Archive - Year - 2002

“I am my little people’s star and slave.” – Imelda Marcos – Los Angeles Times, October 1980 “To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle...

“Heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself – and failing.” – Judith Butler 21 “It’s the most advanced amusement park in the entire world. I’m not talking about just rides….We’ve made living biological attractions.” – John Hammond, Jurassic Park’s creator [1]...

[1] In this essay, I explore the form of feminist agency we encounter in popular Anglophone women’s literature from post-colonial Singapore (Mingfong Ho’s novel, Sing to the Dawn, 1975; Lee Tzu Pheng’s poem “My Country and My People, 1980; the novel, Serpent’s Tooth [1982], and some short stories [1990’s] by...

[1] Genres of expression favored by female authors in Japan such as science fiction and manga (graphic novel) have long been classified as subcategories of so-called subculture with labels like girls’ manga and female sci-fi writing. From the sheer number and variety of works penned by female creators in these...

The lesbian is the heroine of modernism. – Walter Benjamin (90) [1] In scholarly examinations of the period prior to the First World War, Marie Laurencin’s work has been viewed almost exclusively as a footnote to early twentieth-century French modernism, important primarily for its recording of the youthful visages of...

[1] In the early 1960s, a group of artists and filmmakers working primarily in New York City began to make and exhibit films that displayed the kind of willful excesses that would later define the decade as a period of cultural and sexual upheaval. For many audiences of the time,...

[1] FARMER: If as Susan Sontag claims in a celebrated formulation, “to talk about Camp [is] to betray it” (105), contemporary cultural theory might seem the site of a veritable mass treason. From Sontag’s own seminal contribution onward, an increasingly voluminous literature on camp has developed to the point where...

[1] The Verdict (1982), directed by Sidney Lumet, is not the kind of film that has received attention from feminists. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s films (a repeated source of inspiration for psychoanalytic feminist film theory), Lumet’s films are usually perceived as liberal rather than conservative in their politics, as strongly grounded...

[1] BERELOWITZ: In your book you discuss the embodiment of gender in American art of the first half of the 20 th century and trace an unfolding and connected discourse in American modernism from the early days of the Stieglitz circle in the 1920s through Regionalism in the 30s and...

You are my fire The one desire Believe when I say I want it that way. – Backstreet Boys, “I Want It That Way” [1] Among recent trends in youth music culture, perhaps none has been so widely reviled as the rise of a new generation of manufactured “teenybopper” pop...