In the spirit of Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Susan Sontag, Carina Chocano’s You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Trainwrecks, & Other Mixed Messages examines the dramatic and often damaging ways that pop culture influences female identity. Cultural touchstones—from Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from Flashdance to Frozen—serve as entry points to Chocano’s personal reflections and surface some familiar truths about the challenges of locating oneself in the face of an often abstract ideal of womanhood. Chocano and Scripps’s Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Piya Chatterjee are the first speakers in a three-part conversation series.