Women and Gender Studies

Telling stories of The Garden

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:12:42 +0000

Telling stories of The Garden Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/13/2026 - 16:12

Rachel Sauer

In recently published book The Garden, ��ӽ紫ý poet Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief

Paradise is only ever a thought.

Julie Carr pauses for a moment, remembering what led her to The Garden. It was 2021, and there had been several shootings at or near Denver’s East High School—one in the building, one in front of it and one half a block away. Carr’s daughter was a student there at the time.

Carr had written about shootings before, attempting through poetry to understand the incomprehensible, but that wasn’t the topic she wanted to focus on this time.

��ӽ紫ý Professor Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief in her book The Garden.

“Of course it was terrifying and tragic and awful, but I was feeling, as many people are feeling right now, this kind of block against what to do,” explains Carr, professor of English and creative writing and chair of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We protested, we’d written laws . . . but everything felt like a dead end.

“In that moment, I had a friend say, ‘You’re not just having a political problem here, you’re having a spiritual crisis.’ It’s this question of what do we do with violence? What do we do with our feelings of paralysis?”

Those questions led her down wandering paths of mystical tradition, of memories of her uncle, of dreams of fire in the dry Colorado grass, of imaginings like fragments of broken glass. And she arrived at The Garden, her recently published book that weaves fractured narratives into reoriented themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

In the end, as at the beginning, I just wanted to think about the woman smoking on the planter’s edge.

If she can point to a beginning, it was when she began reading the writing of 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. What she found in her reading was unsettling, “in this way in which the questions that we have are the questions humans have always had—questions with no answers, questions about the origins of evil, questions about what it means to be part of a community. But it was helpful to write in conversation with this central medieval thinker.”

On a parallel path to these questions with no answers was Carr’s longtime passion for theoretical physics, which grew during her undergraduate education studying with the philosopher and feminist physicist Karen River Barad. Carr began seeing similarities between the world of thought embedded in quantum field theory and the worlds of thought embedded in Jewish mysticism—“this sense that the world is not as it seems, that there are multiple ways of knowing,” she says.

“I’m interested in different ways of writing: a narrative mode, a more philosophical mode and a more lyrical mode, and how these different approaches can circle around some of the same concerns, the same histories, the same unanswerable questions,” says Julie Carr. (Back cover of The Garden showing artwork by Tony Robbin)

She thought of her uncle, the artist Tony Robbin, who was fascinated with the ideas of four-dimensional space and geometry, which is and isn’t a real thing, Carr explains. The fourth dimension is a mathematical concept that can be played out in the world of math and the world of computer-generated imagery, “even though when we look at the world there’s no fourth spatial dimension that we can see,” she says.

Since the early 19th century, mathematicians and philosophers have theorized about the fourth dimension, ideas that held equal fascination for Cubists like Picasso and other European modernist artists.

“They were interested in the idea of fourth-dimensional space for the same reason I became interested in Maimonides or River Barad was interested in quantum field theory: When you accept quantum theory or 4-D, you begin to understand that empirical reality is only one version of this universe.

“These modernist poets and painters who were interested in the fourth dimension, it gave them a sense of the possible. If you’re looking at (Guillaume) Apollinaire coming out of World War I, writing about `the beyond of this earth’ (in the poem ‘War’), or at Tony (Robbin) trying to describe fourth-dimensional geometry to me over and over when I was a child, you can sense the dynamism, which is so alive in his paintings. They just evoke an endlessness of possibility.”

Once, twice, dozens of times throughout my late-cold-war childhood, my uncle, the painter of the fourth dimension, had stood before me in the fluorescent light of his studio speaking of the universal failure to perceive things as they really were.

It quickly became clear as Carr wrote into these themes that she was writing in multiple different ways—memories of bombs falling that weren’t hers but felt like they were. Holocaust histories pressed against the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pressed against the Gaza war. Strange images, such as a finger tracing the edge of an oxygen tent, a scholar wearing a stained red sweater, her friend the arborist asking her, as they walk toward “a tree blooming bedspread pink,” whether she ever hears ghost stories. Not all of these images could appear in one book.

“It became the idea of writing a trilogy,” Carr says, explaining how The Garden is the first of three, the second of which, Turning, will be released next year. “I’m interested in different ways of writing: a narrative mode, a more philosophical mode and a more lyrical mode, and how these different approaches can circle around some of the same concerns, the same histories, the same unanswerable questions.”

But it seemed to me then and seems to me now that the best books are the ones that are never done. Even if bound and published, even if lauded and canonized, the greatest books carry a sense of incompletion. More: a sense of having been abandoned.

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In recently published book The Garden, ��ӽ紫ý poet Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

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Top image: "Lobofour" by Tony Robbin, 1982

Praise the Lord and plan the family

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:20:01 +0000

Praise the Lord and plan the family Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/06/2026 - 11:20

Rachel Sauer

In new book God Bless the Pill, ��ӽ紫ý scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America

A little more than 100 years ago, the Episcopalian stance on birth control was this: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of contraception, together with the grave dangers—physical, moral and religious—thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.”

Even acknowledging “abnormal cases” in which birth control might be necessary, Episcopalians were just one of many Protestant denominations that, in the early 20th century, “reacted to contraception on a continuum from skeptical to disapproving,” writes Samira Mehta, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

This aligns with commonly held ideas about how contraception—specifically the pill, which received FDA approval in May 1960—became broadly available in the United States: that first- and second-wave feminists pushed for accessibility, policy change and social revolution while religious leaders erected roadblocks and preached against it.

��ӽ紫ý scholar Samira Mehta's new book, God Bless the Pill, explores how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

Except this doesn’t actually tell the whole story.

In her new book God Bless the Pill, scheduled for publication April 14, Mehta details the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

“In a society that overtly thought of sex as something inside of marriage and that was inappropriate outside of marriage, the way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families,” Mehta says.

“This didn’t happen because (as a society) we care about women but because children have a better start if their mother doesn’t die in childbirth, if their family doesn’t have more children than the parents can provide for. The goal was to create healthier families—to use birth control to create healthier families—not just a healthy mother. And there’s concern that if you have more children than you can afford, you become dependent on the state. This is the United States, where we don’t want you to need a school lunch program, so you can’t have more kids than you can afford to give lunch to.”

The role of liberal religion

The idea to research what became God Bless the Pill, Mehta says, germinated from a desire not to lessen the significant influence that first- and second-wave feminism had on making birth control broadly available to women, but to understand what, if any, influence liberal religion had on the accessibility of birth control.

Book release and Q&A

What: A reading from God Bless the Pill by author Samira Mehta, followed by a Q&A facilitated by Phoebe Young, chair of the ��ӽ紫ý Department of History

Where: Waldschänke Ciders + Coffee, 4100 Jason St. in Denver

When: 6-8 p.m. Monday, April 13

Who: All are invited to this free event.

Reserve a spot

Mehta was inspired by social historian Elaine Tyler May’s America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, in which May assesses how access to the pill did and didn’t fulfill utopian dreams of liberating women, eradicating global poverty and supporting stable and happy marriages.

Mehta understood that the history of contraception is not simply a feminist history and found herself wondering what “that story would look like if one fully included religion in the narrative? I hoped and assumed that, as in May’s title, the promise and liberation might outweigh the peril. I also saw in May’s narration the assumption that religion was always conservative and opposed to birth control,” she writes in God Bless the Pill.

But what about liberal religious congregations? Where were they in the aftermath of oral contraception becoming broadly available in 1960?

Mehta took that question to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, where she found documentation of her childhood minister, the Rev. Al Ciarcia of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Bridgeport in Connecticut, publicly supporting birth control during the Griswold v. Connecticut debate—a landmark 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court found that a Connecticut statute forbidding contraceptive use violated the right of marital privacy.

