Archive - Year - 2005

[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...

My inspiration for the script came from watching the religious right videotape The Gay Agenda. There’s a scene where they show drag queens going through a town, and the narrator is warning viewers that these people will take over your town, and I thought, ‘Well, that would be fun.’ –...

“Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture.” —Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Bravo website blurb [1]The recent popularity of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the...

[1] “Would you like to know how it feels to be an American Negro? Would you like to know what Negroes are thinking and doing? Would you like to see their daily life pictured?” asks an advertisement for W.E.B. DuBois’s monthly magazine The Crisis, printed in the March 1925 issue...

[1] Scholars in the United States have traditionally addressed ethical and political concerns, and especially questions of socio-historical critique, social justice and social change, by allying the process of critical inquiry with the formation and reformation of identity, such that what we know forms a reciprocal relationship with who we...

[1] In a 2003 episode of Extreme Makeover, ABC’s makeover show offering transformation through style advice and multiple plastic surgeries, Amy, a “painfully shy 29-year-old cake decorator from Indiana,” exclaims in her post-makeover interview, “I’m me now! I don’t have to listen to what anyone else says” (Season 1- Episode...

The Rise of the Heterosexual Male Adolescent [1] Prior to the twentieth century, male adolescents were often presumed children in affect and interests, and thus excused from heterosexual potential or desire (Maynes, 1992; Stovkis, 1993; Cohen, 1999; Moran, 2000). Even during the first decades of the twentieth century, when industrialization,...

Paintings are not mere illusions about the world but determined and produced allusions to it. Art history must acknowledge these complexities and work on these real social processes, significations and their interactions and relations. Art history which is also a practice of representation must provide complex accounts (Orton and Pollock,...

“As we Latinos redefine ourselves in America, making ourselves up and making ourselves over, we have to be careful, in taking up the promises of America, not to adopt its limiting racial paradigms.” Julia Alvarez, “A White Woman of Color” Will Ferrell to Jennifer Lopez during her opening monologue on...