Bitch co-founder Lisa Jervis's official bio makes her sound far more official than she actually is. In addition to her many writings for Bitch, her work has appeared in Ms., the San Francisco Chronicle, Utne, Mother Jones, the Women's Review of Books, Bust, the late and much-lamented Hues, Salon, the late but not-so-lamented Girlfriends, the late and also-lamented Punk Planet, the late and lamented-by-the-few-people-who've-heard-of-it LiP: Informed Revolt, Body Outlaws (Seal Press), The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (Penguin), and Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press). She is the co-editor of Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership (Seal Press) and (of course) Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). She’s currently finishing up a cookbook called Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Local, Healthy Eating (PM Press, spring 2009) and procrastinating on her research for a book about the intellectual legacy of gender essentialism and its effect on contemporary feminism.
She was born in Boston and partially raised in Los Angeles; she moved to New York City at age 8 and so considers herself a New Yorker by both chronology and temperament, though the transplant to Oakland, California, has worked out remarkably well.
In her spare time, she squeezes fruit at farmer's markets, bikes around Oakland, and resists adopting more cats.
A few of her favorite things are Buffy, Shortbus, cheese onion curry bread, Weeds, Alison Bechdel, Jane Austen, roasted brussels sprouts, Ben Lee, Ben Kweller, liar's dice, knitting, tattoos, Dexter, salacious memoirs, contemporary mystery novels about female PIs and investigative reporters, hammocks, vodka smoothies, The Philadelphia Story, terry-cloth hoodies, Liz Phair (yes, even the later "bad" stuff), sweet potatoes, Michael Pollan, bell hooks, Susan Faludi, and zine libraries.
What I'm reading:
I can't update this page as compulsively as I do my goodreads.com profile, so you should check that out if you are really curious.
What I'm listening to:
My pandora.com "avant pop" station.
What I'm watching:
My So-Called Life, newly borrowed on DVD
Great documentaries like Sir, No Sir and things by Errol Morris Buffy, 'cause I'm always watching Buffy
Silly summertime romantic comedies, because sometimes I am a sucker
The topic of women-only space, who belongs in it, and what kinds of safety it makes possible is a hot one in feminist communities, provoking vigorous debates and protests, particularly with regard to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and its controversial “womyn-born-womyn only” admissions policy. We asked a wide variety of folks—all with significant experience with different kinds of women-only space—to share their opinions on the value of women-only space, how to define it, and what kinds of risks it involves.
“Analysis is hard, it’s complicated, and it disturbs the comfortable simplicity of familiar worldviews.” So writes Susan Bordo, professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky. And she should know: Her incisive writings on a wide variety of topics cut through thickets of controversy and rhetoric to produce a fine, elegant, and, above all, resonant analysis.
To stroll the aisles of your local Toys “R” Us is to venture into the heart of gender darkness. Whether you believe that boys emerge from the womb with dump trucks clutched in their tiny fists or see toys as an early means by which kids are trained to hew to culturally determined gender differences, you’ll find plenty of evidence to back you up. (It basically comes down to how you interpret all that pink.)
“I never intended this book to be published,” writes Phoebe Gloeckner in the introduction to her new collection, A Child’s Lifeand Other Stories. Perusing these finely drawn, mostly autobiographical comic works, which span twenty years, it’s not difficult to see why its creator might be wary of foisting her stories on a public whose idea of an enjoyable narrative is Titanic. Gloeckner’s unsparing memory and painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of family dysfunction, childhood cruelty, and queasy sex make for seriously disquieting reading. The book takes us through the years with Gloeckner’s alter ego Minnie, whose childhood is dominated by her overbearing, ogling stepfather and whose adolescence is spent on the streets of San Francisco in a morass of unsavory drugs and even less savory men.