Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 10 days 8 hours 1 minute
Anita decided to forego our usual intro banter this week, so we just jumped right into this week's topic: the social impact of our cultural obsession with depictions of policing. From Dragnet to Brooklyn 99, what lies behind our abiding interest in the people and institutions tasked with maintaining “law and order”?
On this week’s episode, we talk about the beautiful new film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a deeply personal movie about identity, gentrification, and institutional power. Ebony Adams calls it “simultaneously tactile and dreamlike!” Also, the ramifications of Jay-Z’s new deal with the NFL, and Marvel’s disappointing refusal to publish an anthology introduction that has some (appropriately) harsh words for Donald Trump.
This week, we're going toe-to-toe with writer-director Riley Stearns' new dark comedy The Art of Self Defense, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Alessandro Nivola. We talk about how the film brings a critical lens to the socially constructed "rules" of manhood, and to the ways in which men are pressured to perform masculinity among other men in the establishment of a kind of hierarchy. We also discuss how the film works as a kind of response to Fight Club.
**SPOILERS ABOUND FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE EPISODE -- BE WARNED** Blend yourself a frozen marg and buckle up for this week's episode of Feminist Frequency Radio, in which your Southern California stalwarts cruise up the 101 for a journey into Hollywood Past. This week, we discuss Quentin Tarantino's 9th feature film, an epic* ode to manly men and one uncomplicated babywoman...
Time travel is such a powerful fictional device. It allows creators to shine a light on the cultural struggles and social ills of the present by making powerful connections with the past, and by offering wonderful or horrifying visions of the future. Of course, it can also just be a whole lot of fun! But time travel is uniquely powerful as a tool for feminist writers; after all, feminism has always fought to prevent women’s contributions from being written out of history...
There’s a lot to celebrate about our increasingly diverse mainstream media landscape. Modern audiences can immerse themselves in so many different kinds of compelling stories-- stories from which POC, the disabled, queer people -- (basically anyone who wasn’t middle class, straight, and white) had traditionally been excluded. It’s a victory of a sort, but it only goes so far...
This week, we go on a swingin’ European adventure with Spider-Man: Far From Home. Anita’s friend Sara Fritzon joins us to serve as the token European for our conversation about Peter Parker’s latest escapades. Anita gushes over Tom Holland as Peter, Carolyn rants about the film’s politics, and longtime Spider-Fan Sara explains why she loves the MCU Spider-Man films, despite feeling that they don’t go far enough in exploring and humanizing their villains.
Your battle-hardened hosts gather in the Thunderdome to discuss Strong Female Characters in our media. What kinds of aesthetic and narrative features tend to mark someone as a “strong female character”? Which genres seem most invested in the presentation of a specific kind of sexualized female badass? How do we celebrate the presence of authentic strong female characters while keeping our critical goggles attuned to their more problematic incarnations?
Everyone is talking about HBO’s Chernobyl. They say it’s good but it’s not enjoyable. We decide to find out for ourselves. Entertainment this news includes: Megan Rapinoe, Colin Kaepernick, Nike and re-boycotting Nike for life, Disney’s live action Little Mermaid.
Who You Callin' Mary Sue? On this week’s episode, we tackle the topic of the Mary Sue! It’s a term that some have used as a cudgel in recent years with which to attack prominent female characters that they dislike for one reason or another, but what does the term really mean? Where did it come from? And does it still have any value in our modern-day conversations about female characters?