“We’re trained to shop for motherhood — to buy things to mold our own maternal identities according to someone else’s standards.”

There’s so much I want to say to my doppelgänger. But she’s gone.

There are days, astounding days, when we are returned to ourselves again and again.

On the limits of sympathy, empathy, and vasectomy.

I chose Woodhull as an ancestor. My gender, I decided, was of Frank Woodhull’s lineage.

I always felt so cool buying it. Like as close to my womanhood as I could get.

In the Swahili language and culture, a woman is often identified by her children’s names.

Creation, reproduction, was supposed to be my inheritance, my potential; I, too, was once a daughter cell.

Watching Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” post-Roe.

It was hard to beat intelligence but impossible to beat stupidity, and 766 was brutally, inventively stupid.

I tell the oracles that no one has touched / me, that plenty have looked, drunk their fill / on my (   ).

I let myself believe that we felt the same defiance, the same degree of angry and powerless and omnipotent and free.

Jackson’s biographer on the author’s fragmented female characters — and her critical renaissance

The author of The Upstairs House on postpartum depression, hauntings, and the legacy of Margaret Wise Brown.

The philosopher on sex as a political phenomenon

A federal prisoner released during the pandemic is sent behind back bars—while pregnant.

I am a boy, but I’m not a boy like my brother. Still, neither am I a girl like my sister. “Janie, be a weed,” Mom says.

Photographer Fatimah Hossaini spent three years trying to upend Western narratives about women in her country. She didn't get to finish her work.

What happens when women's rights are instrumental, not ideological.

On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.

Sometimes the body is a body.

"I will die on this hill, the hill that says: Everything that happens online is real. Online is reality, as much as meatspace."

“After the fall of man, Eden was taken away and we humans have to cover our nakedness in compliance with our punishment. “

A ubiquitous stereotype takes on a life of its own.

Reading and rereading Leslie Feinberg’s transformative 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues.

The editors of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics on imagination, abundance, and what keep them up at night

The author of Girlhood talks about patriarchy, empty consent, and being aware of her feral qualities.

The author of the illustrated novel Justine reflects on queer teenage longing, deprivation, and Diet Coke.

Relating their experiences of postpartum psychosis, two writers tap into broader truths about parenting and fear.

On masculinity and making sense of history.

The heat guy considers what to do with us, the frozen lesbians on the little dead-end street. If God cut off our heat, who is he to intervene?

We thought keeping secrets made us powerful. That’s when the handyman found us.

I am younger, and she is older—but love turns us into time travelers.

Sarah Smarsh’s book She Come By It Natural explores the complexities of the Dolly Parton brand of feminism

Christina Kim risked everything to escape North Korea’s entrenched gender violence. She almost didn’t make it.

Vanessa Guillén’s murder was a stark reminder of the dangers facing women in the Army.

A new collection of essays considers the weight of patriarchy and the ordinary traumas of being a woman.

Notes on a riot.

The writer and editor on resisting the expectations for minority voices, her French-inflected prose, and the complications that make life worthwhile.

The Cuban revolutionary Celia Sánchez remains an enigma, despite, or because of, her place at Castro's side.

A trans author reflects on the fraught history of trans women’s memoir covers, and why she didn’t want her likeness on her own.

Amid chaos, repression, and violence, one woman flees Boko Haram; another seeks it out.

The author of The Third Rainbow Girl on internalizing shame, creating healing, and scrambling gender in a place where “the earth loves you and also wants to kill you.”

The public-health researcher and author of The Pleasure Gap on the medicalization of women’s sexuality, the politics of “faking it,” and why female desire “inspires panic and fascination.”

How about adopting a fully grown girl? Says a broken-headed doll.

Much later, after everything that happened, Frank no longer found much pleasure in the Great Books—he suspected they mocked him, that they, in a way, had written his own downfall, his own eventual exile.

The writer on intimate partner violence and the forces that made it a hard story to tell.

The editor of Burn It Down talks about the stabilizing benefits of women’s anger, the slow pace of change, and why it’s important to take up space on the subway.

