"Is This the Promised End?": The Tragedy of King Lear. By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 1974.
Reprinted in Contraries. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.Lear The moment of Lear's awakening is one of the most moving scenes in our literature, coming as it does after so much grotesque and senseless horror; it marks not simply the reconciliation of King and mistreated, exiled daughter, the reconciliation of the tyrannical, aggressive Lear and his loving, all-forgiving Cordelia, but the mysterious moment of "awakening" of the soul itselffor Cordelia, with her unearned kiss, symbolizes that moment of grace that forces the tragic action to a temporary halt, and allows a magical synthesis of the bliss of eternity and the tragedy of time that is so powerful in Shakespeare, because it is so rare.
"Tragic" Visions . . . Goddesses. Bechdel's Law. Bechdel's Law Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Dykes to Watch Out For, has an interesting observation on movies — a little test she applies to them.
It's a very short checklist, viz: 1. Does it have at least two women in it, 2. 3. I bring this up as a point of interest, because of what it says about the blind spots of popular entertainment. The reason Bechdel's test is important is because it's a diagnostic indicator for the objectification of women. The current decade is characterized by security anxieties writ large, a socially conservative culture of retreat from liberalism, and a strong anti-feminist backlash. TV has always been bad — a hypothetical alien trying to make deductions about humanity by watching our TV signals would conclude that our normal gender ratio is four males to each female, and that's just for starters!
PS: From now on I intend to start applying this test to my fiction before I embarrass myself in public. A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar. Emily Heist Moss is sick and tired of the men who harass her and make her feel unsafe in public spaces. It’s a drizzly Friday in Chicago and I’m leaving a bar with my roommate sometime after midnight. We’re on a quest for tacos and we’re discussing the finer points—Should we get pork or beef? From where? How many? —when you decide to make our conversation your business. Here are some things you should know about my week: I’m on the phone with my mom on my way to yoga when a guy leans out of a doorway, drags on his cigarette and gestures with his pelvis how much he is enjoying my yoga pants. Second Council House of Virgo. First Gerry Healy, then Tommy Sheridan, George Galloway and now Martin Smith.
Why are so many men who obtain leadership positions within socialist organisations so ignorant of women’s rights that they sexually abuse women, excuse sexual violence and participate in sexual exploitation? Most readers of this blog will be too young to remember the scandal that was the Workers Revolutionary Party. Led by Gerry Healy – a celebrated international trotskyist, it imploded in 1985 after Aileen Jennings, Healy’s longtime secretary, sent a letter to the Political Committee of the party claiming that the Party’s headquarters and Healy’s nearby residence were being used for “opportunistic sexual liaisons .
Or in less delicate language, that Healy was systematically raping female members of the party, using a combination of intimidation and outright threats of violence to ensure their silence. Last year, George Galloway publicly stated that under some circumstances, rape was merely bad manners. Meet The Predators « A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape.
None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. It has been clear for a long time, at least since Robin Warshaw’s groundbreaking “I Never Called It Rape,” which used Mary Koss’s reseach, that the stranger rape script did not describe rape as most women experienced it.
It’s easy to picture the stranger rapist: a violent criminal, not much different from the violent criminals who commit other violent crimes. This guy was in prison before, and he’ll be back there again, though not for rape because reporting and conviction rates are so low. But who commits the vast majority of rapes, the nonstranger rapes? Lisak & Miller McWhorter. 10 Anime You Should Watch (And That Are Easy to Find!) Power Grid by Kellie Foxx-Gonzalez | 12:31 pm, July 25th, 2012 <span id="am-ngg-js-warning" ><p>Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow.
</p></span><br class="clearfix" /><ol class="am-all-on-one-page"><li><span class="am-aoop-title"><span class="am-aoop-number">1. Exiled Stardust. Bitch Media. How to Fail at Being an Ally. As I wrote last week, people who do not identify as allies cause undue and often unintentional distress in marginalized groups. Skepchick - The Hawkeye Initiative. The everyday sexism project. SRS. Autostraddle. Rainbow Raptors.