Bluestocking Oxford

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Bluestocking Oxford

Oxford-based online journal celebrating and investigating the intellectual and artistic achievements of women throughout history.

We are an Oxford-based online journal celebrating and investigating the intellectual and artistic achievements of women throughout history. Get in touch and write for us by contacting [email protected], we'd love to hear from you!

24/09/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Cinema of True Love: Celine Song's Materialists' by Maisie Corkhill on our website now!

Based on Celine Song's stint as a matchmaker in New York, Materialists perplexed critics when it hit the big screen. Was it a romantic comedy, as the marketing campaign insisted, or a cynical critique of the way capitalism has been hardening hearts? In her article, Maisie Cork looks at transactional relationships and their history in cinema and discovers where the value of Song's Materialists lies. She writes:

'To me, Song’s vision for Materialists is crystal clear [...] It confronts how we cannot help but assign value to people, so that Lucy’s client has to remind her (and us), “I’m not merchandise. I’m a person”. [...] Mainstream body modifications, like preventative botox, and more outlandish procedures like the cosmetic height surgery mentioned in the film (available since before 2020) are marketed as a shrewd investment in your future – if you can afford it. Our era yearns for a storyteller like Song to question whether there may still be something authentic that survives at this stage of human relationships under capitalism.'

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10/09/2025

Check out our latest article: 'The Politics of Charm: Nancy Mitford, Satire, and the Elegant Face of Fascism' by Ava Doherty on our website now!

Nancy Mitford's novels glitter with satire; indeed, to read one is like having the pleasure of sitting next to a great raconteur at a country house dinner party. But for all her willed breeziness and irresistible wit, Mitford's writing style often sits uncomfortably with the gravity of the issues explored. Society-shaking political movements, like fascism and communism, are never treated with moral seriousness. The heroine of The Pursuit of Love (1945), Linda Radlett, is presented as constitutionally incapable of experiencing 'wider love for the poor, the sad and the unattractive'. In her article, Ava Doherty tries to make sense of Mitford's lack of ideological seriousness. She writes:

'What happens when satire flatters its subjects and readers just enough to escape moral ambiguity? Mitford's work, at its core, performs a delicate balancing act between critique and seduction. Her prose simultaneously mocks aristocratic excess while rendering it irresistible through stylistic brilliance. '

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27/08/2025

Check out our latest article: ''Paper is Deynty': How the Paston Women Wrote History' by Yasmin Beed on our website now!

The fifteenth-century Paston Letters are a treasure trove for historians inquisitive about the workings of women's lives in the late Middle Ages. Written by the women of the Paston family themselves at a time when the use of scribes was pervasive and many were illiterate, they are a rather remarkable occurrence of early women speaking to us in their own voices. Thatcher Ulrich, the feminist historian, once said that the 'real drama is in the humdrum': the duties of domestic management, the preparations for an imminent birth, and even the suggestive details of a shopping list. Yasmin Beed browses the manuscripts, illuminating a world of history shored up in parchment and ink. She writes:

'The women of the Paston letters were making history in the living of their lives and in the writing and collecting of their letters, but this history can only be realised if an interest is taken in their lives and in what we can learn from and about them.'

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15/08/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Jenny Saville and The Anatomy of Painting' by Ruby Tipple on our website now!

Jenny Saville (1970-now) is a painter of voluptuous proportions. With photographic precision, she limns the folds, creases and protrusions of the body, challenging the brushstrokes of Old Masters who made of real and imperfect flesh flawless ideals. Instead her bodies are an affront; rendered in oil paint, they ooze from the canvas in spectacular textured layers, producing a feeling of uneasiness, pain and abjection that is underwritten by sympathetic tenderness. Ruby Tipple takes a trip to the National Portrait Gallery's retrospective of the artist, finding a brilliant but imperfect show. She writes:

'When seen alongside her other works from the 1990s and 2000s in the National Portrait Gallery, her visceral and sometimes gory work comes together here to form a strangely beautiful impression. So much of her work focuses on surgical modification, bloodied scars, and imperfection, yet her technique and brushstrokes are unflinchingly vivid for the viewer, shedding light on the unpalatable bits that are often unseen. Walking through these first rooms (the exhibition is in chronological order), there is a chilling sense of fragility created by her images – life at its most precarious, in full display.'

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01/08/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Daphne du Maurier and Fashion' by Belle R () on our website now!

Novelist Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) is best known for haunting novels that brim with gothic intrigue and high romance. Yet fashion played an important, and hitherto undervalued, role in du Maurier's personal life and her fiction, vitally enriching the worlds she inhabited. Taking a closer look at this sartorial influence, Belle R uncovers its bearing on the creation of identity. She writes:

'Du Maurier grew up in a theatrical family. Her father was actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, who was deeply involved in the world of theatre – a space in which clothing and appearance are integral to defining characters’ identities. There is an argument, therefore, that this environment may have significantly influenced du Maurier’s understanding of clothes as more than just fabric—they became costumes, signifiers of identity, and tools for navigating both the personal and public spheres.'

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19/07/2025

Check out our latest article: 'The Rani of Jhansi: Beyond the British Perspective' by Shreya Ganguli on our website now!

