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“We’re Not Family, But We Have a Trauma Bond”: Yellowjackets, Sui Sin Far, and the Cost of Survival
Female relationships shaped under trauma, whether through state violence or survivalist isolation, reveal the uncomfortable truth that care and harm often coexist. Yellowjackets and Sui Sin Far’s “The Land of the Free” show that trauma distorts bonds, weaponizes them, and sometimes breaks them entirely. In Showtime’s Yellowjackets , Misty says, “We’re not family, but we have a very intense trauma bond.” The phrasing is chilling because it collapses the categories of love, l
Taylor Danielle Pedersen
Dec 1, 20252 min read


“Two Girls Standing Up for Each Other”: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Paris Hilton, and the Power of Strategic Persona
Women have always weaponized their personas as a survival strategy in cultures that underestimate them. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , and Paris Hilton aren’t just about blondes playing dumb; they’re about women using caricature to gain power in systems designed to deny it. Lorelei Lee is underestimated precisely because she seems unserious. But that’s the genius: she performs naivety as a shield. When she writes, “There is nothing so wonderful as two girls when they stand up fo
Taylor Danielle Pedersen
Dec 1, 20252 min read


Women’s Relationships: Scripted, Policed, and Rewritten Across U.S. Cultural History
Across more than two centuries of literature, pop culture, and media, the digital timeline on this website reveals a consistent pattern: women’s relationships, whether romantic, platonic, familial, or communal, are shaped, strained, and often weaponized by patriarchal expectations. Yet, at each historical moment, women also rewrite those expectations, using irony, performance, solidarity, and storytelling to create new forms of agency. My timeline shows that female connection
Taylor Danielle Pedersen
Oct 10, 20253 min read


“We Must Not Fail Each Other”: Iola Leroy, Social Media Feminism, and the Politics of Performative Solidarity
Female solidarity has always been aspirational; real in moments, fragile in most, and relentlessly commodified. Today, our cultural landscape is full of pastel Instagram infographics urging women to “fix each other’s crowns” or unite under hashtags like #WomenSupportingWomen, but the reality is far murkier. Frances Harper saw this long before the algorithm did. Iola Leroy exposes the architecture of solidarity: when it thrives, when it fractures, and how systems of race, cla
Taylor Danielle Pedersen
Oct 10, 20253 min read


“You Can’t Compete Where You Don’t Compare”: The Coquette and the Long History of Weaponized Womanhood
The Coquette exposes how patriarchal culture scripts women into competition, surveillance, and moral judgment, and reality TV merely updates the same blueprint. The famous modern line, “You can’t compete where you don’t compare,” is not a new revelation but the recycled logic that condemned Eliza Wharton centuries ago. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette looks like a sentimental cautionary tale on the surface, but underneath it is a study of how women are trained to turn
Taylor Danielle Pedersen
Oct 10, 20252 min read
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