Tag
Lesbian
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Queer Joy Is Earned—and Requires Earnest Care
To view “I Kissed a Girl” as predominantly upbeat is to miss why it’s representation of bad feelings is important.
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Back to the Women’s Land
How do women gain power in a society economically and politically dominated by men? This question vexed mid-20th-century second-wave feminists. At issue was whether women should occupy male spaces or create their own female spaces. For example, was power acquired by demanding entry to traditionally masculine domains like Ivy League colleges, private clubs, and corporate…
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Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a …
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The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
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Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the roundtable featured presentations by Wai Chee Dimock, Heather Love, William Mills Todd III, J. Keith Vincent, and Cynthia Wall. To solicit brief position papers…
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A Handmaiden’s Tale
A hit at this year’s Cannes film festival and when it opened in Korea over the summer, The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) is now in limited release. This stylish and twisty Korean thriller remains true to the oeuvre of its director, revenge-plot master Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, 2003; Lady Vengeance, 2005), and to its source text, the novel…
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The Heartbeat of Chattahoochee Forest: Dahlonega, GA
This piece, marking the release of Bledsoe’s new novel, A Thin Bright Line, is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Urbanites joke about rural hicks. Rural Southerners, especially, are the butt of jokes about their dogs, guns, and ignorance. But anyone traveling—with their eyes and hearts…
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Disability Narratives
Ask most people living with a disability to name their least favorite question and “what happened to you?” will be high on the list. “Wanting to educate yourself about disability and learn more is great, but there’s a time and a place,” writes Erin Tatum in Everyday Feminism magazine. “You should have enough sensibility and…
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A Lesbian “Carol” for Christmas
As we approach the crest of film awards season frenzy, Carol, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, still in limited release, has captured the imagination of critics like no lesbian-themed movie before it. Named best film of 2015 by the New York Film Critics Circle, it comes in at…
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Pornography Porn
In the fall of 1990, at the beginning of my senior year of college, I became obsessed with pornography—or, rather, I became obsessed with the feminist debates about it. From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, pornography, along with sex work, butch-femme, and S/M, divided the feminist community, leading to public debates, legal battles,…
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Who Puts the Fun in Fun Home?
There’s something delightfully intimate about reading a graphic novel and seeing a story unfold across the panels, visualizing the world the way its creator does. Theater, however, doesn’t often afford its audience that luxury. What the audience sees is clouded by their own interpretations, the baggage that they carry with them through the doors. So…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Orange Is the New Black”
In advance of the second season of Netflix’s original series, Orange Is the New Black, which will be released on Friday, June 6, we asked Public Books contributors to share their views on the show’s representation of race, gender, sexuality, incarceration, and the women-in-prison genre. —Heather Love: Made For TV —Megan Comfort: The Two Pipers…
