Thank you @ghostingdani.bsky.social for being infinitely savvier than I and helping this old lady access her, er, my archived essay. 🖤🖤🖤 web.archive.org/web/20250420...

Rebecca Colesworthy@rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 5h ago

Oof. Bookmarking this for when I want to feel bad about myself going to see Liz Phair in a couple weeks. It pains me so that I can’t link to my hyped on melancholy piece from yesteryear about my long history of attending old lady concerts. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/women-aging-...

crowdsourcing: does anyone know of an article or timeline that chronicles or summarizes all the varied horrible things Elon Musk has done over the years? I'm sure somebody somewhere has generated such a document... please let me know, thanks in advance!

Sept 25, come hang out w/ me in Madison, CT, to celebrate the PB launch of Victorian Gaslighting & see @dbellonby.bsky.social, @sunsetandecho.bsky.social & @zibrak.bsky.social in convo about all their great books—Tangled! 12 Stories by American Women! & more! www.dianaebellonby.com/victorian-ga...

Happy paperback book birthday (one day late) to us, @tara-macdonald.bsky.social and @noragilbert.bsky.social! If you're near New Haven on 9/25, come celebrate by the beach. I'll be in convo with Arielle Zibrak and Sarah Mesle, whose book TANGLED just hit shelves! @sunypress.bsky.social #booklaunch

Interested in the f*cked-up politics of white women's hair? This is the book for you! #hairstudies #whitewomenshair #hairpolitics #feminism #newbooks

Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity

A witty, razor-sharp cultural critique of white women’s hair—and the politics it quietly carriesIn Tangled, acclaimed cultural critic Sarah Mesle unpacks the surprising power of white women’s hair in ...

theliteratelizard.com

Charlie's Angels turned 50 this year, and @noragilbert.bsky.social has given us an eye-opening look at how this "jiggle tv" series influenced her feminism, her sense of self, and her views on work, sex, and sisterhood.

The Feminist Case for Loving ‘Charlie’s Angels’

"Jiggle TV," examined through the lens of 1970s shows, all starring women who wore excessively revealing clothing, including Charlie's Angels.

msmagazine.com

Antifascism looks like Pedro Pascal. It looks like Alex Pretti and AOC. It looks like 600 priests, imams, and rabbis in the cold streets of winter Minneapolis. Antifascism is gorgeous.

PEIPolitical 🇨🇦@peipolitical.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Miller: "It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism." #cdnpoli

“Now more than ever, as fascism takes hold around us…We need stories that explore what it takes to resist gaslighting.” The ever-sharp @dbellonby.bsky.social on the political resonance of Vernon Lee’s ghost stories in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. lareviewofbooks.org/article/vern...

A Queer Icon for the Authoritarian Ages | Los Angeles Review of Books

Vernon Lee’s ghost stories explore what it takes to resist male gaslighting and what it means to believe women.

lareviewofbooks.org

"Behind 'Hauntings' lies a forgotten scandal that upends our understanding of the author and what her fearlessly candid queerness means for readers in Trump’s America." Diana Bellonby on "Hauntings": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/vernon-lee-hauntings-lesbian-victorian-queer-ghost-stories/

I keep writing "Metaphor Queen" in the margins of @tayari.bsky.social's KIN. No one, dead or alive, wields a metaphor better than she does. I will die on this hill.

You can now pre-order the paperback version of VICTORIAN GASLIGHTING! Go get yourself a copy and become an expert on this pervasive form of abuse and its 19th c. origins. #gaslighting @sunypress.bsky.social @noragilbert.bsky.social @tara-macdonald.bsky.social

Victorian Gaslighting

sunypress.edu

"Gaslighting can be many diff things...But in any manifestation, it is a form & function of narrative. [It] depends on the power to propagate a false story that negates another person’s reality." Get a taste of VICTORIAN GASLIGHTING on the @sunypress.bsky.social blog sunypress.edu/Blog/2026/Ga...

Gaslighting Eras, Past and Present

sunypress.edu

My author's copy is here! Please go get your hands on this fantastic book. Took me 10 years to research my chapter, "Rape Culture: A Literary History from Ovid to Shakespeare," and I'm so very proud of it. Thank you, Doreen, Erin, Michael, @rcolesworthy.bsky.social, and @sunypress.bsky.social!

Update: @allgrim.bsky.social’s students are incredible. Such good Qs that left me like dang! I need to think abt that for a minute. I’d tweak some things in my essay now but I stand by my core claim: terves suck. So grateful to @debraraecohen.bsky.social for the opp to make it via modernist studies.

Rebecca Colesworthy@rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I get to talk about this essay next week so I’m brazenly sharing it here modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts...