This decision came 25 years after the American Birth Control League, formed by Margaret Sanger in 1921 and renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, assembled a national clergymen’s committee.

“These clergy talk about the importance of sex in a marriage and how a marriage that is sexually dynamic is less likely to result in divorce,” Mehta says. “The rhetoric around sex and marriage starts changing, and clergy members start talking about the sacred nature of a marriage bond and how sex is part of that bond through which two become one—regardless of literally becoming one in the form of a new person.

"The way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families," says Samira Mehta.

“They also advocate for marriages that are economically stable, and more kids can strain the economics of the household.”

Making the moral choice

Though Mehta begins the narrative in God Bless the Pill during World War II, the story of religion and contraception really gathers steam after the war’s end and the Cold War’s beginning. During this time, the value and sanctity of the American family was touted as one of the best weapons against the communist menace.

“There’s talk about Soviet women who have to go out and work in factories and put their kids in daycare,” Mehta says. “But a family that can control how many kids they have—where the mother can stay home and the father’s income is enough to support the family—can control their discretionary income. They can get a KitchenAid stand mixer, they can replace the dishwasher when a new and better model comes out. Limiting the birth rate becomes a way of increasing capitalist consumption.”

Messages highlighting capitalism as a way to defeat communism often occurred in the same breath as messages of moral behavior: “It’s the idea that if you can’t control something, it’s not moral,” Mehta explains. “Nobody wants to argue you should be celibate in marriage, so liberal religion begins framing birth control as a tool that allows us to make moral choices about how to structure our families.

“These clergy members believe that you can lay out the evidence for a compelling moral choice and then everybody will want to make a compelling moral choice. They were arguing that this is an access problem and an education problem, and they thought people would see that the best choices for their families are these choices (the clergy members) are suggesting.”

Mehta notes that even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that people would make the moral choice if it was presented to them—arguing that big families may be appropriate for the farm, but they work against African Americans’ self-interest in the city. “He laid out the argument that African Americans have a right to these tools as well to lift themselves out of poverty.”

Ultimately, Mehta adds, there was and continues to be backlash on both the right and the left, with the right not anticipating the feminist potential of contraception and the left questioning whether birth control is a tool of liberation rather than of racial and patriarchal oppression.

“And then the center isn’t necessarily super comfortable with prolific non-marital sex,” Mehta explains. “They may be OK with married-like relationships, but they’re generally not OK with an emotionally unencumbered and mutually satisfying one-night stand. And the center wasn’t on board with men needing to pull their weight at home and women being in the workforce and kids being in daycare. We’re still seeing a course correction from the center.”

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In new book God Bless the Pill, ��ӽ紫ý scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

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Exhibit celebrates Black Panther Party in stories and portraits

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 22:52:38 +0000

Exhibit celebrates Black Panther Party in stories and portraits Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/22/2026 - 15:52

The documentary exhibit “Revolutionary Grain,” open now through March 15 in the Macky Gallery, highlights the stories of former Black Panther Party members and ongoing struggles for racial justice

This spring, the University of Colorado Boulder Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) and the Department of History, together with the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, present the traveling exhibition “Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panther Party in Portraits and Stories” in the Macky Gallery.

The exhibition, open now through March 15, was created by California-based artist and photographer Suzun Lucia Lamaina and honors the legacy of one of the most influential movements in Black American history.

As part of Black History Month programming, the exhibition will be accompanied by a panel discussion with former Black Panther Party members Gayle Dickson, Aaron Dixon, Ericka Huggins and Billy X Jennings, alongside Lamaina and CAAAS Director Reiland Rabaka, on Thursday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m. in the Norlin Library Center for Global British and Irish Studies Room (M549). The discussion will focus on the history and legacy of the Black Panther Party and its relevance in today’s political climate.

Living history

Hear firsthand accounts of the history of the Black Panther Party and the 1960s Black Freedom Struggle—along with their legacies in Trump's America. The program is part of the accompanying events for the traveling exhibit "Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panther Party in Portraits and Stories" that is on display through March 15 in the Macky Gallery.

What: A panel discussion with former Black Panther Party members Gayle Dickson, Aaron Dixon, Ericka Huggins and Billy X Jennings, alongside CAAAS Director Reiland Rabaka and photographer Suzun Lucia Lamaina.

When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12

Where: Norlin Library Center for Global British and Irish Studies Room (M549)

Learn more

Additional programs featuring former Panthers will take place throughout that week on campus.

The “Revolutionary Grain” exhibition features a social-documentary photographic essay of portraits and personal narratives from more than 50 former members of the Black Panther Party. Lamaina spent five years traveling across the United States to interview and photograph participants, offering them the opportunity to tell their own stories.

“This work is meant to spark conversation,” Lamaina explained of the project, noting that the exhibition coincides with the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party’s founding and ongoing struggles for racial justice in the United States. The exhibition situates the movement’s history in what Lamaina describes as a new phase of the Black Freedom Struggle in contemporary America.

Founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and the late Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party initially focused on addressing police violence in Black communities. By the late 1960s, the party had become a national and international symbol of resistance, establishing nearly 50 chapters across the United States and an international presence in Algiers, North Africa.

“Putting on the Black Panther uniform and committing our lives to the liberation struggle changed the purpose and meaning of our entire identities,” Dixon wrote in his 2012 memoir My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain. “It was a liberating experience. Societal restriction and conformities dropped by the wayside, leaving a fearless, defiant, powerful human being. We no longer looked at ourselves in the same way, nor did we look at the system and its representatives in the same manner. We were the freest of the free.”

In addition to its revolutionary political stance against capitalism, imperialism and fascism, the party launched “survival programs” that provided free breakfasts, medical services and other essential resources to thousands of Black Americans. Despite its community-based activism, the Panthers were frequently targeted by federal authorities, with the Nixon administration labeling the party “the greatest danger to the internal security” of the United States. A number of its members, among them Fred Hampton in Chicago, died at the hands of police officers.

The exhibition seeks to counter decades of misrepresentation by bringing first-person accounts from former members to the foreground, connecting their experiences to present-day debates over racism, police violence and political organizing.

“At a time during which the Trump administration and its supporters are rewriting history and representing versions of the past that downplay or even erase the critical significance of the Black Liberation Struggle of the 1960s and 1970s—of which the Panthers were an integral part—it is all the more important to shed light on the movement’s complexities and give our students, faculty and the community one more opportunity to engage with aging Panther members in meaningful ways," says Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, a professor of history and the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History. "This is a university campus, and it is a celebration, but also a reappraisal, with the help of key actors, of a complex struggle that has also problematic chapters. History is messy, but our students deserve better than what many in Washington have in store for them.”

The exhibition is co-sponsored by the departments of English, Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies and the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

All events are free and open to the public. No tickets are required. For more information, contact Thomas Pegelow Kaplan at thomas.pegelow-kaplan@colorado.edu.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

The documentary exhibit “Revolutionary Grain,” open now through March 15 in the Macky Gallery, highlights the stories of former Black Panther Party members and ongoing struggles for racial justice.

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Top image: Former Black Panther Party members Emory Douglas (left), Kathleen Cleaver (center) and Barbara Easley Cox (right). (Photos: Suzun Lucia Lamaina)

Merry Jewish Christmas

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:59:10 +0000

Merry Jewish Christmas Rachel Sauer Wed, 12/10/2025 - 14:59

Samira Mehta

How Chinese food and the movies became a time-honored tradition for American Jews

There is a meme that circulates every holiday season, an image of a sign in a restaurant window. “The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” it says. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas.”

Is the sign real? Perhaps not; the fact-checking site Snopes found no evidence of the association even existing. But the joke’s popularity points to a tradition cherished by many American Jews – Chinese food on Christmas.

But why would Jews, who do not celebrate Christmas, have Christmas traditions?

