Gender & Sexuality

Purple Gaze

In the City of Sylvia

  • Alan A. Stone

After Ariel

Celebrating the poetry of the women’s movement.

  • Honor Moore

The End of Sexual Identity

Fiction’s new terrain.

  • Stacey D’Erasmo

Demon Doubt

An interview with Vivian Gornick.

  • Vivian Gornick
  • Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Half a Man

Gender apartheid in Iran.

  • Akbar Ganji

The Crucible

Sex Education in the United States.

  • Maureen N. McLane

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A Forbidden Hope

Reviewing Deepa Mehta’s Water.

  • Alan A. Stone

Hands Off Clitoridectomy

Not since Masters and Johnson has the clitoris—or its absence—been a topic of such intense debate. 

  • Yael Tamir

Judgment Day

The Academy’s voters rejected Brokeback Mountain, but the film marks an important moment in Hollywood history.

  • Alan A. Stone

What We Owe to Parents

The goal should not be to render child-rearing costless. The goal should be to lighten the burden.

  • Anne L. Alstott
with responses from
  • Robin West
  • Amy L. Wax
  • Eva Kittay
  • Dorothy Roberts
  • Deborah Stone
  • Richard A. Epstein

Just Marriage

American conservatives pride themselves on moral clarity—and nowhere greater than on the topic of marriage and family.

  • Mary Lyndon Shanley

Feminist Icons in Love

The romantic obsessions of Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras

  • Vivian Gornick

Is Privacy Bad for Women?

What the Indian constitutional tradition can teach about sex equality.

  • Martha C. Nussbaum

Sex Equality vs. Religion: What Should the Law Do?

A response to Susan Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”

  • Cass Sunstein

Review: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Invitations to danger and salvation that makes the blues the blues.

  • Jonathan Gill

Victims and Agents

What Greek tragedy can teach us about sympathy and responsibility.

  • Martha C. Nussbaum

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Feminism and multiculturalism may not be so easily reconciled.

  • Susan Moller Okin
with responses from
  • Katha Pollitt
  • Bonnie Honig
  • Yael Tamir
  • Sander Gilman
  • Robert C. Post
  • Bhikhu Parekh
  • Elizabeth Frazer
  • Saskia Sassen
  • Homi K. Bhabha
  • Joseph Raz
  • Janet Halley

Abortion: Whose Right?

The idea that a fetus has rights cannot be bypassed as nonsense. We have to take the idea seriously.

  • Judith Jarvis Thomson
with responses from
  • Donald H. Regan
  • Douglas Laycock
  • Drucilla Cornell
  • Peter de Marneffe
  • Philip L. Quinn

Lesbian Fictions: Straight or Narrow?

Traditionally, lesbians have appeared in fiction just long enough to be saved by men, perform acts of gross depravity, or suffer at their own hands.

  • Kerry Fried

An Intervention

Out of the shadow of a wall 15 feet away a pair of men emerged and blocked the sidewalk. 

  • George Packer

Beyond Racism and Misogyny

Black feminism and the 2 Live Crew.

  • Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

The Mapplethorpe Moment

For the photographer, art happens when the heat of living and the ice of death meet.

  • Michael Bettencourt

A Walk Into Darkness

The repression of Iranian women.

  • Betty Sosnin

Exorcizing Pornography

It would be simpler to burn a few magazines than to explore the economic, social, and psychological factors of which both rape and pornography are symptoms.

  • Walter Kendrick
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