Gender & Sexuality
Nine Ways That Capitalism Is Ruining Sex
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
After Dobbs
An interview on the post-Dobbs legal landscape—and how the federal government can respond.
Why Does the State Care About Your Gender?
The patchwork of government regulations around sex and gender causes endless misery for transgender people.
Queering the Dating App
Tinder and OkCupid should drop the gender binary. Doing so would help all users—queer and straight alike.
Roe Was Never Enough Anyway
It is long past time for law and policy to facilitate affordable and accessible services.
Are the Courts the Way to Queer Rights?
Saving LGBT equality requires strategic pluralism—marshaling legal challenges and electoral mobilization as well as social movement activism.
Grooming and the Christian Politics of Innocence
Challenges to Christian political control are often spun as threats to child welfare.
What Will It Take to End Violence Against Native Women?
The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act is an important step, but activist Mary Kathryn Nagle argues that only full restoration of Indigenous sovereignty will stop the epidemic.
The Critic of Gay Desire
Why groundbreaking queer studies scholar Leo Bersani rejected the word “queer.”
Father Knows Best
“Don’t Say Gay” laws can be traced to the Reagan-era crusade to put “parents’ rights” before the interests of children.
Dispatch from Kharkiv National University
On the importance of women’s studies after the USSR collapsed, and what it helps us understand about Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Putin’s Anti-Gay War on Ukraine
How the Kremlin weaponizes “traditional values,” portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.
Hating Motherhood
Some feminists think we can improve motherhood. But what if abolishing it is the only way to alleviate its problems?
Care Work in a Wageless World
Selma James’s work with the Wages for Housework movement shows that we ignore the labor of care at our own peril.
The Beginnings of Queer Citizenship
In the 1970s, gay and lesbian West Germans sought to forge political solidarity from sexual identity.
Is There a Constitutional Right to Sex Work?
The Supreme Court recognizes the right of consenting adults to an erotic life free of state control. Given that, it shouldn’t matter whether sex is your job.
Abortion Is Not a “Choice” Without Racial Justice
After Roe v. Wade, Angela Davis wrote about how the reproductive rights movement was failing women of color. As Roe is dismantled, her diagnosis is more crucial than ever.
Why Policing and Prisons Can’t End Gender Violence
The authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. discuss why racialized state violence and gender-based violence have to be fought together.
Get our newsletter
Vital reading on politics, ideas, and culture to your inbox
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975
Registered 501(c)(3) organization
Help Us Stay Paywall-Free
Become a Member