Samira Mehta is director of the ��ӽ紫ý Program in Jewish Studies and an associate professor of women and gender studies.

Like many minority groups, Jews have always created ways of adapting to the societies in which they live, but whose culture they do not totally share. And one thing that means is a collection of Christmas traditions, varying by time and place. Many of them came up in interviews for my book “Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States.”

Old World festivities

Long before Jews came to the United States, some of them celebrated Christmas – participating in many of the cultural traditions, even as they avoided the religious part of the holiday.

According to Jordan Chad, author of “Christmas in Yiddish Tradition,” Jewish folklore about the holiday appears as early as the late 1300s. Plenty of Jewish communities in Europe spent Christmas Eve dancing and drinking, feasting and gambling – as many of their Christian neighbors did, when those neighbors were not in church.

Other scholars have argued that these traditions grew out of attempts to avoid studying Jewish religious texts on a Christian holiday. But Chad demonstrates that, over centuries, those customs came to celebrate the revelry of the season – though not the birth of Jesus.

Even in the 20th century, scholars such as Yaniv Feller have found, many middle- and upper-class German Jews embraced a secular Christmas, complete with a tree, a traditional dinner and presents. After all, some of those Christmas traditions stem less from religion than folk traditions and industrialization.

Given that long history, Jewish Christmas traditions are not necessarily a sign of Americanization.

That said, in the United States, Christmas is so culturally powerful – a day that almost everyone has off, and that the majority of Americans spend with their kith and kin – that many non-Christian immigrants celebrate it in a secular way, with family visits, Santa and a tree. They do not necessarily do the religious parts of the holiday, but they may well deck the halls. Certainly, my own Hindu relatives do.

And many Jews celebrate Christmas in some way because they are part of interfaith families – whether their own immediate family or extended relatives with whom they spend the day. Today, estimates place the American Jewish interfaith marriage rate as high as 50%.

Kosher-style Chinese

For plenty of contemporary Jews, however, it is profoundly important not to celebrate a secular version of Christmas. Starting in the 1970s, in fact, when American Jews were particularly worried about rising rates of interfaith marriage, many of the rabbis willing to perform ceremonies for Jewish-Christian couples made them promise to not have a Christmas tree. This happened despite the fact that, at the time, many American Jews did have Christmas trees in their homes.

Even if Jews do not want to deck the halls, though, many still have the day off. Meanwhile, their non-Jewish friends, families and co-workers are busy and much of the world is closed. And so many Jews have developed their own ways of marking the day.

Some Jewish families decorate a ‘Hanukkah bush’ as a seasonal alternative to a Christmas tree. (Photo: Jonah Green/Wikimedia Commons)

The Chinese food tradition is particularly famous. In fact, during Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s 2010 confirmation hearings, when Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asked her where she had been on Christmas Day, she responded, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

The first written mention of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas Day comes from 1935, when, according to The New York Times, a man named Eng Shee Chuck brought chow mein and toys to a New Jersey Jewish orphanage.

His generosity was probably not why Jews started going to Chinese restaurants on Christmas; it is more likely that they were already doing so. The two communities lived cheek by jowl in many American cities, where immigrants of different sorts ended up in the same neighborhoods. And Chinese food contains little dairy, meaning it rarely violated Jewish dietary laws against mixing milk and meat.

Most Chinese cuisines do use pork and shrimp, which is forbidden by kosher laws. But many Jewish customers were happy to make an exception, especially if the forbidden food was tucked in a dumpling or otherwise out of sight – at least outside their own homes.

As new research by New York University graduate student Shiyong Lu demonstrates, Chinese restaurants were also eager to cater to American Jews: They wanted to develop white, American clientele, and here were some right in their neighborhoods.

As restaurant owners learned that Jews often eschewed pork, some began to offer traditional dishes with chicken instead – allowing more observant Jews to eat “kosher style,” without eating explicitly forbidden food. Today, there is wide variation in Jewish dietary practices, making Chinese food even more accessible for most Jews.

By the end of the 20th century, “Chinese food and a movie” had become the trope of Jewish Christmas. Because most Chinese immigrants were not Christian, their restaurants are often open on Dec. 25. And indeed, they are often filled with Jews.

Movies, volunteering and more

The same tends to be true for movie theaters. In 2012, I saw “Les Misérables” on Christmas Day in a theater that seemed to be a who’s who of the Atlanta Jewish community. In fact, the movies and the Chinese food are often paired, whether out on the town or at home, streaming with take out.

Jewish museums are often open and are another popular destination in cities that have them. And some Jews use Christmas Day for travel. At least in eras past, plane tickets were notably cheaper than the days around the holiday.

Another Jewish Christmas tradition is simply to go to work, so as to let Christian colleagues have the day off. Many Jewish doctors and nurses are on call, or staff the emergency room or the intensive care unit, so that their colleagues can be home.

Still other Jews perform charitable deeds on Christmas: They staff soup kitchens and food banks, bring holiday cheer to nursing homes and hospital patients, or deliver gifts to children in shelters.

Living in a culture that largely closes down each Dec. 25, many Jews have found ways of making meaning in the day – be that sharing family time over beef and broccoli, followed by a holiday blockbuster, or working to make sure that more of their colleagues can have a family day. And those, too, are Christmas traditions.

Samira Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies and an associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Chinese food and the movies became a time-honored tradition for American Jews.

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All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare

Kylie Clarke — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:32:57 +0000

All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare Kylie Clarke Wed, 11/26/2025 - 14:32

Alexandra Phelps

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, ��ӽ紫ý scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later

Act One: Setting the scene

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The legacy and legend of William Shakespeare has expanded well beyond the open-air theaters of Renaissance London. Embedded in classrooms, films and novels, his plays and poetry have become universally known and loved. Before he inspired generations of artists, however, he was inspired by the art around him. Adapting the stories and dramas he observed and experienced, his storytelling has entertained viewers and readers for four centuries.

However, his dramas are mostly what we have left of him.

“The wealth of beautiful and deep feeling poetry and drama that Shakespeare left, contrasted with the poverty of documents that give us a sense of who he is as a person, is very intriguing” explains Dianne Mitchell, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of English and Renaissance literature scholar. This poverty has led scholars and writers, including bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, to imagine what the lives of Shakespeare and his family may have been like.

In her 2020 novel Hamnet, a film adaptation of which will be released in theaters today (Nov. 26), O’Farrell weaves a plot following Shakespeare and his wife – referred to in the novel and film as Agnes – and their children, twins Judith and Hamnet and their older sister Susanna, creating a domestic view of their lives in Stratford. Based on the sparse information about Shakespeare available through legal documents, O’Farrell spins a fictional tale of loss, love and the family of one of the world’s most influential playwrights.

Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet. Image provided by Focus Features

Meet the Shakespeare scholars

Scene One: Finding a love

Enter Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt, & Amanda Giguere

At ��ӽ紫ý, Shakespeare’s work is integral both in English classrooms and on stages. Scholars of literature and theater, as well as organizers of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF), found a love for Shakespeare’s work which now guides their professional careers.

Katherine Eggert

Katherine Eggert, a professor of English and vice chancellor and senior vice provost for academic planning and assessment, remembers, “I was going to study Victorian literature in graduate school, but then I took a class from Stephen Greenblatt, who is one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare scholars, and I knew that I could not leave the Renaissance behind.”

Eggert, drawing on her work on Renaissance epistemology – understanding how it is possible we know things and not others – and Renaissance history, explains, “We know a great deal about Shakespeare’s dealings in property, his legal involvements, we know whether he paid his taxes. We know the kinds of records that get kept in life. We do not have his diaries; we do not have his private remarks about what he thought about any given subject. What we do have is his literary work.”

