The Job of Consent
The Joy of Consent: a Philosophy of Good Sex (October 2023) tests the limits of consent as a heuristic for "good sex," exposing the wide berth between pleasure and what is legible to the law.
Groupthinkers
A review of Divining Desire (OR Books) by Liza Featherstone
Tim Burton's "Big Eyes"
...secret (an open secret, apparently) — "from her own daughter!" even. He capitalizes on a sexist culture to take credit for Margaret's ability, and then uses the specter of that...
New Transcendentalist
...No physicist would dispute this.” “When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience,...
An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement
...rather than from the comfortable center of official culture. If an Oulipian leaves the workbench and settles into a comfortable armchair, his worldview narrows, and his work’s potential diminishes. A...
“Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric”: Trans Assimilation and Cringe
When the right deploys cringe to control trans assimilation, trans people cringe at each other.
Secondary Modern
...art to turn in on itself, away from common experience, and to make itself its own subject. Art, thus separated from culture, requires a social elite to support it and...
Wrong Ways to Eat
...sporadic self-indulgences and self-denials, the diseases that Western culture has recently made of them. In fact, in 2011, a study conducted by doctors in Utah found that Mormons who routinely...
Seconds of Pleasure
...distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn’t stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only...
7 Days of Queer Theory
...With Normal," can kick us off: "The received wisdom in straight culture, is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you...
A Black Jack
...culture we’ve gone from mainstream sitcoms in the 70s like The Jeffersons, which featured an unapologetically acerbic and defiantly successful George Jefferson, and Benson, whose titular character advanced from butler...
A Deluxe Apartment in the Sky
...family, whose upper class suburban environment has, he explains in voiceover, caused them “drop a little of [their] culture.” His eldest son favors field hockey over basketball and has adapted...
Bad Mothers
...a neo-imperialist military project. Despite arguing for the American Pietà as an understudied U.S. visual culture, Tapia deals only briefly with other so-called American Pietàs, such as the 1995 image...
Sunday Reading
...deep book Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity. Taibbi on that Goldman executive I liked this movie. Had a half blog post about the way the movie has...
Beauty Blogosphere 9.21.12
...sky-high heels and how they intersect with the city's car culture. ...And Everything In Between: Drug war: L'Oréal gets a slap on the wrist from the FDA for making...
Sunday Reading
...Lives in Poverty is a pretty serious indictment of the "amateur" athletic culture of the Olympics. I sort of get the feeling that the writer doesn't know it. "No political...