The Politics of Representation: Genre, Gender Violence and Justice

Dec. 1, 2000

From the trial of Socrates to the dozens of proceedings reported daily in the press, the popular trial has been active as a rhetorical form, a social practice and a symptom of historical change – Robert Hariman Every man I meet wants to protect me. Can’t figure out what from...

Technology and the Construction of Gender in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

Nov. 1, 2000

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. – Donna Haraway Replicants are like any other machine. They can be a benefit or a hazard. – Deckard in Blade Runner. [1] Arguably the most influential Science Fiction (SF) film of all time, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) is one...

Hollywood Lesbians: Annamarie Jagose interviews Patricia White about Her Latest Book, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability

Oct. 1, 2000

[1] JAGOSE: Given the Motion Picture Production Code’s determination to corral “sex perversion” outside the cinematic field of vision, classical Hollywood cinema might not seem a promising archive for the consideration of lesbian representability. Can you talk me through what your book takes as its founding paradox, the Production Code’s...

Inflamed Passions: Fire, the Woman Question, and the Policing of Cultural Borders

Sept. 1, 2000

[1] Contemporary discussions of globalization and the transnational circulation of cultural products are often marked by celebratory exhortations of the imminent global village or by less optimistic perspectives that present the Third World as beleaguered and besieged. Countering these perspectives, through an examination of media commentary on the Canadian-Indian film...

Feminist Art and (Post)Modern Anxieties: The Judy Chicago Retrospective

Aug. 1, 2000

[1] Ever since the showing of The Dinner Party in the late 1970s, exhibits of Judy Chicago’s artwork have repeatedly elicited vehement public debate. Her defenders laud her as a groundbreaking feminist whose methods and works challenge the patriarchal structure of the art world. Her critics accuse her of producing...

Abject Criticism

July 20, 2000

[1] It is possible now to speak of a triumph for women in the register of philosophical aesthetics, especially since this word identifies precisely what aesthetic thought has always denied them. We are well aware that Western philosophy has been notoriously gender-biased, despite claims of universality in its premises and...

Jouissance of the Commodities: Rimbaud against Erotic Reification

July 10, 2000

Could the commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we...

Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America: Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells

June 1, 2000

[1] This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism–black and white–in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the...

Queer World Making: Annamarie Jagose interviews Michael Warne

May 1, 2000

[1] JAGOSE: On the pink-jacketed cover of The Trouble with Normal are a rank of plastic male dolls, alternately dressed in a groom’s formal white dinner jacket and black bow tie or a leatherman’s motorcycle cap and bondage chest straps. No one could mistake them for a couple yet, as...

Performing the Closet: Grids and Suits in the Early Art of Gilbert and George

April 1, 2000

[1] Over the past two decades, British artists Gilbert and George have made enormous and colorful photographic art works depicting nude or semi-nude men alongside multiple self-portraits. Large pictographs from the 1980s show vivid cartoon-like penises; larger-than-life-sized images from the 1990s depict the artists themselves, stripped nude, mooning the audience...

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