Cat Lady

Boil the cat lady down to her essence, and you find the belief that you shouldn't trust a cat farther than you can throw it, you'd do well not trust a woman even that far, and it gets worse when they team up.
What is it about women and cats? Historically, both have occupied an uncertain status: are they feral or domestic? Malevolent or harmless? Deceptive or trustworthy?
With a claw-like swipe of the pen, Reiches toys with the facts and fictions that comprise the cat lady stereotype - from witches with their familiars, to Selina Kyle and her alter ego Catwoman, to Taylor Swift and her Ragdolls - and ponders why cats and their owners inspire such suspicion where their canine equivalents do not.
What, after all, is so dangerous about not answering when you're called?

Meredith Reiches is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a founding member of the GenderSci Lab at Harvard. Her research focuses on how tenacious, received ideas about sex and gender shape reconstructions of human origins. Her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, and her research has been featured in the New York Times, Guardian, and Slate. Reiches is herself a childless cat lady, and human guardian to one feline friend named Wren.