Skins, Patches, and Plug-ins: Becoming Woman in the New Gaming Culture

Dec. 1, 2001

[1] Video games have emerged as a dominant form of cultural expression in the new millennium. As a cultural and economic force, they have surpassed the Hollywood film industry in terms of total revenues, and they are a major source of technological innovation and creative imagination. Because of their unparalleled...

Violence Against Prostitutes and a Re-evaluation of the Counterpublic Sphere

Nov. 1, 2001

[1] The speech of women who work in prostitution lacks credibility for many people. This is particularly true when they testify about the violence they face. It is often difficult for others to perceive violence against prostitutes as something real. Many women describe this contradiction in which they are caught...

Whatever Turns You On: Becoming-Lesbian and the Production of Desire in the Xenaverse

Oct. 1, 2001

[1] At the end of the Xena: Warrior Princess episode, “The Play’s the Thing,” in which Gabrielle directs her own play, Minya, with her new friend Paulina in tow, exclaims: Gabrielle, I wanted to thank you. I never would have met Paulina here if it wasn’t for you. In fact,...

A Myth Beyond the Phallus: Female Fetishism in Kathy Acker’s Late Novels

Sept. 1, 2001

[1] Debates about female fetishism have been going on for almost two decades now; but there appears to be as yet no consensus about the value of claiming this particular practice for feminist politics. Ever since Sarah Kofman’s suggestion that a Derridean reading of Freud’s 1927 essay could not preclude...

Passionate Fictions: Horizons of the Exotic and Colonial Self-Fashioning in Mircea Eliade’s Bengal Nights and Maitreyi Devi’s Na Hanyate

Aug. 1, 2001

[1] One desires the archaic and the exotic insofar as it remains the other, but insofar as it retains its ontological difference the encounter with it is liable to be marked by frustration, failure, lack. Narratives with a colonial setting are often marked by such a structure; E.M. Forster’s A...

Fritz Bultman’s Actaeon Paintings: Sexuality, Punishment, and Oedipal Conflict

July 15, 2001

[1] The artists who emerged as the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s were as a group notoriously macho and homophobic. For Fritz Bultman (1919-85), a young painter associated with this first generation of the New York School, such attitudes could only have added to his persistent state of discomfort. In...

The Evolution of a Lesbian Icon: Annamarie Jagose interviews Laura Doan about her New Book, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture

July 2, 2001

[1] JAGOSE: Your book, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, constructs a genealogy of what you term Sapphic modernity. The 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is very prominent in your account, as it is in most histories that trace the post-war...

Disentangling the Strangled Tehuana: The Nationalist Antinomy in Frida Kahlo’s “What the Water Has Given Me”

June 1, 2001

[1] The objective of this study is to articulate a revisionary reading of Frida Kahlo's "What the Water Has Given Me" ["Lo que el agua me ha dado" 1 ] (1938, Fig. 1), a reading that will argue for the painting's central importance for an understanding of Kahlo's œuvre in...

A Journey Shared: Ursula Biemann’s Been There and Back to Nowhere: Gender in Transnational Spaces

May 1, 2001

[1] Ursula Biemann’s Been There and Back to Nowhere is about minority women in border zones, the representations made of them in the media, and the efforts of artists working collaboratively with them to construct a different set of images. More specifically, it is about the ways that female bodies...

To Mirror Tomorrow: Reflections on Feminism and the Future

April 1, 2001

[1] In 1979 Barnard College sponsored “The Scholar and the Feminist VI: The Future of Difference,” a conference whose proceedings were anthologized into a volume called simply The Future of Difference, which, its post-preface proclaims, “has become something of an underground classic” (Eisenstein and Jardine, xiii). What is striking to...

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