Diane Dooley writes about Mars’ need for women and ways to subvert it.
“[T]he mainstreaming of Jane Eyre as a vanilla romance, or even as an exploration of a woman’s pure, uncompromising, and uncomplicated (and religious! and feminist!) integrity, says all kinds of things about our inability to speak honestly about violence and sex.” More on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, consent, sex and submission, here. (via K.A. Laity)
At Babbler Dabbler, Briana discusses female cyborgs in Ghost In The Shell and in Alien: Resurrection.
The Black Girl Nerds Podcast focuses on interracial relationships. “The highest rated BGN podcast yet is about guess what? Interracial Relationships. We actually received more calls from men on this topic then women which speaks volumes to men’s thoughts on the hot button issue.”
“What the breach of generations shows is that there’s more than one way to be feminist.” Lizzie Goodman interviews musician and artist, Kim Gordon.
David Haglund writes about how “Louis C.K. has been making feminism funny for years.” (The bit mentioned).
In honor of Lois Lane’s first appearance 75 years ago, Kurt Busiek talks about Lois with DC Women Kicking Ass. “If you’re a ne’er-do-well, the last person you want trying to get the goods on you in Lois, because she just doesn’t quit.”
The Gutter‘s own Carol Borden wrote a review of Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines for the 2012 ActionFest Blog: “I’ve seen reviews suggesting this movie is a great one to show your daughter or niece, and it is. But it’s not just about letting little girls know that they can be heroes, [...]
The Black Girl Nerds Podcast ponders nerdiness and whiteness: “Does Being Nerdy Mean You ‘Act White?’”
“There’s a reason J.K. Rowling’s publishers demanded that she use initials instead of “Joanne”: it’s the same reason Mary Anne Evans used the pen name George Eliot; the same reason Robert Southey, then England’s poet laureate, wrote to Charlotte Brontë: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.’” [...]
At The Village Voice, Simon Abrams writes about The Walking Dead and its female characters.
Kaitlin Tremblay examines why she prefers first person perspective to third person perspective when gaming: “If female characters have typically existed only to be looked at, then removing them visually and collapsing them in gamer/character removes this gendered aspect of the gaze. There is no gendered complication between playing as Salvador or as Maya, but [...]
Games Industry International is publishing transcripts of this year’s rants at the Game Developers Conference. The first rant is from Tiniest Shark founder, Mitu Khandaker. “I’m 100 per cent able and willing to identify with white male characters – I don’t need characters to look like me to identify with them. That would be really [...]

I’m going to talk a bit about Adventure Time, but I want to tell a story first. When my nephew was a toddler, he liked to play princesses with his mother and me. Usually, we were all beautiful princesses. Once, to show his displeasure, his mother was a “Bad Princess,” which actually was kind of [...]
The Flapper Girl has amazing resources on Twenties and Thirties art, design, illustration, millinery, and, especially, Flappers. Meanwhile, The Library of Congress has a sweet selection of articles on “The Rise of the Flapper!“
Sophia McDougall writes about “sexual assault and ‘Realism’ in popular culture.” (via @Pornokitsch)
The first episode of Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games is live. Watch “Damsels in Distress” here.
“With such a rich tapestry on and off the Oz page, it’s depressing that 2013 finds our return to Oz burdened with a reluctant hero (the dominant kind in the 21st century), and not one of Baum’s plucky young heroines. In a bitter reversal of Baum’s stories, ‘Great and Powerful’ casts the women as the [...]
NPR talks about romance written by and for people of color with authors Brenda Jackson, Michelle Monkou, Camy Tang and romance critic Sarah Wendell at the Romance Writers of American convention. (The radio piece is stronger than the written synopsis).
At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky writes about the new incarnation of Wonder Woman. “[M]aking Wonder Woman more violent doesn’t make her more mature or more real. It just makes her more conventional.” (via @BlackComix)
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