Tag
Queer Theory
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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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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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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Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in …
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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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Queers Growing Old and Young
Do queers ever grow old? Do their ideas stiffen and their sensibilities melt? Do they fret over finances and retirement accounts, the state of their kitchen plumbing …
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The Sisters Grimm
Can a centuries-old literary tradition tell us anything useful about modern life? The continuing vitality of the fairy tale in contemporary culture would suggest an emphatic yes. And the vast portfolio of fairy tales revised and reimagined by feminist writers highlights the genre’s particular relevance to ongoing questions about gender, difference, and power. Carmen Maria…
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Queer Your Own Adventure
“BEWARE and WARNING!” So heralds the front page of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. “This book is …
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The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
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Join the Mutant Resistance!
The real world just got a lot more like a superhero comic, and not in a good way. I write on November 13, 2016; one of the many things that came up in my panicked, angry, sometimes despairing social …
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Rape Culture Syllabus
I just start kissing them. Just kiss—I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. —Donald Trump The video was released on Friday, October 7. At the presidential debate two days later, when CNN…
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The Gay ’70s
Is being gay just about sex? It’s difficult to imagine anyone asking the question today. If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—“Love Wins,” “It Gets Better,” and “You Can Play”—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and…
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Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also directs—on the horizon, Shapiro has made a reluctant entry into the limelight on awards show red carpets, Paley Center panels, and other events for the…
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Virtual Roundtable on Women Directors
It’s no secret that Hollywood has a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring directors …
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Imagining Better Gods: An Interview with Danez Smith
Talking with Danez Smith is a lot like reading his poems: an engagement with a powerfully complex and circuitous mind that is always recalibrating …
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Sexuality, Counterfactually
Larry Kramer’s The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart is not all that interested in the history of sexuality. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion to make about a novel that …
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Pornography Porn
In the fall of 1990, at the beginning of my senior year of college, I became obsessed with pornography—or, rather, I became obsessed with the feminist debates about it. From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, pornography, along with sex work, butch-femme, and S/M, divided the feminist community, leading to public debates, legal battles,…
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#Normporn
In the penultimate season of 30 Rock (2006–13), the sitcom’s resident kinkmeisters and genderqueer lovers, Jenna and Paul, are faced with a profound sexual crisis: after chatting about their day …
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Oliver’s Body
Some autism spectrum and disability activists have turned, in an age in which Asperger syndrome has come to describe Silicon Valley’s new normal, to a figure of the neuroqueer.1 If queerness came, by the early 1990s, to stand less for specific sexual and gendered identities and more for a general troubling of norms that pathologize and…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Transparent”
Jill Soloway’s original program Transparent abounds with firsts: the first TV series to feature a transgender character as its protagonist; the first transgender-themed series to win Golden Globe …
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Why “Looking” Bothered Me
In March, after the end of its second season and a few days of intense speculation, the death knell was sounded for HBO’s Looking, the only recent series on American television with a central cast composed mainly of gay characters. Controversial since its debut, the news of its cancellation has only sparked further debate about…