Dianne Mitchell

For Dianne Mitchell, literary work and poetry of the Renaissance in particular spoke to her. “I had some great teachers when I was an undergraduate who really brought the 16th and 17th century literary world to life, especially poetry. I hadn’t realized how sensual and how deep the poetry felt.” Mitchell, among the other classes she teaches, developed an upper-level English course that is cross-listed with women and gender studies called Sex in Shakespeare’s Time. She reflects that students are “often surprised how up front both real women and imaginary women can be about what it is that they can and don’t desire.”

Kevin Rich

The stage is another way people find new ways to look at texts and themselves. For Kevin Rich, associate professor of theater and director of the Applied Shakespeare graduate certificate, theater offered him a place to conquer his fear of speaking. He remembers, “I was at a summer camp junior year of high school and they said do something that scares you, and I said acting scares me. I always wanted to be a teacher and once I found acting, I knew what I wanted to teach.”

Later, he saw a six-person production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It on a basketball court in New York City’s lower east side and “it was magical. It was awesome. Kids who were coming to play basketball saw that a play was happening and sat on their basketballs and watched it,” he recalls.

Heidi Schmidt

For Heidi Schmidt, a director and teacher with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, it was the connections she made rather than the setting of a theater that drew her in. “I really liked theater people. When I started hanging around theater people there was this relief that I could just be more of myself than I was in the rest of my life.” Now involved in every aspect of the theater, she works alongside Rich and Amanda Giguere, CSF director of outreach, to develop the CSF school program.

Amanda Giguere

Amanda Giguere found theater at a young age at a Shakespeare camp: “It planted the seed and now this is my life’s work.” When she was choosing a graduate school, “I applied to one school, ��ӽ紫ý, sight unseen … because of its connection to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Twenty-one years later, I’m still here.” Her book, Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators, allows teachers all over the country to use CSF’s teaching and practices in their classrooms.

In the five years since its publication and adaptation to film, the novel has grown a wider audience interested in imagining who Shakespeare could have been. Although scholars often try – to varying degrees of success – to explain Shakespeare the person, it is often novelists and playwrights like Shakespeare who bring him most to life. Through his plays, Shakespeare has touched audiences by interpreting the world he experienced through his writing.

Many University of Colorado Boulder Shakespeare scholars and Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF) drama researchers are excited for the film adaptation of Hamnet. This film offers another insight into what Shakespeare could have been, beyond the dramas he created.

Act Two: Teaching Shakespeare

Enter ��ӽ紫ý’s Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt and Amanda Giguere

“Shakespeare’s plays can be a way to think through questions that students themselves are asking, and we don’t only need Shakespeare to help us answer these questions. But it’s funny how much he is wondering about some of the same issues many of my students are wondering about or exploring some of the same problems that beset them,” says Mitchell.

Part of Shakespeare’s brilliance is his ability to reach people at any age. Kevin Rich, an associate professor of Theatre at ��ӽ紫ý, remembers seeing “a 4-year-old perform a Cleopatra monologue (from Antony and Cleopatra). You would think that’s too hard, but at that age, they’re not afraid of words yet – all words are new. This language was not intimidating and she killed it. She was so brave and let the words be as big as they were. That’s when I realized no age is too young to be introduced to these plays, and you’ll always learn more as you get older.”

Eggert emphasizes the importance of reading the text aloud in English courses: “I do ask students to read in class. I think it’s really important to hear Shakespeare and to hear the language coming out of your mouth and not just as a professional. When you read Renaissance literature – not just Shakespeare – and literature of any kind aloud, you understand it in your ear, even if you don’t understand every word on the page.”

Act Three: Favorite plays

Everybody reads Shakespeare differently, allowing for individuals to connect with his works in different ways.

Schmidt, for example, recalls a time at a camp where she was directing Measure for Measure. The play is about a duke who lets the affairs of state slide and instead of handling them, claims he’s going on sabbatical. However, he doesn’t and sticks around in disguise, observing as people get manipulated by his deputy.

“I said, ‘OK, let’s just agree as a group that tricking someone into having sex with someone they don’t want to is bad. Period, the end,’” Schmidt says. “The youngest kid in the class, 13, puts her hand in the air and shouts, ‘Consent is sexy!’ It was one of my proudest teaching moments.”

Giguere recognizes the power in drawing connections between historical events and the situations Shakespeare portrays in his stories.” Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt is about the tyrants in Shakespeare’s plays. I’m on the section on Richard III, and I’m thinking about how it shows what happens when hate is allowed to grow and fester. It’s crazy that Richard III became king, that’s sort of baffling.”

Rich sees great power in how Shakespeare can capture human conditions in social and emotional situations, recalling, “I’ve had an inmate say to me, ‘Shakespeare had to have done time,’ because he cannot have written the prison scene in Richard II without having spent time in a cell himself. I’ve had veterans say he had to have been in war, because he cannot have possibly written about war like he does without having experienced it. So, maybe that’s true or maybe he was just that empathetic, that able to imagine perspectives other than his own.”

Mitchell reflects, “I’ve started teaching one of Shakespeare’s late plays — by which I mean a play that he wrote at the end of his dramatic career — both at the undergraduate and graduate level. It’s a play called Cymbeline. One of the reasons [I like teaching it] is that students have no expectations about the play and its characters when they come into my class. I like teaching it because you really see a Shakespeare at the end of his career who is so confident in his dramatic abilities that he starts breaking all the rules. It’s really fun to watch him discard habits that he practices in some of his more canonical plays.”

Eggert finds that familiarity can generate new insights. She says, “The play I most like to teach, that’s Hamlet. It’s infinitely rich and even if students have already read it before, there is so much to discover on the second, third and 20th reading.” Whether a student is completely new to a play or reading it again, there are so many meaningful ways for them to interact with the text.

Act Four: Hamnet as a novel and a stage play

Giguere and Schmidt both saw the first stage adaptation of Hamnet at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Prior to seeing it, Giguere read the novel and was pleased that even though the novel takes a lot of liberties with who Shakespeare’s wife was, they are “beautiful liberties.”

O’Farrell’s novel, despite being about Shakespeare, leans more deeply into the lives of Agnes and his children than other novelists and scholars have. Often villainized in history, Agnes in the novel is shown in a new light. There is much speculation about the circumstances around her and William Shakespeare’s marriage, Eggert disputes some scholars’ insinuations that since she was older than he and was pregnant, she trapped him in a marriage that he didn’t want. This has led to a fictional narrative in which the two lived separate lives, and Shakespeare moved to London to escape her.

Eggert emphasizes that there is no evidence that supports this theory. In fact, she says, “just a few months ago, a scholar made a good case that a letter found in an old book that had been owned by an acquaintance of Shakespeare’s, used as part of the binding of this book, was written to Shakespeare’s wife, and the letter was to her in London. While this letter doesn’t indicate the entirety of their relationship dynamic, it displays that their lives weren’t as separate as some scholars would want them to be.”

Mitchell describes the importance of centering a story around women, especially beside a character as large as Shakespeare. Instead of imagining Agnes’ life as small in comparison to Shakespeare’s, “One of the things that I liked about the novel was that it’s not about Shakespeare and his rise to fame and success, but rather about the domestic life of the intelligent and deep-feeling woman he married. We don’t have diaries or letters, so fiction is doing the work (of defining) that (Agnes) wasn’t some small person who wasn’t cared for and who was just kind of caught up in the Shakespeare industry. She has her own important life.”

Mitchell explains that the villainization of Agnes’ character could possibly stem from a thoughtful act William Shakespeare and his wife did. Many scholars use the fact that the couple didn’t get married in the local parish church to diminish her character since this act was violating the religious conventions at the time. However, at the time they got married, Shakespeare’s father, John – a cruel character in the novel – was being pursued for his debts. Instead of getting married in the church, where people would have seen him and tried to collect, William and Agnes married elsewhere as a kindness to William’s father.

