Feminism in Theory and Practice featuring Jen Percy
Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. In Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation, Percy takes on taboo subjects – orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity – illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation.
Author Bio:
Jen Percy is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Her first book, Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, a Pushcart Prize, as well as residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. A graduate of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction, Percy’s writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, New Republic, and Esquire, among others. She teaches journalism at New York University’s Arthur J. Carter Institute and co-owns Harvesters, 1565, a bookstore in upstate New York.