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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

‘A crisis becomes a crisis when the white male body is affected,’ writes the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, interviewed in this nineteenth print issue of The White Review Braidotti’s work on the posthuman challenges all forms of supremacy – from humans’ abuse of the environment to deep-rooted racial and gender inequalities – in favour of a more expansive, less hierarchical view of humanity At a time when accelerating movements in global politics are propounding constricted views of who may be classed as ‘human’ and accordingly entitled to bodily autonomy – those who are white, male, heterosexual, rich, native-born – it feels imperative that we continue to seek out voices and narratives outside this shrinking mainstream We are wary, however, of providing another platform for agitprop and the conveyor belt of hastily expiring hot takes Instead we have sought to put together in this issue a collection of writing that is nuanced and reflective, curious and exacting; that will provide solace where required and spur inspiration elsewhere   Since the US election campaign, where debates turned on whether or not a female candidate was capable of withstanding the strain of a presidency, women’s bodies – coded as weak and frail, somehow imparting irrationality, and requiring subordination to male control – have been at the forefront of Trump’s sickening boasts and discriminatory policy-making Women who terminate pregnancies must be ‘punished’, Trump said in March 2016, before using one of his very first acts as president to police women’s control over their own bodies by reinstating a 1980s law denying funding to organisations which perform or provide information about abortions (‘Pro-life’ campaigners might note that during the 1950s and ‘60s, when abortion was legal in only four states, ‘back alley’ terminations accounted for 17 per cent of maternal deaths) Our protest comes in the form of fictions, essays, poems and works of art which interrogate constructions of the female body Jacqueline Feldman follows a group of Femen activists who have turned their bodies into vehicles of protest, and explores the way these women have been alternately vilified, patronised and objectified for exposing their bodies in

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

Interview

September 2015

Interview with Katrina Palmer

Jamie Sutcliffe

Interview

September 2015

G.W.F. Hegel isn’t looking too good. With an afternoon of student tutorials to attend at the School of Sculpture...

Art

January 2012

Interview with Ryan Gander

Timothée Chaillou

Art

January 2012

London-based conceptual artist Ryan Gander masters the art of storytelling through an immensely complex yet subtly coherent body of...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Remain

Ed Lately

Prize Entry

April 2017

The apology had been the most charged and contested gesture between us, the common element in arguments whose subjects...

 

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