A detail I didn’t know: “The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz … who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.” share.inquirer.com/THMiUZ

Julie K. Brown receives Pulitzer Prize special citation for her work on Jeffrey Epstein case

Brown's 2017 and 2018 reporting was cited at the awards ceremony. “Her work, and the government’s release of the Epstein files, continue to reverberate around the world.”

share.inquirer.com

The thing about this insistence that rape victims have some terrifying moral power that ruins men’s lives and compels the public to do anything to avenge them is that it has never once happened. What actually happens is that victims who disclose are ruined and men who are accused gain.

Kat Tenbarge@kattenbarge.bsky.social · 5mo ago

When the president is a heinous abuser, when many of the most popular celebrities are heinous abusers, when the richest people in the world are heinous abusers, when the people developing new technology are heinous abusers, well that’s how you get a culture that incentivizes abuse

Liberal Currents has quietly become one of the few outlets taking male supremacy seriously, either as a foundation of Trumpist fascism or as a system of oppression in its own right.

Alan Elrod@aselrod.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Male supremacists Joel Webbon and Wesley Todd want women to “shut up.” I wrote about this and the abuser politics on the right. www.liberalcurrents.com/abuser-polit...

Thrilled that *Victorian Gaslighting* AND *New Rape Studies* made this list.

Forthcoming Titles in Women's and Gender Studies, 2026 - Choice 360

A list of the latest and soon-to-be-released reference publications through April 2026.

choice360.org

OMG

Roxane Gay@roxanegay.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Yes, this is real.

What if gaslighting didn’t start in modern psychology, but in the Victorian Empire? VICTORIAN GASLIGHTING traces how power, “madness,” and false narratives were used to control women and colonized subjects, and why it still matters. #SCMS26 #ReadUP tinyurl.com/26pr7kyn

This is really extraordinary. I've never seen anything like this from a government official.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · 6mo ago

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

My favorite thing I learned this week is that “Bozo” actually used to be a regular old proper name, and even a slang term like “dude” or “guy” before Bozo the clown became super famous and ruined it forever. He was truly the Karen of his day, and that’s my favorite thing I learned this week.

Too often I think we view misogyny through the lens of women’s responsibility—do women cause misogyny, how can women avoid misogyny, how can we blame women, always—instead of recognizing that there is literally no way to opt out of or avoid misogyny entirely, because our whole society is built on it

It's officially OUT! Please ask your library to order #VictorianGaslighting. In honor of Women's History Month, you can purchase the hardcover at a 30% discount using the code SWHM26. Happy (belated) Book Birthday, @noragilbert.bsky.social and @tara-macdonald.bsky.social! @sunypress.bsky.social

Victorian Gaslighting

sunypress.edu

"Over $400 million in U.S. foreign aid was cut this past year from grants that explicitly mention gender-based violence in their title or description."

Why supporting a shelter for women is now 'kind of radioactive'

That's how researcher Beatriz Garcia Nice describes the new U.S. stance under the Trump administration to programs addressing gender-based violence.

npr.org

American publishing regularly punishes women in their 50s by simply not interviewing them for new jobs in the way @saribotton.bsky.social describes here. So it’s great revenge that she launched Oldster magazine on her own, now with 70k subscribers.

Sari Botton@saribotton.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Had the good fortune to talk a bit about Oldster Magazine with Kasia Pilat at The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/s...

Big moment for me: first time I’ve ever received a set of author copies! #VictorianGaslighting @tara-macdonald.bsky.social @noragilbert.bsky.social @sunypress.bsky.social

Remember when the only cup of healthy masculinity we had to drink from was Ted Lasso? And it was just Ted, not Jason. Well now that we have Bad Bunny, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov AND Benito Ocasio, Hudson Williams, and Connor Storrie, I'm drunk and never quitting these overflowing goblets of joy.

Quotations by this badass professor appear on the back of my co-edited book #VictorianGaslighting AND in Variety mag! Yes, you should read both

Andrea Kaston Tange@aktange.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Come for the garbled quotation, stay for the fact that TWO Victorian lit professors are being quoted, multiple times each, in Variety magazine! (including yours truly, which is fun)

I‘ve mentioned that thanks to the Epstein tranche I learned that one of my PhD advisors, Lee Smolin, continued to have contact with Epstein after 2007, which is not the impression I had It’s weird to say the least for my professional past to become a public story that demands feminist analysis

Lee Smolin pauses working relationship with Perimeter Institute after being named in Epstein files

Lee Smolin has been asked to “pause” his work by the Perimeter Institute as they review ties to Jeffrey Epstein

therecord.com