Act Five: Hamnet as a film

There are many films that have captured, or attempted to capture, the plays and fictionalized life of Shakespeare. Movies such as Shakespeare in Love offer viewers a way to enter his life, even if it’s heavily fictionalized. Films are often one of the most important tools used by professors, including Eggert. Films about Shakespeare or his plays allow viewers to better understand the content, through observing the choices actors and directors make.

“I show clips from films and theater adaptations; there are resources through the [University of Colorado Boulder’s] libraries where you can see how if something is performed slightly differently, it emphasizes an entirely different meaning to the text,” Eggert says.

Although there are fictionalized elements, the stage adaptation of Hamnet was another way for viewers to understand Shakespeare and England at the time. The stage adaptation included people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, something Schmidt notes was a larger part of Shakespeare’s London than people often consider.

Colorado Shakespeare Festival remains popular

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival program has reached more than 140,000 Colorado students and continues to be an integral part of English courses in college. For this school cycle, Rich has adapted Hamlet into a digestible 30-minute and 45-minute play, depending on the student audience. Giguere and Schmidt’s work allows for teachers to prep their students on the plots, background and characters in the plays. Similarly to Rich’s opinion that anyone can interact with the material, Giguere states, “I don’t think you need to be a professional actor or violence prevention expert to use Shakespeare’s plays to think about patterns of violence. I think the plays unlock a lot about our own world and help us understand what it means to be human and what it means to live in a society.

“There is a lot of research that exists about how London, in particular, is a lot more diverse than we like to think it was – it was not all white. There were a lot of different people coming from all over the world and living in London and making their lives in London. I think [an all-white version of London] is an outdated and disproven illusion of what life looked like,” Schmidt says.

Rich adds that the landscape in theatre for interpreting Shakespeare has moved beyond a binary system of comedy and tragedy. “When I was first starting out as an actor, auditioning for companies, they would ask for two contrasting monologues – one comedic, one tragic. It seems that many have moved away from that because that creates a two dimensional view of his plays, which in reality are more than just two genres of comedies and tragedies. He finds levity in serious moments and he finds gravity in the funny moments.”

The film version of Hamnet continues to break down these binaries and established structures through its storytelling. The mysticism that Rich sees in Shakespeare’s work is what Giguere recognizes in O’Farrell’s novel. Some film viewers may recognize the mysticism of the novel while also seeing the humanity of Shakespeare and his family.

Some 400 years later, Shakespeare can connect with individuals on a number of levels. Hamnet’s release in theaters offers viewers a fictionalized way to see him as a person and one version of the life he could have led. However, the concrete things people know about Shakespeare’s storytelling and genius are found in his works. Giguere emphasizes that people should read “all of them. Truly, every Shakespeare play collides with you in different ways depending on where you are in life or what the world is doing. I say this in a tongue-and-cheek way, read all of them, watch all of them. Because that’s what baffles me about these works, is that sometimes you’ll collide with a play and it just hits you in the right way where, ‘Oh my goodness, this sheds light on this other aspect of my life.’”

They Exit (the movie theater)

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, ��ӽ紫ý scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later.

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‘Kenough’: Is 'Barbie' more revolutionary for men than women?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 21:08:55 +0000

‘Kenough’: Is 'Barbie' more revolutionary for men than women? Rachel Sauer Fri, 03/07/2025 - 14:08

Clay Bonnyman Evans

��ӽ紫ý PhD student’s paper argues that the hit film exemplifies ‘masculinity without patriarchy’ in media

M.G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll and co-host of the podcast LA Made: The Barbie Tapes, describes Greta Gerwig’s Oscar Award-winning, box-office behemoth Barbie as “incredibly feminist” and widely perceived as “anti-male.”

Meanwhile, conservative critics rail that the movie is “anti-man” and full of “beta males” in need of a testosterone booster. Conservative British commentator Piers Morgan called it “an assault on not just Ken, but on all men.”

��ӽ紫ý PhD student Julie Estlick argues that Greta Gerwig's award-winning film Barbie is "a really good film for Ken."

But University of Colorado Boulder women and gender studies doctoral student Julie Estlick sees things differently. In her recent paper, “Ken’s Best Friend: Masculinities in Barbie,” published in Feminist Theory, she argues that the movie is “a really good film for Ken.”

On first viewing, Estlick noticed a woman nearby having a “very visceral, emotional response” to the now iconic monolog by actor America Ferrera, which begins, “It is literally impossible to be a woman.”

She wasn’t particularly moved by the speech, and walking out of the theater, she realized she didn’t see the movie as a clear-cut icon of feminism.

“I really questioned whether the film was actually about Barbie, and by extension, women, at least in the way people were claiming,” she says.

Once Barbie was available for streaming, Estlick took a closer look and arrived at a heterodox conclusion:

“Barbie is not anti-man; it is pro-man and is not necessarily a revolutionary film for women, at least not as much as it is for men,” she writes in the paper’s abstract. “This is because Barbie espouses non-hegemonic masculinity through cultural critiques that are rare to see in popular media.”

Hegemonic vs. toxic masculinity

For Estlick, “hegemonic masculinity” is a kind of stand-in for the “toxic masculinity” so often featured in media: superheroes, gangsters, vigilantes, killing machines who are also “lady killers.” Always strong, rarely emotional, such men are absurdly impermeable to harm, and sport chiseled features and perfectly sculpted abs, she says. Yet many are also “man children” whose “ultimate prize” is to have sex with a woman.

“That kind of media comes at the expense of women, works against women, and often oppresses women by sexualizing and objectifying them,” Estlick says.

In the film Barbie, the patriarchy ultimately doesn't serve the Kens any more than it does the Barbies, argues ��ӽ紫ý PhD student Julie Estlick. (Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures)

Non-hegemonic masculinity is strong without being oppressive, and supportive and protective of women without regard to any quid pro quo. It allows for men to openly express emotions and vulnerability and to seek help for their mental-health struggles and emotional needs without shame, while retaining their strength, vitality and masculinity.

“It does the opposite of hegemonic masculinity,” Estlick says. “It works alongside women and doesn’t harm them in any way.”

The Kens are first represented in the movie as clueless accessories to the ruling Barbies of Barbie Land. But after Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) and Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) find a portal to our world, Beach Ken returns and establishes a patriarchal society in which women become mindless accessories to hyper-competitive men in the thrall of hegemonic masculinity.

But ultimately, the patriarchy doesn’t serve the Kens any more than the Barbies.

“As people always say, men’s worst enemy under patriarchy isn’t women. It’s other men and their expectations, who are constantly stuffing men into boxes,” Estlick says.

Which isn’t to say that women don’t also enforce strictures of hegemonic masculinity.

“When little boys are taught to suppress emotions, little girls are watching. They are watching their fathers, and fathers onscreen, acting in certain ways,” Estlick says. “Girls internalize toxic ideologies the same ways boys do.”

Allan the exception

In Barbie, there is just one male who stands apart from Kendom: Allan, played by Michael Cera.

“Allan is positioned as queer in the film in that he is othered but not less masculine in the traditional understanding of the word,” Estlick writes. He “deviates from the conventional canon of masculinity” and “uses his masculinity for feminism and to liberate women while also protesting patriarchy.”

Allan doesn’t fit into Kendom, with or without patriarchy. As the narrator (voiced by Helen Mirren) notes, “There are no multiples of Allan; he’s just Allan.”

The character is based on a discontinued Mattel doll released in 1964, intended to be a friend to Ken. Fearing the friendship might be perceived as gay, the company swiftly removed Allan from store shelves, later replacing him with a “family pack” featuring Barbie’s best friend Midge as his wife, and a backstory that the couple had twins.

In the film, non-toxic Allan is immune to patriarchal brainwashing and sides with the Barbies in re-taking Barbie Land.

