Jennifer Baumgardner

OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi,

In Sync I worked a bunch of minimum wage jobs in college, hard-selling suede bomber jackets at Wilson’s Leather, guzzling Frangelico-flavored coffee while reading Backlash at a failing coffee shop, and nude modeling for figure drawing classes. That last one paid twice the hourly wage of the others, but the

Anne Heche, who died suddenly in August, was seventeen in 1987, when she began playing the twins Marley and Vicky on Another World, my favorite soap. Marley was a kindly drip in mauve Ann Taylor suits and a pained smile. Vicky, the conniver, had bouncy hair and dressed like Olivia

Some people find the analogy of mothers and daughters to describe intrafeminist generational tension annoying and inaccurate, but not me. Chapter six of Manifesta, my book with Amy Richards (2000), is titled “Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother” and ends with an open letter to “older feminists,” the theme of

Magazines used to be valuable—an important medium to read, to write for, in which to be covered. This past week, I counted how many magazines I was sent despite not being a subscriber—Time, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, People, Wired, and National Geographic—all of which, pathetically, wind up in the recycling

A quick (yet somehow exhaustive) memory inventory of where I glimpsed feminism while growing up in Fargo in the 1970s and 1980s: My purple, clothbound Free to Be . . . You and Me book and accompanying record My Judy Blume books, especially Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

At the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Loretta Ross, Toni Bond, and others coined the evocative term reproductive justice to make clear that women have human rights, including the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have”

with assistance from CATHARINE STIMPSON, SHANE SNOWDON, BARBARA SMITH, and ANDI ZEISLER 1790–1792 In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft anonymously pens A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It’s all rave reviews and hot sales until her name is added to the second edition and, overnight, the text is derided as overly