In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns began for the foreseeable future, it felt quite obvious that, among a myriad of emergent crises, domestic abuse was suddenly surging. It was…
Contemporaries Essays
Real Women
Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then? —Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to Beyond Good and Evil “Are you really being truthful, Grandmamma? Really and truly truthful?” —Roald Dahl, The…
Looking at the “Infra” of Infrastructure
Suspicion circulates freely throughout Lydia Millet’s fiction. In the middle of her 2011 environmental-quasi-detective-novel Ghost Lights, the narrator explains that Hal, the protagonist, was “finding it hard to relinquish his…
Suspicion, As Seen on TV
On August 23, 2000, in the finale of the first season of Survivor, as over 51 million people1 watched, Wisconsin truck driver Sue Hawk cemented herself in reality television history…
Introduction
The other day I watched the neo-noir movie Angel Heart (dir. Alan Parker, 1987) starring Robert De Niro as a character named Louis Cyphre and Mickey Rourke as a hard-living…
On Lipstick Lesbians, Feminine Suffering, and Aspirational Idiocy
When I was sixteen, I only wanted one thing: to be fucking sexy. I did not achieve this. It was 2013, and I was just a suburban teen, wearing a…
Neither sexy, cool, nor smart
§1 It was, intellectually and politically, a dark time: 2005. In Miami Beach, a nineteen-year-old with “a rhinestone Playboy bunny ring, white stilettos that laced in tight X’s up her…
On Twinning: The Parent Trap, The Hiltons, and the White Girls Who Raised Me
Once, at ten, I cut a tuft of my hair with a pair of craft scissors. I had just re-watched The Parent Trap and was mesmerized still by that red-headed…
Have We Learned Anything?
In late November 2006, I was knee-deep in my daughter’s toddlerhood, still getting used to the new body I’d found myself in. A little rounder in the middle, breasts still…
The American Bimbo as a Site of Spiritual Struggle
Two days after shaving my head down to the skin with the help of my roommate and a BIC razor, I fell asleep on our couch while watching cable TV….