Reviews Archives - Page 12 of 17

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Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

November 21, 2017 • by Aaron Neber

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...

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What Happens Now?

Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

November 16, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It’s a year after the American Election Day that shook the world, and a new book that seeks to explain the disaster of Donald Trump’s victory drops every few weeks. We political historians are scrambling to keep up. Last month, Hillary Clinton’s What Happened? hit the stands. How does it feel to ...

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The Antidote to “Too Much Niebuhr”?

A.J. Muste and the Anti-American Political Tradition

November 15, 2017 • by Ray Haberski

The conflict between radical pacifists and other Protestants went deeper than the question of the United States’ role in the world; it was also about national identity, race, and historical memory. To Muste, when policymakers posited the United States as the representative of democratic civilization, they effectively erased its history ...

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Postcolonial Investigations and the Role of Necessary Discontinuity

A Review of Iain Chambers’ Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities

October 24, 2017 • by Dora Suarez

In Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities, Iain Chambers is preoccupied with the critical foreclosure that impedes our perception of the ways contemporary migration, as well as “the racism that precedes and accompanies it,” is not abnormal or exceptional.[1] In face of the waves of violence that convulse the landscape of the ...

Postcolonial Investigations and the Role of Necessary Discontinuity

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Full Frontal Feminism

Why Billie Jean King Made History in the Battle of the Sexes

October 9, 2017 • by Susan Ware

If only the 2016 election had turned out so well. “The Battle of the Sexes” puts its politics -- both feminist and sexual -- front and center, which is rather remarkable for a mainstream Hollywood offering. King takes on the male tennis establishment, personified by unctuous tennis promoter and former champion ...

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The Sound of a Thunder

Weatherman and the Music of Late-Life Regrets

October 3, 2017 • by Jeremy Varon

Meteorological images of all sorts -- with their implications of inevitability -- found their way into the narratives about the group. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather,” plucked from Creedence Clearwater Revival went a 1969 headline in the Underground Press about the group. And in a late 1970 communiqué called “New ...

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‘Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race’ by Clay Cane

A book review

September 23, 2017 • by Kevin Ewing

In 1991, filmmaker, educator, and gay rights activist Marlon Riggs told Outlook magazine: “When the existing history and culture do not acknowledge and address you -- do not see or talk to you -- you must write a new history, shape a new culture that will.” He called for Black lesbian and ...

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Bringing AIDS Home

A Queer Look at the History of an Epidemic

September 18, 2017 • by Dan Royles

AIDS at Home includes a wide range of materials, from archival documents and ephemera to documentary film and fine art. Visitors can watch Buddies for Life, a short documentary about the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) buddy program, in which volunteers provided help and companionship to people living with AIDS. ...

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The My Mother / My Self: Presidential Election of 2016

Susan Bordo’s The Destruction of Hillary Clinton

September 17, 2017 • by Nell Painter

Bordo devotes three and a half early pages to Clinton’s appeal to women her age, and Bordo’s age, and mine -- we old women who still evoke wicked stepmothers, witches, shrill voices, and physical ugliness (18-22). In 2016, Democratic women divided by generation, with older women pro-Hillary and younger women ...

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For and Against the Anthropocene

A review of ‘Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today’

September 15, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Since the turn of the 21st century, many scientists have been arguing for the designation of a new epoch in Earth's geological history, which they term the Anthropocene in acknowledgment of the impact of humans on the planet's evolution. While not yet officially approved by the International Union of Geological ...

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The Body in Space/Trauma in the Body

A Review of Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger’

August 17, 2017 • by Lynne Peskoe-Yang

Roxane Gay’s first book-length memoir, Hunger, is about space: the space that certain bodies are allowed to occupy, and the world’s response when they are unable or unwilling to fit inside it. In tender, explosive prose, Gay writes of the systemic medical dismissal and the social and sexual ostracism that ...

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Defending Abortion Without “Rights”

A Review of Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason

August 14, 2017 • by Juniper Alcorn

In Foucault’s Futures, Penelope Deutscher stages critical discussions between Foucault and his critics and intellectual descendants, bringing reproduction into focus as an issue of biopolitics. The “future” of Foucault is contained in two questions: first, in what sense is reproduction present in Foucault’s work and how has it eluded or ...