The publishing industry has for some time now been heavily publicizing a few figures whose success is keeping the whole thing afloat. Sally Rooney is one of those figures. Her…
Archive for 2020
So-Called Normal People
A dozen or so years ago, when she and I still shared a home, I gave to my oldest stepdaughter what I think both of us would now agree was…
The Sweet Stuff
Straight sex is not a disaster. That’s the plot of Sally Rooney’s novels. This is perhaps hard to take. After all, as Peter Coviello notes, Eve Sedgwick taught us that…
Introduction: Sally Rooney Cluster
Sally Rooney is the harbinger of a literary world yet to come! Or she is evidence of that world in its crumbling decline. It depends who you ask. Upon her…
Exodus: Beshalach: Omari, May 27
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Beshalach Exodus 13:17 – 17:16 Portland, OR Dear friends, I have taken to wandering lately. I’ve had to. My apartment is small…
Exodus: Bo: Briallen, May 21
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Bo Exodus 10:1 – 13:16 Elmhurst, Queens Dear readers, The locusts are swarming, the darkness is descending, and the Lord is…
When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic”
Wow. I mean, really: wow. I re-read Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet for this collective engagement with core texts from 1990, and was reminded of the vertiginous nature of her…
Haircut Theory: Living with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
I recently found myself in a bit of gender trouble when I discovered that Judith Butler and my girlfriend share a hairstylist. That Judith Butler does not cut her own…
Hearing What Black Women Have Been Telling Us All Along: On Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought
Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990) helped to announce and participated in a watershed moment in Black feminist theory, one that ushered in what might be understood as the…
The Dirty World: On Stuart Hall’s “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities”
The “dirty world” supplied cultural studies with its questions, and the traditional humanities with its points of departure and return. Invoked more than once in Stuart Hall’s 1990 essay for…