@reproutopia
Philadelphia feminist writer • ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFS, POLICEWOMEN & GIRLBOSSES AGAINST LIBERATION • patreon.com/reproutopia • Full Surrogacy Now • Abolish the Family • essays @ LRB, Harper's, The Drift, Lux • octopus essay n+1 mag • "recovering academic"
“One turns to fictional horrors because there are so many horrors in reality. Where else, we ask, to put the feelings, pending revolution? A scary movie shrinks the world’s horrors down into, not manageable exactly, but bounded, feelable parcels.”— @reproutopia.bsky.social
NEW MAGAZINE ALERT
"When you are in Palestine, you see things exactly as they are." -Sara Yasin @palfest.bsky.social www.thekeymagazine.com/p/western-jo...
"Where else, we ask, to put the feelings, pending revolution? A scary movie shrinks the world’s horrors down into, not manageable exactly, but bounded, feelable parcels. In a landscape dense with quiescent cultural products, horror is anti-anesthetic."
Can't wait!! Godspeed to you. Unrelatedly, a crazy thing about my week last week was learning that my "Satanic Death Is Real" piece is part of the Prairieland terrorism trial 🤯
That's so exciting! I'm so failing to figure out what this next book is 👀👀👀
Thank you so much, Jon! I had your book open while writing this
Enormously grateful to @reproutopia.bsky.social for this piece: not only an excellent review of books exemplifying some of the trends within contemporary horror criticism but also a wonderful exploration of the collectivity that draws us to horror in the first place: massreview.org/2026/03/03/s...
"I more than once mentally thanked Lisowski in Uncanny Valley Girls for the respect she affords films like Antichrist & The Ring merely by refraining from jamming the square peg of horror into liberal feminism’s round hole."
Me on horror + feminism, now & in the '70s: massreview.org/2026/03/03/s...
The attitude @zefrrr.bsky.social adopts for her horror analysis resonates with Avgi Saketopoulou’s vindication of “traumatophilia,” an approach to woundedness that refrains from pathologizing the kind of scar-tracing self-touching at the heart of UNCANNY VALLEY GIRLS: massreview.org/2026/03/03/s...
Thank you for this! I'll have a look!
Ooh no, it is on my list though! Thank you for the recommendation
WAIT shit I got it the wrong way around in this skeet obviously: it's UNCANNY VALLEY GIRLS by Zefyr Lisowski and SCREAM WITH ME by Eleanor Johnson 🤦🏻♀️
Thank you :)
Absolutely! I went on "Cerise and Vicky Rank The Movies" to talk about all the Jurassic Park movies, but idk why I can't find the link to the episode right now, maybe @vickyacab.bsky.social can help
😍🤩🌞 That makes me so happy, Gretchen
A striking vivisection of the appeal - the allure, rather - that horror's imagery and storytelling has to those who nonetheless must live some of it in reality as well.
I used to think I didn’t like horror films, but then 13 yrs ago I met my wife, & she showed me otherwise. A door opened for me onto a world of visceral anti-normality, by turns nastily nihilistic & counterintuitively utopian. New words from me on feminism+scary movies: massreview.org/2026/03/03/s...
A scary movie shrinks the world’s horrors down into, not manageable exactly, but bounded, feelable parcels. In a landscape dense with quiescent cultural products, horror is antianesthetic. Me on SCREAM WITH ME by Zefyr Lisowski + UNCANNY VALLEY GIRLS by Eleanor Johnson massreview.org/2026/03/03/s...
NO WAR ON IRAN
Davis & Byron exalt real friends above other concepts of love. Not a cult, nor the cult of the couple-form is what is most needed for flourishing; rather, what these novels call for is friend-love—beyond even the mutual mothering-imperative—without an onus to heal www.publicbooks.org/is-the-cis-l...
I meant every word of the blurb I gave for this book. One could and should read it for its passing, almost off-hand prescription regarding what Emma calls good, "gestational" deaths, alone. But everyone *needs* to read its theorization of children, of gestation's relation to the totality of history.
Another favorite quote from this book is Emma's extremely thoughtful reply to cissexist feminism (TERFism):
“Nothing is lost by recognizing that misogyny and transphobia are eternally and intrinsically linked, actually consubstantial, forces that punish people for their relation to the feminine.”
"Gestationality and not individuality is the horizon of feminism."
-revolutionary feminist Emma Heaney aka @riislover667.bsky.social (This Watery Place, 2025 www.plutobooks.com/product/this...).
Many 70s utopianisms gave way to quasifascistic ideologies (e.g. TERFism). Do you really dismiss youth lib tout court for this reason? I don't. Tbh it's hard conducting a conv w s/o who has repeatedly marked me not just as s/o to disagree with, but as an anti feminist, csa, rape pedophilia apologist
Do I? Who are you thinking of?
Of course they were feminists, but I don't consider their queer liberationist arguments against sex offender registries and paranoid or carceral antipedophilia legislation, on the basis that these things harm children, to be an enemy feminism, no. Clearly you do. Ok!
I know you hate my guts for some reason but could you at least bother reading the book and grasping the definition and decades-old radical feminist derivation of the concept of pornophobia (basically an expansion on whorephobia) before holding forth about my evilness and pedophile-smearing me??
I have zero clue why you think I don't engage with it care about this. I literally spent all of last Sunday teaching about this exact thing. The reason I don't include Califia & Rubin's support of NAMBLA in Enemy Feminisms is that it is a book about, er, enemy *feminisms* (not enemy queer politics).
hehehe look it's maybe not our #1 priority but it has to be on the list
An automatically generated Patreon post card, with an image still from "Wuthering Heights" (2026) depicting Cathy and Edgar living the high life, and the title of the Patreon post; a non carceral solution to Emerald Fennell
God help me, I taked a take
www.patreon.com/posts/151170...
#wutheringheights
"Not a cult, nor the cult of the couple-form is what is most needed for human flourishing; rather, what these novels call for is friend-love—beyond even the mutual mothering-imperative—without any onus to heal or repair"
www.publicbooks.org/is-the-cis-l...