"Supreme Court Backs Catholic Agency in Case on Gay Rights and Foster Care"
”The Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who apply to take in foster children. The decision, in the latest clash between antidiscrimination principles and claims of conscience, was a setback for gay rights and further evidence that religious groups almost always prevail in the current court.”
"Madeline Davis, Who Spoke to the Nation as a Lesbian, Dies at 80"
”She was the first openly gay woman to speak to a major party’s national convention, asking Democrats in 1972 to include an anti-discrimination plank in their platform.”
Shay Ryan Olmstead, "The new wave of anti-trans legislation is based on very old arguments and ideas"
”Trans Americans have taken to the courts for decades to fight against the notion that they are a threat.”
Julio Capó Jr., "There’s no LGBTQ Pride without immigrants"
”Immigration has been and always will be an LGBTQ issue. For the past century, government officials have adopted homophobic and racist strategies as a way to justify harsh immigration policies. In response, immigrants have long taken great risks to forge necessary paths to help liberate those seeking the freedom to express their gender and sexuality.”
Aaron S. Lecklider, "The push for LGBTQ equality began long before Stonewall "
”Activists were advocating for LGBTQ Americans decades before the gay liberation movement of the 1960s.”
Gillian Frank and Adam Laats, "This Critical Race Theory Panic Is a Chip Off the Old Block"
”This summer’s spate of state-level bills aimed at censoring the content of history teaching in public school classrooms—bills that have made much of the supposed double threat of “critical race theory” and the New York Times’ 1619 Project—might seem somewhat random. But in fact, conservative attacks like these on humanities curricula that discuss race and racism in the United States follow a long-established pattern.”
Jill Filipovic, "How US Abortion Politics Distorts Women’s Lives in Conflict Zones"
”From Rwanda and Bosnia to Myanmar and Tigray, rape is now recognized as a genocidal crime. Yet its survivors rarely receive the health care they need—thanks to America’s deadly culture war.”
Article Spotlight
Tanfer Emin Tunc, The Autobiography of a Neurasthene (1910): The Medical Counternarratives of Margaret Abigail Cleaves, MD. Gender & History (2021): https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12536
This article argues that Margaret Abigail Cleaves's The Autobiography of a Neurasthene was part of a body of nineteenth-century writing that attempted to reclaim and recover the voices of American women by chronicling their struggles with illnesses and cures and documenting their interactions with the medical profession. Cleaves's gynocentric counternarrative was a searing criticism of the prevalent medical model of her era that questioned its treatment of neurasthenic women and offered therapeutic alternatives such as electric, light and music therapy. By doing so, it positioned Cleaves as a significant force of change in understandings of women and their bodies.
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Episode Spotlight
In the 1960s and early 1970s many Americans believed that rape was a rare and violent act perpetrated by outsiders and sociopaths. Popular culture taught men that women needed to be tricked or coerced into sex, and psychiatrists accused rape victims of secretly inviting their attacks. Susan Brownmiller’s best-selling book Against Our Will shattered these myths about sexual violence. Informed by the broader feminist anti-rape movement, Against Our Will portrayed rape as a systemic, pervasive, and culturally sanctioned act of power and intimidation. Yet even as Brownmiller provided a framework for naming sexual violence as a mechanism of patriarchy, she also minimized the importance of race and denied the ways that rape accusations have long justified the criminalization and murder of men of color. At a moment when #MeToo has brought about yet another national reckoning with sexual violence and male power, Brownmiller’s book, its legacy, and the contexts that produced the anti-rape movement of the 1970s demand re-examination.
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Books
