Happy Birthday to HF, and me!

Celebrating one year of the newsletter by turning on a paid subscription option

This is the official anniversary post to celebrate one year of writing Hot Feminism! When I jumped in last July, out of anger and despair following the overturning of Roe, I had no idea what writing this would mean to me, and I just want to take a quick second to thank all of you for reading. That all y’all would be interested in feminism, queer rights and local South Carolina politics gives me so much hope for our future. It’s also been a lot of fun to write, and such a delight to host guest writers and artists.

My vision for the future is to continue in this collaborative direction, and to include many voices here. In my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course (starting next month!), we begin by discussing standpoint epistemology, or the idea that what we know and believe is inextricable from our identities. I’m a middle-aged white woman, married to a man, raising a couple of children in a middle income tax bracket. All these factors will influence what I see and what I write here, regardless of my attempts to have a broad view. I don’t think the causes of gender and sexual equality are possible to achieve unless we do so together, so I’d love to keep moving in the direction of a collective newsletter.

To this end, I’d also love to be able to pay people for their labor when they contribute to the newsletter, and so I’ve turned on a paid subscription option. For now, all content will be available to both free and paid subscribers, but if you can afford to support writers and artists and feminist work here in the South, I’d be most grateful.

I’m celebrating my birthday this weekend with Stephen, but next week I’m going out with girlfriends to dinner and then to see the Barbie movie. I love this wild world where a sexist doll becomes a feminist icon—and hey, why not. I never imagined turning 44 would be “going to see the Barbie movie” but here we are, and of course we’ll have a WGST symposium on it this fall to discuss.

We’re also still waiting to see if the SC Supreme Court will block the new abortion ban. I feel very nervous about Justice Few’s comments, and the impending further right shift of the court when the Chief Justice retires. Just a reminder, as we prepare for 2024, that the legislature appoints the Supreme Court, so if we’d like to avoid being the only all white men court, we need to really lean into our state senate and house elections.

Thanks again for reading, and sharing, and all of your support. This has been the highlight of my last year—thank you!!

[And apologies for the unannounced one-month hiatus! We had some fun family vacations, and the kids were out of camp for three weeks. There’s a definite inverse relationship between how much childcare we have and how much I’m able to write.]