Feminist

It’s a shame about the weather but, in the eyes of many, the summer of 2023 is at least furnishing a triumph of feminism, and it’s been cinema’s privilege to host it. Supposedly, Greta Gerwig’s fantasy comedy Barbie is ushering womankind on to the true path to sisterly empowerment. Really?It sounds plausible, at least at first. “She’s everything. He’s just Ken,” reads the film’s tagline. Gerwig proclaims Barbie to be “most certainly a feminist film”, and it has frightened some male pundits out of their wits. Toby Young…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeHollywood can’t seem to stop pumping out origin stories for popular consumer products. We’ve already had Tetris and Air (as in Air Jordans). Blackberry is right around the corner. Miraculously, Barbie didn’t turn out to be two hours of inventor Ruth Handler yelling in boardrooms about smooth crotches. It all feels like capitalism in hyperdrive. And now we’ve got The Beanie Bubble.This…

Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s cinematic reinvention of Mattel’s most (in)famous toy comes on like a sugar-rush mashup of Pixar’s Toy Story 2, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the cult live-action feature Josie and the Pussycats and the Roger Ebert-scripted exploitation romp Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.After a heavily…

Almost 30 years ago, when I researched and wrote a history of the people and ideas that led to the creation of Barbie, I had no doubt she would be as talked about in 2023 as she was in 1959, when she first appeared. But what I never expected was the way that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, has come to be viewed as feminist, or, in any event, as an important cultural touchstone in understanding feminism. From the get-go, Barbie and her possessions reflected and shaped the marketplace, experiencing…

The reviews are rolling in for Barbie, and the overall sentiment so far is that the movie based on a toy has a whole lot more to say than you might expect, both in its visual dazzle and on an intellectual level. Though many more reviews are sure to flood the site soon, review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes has crowned Barbie with a 94 percent based on 63 reviews so far. On Metacritic, the 39 reviews counted so far have generated a score of 81 and labeled as a “Metacritic Must See.” The reviewer Mario Alegre with Próxima Tanda…

When Lauren Elkin began work on this book, she believed its subject was monstrosity and female creativity, her spur a now much-quoted line from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept of Speculation: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” Naturally, Elkin hardly needed to be told that such a monster is almost inevitably male: a beast who relies on women for all the mundane things in life (the cooking, the washing, the regular praise due to an undoubted genius). Female art monsters are thin on…

“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you,” the main trailer for Barbie tells us in glorious neon-pink font. “If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” it slyly adds. We are primed for Greta Gerwig’s surreal smash of the summer to give us a loving, but knowing look at all the iconic doll represents—but it seems like the execs behind her aren’t so keen.Spoilers of the Week | June 17thIn a truly fascinating cover story for Time magazine this week—which covers everything from just how star Margot Robbie pulled off that…

On the face of it, rage and joy are not an easy aesthetic fit. Rage is engaged, rope-veined; joy is free and light – frivolous, even. And yet the collected works of musical activist Kathleen Hanna – across three bands: 1990s punk outfit Bikini Kill, her electronic bedroom pop project the Julie Ruin, and Le Tigre, a multimedia collaboration alongside Johanna Fateman (mostly guitar) and JD Samson (mostly synths) – dance along the tightrope between fury and fun.Now on a reunion tour – they’re in the UK for the first time in…

Did Susan Sontag like women? I’m not so sure she did, which made the arrival of feminism in the early 1970s a complicated prospect. Should she get on board or scuttle the ship? I’m not talking about the private realm, of course. She liked, loved, lusted after and admired plenty of individual women. Although she declined to identify publicly as a lesbian, most of her sexual relationships were with women. But was membership of the second sex useful to the public project of Being Sontag? Judging from the evidence here, it…

Emma Watson Once Blasted Trolls Over Feminism & Her N*de Photoshoot (Picture Credit: Instagram) As the Harry Potter star posed in a see-through top for the magazine cover, some accused her of being anti-feminist due to her photos. The photo in the photoshoot showed Watson in an open, white, crocheted bolero jacket with no bra or shirt underneath. The Beauty and the Beast star addressed the controversy during a conversation with Reuters, stating that feminism was all about choice. The actress was also the UN Women…