In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a privately operated immigration detention center in Irwin County, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint that alleged “jarring medical neglect” at the facility. The brief was 27 pages long, but it was only the contents of a page-and-a-half (section 4, subsection D) that caught the public’s imagination: hysterectomies conducted without the consent or knowledge of migrant women. Wooten’s account of a “uterus collector”...
For the last few years, I’ve privately called myself a “feminist-nihilist” or “nihilist-feminist,” which is both a bad joke and a halfway lie — if only because “nihilism” doesn’t actually mean what I mean. Nor do I mean apathy or indifference. My relationship to contemporary feminism resembles my youthful allegiance to a Christian god: something that must exist (for reasons that can be more or less defined as “better that...
For a long time now, we’ve had the sense that feminism is in trouble. In the years before the pandemic, its most prominent battles — the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, #MeToo, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, “Nevertheless, she persisted” — were about figureheads. These days, symbols no longer seem adequate, or even all that meaningful. The professions (teaching, nursing, eldercare) that have been most overtaxed and underprotected during the...
Before, no rain fell because I needed none — good in any case, because, Homer writes, Gods are daunting when they appear as they are. A student emails that class is a struggle (in a sense): I need help, he says, understanding the Problems of Mass Incarnation. In the garden, sunflower heads hoist and swing. Rain-shadow jumps through the door. Yesterday my bicycle ran over a yellow snake. Don’t we...