the rights of women—cis, trans, everyone—and gender nonconformists.
November 11, 2016
I Voted for All of Them
I thought I would watch the results and drink champagne with women I love, and then we’d wake up the next day and begin our dutiful critique.
I watched my Facebook feed fill with friends dedicating their votes to their mothers and grandmothers and daughters. Despite my disillusionment, I began to feel sentimental.
August 5, 2016
Episode 26: Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener speaks with editor Dayna Tortorici about her essay “Uncanny Valley,” a fictionalized account of her time working in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Anna and Dayna discuss the background of the story and how this became one of the magazine’s most popular pieces.
Kiddie Porn
In the sexual counterrevolution, Ginsberg was the antiporn Gettysburg — the battle that turned the tide.
Once in a while, my parents allow some critically authorized highbrow “erotic” periodical like Eros or Evergreen to breach our doorway. But they draw the line at Playboy, in spite of its long, left-leaning pieces by and about important men like Vladimir Nabokov and James Baldwin. Mom and Dad aren’t prudes, they’re snobs. They consider comics, Mad magazine—even mysteries—degraded forms of literature. What would they think of Man to Man? I don’t have to ask.
Women’s economic empowerment was at the heart of Clinton’s politics in the ’90s, and it has been at the heart of her…
The Woman's Party
It is not his talent that made this sentencing a watershed. It is hers.
The Stanford Letters
May 4, 2016
Nowhere are the limits of the “women’s health” defense of abortion clearer than in the case of Zika.
On Zika and Abortion
April 19, 2016
Recommended reading for the New York primary.
Primary Sources
April 18, 2016
Where the Boys Are
When we look at Bernie Sanders, what do we see?
I Still Love Hillary Clinton. I Still Don’t Want to Vote for Her. My own profile in political emotion, all but impossible in the eyes of the Clinton campaign, is not a march toward reason but a deepening of continued convolution. It’s not just that, having enthusiastically cast my first ballot for Bill Clinton in my second-grade class mock election in 1992, I have a lifelong affinity bordering on Camelot-style adoration for both Clintons. It’s also that, having hit puberty at exactly the right time to learn everything I know about sex from news coverage of the Starr report, their collective role in my constitution as a sexual subject is second perhaps only to that other pair of baby boomers who gave birth to me. Hillary’s incredible pathos, her depths of ambition, the abuse she has borne, her inability to keep her feelings off her face—all the supposedly unlikeable personal qualities that Hillary-lovers love about Hillary, I love too. I challenge you to watch her Oscar lifetime achievement award-ish montage from the 2008 Democratic National Convention—the one where she talks about writing to NASA to find out how a girl can become a lady astronaut—and not cry. I could look at her all day, would love to crack open a campaign-trail Bud together (she is supposedly very funny in person), if I were in therapy right now I’m sure it would not take long to concur that I still want her to fuck me. Yet for all the reasons of policy and ideology that leftists who don’t want to vote for Hillary don’t want to vote for Hillary, I don’t want to vote for her either. I will grant that in its details, this profile may be idiosyncratic. But in its general contours, I don’t think what I am saying is unrepresentative so much as, within our current discourse, simply unrepresentable.
January 8, 2016
Year in Review: 2015
When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in December for the first time since the onset of the financial crisis, the feeling around the decision was one of somber, even funereal, inevitability. It was hard not to think of the mayor of Amity, assured of the water’s safety, reluctantly leading his citizens back down to the beach. Incidentally, Jaws was released in 1975, the last year that real wages rose. We all know the water isn’t safe, but an economy organized like Amity’s has no choice but to act like it is.
Gay as in Happy
On Maggie Nelson
To use Myles’s metaphor: Nelson is half a scholar with a downturned cup, attempting to trap something scuttling uncooperatively around, and half a writer-bug, trying to dodge the cup.
Aren’t we all somewhere on the sapphic continuum?
Letters
July 8, 2015
You Can Ask Me About My Hair
On Nakeya Brown’s In Private Moments
The photographs of Nakeya Brown spark a list of questions. What is a hot comb? What is a weave? Why do you burn or boil the edges of braid extensions? Each of these are little entry points into the unexplored and overlooked private lives and private decisions of black people, black women specifically.
April 28, 2015
In Praise of Vulgar Feminism
On Kim Gordon and Courtney Love
Faced with a choice between the bassist of Sonic Youth and the nihilist nymphet Lana Del Rey and her army of Twitter defenders, the highbrow music fan knows whose side she’s on. And it’s not as if Gordon is wrong about Del Rey, whose embrace of American rock and roll myths, shot through with a cartoonish sense of female desire, really is infantile. The appeal of Kim Gordon is completely different.
Those Like Us
On Elena Ferrante
I confess that this anecdote and its contents — the theory of the “symbolic mother,” the concept of a “female symbolic,” the school of difference feminism (unfashionable in egalitarian America), and écriture féminine in the French tradition — made no sense to me until I read Ferrante. Not that it’s so crystalline now: a convenient difficulty of difference feminism, for anyone asked to explain it, is its insistence on being inexplicable in legible (“male”) terms. But Ferrante’s novels animate these ideas with a generous clarity.
