Audrey Bilger

In New Essay, President Bilger Makes the Case for Public Writing The piece appears in ‘Public Feminisms,’ an open-access book published in April by Lever Press. In a new essay, President Audrey Bilger makes the case that feminist scholars have a responsibility to expand their writing beyond academic venues and engage with the public in accessible ways. “Writing for general audiences and presenting feminist theory in accessible terms,” she writes, “is an important part of the broader project of

At around 6 a.m. — I couldn't wait longer — I rode my red Schwinn Cruiser to deliver the treasure enclosed in its plastic case. (I didn't have a car at the time because a few weeks earlier my husband of 14 years had left, taking the VW Beetle with him, along with most of our record collection.) I stayed up all night working out the ideal segues, pulling records and dropping the needle just so. I calculated minutes and seconds for the perfect track list.

WHEN I FIRST CAME OUT as a lesbian in my mid-thirties, I looked for books. It’s what I do any time I make a change. A decade before that, I stopped eating meat, and I read every book I could find on being a vegetarian. If I was gay, I wanted to do my homework and make a plan. I was and am a literature professor, so reading is my job, and books help me make sense of the world.

AS PROPOSITION 8, my home state of California's ban on same-sex marriage, makes its way through the courts, it leaves behind a trail of documents that will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand American democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Now that Prop 8 has been declared unconstitutional for the second time and the Perry case may be headed to the Supreme Court, we can pause to take stock of this work-in-progress. The Prop 8 trial is, in fact, one of the greatest stories of our time.

Virtually every significant romance in my life has revolved around music. My first boyfriend was a singer/songwriter, my first girlfriend was in a band with me, and my wife rocks my world on a daily basis (they were/are all guitar-players, but I’m sure that’s beside the point!). Each relationship has had its soundtrack, the sharing of tunes, and much musical exploration.