Femspec Journal: 62 books

Sharon had discovered the encampment of women and children living under the cardboard packing boxes quite by accident one day when she had stepped into a booth in the hallway of the mall marked “DIAL A BREAST.” Just what had she discovered? The more she learned the stranger everything seemed but then again...

Batya Weinbaum interviewed Sabine Lichtenfels in July, 2005 when invited to participate in the seminar for Peace Journalists at Tamera. Tamera is an international intentional community in Southern Portugal. They openly maintain free love lifestyle to free up energy to liberate and change an oppressive society, along the lines of New Left thinkers influenced by Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich.

"One of the plague sites was a group of stories I read in which bluestockings, i.e., educated women, were associated in some manner with witchcraft. The linkage was interesting, but contradictory. Most bluestockings were middle to upper class urban women with formal education, while the most...

A woman in a motorized wheelchair struggling with a painful virus and delivering her own meds by pushbutton, faces her fear of death, remembering the shy girl she had been even as one of her country’s most respected scientists and as a member of a top secret research team.

Penelope Rosemont's Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, is discussed. This collection contains writings and some visual work by approximately one hundred women from all over the world. These surrealist women are also talked about as being political activists.

Exemplifying many of the concepts embedded in our issue’s focus on Great Age, Betty La Duke, now at eighty-two, has been making art that celebrates the life force in human, animal, and plant dwellers on our planet as she traveled the world “From the Bronx to Timbuktu” (her way of describing...

Mexico provides a surreal surrounding for painters to experience new visions. Tichenor's artistic conceptions are not European. The artist makes an analogy about past practices of shamans and unexplainable phenomena in her art work. Her artwork glows in a radiating way that is un-natural. Tichenor's...

This play includes two characters who are a married couple. The wife sees an angel. The husband tries to find something about angels in the Bible, while the wife defines revelation for him. She claims that the whole point of a revelation is to introduce something new. Gender differences are noted...

“Lynn Joyrich has outlined in some detail her theories regarding how television melodrama, gender and affect in soap opera coax a “feminine” viewpoint. At the same time, Tania Modleski has criticized soap operas for directing female anger at female power. The science fiction series Farscape...

This article provocatively explores the usefulness of the construct of magical realism in the context of post-colonial oppositional narrative strategies, in particular by feminist authors.

With the growing popularity of post-apocalyptic scenarios, not just in SF literature but also in reality television shows about survivalism such as Doomsday Preppers (2011), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) are more relevant than ever.

The world of SF is introduced for a complex female character in the form of the maternal shape-shifter, Anyanwu. Butler’s depiction of womanhood through Anyanwu defamiliarizes the construction of women in science fiction. “In Anyanwu, Butler demonstrates the wealth of potential for characterization...

Depiction of WinoWoman on a street in Philadelphia, with references to the mythic Harriet Tubman's feet and other aspects of celebration.

This writer from the 1930s was similar to modern feminists. The story set in the twenty-fourth century includes introspection on prophecies of the past through the mechanism of old books that had been discovered from the turn of the 20th century by the protagonist. It is an uncomplicated short discussion...