“We have to take over spaces because we are not going to be invited in.”
Tag: Sexuality
Trans Women and Children on TV
The family as we know it today functions to further isolate trans children from trans women and vice versa. Thank goodness for TV.
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?
France and the Question of Consent
Two memoirs trenchantly critique the ways in which France has framed sexual consent, legally and culturally, since the 1970s.
The Broken Promises of “Bridgerton”
The show portrays a racially diverse society, but papers over white-supremacist interracial sexual assault and violence. Was there another way?
Philanthropy and the “Jewish Continuity Crisis”
Today, Jewish philanthropy—like all philanthropy—is big business, thanks to US philanthropy’s torturous entanglement with US capitalism.
America Comes Out
Once, “coming out” was something done within gay social worlds. Today, new groups do so to refute stigma, and to reclaim that stigma as pride.
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen ...
Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the ...
Samuel Delany on Capitalism, Racism, and Science Fiction
Samuel Delany was 20 when his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, appeared ...
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
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 ...
B-Sides: J. R. Ackerley’s “We Think the World of You”
J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1960) isn’t a novel I’d ever say I ...
Public Thinker: Jack Halberstam on Wildness, Anarchy, and Growing Up Punk
Defying disciplinary categorization, Halberstam’s work draws on ...
Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or ...
The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and ...
“You Could Have Changed Everything”
One may as well begin with George Merrill’s touch to E. M. Forster’s backside (“gently, and just above the buttocks,” Forster recalls). It was 1913 ...
“A Thousand Years” of Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard has a gift for seeing similarities. In every gallery of her Survey at the Whitney, this capacity for sensing, finding, and producing similarities is ...
For the Love of Doughnuts
On the surface, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie tells the story of Minerva and Cal, who fall in love with each other. Really, though, Bet Me is a story about a fat woman ...