A Palimpsest of Returns In July 2017, I accompanied twelve students from Oregon State University to Cuba on a study abroad trip. It was also my first trip to Cuba,…
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Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object
Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object
Feeling Like a Bad Trans Object
Being trans in a cis culture means that too many first encounters with oneself come through the shame of exposure. I remember being called gay by kids so many times…
Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object
Tasting Embarrassment, or, Liking Leo
I want to embark on a self-conscious exploration of encountering white stardom. To my mind, the white star is objectified as someone else and for someone else, and yet, through…
Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object
It Me: Annotation and Restraint
I. Restrained When I am feeling pulled in many directions at once by my interests or my values or my actions, my friend Adam has long advised me that we…
Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object
Back to Plath
Is Sylvia Plath assigned to high school English classes in this forsaken country? I wouldn’t know — at least not from personal experience. I don’t remember reading her in my…
Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object
Introduction: Someone Else’s Object
A Lost Doll In her essay, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gives an account of a childhood memory that she likes to think of as…
Contemporaries Essays, The Stuff of Figure, Now
The Stuff of Figure, Now: Introduction
My senior year of college I took a seminar on apocalyptic literature. It was a course with a lot of social cachet on our small liberal arts campus. The flashiest…
Contemporaries Essays, The Stuff of Figure, Now
A Study in Upholstery
This essay is a highly concentrated inquiry into one weird poetic trope, wherein the sexualized body of a woman is described in terms of upholstered furniture. I’ll introduce and discuss…
Contemporaries Essays, The Stuff of Figure, Now
Producing Totality
“We were like figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together.” —Saul Bellow, Dangling Man Recently, detail is in decay, as seen in Elif Batuman’s (“Short Story and Novel”; “Get a…
Contemporaries Essays, The Stuff of Figure, Now
Paper, Scissors, Stone
Language is fossil poetry.— Ralph Waldo Emerso WORDS DIE, THE WORLD IS ETERNALLY YOUNG.— Aleksei Kruchenykh Traditional rhetoric accorded two main functions to metaphor, the first functional and the second…