“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
Tag: Lesbian
On Dressing Down Myth
“I research specific instances of Black artists who strip themselves out of mythologized dressings around race, sexuality, and gender.”
The Bingewatch: Lesbian Drama
Why do I, and so many others, still stan for “The L Word,” despite its failure to enact a perfectly calibrated representation of queer life?
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 ...
Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a ...
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 …
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...