Natalie Wilson's Posts

Breaking Dawn: Part 1—An Anti-Abortion Message in a Bruised-Apple Package

[SPOILER ALERT: This review reveals major events in Breaking Dawn.] As I sat watching the vampiric ode to white weddings that dominated the opening scenes of Breaking Dawn: Part 1, I waited anxiously for the honeymoon and morning-after scenes, wondering how the latest Twilight film would present vampire Edward’s “headboard-busting” sex and his new wife [...]

To Get Hate Speech Off Campus, Cal State Students Wield Title IX

In an ongoing student battle against a hate-filled tabloid, The Koala, that has been causing uproar on three Cal State campuses since January, Cal State San Marcos students have now filed a Title IX complaint with the university. In addition to aggressively handing out their publication by shoving it in students’ faces, “Koalans” also make [...]

What a Difference a Strong Snow White Makes

Two new fall TV shows, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, blend the real world with the world of fairy tales–but there the similarities stop. The two are radically different, especially in their representations of women. When Grimm remembers that women exist, they are hapless victims (think CSI: Deep Dark Woods), while Once Upon a [...]

“In Time” Wastes Time

Based on a very timely premise, the new film In Time ironically moves rather slowly over the course of its 109 minutes. Lacking a “time is running out” feel and failing to deliver an edge-of-your-seat “every moment counts” experience, the film instead plods along in its attempt to examine wealth disparity through the metaphor of [...]

Rape as a Weapon of War

On October 11, PBS will kick off its new five-part series Women, War, and Peace, executive-produced by Abigail Disney, Gini Reticker and Pamela Hogan. I interviewed Peggy Kuo, a war-crimes prosecutor featured in I Came To Testify, the first segment to air, which focuses on the first-ever international criminal tribunal that addressed rape as a [...]

Pan Am: Will Women Take Flight?

Though I agree with Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker that you can’t judge a show by its pilot, I would counter that, in the case of Pan Am, there is quite a bit we can glean from the season opener. Indeed, just as one can gather quite a bit from a book’s cover–is the [...]

Wed, Bed and Bruised–But Certainly Not Equal

As today is the 40th anniversary of Women’s Equality Day, it’s an appropriate moment to consider the continuing inequalities women face. As a scholar of popular culture who tracks the way it grapples with changing conceptions of gender and sexuality, I am struck by the profound difference between Bella Abzug, staunch supporter of women’s rights, [...]

A New “Fright Night”: What a Difference a Female Screenwriter Makes

Debates about whether women’s writing was uniquely female or if there was a “feminine voice” permeated much femininist theorizing in the ’70s and ’80s. While I tend to be wary of claims about difference grounded in biological determinism, I do think that for many female writers their experiences as women, or as what Simone de [...]

Blowing the Whistle on “Peacekeeping” Sex Traffickers

The book version of The Whistleblower provided a harrowing, page-turning account of sexual trafficking in post-war Bosnia, revealing how the private military contractor DynCorp, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department were complicit in hiding, as well as perpetuating, the global sex trafficking industry. The film adaptation now out in theaters, with an original [...]

The Terrible, Awful Sweetness of The Help

If Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help was an angel food cake study of racism and segregation in the 60’s South, the new movie adaptation is even fluffier. Like a dollop of whip cream skimmed off a multi-layered cake, the film only grazes the surface of the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender and geohistory. Let [...]

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