You wouldn’t know it from the amount of time I spend thinking, talking, and writing about horror cinema, but I’m actually not a huge horror fan. I’ll spend hours falling through a TV Tropes or Wikipedia rabbit hole reading plot summary after plot summary, but what I’m looking for are spoilers and someone else to do […]

Don’t miss the latest episode of The FREQ Show! In “Manufacturing a Muslim Menace,” we analyze the ways in which the ubiquitous, deeply harmful stereotypical representations of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists and savages in so much popular media contribute directly to Islamophobia in our culture. More than that, they cultivate a political space in which […]

After seeing Wonder Woman last Friday and having a chat on Facebook Live to share our immediate impressions, Anita and I exchanged emails this weekend to discuss the film in more detail once we’d had a little time to process their thoughts. Be aware that we talk about the ending in some detail, so… Anita: There’s […]

Although we’ve just said goodbye to our long-running Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series, here at Feminist Frequency, we’re staying busy! Today marks the debut of The FREQ Show, a series where we turn our lens to some of the highlights and lowlights of pop culture, and the fascinating intersection of current events with media representations. Our first episode […]

My parents’ attitude toward selecting films to watch on family movie nights was pretty loose when I was young. They’d refined the criteria a bit more by the time my brother was able to sit up by himself and keep his eyes focused; but when I was little, the only real rule was no nudity below […]

Let’s state the obvious right up front: Beauty and the Beast is a Disney film. What this means is that it follows a long history of formulaic narratives involving young women in a bit of a pickle (as the result of, say, selling their voice to get out of that darn sea, see the world, and […]

It’s telling that Logan, Hugh Jackman’s final outing as Wolverine after playing the character for 17 years, heavily references a moment in Shane, the legendary 1953 Western. Specifically, it references the moment when gunfighter Shane tells Joey, the young son of some local ranchers, “Joey, there’s no living with, with a killing. There’s no going back […]

I saw Get Out among a predominantly white audience this weekend. The decision was spontaneous and swift — there was a showing near me (in the white-ass suburb in which I live) at the perfect time, so I went. If I had had more than 10 seconds to think about it and plan, I would have […]

John Wick is “a man of focus,” as another character describes him early in John Wick: Chapter 2. Once he sets his mind on a singular task, you don’t want to come between him and its accomplishment. When Chapter 2 begins, that task is the recovery of the ’69 Mustang that was taken from him in the […]

There’s a line of dialogue about halfway through Split,  M. Night Shyamalan’s latest blockbuster, that masterfully illustrates precisely how this film careens smugly off the rails. Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), sympathetic psychiatrist to the movie’s hero (more on this later), sits across from her patient and asks him which of the personae inhabiting his body currently “has […]