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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Principle of Our Negative Solidarity
...undermined by an economics of competition. As Gilbert argues: Neoliberal culture works specifically to enhance our creative capacities while inhibiting any attempt to put them to work in a collective,...
Philosophers of Babel
...funding to match: Eurothink at its academic best. Why else would the culture czars of Paris and Brussels who’ve brought you the yearly European Culture Capitals (Umeå, anyone?) and Quaero...
Dating in the Expanded Field
...the very thing it is supposed to capture. Boomer parents bewail the hookup culture that they say has replaced dating, while their adult children stare into the abyss of Craigslist...
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...
"It Continues Not To End": Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project
...of Kenyan and African literature more broadly. Second, the historical. This text is very much of a particular moment in Kenyan literary culture, what I would characterize as the disillusionment...
Beauty Blogosphere 5.9.13
...big deal. Y not?: The Grand Narrative, as always, manages to elucidate aspects of American culture while examining contemporary Korean culture. This time: How the "Y-line" branding trend in South...
Race, Recognition, and Exotica
...“really” Indian. Being any race is tricky, being Indian particularly so. Are you Indian because of your bloodline? Your culture? Visibility? Self-identification? Tribal enrollment? Skin color? Community? I’m one-quarter ethnically...