Dynamos are women Round with the first sweet swelling Of a new mother’s milk. — Macknight Black, “New Mother,” 1929 [1] In 1940, Clarence Holbrook Carter produced a painting that disturbed him. In fact, War Bride (figure 1) was so unlike his previous work that he was reluctant to exhibit...

Introduction [1] Both the movements and the settlements of the tremendous populations who live outside their country of origin, estimated at 150 million, have been of worldwide concern, as displaced groups exert striking influence well beyond their numbers on the identities, economies, and politics of nation-states. Within the expanded body...

[1] Providing the meaning to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, has become an initiation rite in theory and criticism culture. The meaning of Billy Budd usually comes in the form of the position which the critic takes on the novella’s presumably central moral question: the Case either For or Against...

“I try to laugh about it cover it all up with lies I try and laugh about it hiding the tears in my eyes cause boys don’t cry boys don’t cry” – The Cure “Boys Don’t Cry,” Boys Don’t Cry 1980 “True to form, Dagger sulked, maintained his distance, and...

[1] A striking thing seems to be happening in contemporary male dance films. In the 1990s and into the new millennium, men suffering from masculinity crises often engage with dance in order to once again make a credible claim to their masculinity. So pervasive is this trend in films like...

[1] BERELOWITZ: You make the argument that Eakins’s paintings are an attempt to negotiate – indeed, to refashion – Gilded Age conceptions of masculinity. Could you set out for us what was the dominant understanding of masculinity when Eakins was embarking on his career in the 1870s and what shift...

“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...