Tag Archives: Gender Studies

Feminism Now and Then: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

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Charlotte Kessler | 26 June 2017.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the best known contemporary feminists; she is a Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and feminist theory. In 2014, she published her essay We Should All Be Feminists after giving a Tedx talk on her approach to feminism and followed it up with her feminist manifesto Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions in March 2017. Written as a letter to a friend, and recommending how to raise her newborn girl, Dear Ijeawele makes powerful statements about feminism today. Issues addressed in Dear Ijeawele resemble those raised in Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex, published in 1948. I will examine how Adichie has furthered de Beauvoir’s feminist thought and made it more inclusive and therefore better suited to contemporary feminism. Adichie echoes, whether consciously or unconsciously, arguments made by de Beauvoir in The Second Sex about childhood, the mother and marriage.

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Toilet Block

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Gina Maya | 3 April 2017.

Bears do it in the woods, they say, but Westerners do it as God ordained it, in a room labelled male or female. Never mind that gender-segregated toilets appeared not in Biblical times but the Victorian age; the issue of public toilets is becoming one of the touchstones of our post-Brexit, post-Trump age, regarding who goes where, and whether or not trans- or non-binary-identifying people count as legitimate.

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Trauma, Traditional Gender Roles and Radiation Fears: Shinya Tsukamoto’s Kotoko

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Chantal Bertalanffy | 21 March 2017.

[TW: discussions of domestic and physical violence]

Single-mom Kotoko (played by Japanese singer Cocco) is traumatized. She is the anti-heroine in Japanese cult director Shinya Tsukamoto’s psychological horror film of the same name, Kotoko (2011). The story revolves around her struggle to raise her baby while suffering from paranoia, reoccurring visions, self-harm, and other Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)-related symptoms of an unknown cause.

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Charles Bukowski: More than misogyny?

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February 15, 2016 | Matthew Tibble.

“The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation”

(Bukowski, “Letter to Steven Richmond”)

Bukowski’s academic respectability lies well below that of Frederick Exley, Hunter S. Thompson and John Fante. He was a self-proclaimed womaniser and an alcoholic whose writings ruptured the vanguard of American literature under his “Dirty Old Man” persona in the late sixties and he continued to garner attention with fictionalised memoirs right up until his death in 1994.

[tw discussions of abuse and violence]

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