A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality. Yet, at the risk of angering his ghost, we mu
Almost from the beginning Audre Lorde questioned the fundamental tag of identity: her name. As a chubby, unruly five-year-old, she dropped the "y" from "Audrey," enjoying the aesthetic balance that "Audre Lorde," with its double "e," created on her blue-lined notebook paper. Later in life she would a
According to Luce Irigaray, Western civilization is "without any female philosophy or linguistics, any female religion or politics. All of these disciplines have been set up in accordance with a male object." This kind of basic feminist observation might sound obvious now, but when Irigaray first utt
The film touted by critics as the most powerful propaganda piece ever was created for the Nazis -- it was also made by a woman. The bold and beautiful Leni Riefenstahl got her start as a ballet dancer in pre-war Berlin. When she saw an early Arnold Fanck film on mountaineering, she was literally s