Abstract: This inaugural installment of “ SEL : The Exchange” brings together Susan Fraiman (University of Virginia) and Gayle Salamon (Princeton University) in a wide-ranging conversation on gender, sexuality, domesticity, and cultural critique. Beginning with the recent television series Adolescence (2025), the exchange explores masculinity “in full collapse,” the family as an alternative to courtroom drama, and the gendered resonances of physical acts such as throwing and walking. From there, Fraiman and Salamon turn to questions of feminist comportment, consciousness-raising, and the persistent divide between equality and difference feminism. Their discussion engages phenomenology, queer and trans theory, and the history of feminist debates, while also drawing on film, nineteenth-century fiction, and memoirs of eldercare. Throughout, they examine how gender and sexuality are co-constitutive categories, how domestic labor embodies creative intelligence, and how trans and feminist discourses need one another in fraught times. The result is a vibrant dialogue that models intellectual generosity and shows the continuing urgency of feminist and queer analysis for literature, culture, and everyday life.
Fraiman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.