The Rani of Jhansi knew how to use a sword - not a bad skill to have if you're leading an Indian rebellion against the British. Her military action in 1857 was prompted by the acquisitive East India Company, which set about grabbing Indian lands without 'legitimate heirs'. Yet this warrior queen remains an elusive historical figure, with much of what we know about her coming from British imperialists. In this article, Shreya Ganguli puts together a new archive, drawing on fictive representations, local mythology and art to enlarge scholarship on the Rani. She writes:

'There is potential and scope to write a history of the Rani of Jhansi from beyond the British perspective. Whilst it may be more archivally challenging, there is much to be gained in engaging with subaltern sources to write about this subaltern woman who shocked both Indian and British contemporaries alike with her bravery, determination, and defiance of the status quo.'

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04/07/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Marie Skłodowska-Curie: “Nothing in life is to be feared”' by Félicités Rap on our website now!

To this day, there is only one woman who has won the Nobel Prize two times - the inimitable chemist and physicist Marie Curie (1867-1934). Famed for breaking new ground with her early career research into radioactivity, including discovering radium and polonium, the education that allowed her to conduct her experiments was hard-won, acquired by ardent grafting and sisterly support. In her article, Félicités Rap ventures into Curie's laboratory and finds the traces of a life defined by unwavering fortitude and resilience. She writes:

'Although Marie Skłodowska-Curie did not study medicine, she was able to save millions of lives to this day thanks to her discoveries about radioactivity, which continue to have applications in medicine today, whether in diagnosing or treating patients. She once wrote that ‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood’ and throughout her life, she embodied her own words.'

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06/06/2025

Check out our latest article: The Disarming Power of the Artistic Double: Identity, Gender, and Heritage in Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas' by Ruby Tipple on our website now!

Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas' (1939) is a surrealistic and confessional painting which, in its fine details, is full of cryptic suggestions about the artist's personal life. Tipple takes on the task of probing its biographical implications while also uncovering the painting's identity politics which, she argues, resonates on a wider, universal level. Tipple writes:

'Frida Kahlo’s infamous The Two Fridas (1939) [...] is from the middle of Kahlo’s artistic career — a career primarily focused on self-portraits which highlight her struggles with disability, lost love and turbulent interpersonal relationships, as well as paintings containing incisive political comments on capitalism, Marxism and Mexican identity and heritage.'

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16/05/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Make me Juno': What Sabrina Carpenter's pop music can tell us about 21st century feminism by Emily Dillon on our website now!

Can female s*xual desire really be empowering given the prevalence of the 'internalised male gaze'? This is the question Emily Dillon poses in her article, which draws on the witty and provocative pop lyrics of to measure the progress of mainstream feminism. Dillon writes:

'While it is true that female pop stars are increasingly comfortable embracing their s*xualities in their music, this cannot be seen as true freedom. Mulvey’s theory gave rise to the idea of the ‘internalised male gaze’: the phenomenon whereby women feel as if they are performing for a man, just like the men behind the camera or in the scene in Mulvey’s original theory. '

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02/05/2025

Check out our latest article in tribute to Austen's birthday and our forthcoming Bluestocking Banquet: '250th Anniversary: Jane Austen's 'Meanness'' by Maisie Corkhill on our website now!

From Sense and Sensibility (1811) to Persuasion (1817), Austen's novels document the tittle tattle of eighteenth-century assembly rooms and romances of polite society but could the novelist really be the original mean girl? In this special anniversary article, former Bluestocking editor Maisie Corkhill returns to trace a lineage of cynical satire that extends from Augustan poetry to mock conduct books, from which, she argues, Austen develops her playful proclivity for meanness. Corkhill writes:

'Many readers have been appalled that Austen could be so cruel. This is perhaps why there has been no great critical tradition of approaching Austen’s work through meanness. Not to celebrate meanness for its own sake, these instances allow us to place Austen in a lineage of darky funny satire written by women in the 18th century, revealing meanness as a powerful vehicle for social commentary.'

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18/04/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Prosaic Settings, Unepic Loves, and Grotesque Muses: Patrizia Cavalli and Her Poetics of Disenchantment' by Silvia Cercarelli on our website now!

Poetry is often associated with intense emotions and events that change the whole weather of life. But what if, as W.H. Auden once wrote, 'poetry makes nothing happen'? Patrizia Cavalli (1947-2022), the most influential poet in Italy for the last fifty years, would certainly concur. With wry self-awareness, her 1974 poetry collection My Poem's Won't Change the World captured the day's monotonous rhythms and the voice of dismissed thoughts with lyrical limpidity, making a case for the poetic validity of quotidian experience. In this article, Silvia Cercarelli maps Cavalli's diverse forms of poetic disenchantment. She writes:

'Far from celebrating the timeless charm of Fellini’s Rome, Cavalli provides snippets of a routinous, almost wearying existence, in which sparkles of excitement, paradoxically, only seem to emerge out of missed opportunities, faded enthusiasms and lost encounters.'

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14/03/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Critiquing Desire: A Review of The Right to S*x by Amia Srinivasan' by Bluestocking Editor, Ouissal Moumou, on our website now!

Tied up with our s*xual desires are deep socio-political influences. What happens in the bedroom does not, in fact, stay in the bedroom but reflects the oppressions of the world outside. This is the argument Amia Srinivasan makes with intellectual incision and sophistication in her monograph, The Right to S*x. Published in 2021, it wasn’t long before the critics picked up their pens and questioned the implications of her argument, whether it undermined individual desire and set normative standards. In this article, Ouissal Moumou dissects their claims and finds out if anyone really has an inherent ‘right’ to s*x. She writes:

‘Critics seem to have missed the point of Srinivasan’s argument. Her claim is not that there is a right to s*x or that consent is unimportant, but rather that we should look beyond consent to interrogate where desire comes from and how it is shaped.’

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