More Than A Magazine, A Movement
From devastating dramas to sharp satires and genre-bending thrillers, this year’s feminist fiction on screen refused easy answers—and demanded our attention. These films and series center women’s agency, ambition and survival, offering stories that linger long after the credits roll. Here are some of the standout feminist fiction watches of the year.
Aviva Dove-Viebahn reviews the top fiction feminist watches from the past year including The Substance, Ironheart and The Better Sister.
On the day bell hooks became an ancestor, four years ago today, my beloved friend, comrade and co-conspirator Black feminist sociologist Shawn McGuffey and I were consoling one another over text when he wrote, “We should do something.” “Say less,” I replied.
We had institutional support from Northeastern University at a time when universities and other institutions were publicly and ceremoniously committing to funding DEI related initiatives in the tidal wave of so-called racial reckoning that occurred in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. The first symposium took place two months later on a cold and clear February morning in 2022. This annual gathering became an important tradition that we looked forward to each year.
This week, we mark four years since the woman born Gloria Jean Watkins, a Black feminist writer, academic, professor and activist became an ancestor. But in 2026, there will be no bell hooks symposium at my university. Due to university wide fiscal austerity, we will not mark the anniversary this year in any official way. It is a tremendous loss, for our students and for our community locally, nationally and internationally.
As I grappled with my own grief over this loss, I had to also reflect deeply about what it means to be a Black feminist scholar in the academy today.
Another year of feminist struggles, another year of feminist triumphs. Our pop culture pushed back and provided many glimpses into feminist resistance throughout the culture.
This year’s top feminist moments reveal how artists, storytellers and creators confronted regressive politics with imagination, joy, righteous anger and expansive visions of humanity.
At the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) Global Women’s Rights Awards on Nov. 18 in Los Angeles, FMF honored the team behind the Broadway smash hit Liberation: playwright Bess Wohl, director Whitney White and Lisa Cronin Wohl, an OG Ms. writer from the 1970s.
“Theater is made up of dialogue. Autocracy is a monologue. Theater is about community: We watch a play together. Autocracy seeks to isolate us. Theater is about curiosity: A good play asks a question. Autocracy is not interested in questions, only in control.
“So, thank you, because in honoring this play, you honor the role of dialogue, community and questions in creating social change.”
Greetings from Los Angeles—on the heels of a very special evening to celebrate the heart and soul of the democracy movement. On Tuesday night, Ms. paid tribute at the Global Women’s Rights Awards to bold leaders operating at the intersection of media, the law and storytelling—recognizing these as the essential trifecta for toppling authoritarianism. And, importantly, for fueling a feminist future.
When Harmonia Rosales first unveiled The Creation of God in 2017—a reimagining of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with a Black woman as the divine—she didn’t just challenge art history; she remade it in her image. With her brush, Rosales flipped the script on Western depictions of power, beauty and divinity, centering Black womanhood and African spiritual traditions long erased from the canon.
Her new book, Chronicles of Ori, continues that reclamation through story. A lushly illustrated volume rooted in Yoruba mythology, the work brings to life the Orishas, divine figures of West African cosmology, and weaves them together with familiar names like Eve—both biblical and mitochondrial—into a mythology that claims space for the African diaspora beyond enslavement.
“I felt that we needed a mythology,” Rosales told Ms. “We needed something to connect to besides enslavement, because that’s what seems to be in the Western canon.”
With Chronicles of Ori, she offers that connection: a world where African gods are unmasked, women embody creation itself, and the sacred is painted in brown skin. Through her art and her words, Rosales restores what history fragmented—melding spirituality, storytelling and imagination into what she calls a new kind of mythology, one that reclaims both memory and power.
The feminist revolution has taken center stage. Liberation, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White, officially opened on Broadway on Oct. 28, 2025, at the James Earl Jones Theatre, following a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier this year.
In an interview with Vogue, Wohl said she was inspired by her mother’s work as an editor at Ms.: “The arc of history is so much longer than we realize. Already in 1970 women were feeling frustrated, like, ‘When is this gonna happen?’ … And I think that that urgency really powers so much of the story of the play.”
For three years running, artist and activist Tiffany Shlain has created calls to action around her feminist history tree ring sculpture in advance of U.S. elections where women’s voting rights, reproductive rights and long held democratic principles face historic setbacks. The milestones and tribulations of women’s history seared onto its surface are particularly resonant now, as many records of women’s presence and accomplishments are disappearing from public view.
I’m tired. Maybe you are too.
I’ve been fighting for gender equality for over two decades—pushing against outdated norms, challenging industries that resist change and speaking up in rooms where I wasn’t always welcome. And while I’ve seen progress, the setbacks have a way of draining your spirit.
But last week, I felt a shift in my energy.
I saw Billie Jean, the new play about Billie Jean King, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. And just like that, something inside me reignited.
I’m writing thisn ot to share a story about a play, but to share a truth about persistence. The path to equality is long, winding and punishing. But it is also worth every step.
It’s tempting these dark days to dismiss the idea that any one person can make a difference. And yet, every day ordinary people fight injustice. And some days, those people persist long enough, resist long enough, that their fights rise to national prominence.
One such fight is chronicled in the new film Lilly, released in theaters this May and now available for rent. The brainchild of director Rachel Feldman, Lilly tells the story of Lilly Ledbetter, “an ordinary woman who became extraordinary,” in the words of Patricia Clarkson, who portrays her in the film.