“(T)he film can be understood as a vital framework for masculinity that allows for vulnerability, emotion and heterosexual intimacy among men,” says researcher Julie Estlick. (Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures)

“Right off the bat we see (Allan) as queered from the rest of the Kens and Barbies,” Estlick says.

But Beach Ken, too, eventually senses that he’s not happy in the patriarchal society has created. In one of the movie’s final scenes, a tearfully confused Beach Ken converses with Stereotypical Barbie from a literal ledge:

“You have to figure out who you are without me,” Barbie tells him kindly. “You’re not your girlfriend. You’re not your house, you’re not your mink … You’re not even beach. Maybe all the things that you thought made you aren’t … really you. Maybe it’s Barbie and … it’s Ken.”

In other words, Barbie is rooting for Ken to claim his individuality.

“Beach Ken’s house, clothes, job and girlfriend all represent boxes that society expects men to tick, but this scene illustrates that it is okay to deviate from normative behaviors of masculinity and that manhood is not solely defined through heteronormative bonds and behaviors,” Estlick writes. And “it is acceptable for men to admit to a woman that they need help.”

Barbie is pure, candy-colored fantasy. But in our world, Estlick believes it points the way toward further non-toxic media representations of masculinity and ultimately contribute to better mental health for men trapped in a “man box” — as well as women who have borne the burden of men’s self- and societally imposed strictures on their own humanity.

“(T)he film can be understood as a vital framework for masculinity that allows for vulnerability, emotion and heterosexual intimacy among men,” she concludes. It “(opens) the door to the creation of more media that subverts societal expectations of toxic masculinity.”

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��ӽ紫ý PhD student’s paper argues that the hit film exemplifies ‘masculinity without patriarchy’ in media.

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These princesses aren’t just waiting around for their prince

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:57:28 +0000

These princesses aren’t just waiting around for their prince Rachel Sauer Fri, 11/22/2024 - 08:57

Adamari Ruelas

Looking at two of Disney’s most famous female characters, Anna and Elsa, with a critical eye with CU lecturer Shannon Leone

Nov. 22 marks the five-year anniversary of the release of Disney’s global phenomenon Frozen 2. This film, and the first Frozen, are widely considered some of Disney’s most progressive works, changing how the studio depicts their female characters.

Many applaud the films for giving young women and girls new and better role models than those previous generations had in Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. However, are Anna and Elsa really that different from the princesses who came before them?

Shannon Leone, a ��ӽ紫ý lecturer, teaches a popular course in the Department of Women and Gender Studies called Disney’s Women and Girls.

Shannon Leone, a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder who teaches a popular course in the Department of Women and Gender Studies called Disney’s Women and Girls, notes, “If you look at more traditional Disney films, they have encouraged an idea of both girlhood and womanhood that celebrates traditional feminine passivity, the quintessential example being the damsel in distress. With more recent female protagonists, they have become arguably more empowered and express desires outside of romance.”

Yet there still is debate about how the women and girls of Disney are influencing their youngest viewers and fans.

“Younger children have more choices in who they can align their identities with—characters they can celebrate and characters that they can look at with a more critical eye. They have more choices than previous generations,” Leone says.

Some scholars have noted that Disney previously taught young girls that the only pleasure and purpose in life was finding a man to love them—a message that many women have questioned and rebelled against.

Now, Disney creates “progressive” princesses like Tiana from The Princess and the Frog and Moana from Moana, who will appear on screen again Nov. 27 when Moana 2 opens

Something different

One thing that makes the Frozen films—and their heroes Anna and Elsa—different from their Disney predecessors is its focus on love, but not necessarily romantic love.

“Frozen is an example of a film that portrays sisterly love, which unfortunately continues to be rare in Disney films,” Leone says. Most Disney films with a female protagonist are centered around an idea of love—specifically romantic love. By focusing on the love shared between sisters, instead of a man and a woman, Frozen and Frozen 2 present a broader picture of love and the things to which girls can aspire, Leone says.

Moana, who has been praised for having a more realistic figure, will return to theaters Nov. 27 in Moana 2. (Image: Disney Enterprises Inc.)

And the film Moana didn’t have a romantic subplot at all, instead focusing on Moana’s dreams of exploration. Moana also has been widely praised for having a more realistic figure compared with the impossible dimensions of previous Disney heroines.

It’s not just the romantic plotlines of Disney films that have changed, but also how the female characters are portrayed in the first place, Leone says. She cites Elsa from Frozen as an important example: a woman who is depicted more like a traditional Disney female villain than a princess.

“Elsa was supposed to be a villain, and having some traces of what would have made her an antagonist in the film actually produces more of a multifaceted human being, which I think young viewers responded to,” Leone explains.

Another notable example is Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, who made history by being Disney’s first African American princess. Despite breaking down barriers, many critiqued the movie for Tiana’s Eurocentric features.

“The film is self-aware of traditional expectations of beauty in association with the princess type. With that being said, I don’t want to undermine the significance of that film in its representation of Black American identity,” Leone says, emphasizing that despite its flaws, the movie still made important progress in representation.

While younger generations of little girls may have better role models in the Disney princesses of today, it’s still important to consider what these movies are teaching young viewers. “Contemporary films seem to still have to contend with these racialized and gendered expectations of the damsel in distress and the masculine hero,” Leone says, adding that it's easy to overlook the deeper meanings in Disney movies that children may latch onto.

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Looking at two of Disney’s most famous female characters, Anna and Elsa, with a critical eye with CU lecturer Shannon Leone.

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Top image: Disney Enterprises Inc.

Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 18:55:16 +0000

Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 12:55

Rachel Sauer

In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, ��ӽ紫ý’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds

Nathan Alexander Moore was thinking about the end of the world—not how to survive the apocalypse or overcome it, necessarily, or even how to fix it, but rather the decisions we make when the world collapses around us.

“Who do you become?” asks Moore, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Women and Gender Studies. “What choices do we make in this new world? How do we understand ourselves, and understand ourselves in community, in the larger context of a world that is ending or starting anew?

“For me, as someone who loves all things speculative fiction, dystopias are so interesting because these worlds become dystopic because of who the events are happening to. And the largest impacts, in fiction and real life, often happen to people who are marginalized. Dystopia largely impacts people who are Black or Brown, in places that are underdeveloped and underfunded.”

Nathan Alexander Moore, an assistant professor of Black trans and queer studies in the ��ӽ紫ý Department of Women and Gender Studies, explores issues of identity in her newly published dystopian story collection The Rupture Files.

From that end—or beginning—of the world was born The Rupture Files, Moore’s newly published story collection. Touted by publisher Hajar Press as “supernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster,” Moore’s tales actually plunge deeper into the ruined Earth, with Black and queer and trans characters exploring who they are and who they might become.

“I’m very aware of all of the history and the many cultural representations that have shaped Black people, and specifically Black queer people,” Moore explains. “I feel so much in our culture and in representations in film and television and literature, that Black characters and Black queer characters either become paragons or, on the opposite end, they’re kind of the worst of the worst, the villains, the despicable ones.

“For me, it’s about telling a story about a person who is nuanced. Some will see them as the hero, some as the villain, but at the core they are a person who is learning and growing and struggling. I want to show them—to show us—as beautiful, nuanced, complex characters, and that whatever their experience is, it’s a real experience. To try to be universal would strip us of what makes it interesting.”

Becoming a writer

Moore, who identifies as Black and trans, was a reader before she was a writer, finding motivation to finish her homework so she could crack open an Anne Rice novel. One of the first stories she wrote and shared with other people was called “Midnight and Nocturnes”—“I was using big words,” Moore recalls, “I thought I was so cute in high school”—about a vampire who was turned in ancient Egypt.

