When Is It OK to Beat Your Wife?

A version of this piece appeared on the blog for the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Ever wonder how people justified wife beating as an OK thing to do?

Compromising Positions: Reflections on the Violence Against Women Act

A version of this essay appeared in Sexuality and Society.

Since becoming law on Sept. 13, 1994, The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has provided billions

The Real Choices Women Make

A version of this essay appeared on Alternet.

I leaned across the small cafe table and asked, inappropriately, “So, what brings you here?” I knew better, but the laughter, clinking of glasses, lit votives and mellow trip-hop made it feel like a real party.

Gender as a Social Institution

A version of this piece appears in the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society:

Gender As A Social Institution

Introduction

A number of theories attempt to explain how social inequality based on gender is produced, maintained and unsettled. This article takes up one such approach, looking at gender as a social institution. Framing gender as a social institution asserts

Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources

From Writing Spaces, a great (and free!) collection of essays for use in the college writing classroom.  Fun fact: I made the final edits to this piece the day I gave birth to my daughter Lila.  I still remember my arms stretching awkwardly over my belly to reach the keyboard.

The abstract:

As a writing instructor, you want to help students reflect on and refine reading practices that are so crucial to writing and academic success.  An examination of the elements of a rhetorical reading strategy—conceptualizing reading as part of an academic conversation, reading actively (and what this looks like), figuring out primary and secondary audiences, recognizing road maps embedded in the reading, and identifying the main argument and why it matters—make this chapter a powerful tool for starting classroom discussion and/or inspiring written reflection. This chapter can also help your students learn to recognize and avoid employing reading strategies that don’t work: reading without grasping content, skimming or skipping text, or latching onto one minor argument without understanding the author’s main point, or following every unfamiliar term, name, and phrase back to multiple sources.

The full piece is here.

Memory Keeper

A version of this piece was published on HerStry.com.

Noah and I were walking the other day when we heard a baby crying. Like really crying. Like drowning out the traffic and the birds and the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street.

“Mom, did I cry when I was a baby?”

Playing Games With the Law: Legal Advocacy and Resistance

A version of this essay appeared in Victim No More: Women’s Resistance to Law, Culture and Power. 

When I began working as a legal advocate for Safe Haven[1], a domestic violence agency in Seattle, Washington in 1996, I frequently heard stories of the 1970s: the cramped two bedroom apartment that served as the shelter when Safe Haven first opened in 1976, the dedication of the feminist volunteers, the women who went out at night in bullet proof vests and plucked (hopefully willing) women from their abusive homes. The tireless women who planned rallies, ran consciousness raising groups, unclogged toilets,

Welcome.

This site is a work-in-progress featuring a few (really) different kinds of writing, from travel essays to parenting posts to feminist scholarship.  You can either roam freely or use the categories on the right to direct your journey.

If something you read resonates with you, please let me know!  Likewise, if you are doing some work (or thinking some thoughts) that intersects with or complements mine, please feel free to introduce yourself and your work to me.

Karen

Wasabi Was the Bitter Herb

A version of this essay appeared in Expat: Women’s True Tales of  Life Abroad

For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has stockpiled cans of tuna. She’d run down to Waldbaum’s every time the price of Bumble Bee Chunk White fell below 69 cents a can. There’d be a limit—four or six per visit—and she’d shuttle between her apartment in Astoria, Queens to the store in Forest Hills. She’d load my dad up with a leaning tower

The Seventeen Year Twitch

A version of this essay appears in Sex and Single Girls.  

Sandy asked the three of us to drip the grease from our pizza onto hers–she liked it extra-greasy. As I pointed my slice over hers (at just the right angle so as not to lose the cheese), Erica said, “it was incredible. Fantastic. Incredible. I don’t know what to say.” Erica rubbed her fingers under her eyes to smudge her teal eyeliner just so, then checked her work in a small mirror.