The emotional need comes first and then the pictures.
–Nan Goldin, 1998

In this issue we explore some of the catalysts for feminist consciousness, looking specifically at the relationship between feeling and technology. Many of the articles published here examine the ways in which feminism and the mass media have developed alongside one another, inventing visual and other languages that shape new emotions and perceptions. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller explores the effects of emerging audio and print technologies on the lives and self-representations of late-nineteenth-century feminists Annie Besant and sisters Helen and Olivia Rossetti; Cheryl Hindrichs explores the idea of a feminist optics in work by filmmaker Germaine Dulac and writer Virginia Woolf; Sarah Ruddy discusses the language of loss in the photographs of Nan Goldin; and Myra J. Hird calls for a re-examination of the feminist potential of scientific disciplines such as biology and neurology. Some of our authors also examine the ways in which future perceptions can be changed by encounters with the past, either in fact or in fantasy: Roberta Gold looks at the ways in which Second Wave feminism in New York adapted many of the strategies of the earlier tenants’ rights movement, and Catherine Pavlish uses the figure of Emily Dickinson to meditate on the pressures of a feminist consciousness in both Dickinson’s era and our own. { READ MORE as PDF }

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Preface
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Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Body, Spirit, Print: The Radical Autobiographies of
Annie Besant and Helen and Olivia Rossetti
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Catherine Pavlish
Becoming Emily (Creative Nonfiction)
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Cheryl Hindrichs
Feminist Optics and Avant-Garde Cinema:
Germaine Dulac’s “The Smiling Madame Beudet”
and Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”
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Natalie E. Illum
The Center at Halsted; still (Poetry)
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Myra J. Hird
Feminist Engagements with Matter
(Review Essay)
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Sarah Ruddy
“A Radiant Eye Yearns from Me”:
Figuring Documentary in the Photography of Nan Goldin
(Art Essay)
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H.E. Wright
Baby (Fiction)
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Roberta Gold
“I Had Not Seen Women like That Before”:
Intergenerational Feminism in New York City’s
Tenant Movement
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Angie Young
Abortion, Ideology, and the Murder of George Tiller
(News and Views)
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Notes on Contributors
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Guidelines for Contributors
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Publications Received
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Cover Art
Nan Goldin, Ryan in the tub, Provincetown, 1976.