On 5 January this year I published here a post on a new Swedish system to rate films according to their feminist interest. In this post I mentioned in passing Frozen, noting that, although this Disney film exalts sisterly love, after seeing it my two Madrid nieces didn’t hug each other but remained “mesmerised,” poor […]
I spent a rich afternoon yesterday reviewing Xavier Aldana Reyes’s excellent volume Body Gothic: Corporal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014). As happens, despite the 2,000 words I wrote, I’m not done yet; there’s still a matter to address: the limits of my own tolerance to the shocking […]
This week I have watched the US series True Detective (9 episodes, 2014) and have read book 19 in Ian Rankin’s series about Edinburgh cop John Rebus, Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012). Blame a nasty cold for my sluggish mind but at points the missing girls in Nic Pizzolato’s screenplay would get mixed with […]
I was just considering whether to recycle a truncated debate in class last week for this post, when an email message brought me notice of a lecture by the illustrious Prof. Paul Collier, an economist from the Blavatnik School at Oxford University (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econpco/). His title: “Is the world approaching war again?” This chimes in with […]
Yesterday I had the unusual pleasure of basing my lecture on a collective volume just issued, in which I participate: Àngels Carabí & Josep Maria Armengol’s (eds.) Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Serendipity dictated the coincidence of publication and lecture, and I very much enjoyed this happy accident. The topic of […]
You may have heard that millions of I-Phone users were very much annoyed with Apple when they discovered that the new U2 album had been downloaded onto their smartphones without their permission. What you might not know is that the youngest I-Phone-addicts flooded Twitter with complaints beginning ‘who the f*** are U2?’ I wonder whether […]
This post summarises debates in two sessions with my students in which they offered presentations on: Session 1) Madonna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Adele, Lana del Rey; Session 2) Katie Perry, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, and Selena Gomez. During these sessions, we raised the following issues for debate: Pop seems to be currently […]
I am very fond of timelines. I find that one of the problems of the post-traditional model of education is that it has condemned memorizing as a useless nuisance. This leads to a great deal of imprecision regarding exact historical dates, which in its turn produces a hazy impression of historical periods. Without learning particular […]
Next semester I’ll be teaching for the first time a new BA elective, ‘Gender Studies (in English.’ This might be my only chance since, if Minister Wert’s reform of the BA degrees proceeds, we might lose altogether the fourth year and with it the electives. Anyway, I’m paying even more attention than usual to gender […]
Isaías Lafuente’s non-academic essay Agrupémonos todas: La lucha de las españolas por la igualdad (2004) has been, as I explained in my previous post, a book I have devoured with great pleasure. And shame… that I didn’t know many of the women and events he mentions. In the effort of trying to grasp the basics […]