A French boy named G that I’ve been spending time with here calls me Helen of Troy. Then, the strongest woman he’s ever met. Then, a knight — not a damsel — in distress. He says I am waiting to stake my sword into a rock. He doesn’t know about the entry (“Time Away: Modern Day Swords”) I posted a couple of weeks ago.
Read MoreNaomi entreating Ruth and Orpah to return to the land of Moab, William Blake, 1795 by Emily McAvan In this paper I read the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Bible in relation to modern Jewish feminist and queer theories. I trace the movement in the narrative between mourning and melancholia, suggesting that the mourning…
Read MoreVitruvius presenting De Architectura to Augustus. From Vitruvius on Archtitecture by Thomas Gordon Smith, 1864 From Evening Will Come: Julie Carr: And how about happiness? Lisa Robertson: Well, I’m not sure that pleasure and happiness are always necessarily aligned, but at an earlier period of my life I might have thought that was so. [Laughter]…
Read MoreThe First Frame of Each Shot from Lana Del Rey’s video Carmen: Part I by X The Turin Horse is about the heaviness of human existence. How it’s difficult to live your daily life, and the monotony of life. –Béla Tarr, on his film The Turin Horse And if I tell you that I feel…
Read MoreThe Name of the Rose, Neue Constantin Film, 1986 by Natalija Bonic When Freud devised the “talking cure,” he envisaged it as having a therapeutic effect, not only on individuals suffering from neurosis, but also on society as a whole. By enabling patients to talk freely about their repressed (and often socially unacceptable) fears and…
Read MoreDrop Dead, Amie Dicke, 2007 From The Virginia Quarterly Review: My favorite definition of a feminist is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, described them simply as “women who don’t want to be treated like shit.” This definition is pointed and succinct, but I…
Read MoreTheory graffiti tags by Kenneth Reinhard [In this talk, I am drawing largely on the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau. In particular, I am guided by Badiou’s essays “Philosophy and Desire,” “Eight Theses on the Universal,” and his books Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Being and Event. Žižek’s work, from…
Read Moreby Jeremy Fernando The Juche idea defined man as the master who dominates the world, not merely as part of it, and thus established a new world outlook which … regards the world and its changes and progress with man, its master, at its centre. (Kim Jong Il: On the Juche Idea, 74) To conquer…
Read MoreFrom The Simpsons, Fox Broadcasting Company by Amy E. Wendling The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, by Kevin Floyd, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 270 pp. Of the many striking features of Kevin Floyd’s excellent study, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, certainly the most striking is its second chapter. In…
Read Moreby Madhavi Menon Surprisingly, queer theorists have rarely encountered Shakespeare. Not because they are badly-read or have blinkers on, but because of a deep belief that Shakespeare existed “before” the days of queer theory, and so it would be anachronistic to put the one in conversation with the other. For many queer theorists the historical…
Read MoreFranz Kafka, Andy Warhol, 1980 From London Review of Books: An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished…
Read MoreSir Thomas Browne possessed veritable shelves of non-existent books. The sadly under-read seventeenth-century prose master oft sat in his Norwich garden and contemplated that infinitely long syllabus which does not exist in our universe.
Read MoreI’m not arguing that centre-right and right-wing critics of antisemitism are antisemitic, but their campaign has a ferocious hygiene about it that carries unpleasant and ironic resonances…
Read More
