BY JOANNA FRUEH Surrealism is an art and literary movement in the early twentieth century. Its best-known work is a painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, in which clocks look like they’re melting in a bleak and blank terrain. In Surrealist painting, distortions of everyday reality, in scale, shape, and space give surreal … More The Big Surreal
BY ELIZABETH LOSHWilliam & Mary What does a bulletproof dress prototype have to do with the digital humanities? A lot actually, according to artist micha cárdenas. Such a garment, which was crafted from Kevlar airbags scavenged from a junkyard, could be capable of stopping a 9mm bullet. It’s one of the objects featured in the … More Fashioning Feminism: On Bodies of Information.
BY NIMA NAGHIBIAssociate professor of English at Ryerson University, Toronto In this first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, diasporic Iranians, many of them women, are deploying the autobiographical form to narrate their personal experiences of life in post-revolutionary Iran and in the diaspora. The explosion of life writing in North America since … More Nostalgia for a lost nation in diasporic Iranian memoir.
Cliff’s writing serves as a model for how to confront the dualities of our complex world. The University of Minnesota Press is deeply saddened to hear of Michelle Cliff’s death. Cliff embraced her many identities as a light-skinned Creole, a lesbian, and an immigrant in both England and the United States to prove the intersections … More Author Michelle Cliff dies at 69
Barbara Brenner, a key figure in North American breast cancer history, wrote the following piece in 2005 as a Perspective for the San Francisco public radio station KQED. Brenner died in 2013. So Much to Be Done, an anthology of her political and personal writings, has been published by University of Minnesota Press. ——-Anyone who … More Looking back: Breast cancer activist Barbara Brenner on cancer wristbands
BY SARAH DEERProfessor of law at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, MN On July 29, 2010, Native people (myself included) filled the East Room of the White House to see President Obama sign legislation that has become a game-changer for tribal nations in the United States. This legislation, the Tribal Law and … More Shared humanity, shared responsibility: The Tribal Law and Order Act at 5
No Ceilings uses data sets to tell stories about gender inequality worldwide.What are the stories behind the data?Image: Screenshot, noceilings.org. BY ALICE KANGAssistant professor of political science and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln On March 9, 2015, one day after International Women’s Day, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Gates Foundation co-chair Melinda … More On ‘big data’ and the ways we evaluate women’s lives on a global scale
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Poverty Bill (also known as the Economic Opportunity Act) on Aug. 20, 1964, while press and supporters of the bill look on. LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton, available via Creative Commons. BY JENNA M. LOYDAssistant professor of public health policy and administration, Joseph J. Zilber School of Public … More War, poverty, and the War on Poverty: 50 years later
View of Gamboa de Baixo, a neighborhood in the Brazilian city of Salvador, Bahia, which is known for its Afro-Brazilian culture and street carnival. It is also known as Brazil’s “capital of happiness.” BY KEISHA-KHAN Y. PERRYAssistant professor of Africana studies at Brown University Gamboa de Baixo is a neighborhoodin the northeastern Brazilian cityof Salvador, … More “People are born here and only leave here when they die": On forced land eviction in Salvador, Brazil.
The Irish asylum process in the early years of the millennium. By Eithne LuibhéidAssociate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona At the turn of the millennium, how did the general public come to believe that pregnancy might provide a visible sign that a woman was an undocumented migrant? And how … More Nationalist Heterosexuality and Migrants’ (Il)Legal Status
