Tag: Queer Theory

Queer Ever After?

If queer today often looks rather like heteronormativity’s “sick and boring life,” how can we cultivate queerer worlds, or other possibilities?

Impossible Belonging

If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than ...

The Sisters Grimm

Can a centuries-old literary tradition tell us anything useful about modern life? The continuing vitality of the fairy tale in contemporary culture would suggest an emphatic yes. And the vast ...

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 …

Join the Mutant Resistance!

The real world just got a lot more like a superhero comic, and not in a good way. I write on November 13, 2016; one of the many things that came up in my panicked, angry, sometimes despairing social …

Rape Culture Syllabus

I just start kissing them. Just kiss—I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.   —Donald ...

The Gay ’70s

Is being gay just about sex? It’s difficult to imagine anyone asking the question today. If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s ...

Sexuality, Counterfactually

Larry Kramer’s The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart is not all that interested in the history of sexuality. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion to make about a novel that ...

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 ...

#Normporn

In the penultimate season of 30 Rock (2006–13), the sitcom’s resident kinkmeisters and genderqueer lovers, Jenna and Paul, are faced with a profound sexual crisis: after chatting about their day ...