I’ve read back to back Frederick Douglass’ autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892) and Emmeline Pankhurst’s memoirs My Own Story (1914), just by chance. The first page of her volume already shows how closely connected both books are, for Pankhurst (1858-1928) was the daughter of British activists and she writes that […]
Following the thread started by my reading Solomon Northup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave (1853), prompted by Steve McQueen’s film adaptation, I came across a list of films about slavery. This included Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble (2000), an apparently mediocre TV movie. I knew about Kemble as a famous Victorian English actress […]
Time does fly… I first read about the new Swedish film rating system against sexism back in November, made a note to discuss it here but then other topics caught my attention. I don’t understand Swedish and I’ll have to rely, therefore, on English-language media for an explanation of how the rating system works. Have […]
If you have already read my posts for the films Battle Los Angeles and Warrior you must already know that I find testosterone-driven Hollywood films very useful to grasp the real state of our current gender discourse, and, thus, correct the utopian drive of (pro-feminist) academic theory. As I have been preaching for the last […]
For the last five weeks I’ve been teaching an MA course with the title of ‘Postmodernity: New Sexualities/New Textualities.’ This was originally called ‘The Discourses of Desire,’ a title I much preferred but that was dropped out to include some reference to the confusing idea that we live in postmodern times (they seem to be […]
Trying to find an adequate novel for a student’s BA dissertation (or Treball de Fi de Grau), I finally read Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Sunset Song (1932). I say finally because I am indeed very much interested in Scottish fiction but have huge gaps in my reading list, like this one. Reviews and academic criticism […]
I’m writing this post in answer to Sophia McDougall’s juicy article for the New Statesman, “I hate Strong Female Characters” (15 August, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters). Basically she complains that while male characters get pinned on them a variety of adjectives (see her list for Sherlock Holmes), female characters in recent audiovisual fiction “get to be Strong.” McDougall […]
MASCULINITY EMBODIED (AND THOSE MANLY VOICES!) Today I need to say something about men’s voices. A few years ago I got contacted by an American man with a warm, husky voice, Dave Muldoon, who asked me to help him develop a PhD dissertation on men’s voices –he is himself the voice of Tom Waits in […]
This is a post I wish I didn’t have to write, as I wish that E L James’s Grey Trilogy did not exist. I’m even deeply concerned that by publishing this, I might be calling anyone’s attention to this disturbing, revolting piece of trash. After meeting Christian Grey I can only say that I am […]
Not even on the day of her flamboyant funeral have the Spanish media managed to pronounce Margaret Thatcher’s surname correctly: it’s ‘zatcha’ (more or less), not ‘tacher’. I suppose that the visual similarities with the word ‘teacher’ to our boorish, monolingual Spanish eyes are responsible for the habitual mispronunciation but this is nonetheless annoying. It’s […]