Femspec Journal: 62 books

A doctoral candidate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve covers the Third International Congress on sex and gender held at Oxford University. She discusses intersexual individuals reported on by Lee Anderson Brown of Sydney, and explores sources that might inspire artistic representations...

In the science building, Helgart’s twenty-sixth attempt to repair the auras of her expensive chinchillas had failed again. The bright life spikes of healthy aura were fading, and the healer is called upon to use her powers of mind streaming to diagnose and heal. The talented magician had worked...

It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized that as a woman my technical aptitude was an issue. I was the first woman in the environmental engineering doctoral program at Michigan Tech University. It was here that I first learned how differently I approached technical problem solving and how...

My worst fears seemed to be realized when, on my first day, my department chair, a Harvard man nearing retirement, greeted me by saying, “I really hate to see you here. Society wastes its investment when it educates women.” Now a dream more than twenty years after I actually loaded my books and...

New day, new start, new job. Lots of possibilities. Serena’s was a “New Blood” appointment advertised (in England) to fill posts hitherto occupied by much older people on the edge of retirement or those edged out into retirement by what is termed Voluntary Severance.

As I entered my thirties and soon realized, in spite of career uncertainty, that the time may have arrived for me to consider motherhood, which I had delayed until completion of the doctorate. One year later, in 1992, I had given birth to a son and had taken a one-year maternity leave, which thereby...

“In her otherwise largely realist fiction before Japan, Carter often used a male protagonist, her feminism consisted mainly of female characters’ exploitation and final destruction or violently taking the role of the male characters. This binary, as it happens, informs Carter’s analysis of Sade’s...

“Having a Good Cry is part of a series called ‘The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative’ from Ohio State University Press, and Warhol is correct to characterize her project as (in part) bringing a feminist narratology” to cultural studies (24). This is the source of both the project’s strengths and weaknesses.”

I take a deep breath and look inside myself. If neither “hetero” nor "homo” forms of love have created wisdom, then what is to be the new archetype of love within which true wisdom can be born? Should I become a separatist lesbian; is that the politically smart thing to do? From the Introduction...

Discussions of the politics of science fiction literature often consider gender, sexuality, race, class, and, more recently, disability; age, however, is far less present within science fiction and science fiction criticism. Few representations of old age spring to mind within the genre, particularly within written works of science fiction.

Using the concepts of Eutopia and Dystopia to describe the extremes of utopias, Brian Attebery's article "Women Alone, Men Alone: Single-Sex Utopias" examines the revivification of utopian fiction since the 1950s. By coining the term masculinist as a linguistic parallel to feminist, Attebery...

Writing from within the Jewish tradition, Marge Piercy’s novel, He, She and It, contributes to the on-going debate regarding gender equality and kyriarchal conceptions of older women through challenging the inclusion, or exclusion, of the Other including the elder in social institutions. 

Two short stories by Native American Stephanie Sellers. She tells the story of a mythic coyote who wants to give birth. When Nurse I'm-in-Charge rammed the wires to the heart monitor up Coyote's vagina, she ordered him to stop screaming. "Good girls deliver quietly," she told him.

This is a work of fiction that starts out by showing marriage (sex) as being the way to let out one's true passion and true self. The use of subtle magical realism helps the author to tell of the enjoyable and the frightening aspects that co-exist while experiencing sex within the marriage. Men are...