The vampire wakes at dusk “and she’s like, ‘I’m gonna go eat some people, I’m hungry.’ Then she runs into a vampire hunter, and for the first time she pauses at killing because he has the exact eyes of someone she knew in life. She says, ‘I remember when I was human, I loved you. You broke my heart, and I loved you’ and it ends with her making a big choice whether she’s going to live or die.”

Moore wrote it when she was 16 or 17 and submitted to a contest on Facebook and ended up winning third place. “It was the first story where I very much remember writing it and thinking, ‘OK, I think I’m writing, I think I might be a writer.’ And then when I came in third, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s on her way!’ It also helped that I wrote that story when Twilight/True Blood/Vampire Diaries was of the moment, and I was reading all of those books.”

Through graduate school, she focused on creative writing and Black literature and cultures, delving deeper into speculative fiction through a lens of feminism and collective memory. Her PhD, earned at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on contingency and Black temporal imaginations, and included a chapter titled “From Catastrophe to the Cataclysm: Black Speculations on the Limits of the Anthropocene & the Temporality of Disasters.”

In fact, writing The Rupture Files wasn’t completely Moore's idea. An editor at Hajar Press saw a presentation she gave for Black Women Radicals about writing Black geopolitics through speculative fiction and asked Moore if she wrote her own speculative fiction.

As it happened, there were some people she’d been living with for a while…

‘The world we’re living in’

“The first story (in The Rupture Files) is called ‘Sequela,’ and it’s about this far-future dystopia where the world is mostly ocean and everything is transient,” Moore says. “There were portions (of that story) I had written as series of prose poems, and they had been kind of living in my head. With the other stories, I had characters who weren’t fully realized—I had a snapshot, a photograph, they were peering over the fence and I was like, ‘Hmm, what are you doing?’ For a long time, they were thought experiments, and in writing them they became real.”

The story “Sequela” is about a woman named Shalomar, who lives in one of a series of stations in this new ocean world—“I imagine the stations like metallic squids, though I never said it in the story, and they kind of hunker on land and then jump around,” Moore explains—and whose job is station archivist. Whatever the station pulls out of the ocean, it’s her job to analyze it and think about its historical value. As a Black woman, Shalomar had been trying to document Black history before the apocalypse, and after it she discovered that the water wanted her to tell a different story, as did the mermaids.

In a story called “Ashes for Your Beauty,” Moore tells the story of a woman who is the consort (read: food source) of a vampire in a bombed-out, post-nuclear world, who discovers that she has power, and she can make power. “So, she has to decide, ‘Am I going to stay in this life that’s very scary and terrible but stable, or burn shit down?’” Moore says.

Writing the four stories in The Rupture Files was a different experience from the novel manuscript Moore wrote while earning her master’s.

“I was thinking about narrative arcs, about character development, who is the main person, whose perspective feels the most interesting,” Moore says. “I was balancing the expansiveness of living in a brand-new world that even I didn’t know all the rules of and also making it containable in short form. It was a steep learning curve but really fun.”

It also, she says, allowed her to more deeply consider the world as it currently is: “What’s always interesting about dystopias is they are projected as far futures, but any time someone’s writing a dystopia, they’re writing about the present—expanded and intensified, but the present. Dystopic writing is really about looking out at the world we’re living in today.”

Top: Background dystopia image by Daniele Gay

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In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, ��ӽ紫ý’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds.

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Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:49:15 +0000

Ghost stories: understanding a present haunted by the past Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2024 - 11:49

Blake Puscher

A ��ӽ紫ý poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is not a typical history book.

To write it, Julie Carr delved not just into archives and manuscripts, but also into her own family’s history—specifically, the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem, a People’s Party politician who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Nebraska between 1891 and 1897. Kem’s story weaves everything from populism to eugenics to spiritualism, and represents a broader narrative of a particular time, place and people in the American West.

Subtitled “Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West,” the book, through Kem, tells the story of how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the region and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

Julie Carr, a ��ӽ紫ý professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, plumbed her family's history to write Mud, Blood, and Ghosts.

In crafting the book, which was published last year, Carr, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, blended historical exposition with poetic language, a way of writing that she says is essential for expressing complex emotions. Because of the personal nature of the subject, Carr says, she was interested in speaking from her own perspective in the present as well as from Kem’s perspective in the past, demonstrating the idea that history is always with us.

In this sense, the reference to ghosts in the title has a double meaning, not just refering to 19th century spiritualists, but how “we are haunted by our pasts. They are with us all the time, and they are directing what we do,” Carr says.

“To acknowledge that is to take responsibility for it, to think, ‘Given all of that, what is my responsibility to the future and to the present?’”

A farmer’s populism

Omer Kem was born in 1855 in Hagerstown, Indiana, to an itinerant and largely unsuccessful farmer who often moved his family to find better work. Kem’s family was ravaged by disease and continuing financial instability, so he set out on his own, ultimately moving to Nebraska. As a young man, he farmed through government programs like the Swamp Lands Act and the Homestead Act, but failed due to infertile conditions. Many farmer settlers in Nebraska were in a similar situation, falling into debt as the seeds they sowed blew away in the hot winds of the region’s 1889-1899 drought.

When Kem ran for and won a seat in Congress, his experiences inspired him to join the populist movement of the time along with many rural farmers and other people living in poverty. The movement was a response to the economic and social conditions of the Gilded Age, according to Carr:

“Both urban laborers and rural laborers were left in the lurch,” as the former lacked protections like the eight-hour workday and the latter faced unregulated crop prices and railroad rates, among other issues. Meanwhile, with no graduated income tax, the people at the top did not pay more, and there was no significant social safety net at that time.

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts details how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the American West and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.

“All of these things combined with the problem of weather and climate in the Plains states,” Carr says. Many poor farmers had moved to states in the Great Plains region during the mid- and late-19th century following the Homestead Act, but in dry climates, the land couldn’t produce without massive irrigation. In the South, where climate was not the issue, “we’re looking at a totally different dynamic having to do with the end of Reconstruction, and poverty among Black farmers especially.”

What unites the People’s Party with today’s populists might be its criticism of the societal elite, Carr says, “coupled with the demand for greater representation in politics. I think a lot of people would say that many contemporary American populists, on the right or the left, are people who for various reasons have not felt included in the political system.”

American eugenics at the turn of the 20th century

Kem also was influenced by the racial segregation and fear of “mixing races” that was both commonplace and largely unchallenged for several generations after the Civil War. Along with large swathes of the American public, Carr says, Kem came to believe in the ideology of eugenics, a term coined to describe attempts at increasing the number of people with “superior” mental and physical traits through the human equivalent of selective breeding. It grew, in part, from elements of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the heritability of traits.

“The science itself was not very detailed,” Carr explains. “It was the beginning of an understanding of how genetics works. That science got married to criminology, ideas around welfare, the problems that came with urbanization, the first wave of the Great Migration and the huge numbers of immigrants coming in during the beginning of the 20th century.”

These major demographic and political changes made some people afraid, especially members of dominant groups, Carr says. Because of the widespread belief that many traits and behaviors were inherited, eugenicists justified ostracizing or marginalizing people who were Black, poor, disabled, criminals and immigrants, insisting they would “taint” the gene pool.

“Many people who believed in ‘progress’ believed in eugenics,” Carr says, including those who might be considered left-wing. “That’s important to say because it points to the ways in which white supremacy and fascistic thinking can bleed into different political mindsets or belief systems.” Even prominent feminists of the time like Margaret Sanger espoused eugenic beliefs, though she never fully bought into forced sterilization as Kem did, Carr says.

The spiritualist movement

In addition to eugenics, Omer Kem believed in spiritualism, a movement centered around the idea that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Carr notes in her book that spiritualism was common in Midwest Populist circles as well as among the general public; there were an estimated 5 to 6 million adherents by the 1860s, according to a historian cited by Carr.

