The Gender of Money

Dec. 1, 2006

Woman’s complexion is more humid than man’s. [The nature] of the humid receives an impression easily but retains it poorly. The humid is readily mobile, and thus women are unconstant and always seeking something new. Hence when she is engaged in the act under one man, if it were possible...

Feminine Freakishness: Carnivalesque Bodies in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Nov. 1, 2006

[1] Angela Carter described herself as being in the “demythologising business” (“Notes”, 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus Carter’s interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The winged aerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom she journeys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin...

Subjectivity Politics in Sorrow Mountain: Transnational Feminism and Tibetan Autobiography

Oct. 15, 2006

[1] It has become a commonplace to describe growing Western engagement with Buddhism as a search for relief from spiritual vacuity and deep dissatisfaction produced by modernity. Buddhism in this narrative figures as either pre-modern or timeless, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in particular symbolizing an otherwise lost authenticity...

Jet-Man Meets Cover Girl at the F-111: Gender and Technology in James Rosenquist’s F-111

Oct. 1, 2006

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went to the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! —Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (1955) Figure 1 James Rosenquist (b. 1933). _F-111_. 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum. 10′ x 86′ overall. Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex...

Making Over Masculinity: A Queer “I” for the Straight Guy

Sept. 1, 2006

[1]Just in case you’ve been living without cable, like an animal, for the past few years, I’ll begin this essay by explaining that Queer Eye For the Straight Guy is a successful show on Bravo where, every week, five gay men make over a straight man: dressing him in a...

Working Gender/Fading Taxonomies

Aug. 1, 2006

[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...

Third Wave Feminism: and the Politics of Motherhood

June 1, 2006

[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...

Black and White Masculinity: in Three Steven Soderbergh Films

May 1, 2006

[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...

Agreeable Objects and Angry Paintings: “Female Imagery” in Art by Hannah Wilke and Louise Fishman, 1970-1973

April 1, 2006

[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...

Lesbian Violence as Fascist Crusade in Monster

March 1, 2006

[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...

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