gender | The Smart Set

Elena Ferrante and Feminine Creativity

Brianna Di Monda and Stiliana Milkova — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 21:03:02 +0000

While there have been numerous essays, interviews, and op-eds published about Elena Ferrante, Stiliana Milkova’s Elena Ferrante as World Literature is the first English-language monograph on the author. With her new book, Milkova situates the pseudonymous Italian writer at the intersection of Greek mythology; Freudian psychoanalysis; and French, Italian, and Anglophone feminist thought, showing how […]

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The Neck and the Butterfly

Evelyn Joseph — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 12:30:00 +0000

I open the fridge. I spend the morning in my underwear, scrubbing each item and shelf down and turning into a popsicle in the process. I try not to grit my teeth over my girlfriend’s occasional habit of leaving her used cup on the counter. Noikokyroúla, my maternal grandmother calls child me. My little housekeeper. Literally, housewife. Cinderella, […]

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Strange Islands

Benjamin Welton — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:46:34 +0000

According to author W. Scott Poole in his book, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, cinematic horror began with the Great War,” and because of the war’s devastation — millions of dead, entire countries created from the carcasses of old ones, an upending of the Victorian order — a slew of filmmakers in […]

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All the Faithful Ladies

Kelsey Osgood — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 11:30:21 +0000

One of the earliest known examples of a women-only society comes from the Greek myth of the Amazons, the group of fierce female warriors described by various Greek and Latin historians as “killers of men,” “those who fight like men,” or “those who loathe all men.” In one telling, Amazons only left their home region of Themiscyra to have sex with a nearby all-male tribe called the Gargareans; they copulated to […]

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Handling the Truth

Matt Hanson — Thu, 16 May 2019 11:30:59 +0000

Given how contentious (and often male-dominated) the debate about how society treats female agency has often become, it’s a very good thing that the Criterion Collection has just rereleased a scintillating French courtroom drama that lets the woman have the final word. The film is called La Vérité (“The Truth”), directed by the great Henri-George Clouzot […]

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My Trouble With Men

Mike Ingram — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:30:55 +0000

In graduate school, a female classmate told me I read like a girl. We were at a house party. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep had recently been released in paperback, and I mentioned that I’d read it over the summer and enjoyed it. “Really?” my classmate said. Her face began at surprise and then traveled toward […]

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The Paradox of Pointe

Paula Marantz Cohen — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 11:30:25 +0000

I just came from a performance of Giselle, the classic ballet in which the heroine, a peasant girl, falls in love with a prince and then dies when she discovers that he is betrothed to a noblewoman. I love this ballet and watched it with rapt attention, but I was struck, in the context of […]

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The Princess is in Another Castle

Paul Crenshaw — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 11:35:09 +0000

I play a girl. I have ulterior motives, but I also like role-playing. These are role-playing games, I tell myself, and why not play the furthest role from what I am. What I am is a middle-aged man, thick with beard and tattoos, who never lost his love for video games, and I choose a […]

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The Mirror has Two Gazes

Sana Vora — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 12:30:03 +0000

Carrie Rickey is a feminist art and film critic, raised in Los Angeles before attending the University of California, San Diego. Rickey’s work history spans from writing art criticism for Artforum and Art in America, to being a columnist for the now-defunct Mademoiselle. She often contributes to publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, […]

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Unseemly

Lorraine York — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 14:09:05 +0000

Literature cannot be the business of a women’s life & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are, you will be […]

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