Tag
Sexuality
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“Could I be an Asian girl?”: Racist Fantasy in HBO’s “The White Lotus”
Portraying the fall of the mighty is easy money, low-hanging fruit. Eat the rich! What’s riskier and harder to swallow are the moments when the viewer comes into contact with the white elite’s racist fantasies, which include the tendencies of prestige TV and its insufficient depictions of people of color.
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Queer Ever After?
If queer today often looks rather like heteronormativity’s “sick and boring life,” how can we cultivate queerer worlds, or other possibilities?
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France and the Question of Consent
Two memoirs trenchantly critique the ways in which France has framed sexual consent, legally and culturally, since the 1970s.
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The Broken Promises of “Bridgerton”
The show portrays a racially diverse society, but papers over white-supremacist interracial sexual assault and violence. Was there another way?
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Philanthropy and the “Jewish Continuity Crisis”
Today, Jewish philanthropy—like all philanthropy—is big business, thanks to US philanthropy’s torturous entanglement with US capitalism.[none-for-homepage]
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America Comes Out
Once, “coming out” was something done within gay social worlds. Today, new groups do so to refute stigma, and to reclaim that stigma as pride.
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What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
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Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen …
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Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the …
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Samuel Delany on Capitalism, Racism, and Science Fiction
Samuel Delany was 20 when his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, appeared …
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A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with …
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Impossible Belonging
If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than whatever might come after, what else is there to want, in the wake of naming injury, but to fix…
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B-Sides: J. R. Ackerley’s “We Think the World of You”
J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1960) isn’t a novel I’d ever say I …
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Public Thinker: Jack Halberstam on Wildness, Anarchy, and Growing Up Punk
Defying disciplinary categorization, Halberstam’s work draws on … [none-for-homepage]
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Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or early adolescence. When kids embrace models of social identity newly available to their generation, the parents who love and care for them…
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The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and …
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“You Could Have Changed Everything”
One may as well begin with George Merrill’s touch to E. M. Forster’s backside (“gently, and just above the buttocks,” Forster recalls). It was 1913 …
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“A Thousand Years” of Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard has a gift for seeing similarities. In every gallery of her Survey at the Whitney, this capacity for sensing, finding, and producing similarities is …
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For the Love of Doughnuts
On the surface, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie tells the story of Minerva and Cal, who fall in love with each other. Really, though, Bet Me is a story about a fat woman …
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Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer representations in India. While the verdict was the result of extended campaigns by the Naz Foundation and others, the euphoria that followed the Delhi High Court’s…
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The World of Gay World Lit
Contemporary gay life is characterized by a curious paradox: visibility and acceptance have made life better for many—especially but not only for white gay men—but at the cost of community and identity. Gay visibility, with its attendant politics of respectability, has occurred at the expense of the gay bar, the bathhouse, the piano bar, and…
