[1] I spent several years of my life looking, waiting for the right time to die. In my early twenties, I fantasized about being martyred, killed for a purpose, a cause, something that would make my death bearable for the others, those who cared. I felt no risk in drugs,...

[1] The experience of fitness by women in our culture is ideologically inflected by assumptions about gender and biology, with the frequent result that many women are active primarily for extrinsic motives—to satisfy our own and others’ ideas about feminine attractiveness—rather than intrinsic ones such as a heightened sense of...

[1] The prominence of the ‘ghostly’ in Affinity, Sarah Waters’s 1991 neo-Victorian gothic fiction of female same sex desire, might be read as a fantastic fictional evocation of a recurring trope in lesbian feminist literary history and historiography: the historical ‘invisibility’ of lesbian identity. However, I wish to explore the...

Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. –Lisa Lowe We need to know where we...

[1] Romance has, to put it mildly, a sketchy political history. On the one hand, its focus on interpersonal dramas within the feminized private sphere, from aristocratic liaisons in the chivalric epics of the Middle Ages to the novels of Jane Austen to the tawdry delights of Harlequin, Mills and...

Woman’s complexion is more humid than man’s. [The nature] of the humid receives an impression easily but retains it poorly. The humid is readily mobile, and thus women are unconstant and always seeking something new. Hence when she is engaged in the act under one man, if it were possible...

[1] Angela Carter described herself as being in the “demythologising business” (“Notes”, 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus Carter’s interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The winged aerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom she journeys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin...

[1] It has become a commonplace to describe growing Western engagement with Buddhism as a search for relief from spiritual vacuity and deep dissatisfaction produced by modernity. Buddhism in this narrative figures as either pre-modern or timeless, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in particular symbolizing an otherwise lost authenticity...

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went to the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! —Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (1955) Figure 1 James Rosenquist (b. 1933). _F-111_. 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum. 10′ x 86′ overall. Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex...

[1]Just in case you’ve been living without cable, like an animal, for the past few years, I’ll begin this essay by explaining that Queer Eye For the Straight Guy is a successful show on Bravo where, every week, five gay men make over a straight man: dressing him in a...