Gender & Sexuality

Why I Provide Abortions

My patients and I don’t use words like “choice” or “viability.”

  • Christine Henneberg

How Domestic Labor Robs Women of Their Love

The glaring omission in recent works depicting the agonies of nannying and housekeeping.

  • Sophie Lewis

Abortion Is a Public Good

The right to reproductive health and agency is a compelling state interest.

  • Judith Levine

Pornography’s Contradictions

Which forms of oversight enhance erotic flourishing, and which quash it?

  • Joseph J. Fischel

Pleasure and Justice

On feminism, sex, and the ethics of desire.

  • Becca Rothfeld

Gender Is Queer for Everyone

Gender rarely lives up to our expectations, and a lot of what we think of as gender actually has more to do with race and money.

  • Kathryn Bond Stockton

Sign up for our newsletter

Beyond Choice

Liberalism cannot simply be extended to the uterus. Reproductive justice requires a vision of the social body.
  • Abby Minor

Keep Pride Nude

It’s an important part of the fight for a freer society.

  • Joseph J. Fischel

How Do Gender Transitions Happen?

It’s a much better question than the obsession with asking why.

  • Jules Joanne Gleeson

The Feminist Past History Can’t Give Us

Recent efforts to commemorate Laura Bassi—a pioneering physicist in eighteenth-century Italy—often say more about us than the world of women in science.

  • Paula Findlen

Violence Has No Gender

The penalties of gender and sexual violence are not equally distributed, but psyche violence is genderless.

  • Judith Levine

How ACT UP Did It

Sarah Schulman’s history shows how AIDS activists forced the government to accept that they mattered.

  • Hugh Ryan

Eroding the Regulatory State

The stakes of religious exemption challenges.

  • Joanna Wuest
  • Briana Last

The Death of the Gay Bar

The pandemic will shutter many gay bars. Should we mourn their passing?

  • Samuel Clowes Huneke

Ancestral Wealth

The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life

  • Tyehimba Jess

Feminism in Lockdown

The pandemic has foregrounded women’s exploitation in the home and challenged feminism to once again go beyond middle-class concerns. 

  • Jessa Crispin

Why We Shouldn’t Compare Transracial to Transgender Identity

Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.

  • Robin Dembroff
  • Dee Payton

Mourning in Tehran

On Ashura, Shi’a Muslims grieve the Prophet’s grandson. But with Iran crippled by COVID-19 and U.S. sanctions, it was also an occasion this year to mourn the country’s deaths from disease and despair.

  • Nargol Aran

The Obligation of Self-Discovery

Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration. 

  • Vivian Gornick

Save the Equal Rights Amendment

Renewed efforts to quash it stand to wipe out a hundred years of women’s work as constitution-makers.

  • Julie C. Suk

When Quotas Come Up Short

Some gender equality initiatives help to reinforce exclusion rather than dismantle it.

  • Marie E. Berry
  • Milli Lake

Pathologizing Desire

Current contempt for age gap relationships serves to strip both men and women of their agency. 

  • Jessa Crispin

What’s Next for Abortion Law?

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling is only the latest twist in the convoluted legal history of women’s reproductive rights. The future looks no less partisan.

  • Mary Ziegler

Whose Anger Counts?

Cancel culture can go wrong, but that doesn't mean the objections of far-right trolls and social justice activists should be mistaken for having equal worth.

  • Whitney Phillips
trending_flat
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

Donate

Become a Member

Subscribe