Joanna: I am very excited to be talking with you today: thanks so much for your time. I came across your work when reading an academic paper that you published in 1990 on the criminalization of pregnant women who drink alcohol or take proscribed drugs, so it resonated with my current research on female cultures of drinking (my ‘working title’ is Wine: History, Memoir, and the Muse). I then learned that you graduated from Cornell University and the New York University School o

‘A new motto: What have they done to you, poor child? But now enough of my filthy stories.’ (Sigmund Freud writing to Wilhelm Fliess on 22 December 1897). Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1973 film Daddy is an angry retort to oppressive regimes, particularly that most destructive one of childhood sexual abuse. But its power lies equally in its ambivalence and, in the end, its profound negativity. While Whitehead and de Saint Phalle resolutely sought to free

bell hooks has been an enduring presence in my life. I first read her 1981 classic Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism as an...