A number of scholars document spiritualists’ involvement in progressive political causes. For example, the Bland family, Washington, D.C., activists whom Kem met when he moved to the capital after being elected to Congress, were populists as well as the founders of the National Indian Defense Association, a reform organization that opposed the forced assimilation of Native Americans.

��ӽ紫ý Professor Julie Carr focused on the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem to explore the history of spiritualism, populism and eugenics in the American West and the United States.

At a dinner that Kem had with the Blands after he had been placed on the House Indian Affairs Committee, the Blands’ niece Maggie, a purported medium, described the ghosts of Kem’s mother and beloved sister Ellen as glowing orbs hovering near his head. This led to a series of encounters with his dead family members, including his son Bert.

Carr suggests that the Blands might have been using their spiritualism as a form of lobbying, as after these encounters with his dead relatives, Kem became very close to the Blands and did, in fact, advocate for their cause in Congress. Later, Kem’s spiritualism took another turn when he began to “see” a Native American “spirit guide” who he believed had entered his body.

Historians understand the prevalence of Native spirit guides differently. Some interpret it as yet another form of removal, reducing Native Americans to spectral presences, while others argue that spiritualists were generally sympathetic toward Native Americans, and sometimes used the “voices” of Native spirits to advocate for reforms (though these generally involved coerced assimilation through institutions such as the Indian schools). While this may have been a form of social justice work, it was a distorted one, according to Carr, based as it was on both appropriation and projection.

“In my great-grandfather’s case,” Carr says, “he started having visions of the ‘spirit’ of a ‘Native American healer’ entering his body in the 1890s when he was in Congress. He maintained this imagined relationship with this ‘spirit’ for the rest of his life. I think there’re some interesting psychological dynamics going on there, one being a desire to identify with Native Americans because of the way that he understands Indigenous people as having a legitimate right to the land.

“The other complexity is that, even as he’s making speeches on the congressional floor advocating for at least some level of Native sovereignty, he is also legislating for the further removal of Native people from land. In that split, you can see a kind of crisis. If nothing else, it has to be a crisis of conscience. Creating for himself, in a sense, an imaginary friend in this spirit guide he calls ‘Fleet Wind’ is a way, I think, to respond to that crisis of conscience. Perhaps this is true of many forms of appropriation and projection.”

Kem’s “complex history of bad and good luck, of power struggles, and of property,” as Carr describes them, highlights how the past haunts the present like a ghost, despite the flaws of its actors. Carr finds stark contrast between the past and the present in the People’s Party platform: “This Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other.”

“Though this word love, like the phrase the people, has so often been cheapened, distorted and mobilized for violent ends,” Carr writes, “I still want to ask: What if we took them at their word?”

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A ��ӽ紫ý poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family.

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In historic first, Mexico is poised to elect female president

Anonymous — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:38:06 +0000

In historic first, Mexico is poised to elect female president Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/31/2024 - 08:38

Pam Moore

However, ��ӽ紫ý scholar Lorraine Bayard de Volo notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a more feminist mode of governing

Editor's note: On Monday, Claudia Scheinbaum is the presumptive winner in what is being called a landslide victory.

While Americans follow a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, it’s also an exciting and historic election year in the country’s southern neighbor.

On June 2, Mexico’s election day, and for the first time in the nation’s history, a woman will almost certainly win the presidential election.

The election is significant not only for the more than 127 million people living in Mexico, but for the Mexican diaspora and those of Mexican heritage throughout the world, including in Colorado’s Front Range.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a ��ӽ紫ý political scientist and professor of women and gender studies, notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a feminist mode of governing in Mexico.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a political scientist and University of Colorado Boulder professor of women and gender studies, has been a scholar of Latin American politics—focusing on gender as it interacts with and informs war, revolution, political violence and social movements—since her undergraduate studies. She has closely followed Mexico’s presidential election, noting that even though Mexico trails several of its Latin American counterparts in electing a female president, the event still is historic for a country that has traditionally identified with macho culture.

Bayard de Volo recently spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about what this presidential election could mean for Mexico and for those around the world watching.

Question: How did you become interested in this area of study?

Bayard de Volo: As an undergraduate in the ‘80s, studying political science and economics, I was very interested in the various ways in which the U.S. was funding the wars taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In graduate school, I became increasingly interested in the growing field of gender studies. As a political science PhD student specializing in gender studies, I was able to combine my interests. While studying Latin American politics, particularly war, revolutions and social movements, I was hearing about how women were getting involved, yet there was very little understanding of how gender informed political violence and social mobilization.

I became very intrigued with trying to fill the gap in the research, and I’ve been fascinated by this field of study ever since.

Question: Can you give a quick overview of the upcoming Mexican presidential election?

Bayard de Volo: The Mexican president is in office for a six-year term and cannot run for reelection. Of the three candidates running to take the place of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) when his term ends on Oct. 1, the two leading contenders are Claudia Scheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez.

Scheinbaum represents the Morena coalition, which is a newer party, but also the same party as AMLO, who won in a landslide and still has very high approval ratings. She’s leading in the polls right now, at least in part due to AMLO’s popularity. Although she identifies as a feminist, if she were to win, she’d inherit her predecessor’s antagonism toward Mexico’s growing women’s movement. Scheinbaum’s experience includes working in the AMLO administration and having served as the Head of Government of Mexico City.

Xóchitl Gálvez represents the Frente Amplio, the broad front, a coalition party that includes three formerly very powerful parties (and formerly mutually antagonistic parties). She was a senator until her nomination as a presidential candidate and has organized for indigenous rights and also served as mayor in a borough of Mexico City.

Interestingly, it’s not only their gender identities but also their ethnicities that represent a departure from the norm. Scheinbaum is of Jewish descent while Gálvez has indigenous roots.

People at an opposition rally in the Zocalo, Mexico City's main square, May 19 to encourage voting in Sunday's presidential election. The sign reads, “We are all the same Mexico." (Photo: Ginnette Riquelme/AP)

No matter who wins this election, AMLO will continue to have a lot of influence due to his overwhelming popularity. There are concerns that his political capital could be used to pressure his successor.

Question: To what extent has the rise of Mexico’s women’s movement contributed to the likely election of its first female president?

Bayard de Volo: It’s hard to say. The women’s movement is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Many Latin American countries—including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica—have already elected female presidents, so Mexico is actually behind the curve in that regard.

Meanwhile, there’s been a vibrant, burgeoning women’s movement in Mexico in recent years, which has focused its efforts on reproductive rights and femicide. While efforts were underway to overturn Roe v. Wade here in the United States through two different Supreme Court decisions, Mexico decriminalized abortion within certain parameters.

Although the government has done little to address the high rates of femicide, and despite being a nation known for its macho culture, Mexico’s government has adopted gender quotas with the goal of achieving gender parity in politics. Right now, 50% of Mexico’s lower house is female, women are governors in about a quarter of Mexico’s states and there are some states where women outnumber men in elected office.

The rising women’s movement might be reflective of increasing acceptance of gender parity, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say it’s had a huge influence on the election. Women in Mexico take many different political positions. There’s no clear agreement on what constitutes ‘women’s interests,’ and the election of a female president wouldn’t necessarily guarantee a more feminist mode of governing.

Question: What can the United States learn from Mexico?

Bayard de Volo: That’s a hard question because we are such different countries with different electoral systems. It would be very difficult to implement a gender quota in the U.S. because we don’t have proportional representation. Trying to do something like that here would be controversial, to say the least. That said, it is interesting that a nation that has been identified as quintessentially macho is prepared to elect a woman.

Top image: left, Claudia Scheinbaum (photo: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto/Getty Images) and right, Xóchitl Gálvez (photo: from Gálvez's Facebook)

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However, ��ӽ紫ý scholar Lorraine Bayard de Volo notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a more feminist mode of governing.

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