[1]The public rehearsal of making over goes back to 1979, the moment when post-war housing began to fall apart and when This Old House, the WGBH home restoration program, was first aired. Making over was never simply the humble process of rescuing, repairing, updating, and revivifying shabby structures or tasteless...

[1] The publication of Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers (2001), co-edited by Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender, marks a shift in the attention of third wave feminists away from the role of rebellious daughters to the role of motherhood. This essay investigates the politics of motherhood...

[1] Steven Soderbergh, director of both experimental films and big-budget genre films, has been unusually candid about racism in Hollywood. In a June 2003 New York Times profile of African American actor Don Cheadle, Soderbergh bluntly states that Cheadle would have advanced further at this point in his career if...

[1] “Who has the guts to deal with cunts?” asked sculptor Hannah Wilke in 1973 (Schwartz). Louise Fishman, a painter, told critic Sarah Whitworth that her thoughts immediately turned to women’s genitals when she decided to examine consciously what part being a woman played in her work (58). Both saw...

[1] The cultural articulation of sexuality to political violence has enjoyed no shortage of scholarly analysis in recent years. Drawing upon libidinal models familiar to readers of renowned German Freudo-Marxists Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Klaus Theweleit, several monographs published since the mid-to-late 1990s forward compelling arguments about the relationship...

If the humanities have a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense...

[1] The average person does not distinguish between “sex” and “gender,” and uses the two terms interchangeably. The same can be said of a significant number of social scientists. For instance, an unsystematic review of one recent issue of Sociological Forum and several recent issues of American Journal of Sociology...

[1] “About 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans convention center grew increasingly hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead,” reported the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Thursday, September 1, 2005. There were helicopters, there were boats, and there were even...

[1] Writing in issue 38 of this journal, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard suggested that Hindu nationalists in pre-Independence India engaged in “a process of myth-making whereby feminine sexual purity was endowed with the status of the transcendental signifier of national virtue … embedded in a mosaic of macrosociological dynamics of colonialism and...

Our main idea for the day was to moider Mother. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. We have worked it out carefully and are both thrilled by the idea. Naturally, we feel a trifle nervous...