Archive - Year - 2007

[1] I can still remember the first time it happened. I was either thirteen or fourteen, I don’t know that, but I do know that I was sitting in a chair in the kitchen with my back to the folding doors leading down the long slate hallway. I was somewhere...

Indeed if one is to be a man almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. -Norman Mailer, The White...

Bodies, stardom, narratives [1] The questions that compel this essay concern the relationship between bodies and narratives: the narratives available to certain bodies and the disruptive impact of those bodies on narratives. My focus is the embodiment of the spunky heroine of the romantic comedy film–the feisty screwball leading lady...

Figure 1 MOORTI: Private Lives, Proper Relations offers a new lens through which one can understand some key late twentieth century African American women’s fiction. Your book primarily argues that the hidden arena of intimacy is thoroughly politicized for African Americans, that the black domestic sphere is shaped by interlocking...

Work, play, art, science, literature, sex, education … digitization leaves nothing untouched. Social relations are being transformed by the development of telecommuting, hypermedia systems, and the new world of on-line information. In particular, everything in the vicinity of sex, gender, and sexuality is being dramatically rewired (Plant,Babes in the Net).I...

[1] To find work as a flight attendant in the 1960s took more than affability, patience, good looks and an openness to travel. While all these traits were certainly essential, there were also more pernicious criteria that made this field rife with discrimination. African Americans were only reluctantly hired at...

[1] I spent several years of my life looking, waiting for the right time to die. In my early twenties, I fantasized about being martyred, killed for a purpose, a cause, something that would make my death bearable for the others, those who cared. I felt no risk in drugs,...

[1] The experience of fitness by women in our culture is ideologically inflected by assumptions about gender and biology, with the frequent result that many women are active primarily for extrinsic motives—to satisfy our own and others’ ideas about feminine attractiveness—rather than intrinsic ones such as a heightened sense of...

[1] The prominence of the ‘ghostly’ in Affinity, Sarah Waters’s 1991 neo-Victorian gothic fiction of female same sex desire, might be read as a fantastic fictional evocation of a recurring trope in lesbian feminist literary history and historiography: the historical ‘invisibility’ of lesbian identity. However, I wish to explore the...

Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. –Lisa Lowe We need to know where we...