A slow-burning epic, On Swift Horses paints a new picture of our American mythology.

Colombian artist Ruby Rumié confronts domestic violence.

The discourse around the #MeToo movement doesn't always reflect the realities of living with trauma.

I was out in the front garden weeding between the about-to-bloom tiger lilies the first time I saw them. Four girls in bathing suits and flip-flops, their mouths popsicle red and Italian-ice blue.

In an excerpt from her new memoir, Jeannie Vanasco grapples with whether, and how, to approach the boy who raped her fourteen years before.

If sex work were decriminalized, would Alisha Walker still have been charged with murder?

Not necessarily for the male gaze, heels can exemplify an assertive personality, a refusal to be ignored.

Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.

The author of the stunning debut novel Naamah on reimagining the story of the ark to be feminist and surreal, with a healthy dose of agnosticism.

A boundary-pushing drag bar in Brooklyn promises more freedom for us all

The writer on how to rise from trauma and heal collective wounds.

The philosopher on how our appearance intolerance hinders ideas and human flourishing

Women's recruitment into elite commandos, formed in response to post-9/11 terrorism, was not driven by a desire for diversity in the workplace, but by the need to conduct raids and arrest militants without alienating local communities.

A novel borne out of an earthquake, a departed friend, and a translation from which lost voices rise.

She banged on the elevator door with her left fist and then fumbled through her purse. All she had that approximated a weapon was a ballpoint pen. Her purse revealed some tawdry, ill-conceived faith in human nature. The elevator door made a deep, echoing thud as she hit it, and the doors remained shut.

You’re twenty-two in 1975, and you’re with your bud walking past the candy store at the beach where the kids hang out, and you see two eighth-grade girls hanging out. Do you say: a) nothing b) anything or c) “Two more years.”

Being a woman is always a performance; only the very old and very young are allowed to bow out of it. The rest must play our parts with vigor but seemingly without effort.

The author on her new memoir, SICK; searching for home; and her struggle to be heard by the medical establishment.

I know how to stay safe among lions in the wild. Around men of my own species, things feel more complicated.

Female Fighters series: The activist-scholar talks about black women and militancy, and whether guns have a place in struggles for liberation.

Where are disabled people in the Time's Up movement?

Remembering a #MeToo moment in Franco’s Spain.

A philosopher rethinks what’s keeping women down.

I stretch my neck into the next life.

A cautionary tale of how criminalization impacts women across class lines.

Vanessa Grigoriadis discusses her new book about campus sexual assault in the time of Trump.

This is a story about what girls must learn and how dangerous it can feel to learn it.

Her emotional circuitry endlessly interrupted every time she took off her clothes.

On living in Jerusalem.

The feminist scholar on bridging theory and ordinary life, and the pervasive myth that feminism originated in white culture.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with a sexy photograph. When I grew up, it looked different.

The writer on making hard choices, being raised by feminists, and her latest novel's newfound wisdom.

The genre-spanning writer on oppressed and unruly bodies, and her new memoir, Hunger.

Here comes the hard part, the Land of the Dead / floating just above my head

Oral histories on life, death, and survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

The polar explorer on navigating danger.

The black masks of Frank Ocean, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W.E.B. Du Bois in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight.

The knee-jerk response to militarized women is dismissal and condemnation. Instead, the founder of V-Day argues, it is time to reexamine their stories and understand their wrath.

In search of the female extremist, somewhere between fantasy and fear.

What hurdles remain for LBGT+ boys in the Boy Scouts?

The power and danger of women who take up space.

Uterine transplants are frontier science, but they offer hope of possibility for trans women and others seeking parenthood.

Lisa Wade’s first book reframes the conversation about sex on campus.

The artist, writer, filmmaker, and singer on transcending binaries to create works of empathy and protest.

The artist and theorist on the possibilities for music after sound.

A photographic portrait of war, peace, and life in the countryside.

In Colombia, a female fighter on life after FARC.

How queer families redefine the terms we use.