Impressive People

Michele Wallace

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michele Faith Wallace (born January 4, 1952) is a feminist author and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. She became famous in 1979 when, at age 27, she published Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman, a book in which she criticized black nationalism and sexism. [1] Her writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a "leader of a [new] generation of African-American intellectuals." [2] The cogency and insightfulness of Wallace's essays on visual culture and its relationship to race and gender is typified by "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture" and her afterword in the book Black Popular Culture (based on a groundbreaking conference organized by Wallace at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1991): "Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture". Her attention to the invisibility and/or fetishization of Black women in art, film, and television has inspired new critical thinking about race and gender in popular culture, particularly in what she has called "the gap around the psychoanalytic" in contemporary African-American critical discourse. Books like Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, for example, have been a galvanizing and highly influential force in both African-American and feminist circles. [3] The real power of Wallace's writing--a commanding force evident in works as diverse as her essays on film and literature both for scholarly journals and popular essays, such as for the Village Voice--is a clarity and rigor that allows her to reach a broad and committed audience. Wallace earned her B.A. and M.A. in English from The City College of New York and has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. She is Professor of English at The City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York.....

Erica Jong

A 1963 graduate of Barnard College, and with an M.A. in 18th century English Literature from Columbia University (1965), Jong is best known for her first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), which created a sensation with its frank treatment of a woman's sexual desires. Although it contains many sexual elements, the book is mainly the account of a young, hypersensitive woman, in her late twenties, trying to find who she is and where she is going. It contains many psychological, humorous, descriptive elements, and rich cultural and literary references. The book tries to answer the many conflicts arising in women in today's world, of womanhood, femininity, love, one's quest for freedom and purpose.

Jong wrote Fear of Flying in the first person, and her main character suffers from the fear of flying in more than one way, including the literal one. As her airline flight is taking off from New York on its way to Vienna, she says, "My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature in my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case, dress--since I'm not wearing a bra)..." She created a new type of heroin

Gloria Marie Steinem

(born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist.

Rising to national prominence as a feminist leader in 1969, Steinem was a columnist at New Yorkmagazine in the 1960s and broke ground in 1963 with an investigative report of how the women ofPlayboy were treated, which was made into the 1985 movie A Bunny's Tale. In the 1970s she became a leading political leader and one of the most important heads of the second-wave feminism, the women's rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s....

Angela Davis

Davis in October 2006

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American socialist, political activist and retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the director of the university's Feminist Studies department.^[1] Davis was a vocal activist during the Civil Rights Movement and a former Black Panther. Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, popular music culture and social consciousness, and philosophy of punishment and prisons.^[2]

In the 1970s, she was a target of COINTELPRO, tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the Reagan era.

Since moving in the early 1990s from communism to reformism she has identified herself as a democratic socialist. Davis is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex......