Sophie Lewis’s new book, Enemy Feminisms, is due in February.
In the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a dip. But John Paul...
For one day, 24 October 1975, nine-tenths of the adult female population of Iceland went on strike. They withdrew their paid labour and stopped their unpaid work, putting down their babies and abandoning the housework. Kvennafrídagurinn, or ‘Women’s Day Off’, reversed the usual scenario in which wives, girlfriends, mothers and daughters supported unionised...
If we are in an age of ‘heteropessimism’, it is fitting that nothing should fascinate us so much as the spectacle of extreme hetero-optimists searching for ‘the one’. The first episode of Love Island UK’s winter season this week pulled in ITV2’s biggest audience since the previous season’s winners, Ekin-Su and Davide, were brought back to talk about their plans to start a family.
My mother’s funeral took place on Zoom during lockdown, and attendees were encouraged to remember her by smoking indoors and drinking vodka. I think I was thirteen when a doctor first explained that maman would have to give up drink completely. It didn’t happen. Empty Smirnoff bottles used to clink around the bottom of her wardrobe when the cat crawled in there to hide from...
Who are these women who work as surrogates, where do they do it, and how and why? What does it mean for sex and gender, race and genetics, nations and borders, binary sexuation, the existence and structure...
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