Posts by Gina Barreca

November 28, 2007, 01:30 PM ET

Isn't 'Free Gift' Redundant?

By Gina Barreca

When feeling oppressed by domesticity and the straightjacket of gender expectations, men and women often respond differently: men will start wars, buy cars, or go to Hooters.

Women will get themselves a little treat.

I was holiday shopping last week and I decided to indulge in my gender-specific stress-reducing activity. I made a self-indulgent purchase. I bought something just for me. (And since I hate using that kind of cutesy phrase, you can see just how frazzled I already was even before I embarked on this mission; I was shopping because I had three deadlines and I needed to do something — anything — other than write. More about this in a later post.)

Anyway, I like to buy makeup — not because I believe that the indulgence in girly-girl femininity acts as a fabulous cultural counterpart to the edgy intellectual feminism that emerged since the new millennium. I buy makeup...

E-mail

November 26, 2007, 08:57 AM ET

A Life of 'Law & Order'

By Gina Barreca

My husband and I used to get out a little more, but now we only do one thing in the evenings: we watch Law & Order.

Not that we have ever been what some people would consider genuinely sophisticated.

I mean, we’ve never had season tickets to the opera. We’ve never belonged to a theater-going group.

Neither of us would, even under the threat of being pilloried, attend a performance of the ballet.

Sure, we read books, but that’s mostly because of our jobs. Granted, we like paintings, but that’s mostly because of our bare walls. Music is okay as long as it keeps to its place, which is in the background.

(Am I leaving anything out? Oh, performance art. Well, since performance art is basically stand-up comedy that isn’t funny, I don’t feel a deep and abiding need to include it.)

To sum up, we’ve never made a habit of trafficking in culturally significant events except in...

November 24, 2007, 10:04 AM ET

College Girls and College Women: The Blockbuster Sequel

By Gina Barreca

(Part 2) I grew up watching the 1960s movie Where the Boys Are, in which girls go to Fort Lauderdale to “check out the talent” and end up in various compromising positions.

Attempted suicide, premarital sex, listening to jazz, and hooking up with George Hamilton (who wore his Brown University blazer while sitting on the beach) were only the least of their transgressions.

So enthralled was I by the movie that when I was 12, I borrowed the book version from the local library. Nearly 50 years after its publication, I’d argue that Swarthout’s novel remains pretty subversive.

For example, the first-person heroine has a moment of awakening when in bed with a jazz musician. She describes herself as “The First Girl To Reach Outer Space” and goes on to announce: “Together Basil and I stumbled upon dialectic sex, which may be ancient to humanity but was new to us: the system of...

November 21, 2007, 11:23 AM ET

College Girls and College Women

By Gina Barreca

College girls aren’t what they used to be.

They used to be both forbidden and alluring. College girls were once different from other women because they were flirting with the masculine world — not just with cute boys.

It was no different at women’s colleges either; if anything, the students at an all-women’s school had a hothouse air about them. They were rarefied and even slightly more dangerous than the girls who tried (always unsuccessfully) to be one of the boys at a co-ed institution.

Nowadays, college girls are college women; they are almost, but not quite, simply students. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.

Yet I still have young women who come to my office after class and ask a version of the following (take a deep breath and hear it all without a pause): “Professor Barreca we’ve been coming to the lectures and doing the reading so we understand that ...

November 19, 2007, 07:03 PM ET

Sacrebleu! I Blog! No Blague. OK, Hon?

By Gina Barreca

You know who’s excited that I have a blog? My graduate students, especially Sarah and Morgan who work with me in my office. Even my undergraduates at UConn are proud of me. Usually they’re only proud of other undergraduates dressed in blue-and-white uniforms, the ones with a white-dog mascot clapping nearby. But when the ones hanging around my office heard I’d be part of a blog, they made sounds of approval of the sort that nurses make when a patient begins eating solids. So everybody seems pleased.

Me, I’m not so sure. This is a new deal for me, this writing three times a week. “Write about whatever you think deserves comment,” soothed the encouraging editor at The Chronicle.

“What are the other people going to write about?” I asked, already nervous about the opinions of my unseen, unmet (and, at that point, even unnamed) colleagues.

“Oh, public policy, the...