I was approached a while ago by a Danish colleague who explained to me that she would bring to Barcelona a group of undergrad American students, as part of their Study Abroad programme. She asked me for help regarding gender issues in Spain, as her students will be dealing with these during their stay in […]
British cinemas are warning sensitive spectators about the first ‘conte cruel’ in Damián Szifrón’s highly acclaimed film Relatos Salvajes (2014). The story certainly has eerie coincidences with Andreas Lubitz’s tragic murder-suicide of last week. Yet, Szifrón’s very Argentinean take on the matter of a pilot’s terminal depression is humorous rather than tragic. The tale is […]
Today, 8 of March, International Woman’s Day, I only feel irritation. I’m irritated because we still need a special day to complain that more than half of humankind is subordinated to men, who are actually the minority. I’m irritated because I wish we did not need days like today in 2015 and because even if […]
In the process of reviewing an ongoing PhD dissertation, I learn about the recent scholarly interest on asexuality. Apparently, some of the key volumes are Anthony Bogaert’s Understanding Asexuality (2012), Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks’ edited collection Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (2014) and The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality (2014) by Julie […]
[I’m recycling here the Preface to the volume I have just edited, Gender and Feminism: The Students’ View, available from https://ddd.uab.cat/record/129180. Please, publicise it in your Twitter and Facebook, thanks] An awareness of gender differences begins very early in life as does little girls’ demand for equal treatment, even when the concept of ‘equal rights’ […]
Today I’m going simultaneously in two directions: I am demanding that Open Access policies be extended to the literary works of deceased authors, and I am praising a rare book (which has caused me to consider the matter of literary legacy). Let’s see if I can be minimally coherent. Books have this way of deciding […]
I have spent an intense week marking the 33 essays produced by the students enrolled in my BA elective on Gender Studies. Together they amount to a complete volume of about 80000 words, perhaps worth publishing online (though I hesitate to embark again on the arduous task of editing undergrad work). The list of paper […]
It is not my intention to write today exclusively about the Hugo Boss ‘Man of Today’ campaign with Gerard Butler, aimed at boosting sales of its star perfume Boss Bottled. However, it is a useful starting point. You may have seen the TV add, first aired in November 2014. Butler looks his habitual handsome self […]
One of my undergrad students is writing a paper for my Gender Studies course on Peeta Mellark’s alternative masculinity and this led me to reading recently the complete Hunger Games trilogy. As I wrote two posts ago, the final volume even gave me nightmares as I found the whole concept of having children kill other […]
I have lost count of how often I have taught R.L. Stevenson’s masterpiece The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, on which I have published here several posts, as this seems to be an inexhaustible text. I return once more to it after having marked the most recent batch of students’ exams to […]