Gender and Videogames: The political valency of Lara Croft

The Face: Is Lara a feminist icon or a sexist fantasy? Toby Gard: Neither and a bit of both. Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist cliches apart from the fact that she’s got an unbelievable figure. Strong, independent women are the perfect fantasy girls—the untouchable is always the most desirable (Interview with Lara’s creator Toby Gard in The Face magazine, June 1997)

Vital lines drawn from books: difficult feelings in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alison’s lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped – killed even, in the case of the father – in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualise her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West

Mi madre comparte sus secretos. Historias. Revista de la Dirección de Estudios Históricos Num. 83 (2012) septiembre-diciembre

Katie Roiphe es profesora en el Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute de la Universidad de Nueva York. Nació en 1968 y es autora de libros muy diversos, como The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994), el cual le valió un gran elogio de parte de Camille Paglia, Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century’s End (1997) y Uncomonn Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1937 (2007), así como de la novela Still She Haunts Me (2001), la cual trata sobre Lewis Carroll y quien fuera su modelo para Alicia en el País de las Maravillas. Es hija de Anne Roiphe (1935), quien formara filas entre las feministas de Estados Unidos de medio siglo, autora de un puñado de novelas autobiográficas y de los siguientes libros de memorias: Fruitful: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood (1996), 1185 Park Avenue, A Memoir (2000), Epilogue: A Memoir (2008) Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason (2011). Esta nota, tomada de The New York Times el 27 de marzo de 2011, versa precisamente sobre Art and Madness