Blood is an enduring metaphor for heteronormative kinship. However, Keiko Lane, author of the new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art (Duke, 2024), appropriates the image of blood as a symbol for the queer intimacies forged in coalitional AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. The memoir follows Lane as…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
Towards an Asian American Disability Politics: On Mimi Khúc’s “Dear Elia”
Sami Schalk, in Black Disability Politics (2022), notes “the limited scholarly work on the specific approaches to disability politics within particular racialized communities thus far” (162). Schalk explains that the lack of such scholarly work prevents her from exploring to what extent a Black disability politics overlaps with the disability politics of Indigenous and Native,…
Black Feminist Healing Arts: A Making of Pedagogy and Praxis
BLACK FEMINIST HEALING ARTS: A MAKING OF PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS . . . – the inception – It was Summer 2020, at the height of the pandemic, amidst erupting waves of Black grief. And there I was, sittin’ up in my room, preparing to teach my very first university course amidst a global…
“Edible Panopticons”: Hour-Man, the Pill, and the Superpower of Pharmaceutical Autonomy
Before he was the square-chested, slick-haired icon, Superman was a villain’s pharmaceutical test subject. In their 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman,” Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (who would later create the iconic Clark Kent comics) describe an evil chemist who goes to the bread-line and indiscriminately chooses one of the many “disillusioned…
“Misshaped parts did them appall”: The Purulent Paradox of the “Skinny Fat” Body
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), an allegorical romance epic, begins with Redcross, the fledgling hero of holiness who struggles to live up to his name. Time and again, he veers from the steady camaraderie of Una—an embodiment of the one, true, Protestant church—for the femme fatale Duessa, who’s stunning to look at but rotten…
From the Clinic to the Talk Show: Narratives of Trans History in Framing Agnes
While the trans community and its allies know that trans people have always existed, it is up to queer and feminist historians to provide a representation of that past, to tell histories of trans individuals from the archives we have available. Framing Agnes (Chase Joynt, 2022) depicts Joynt’s and Kristen Schilt’s search for such…
(Dis)articulation: “Broken Ladies” and the Anatomized Female Body
Articulating symptoms of illness often first requires dis-articulation: this part hurts; this one thing happened; I started feeling this, then this; are these things related? First narrativized as a series of observations, symptoms separate out into individual signs (one symptom, after all, could be the effect of one cause, but a different symptom could be…
The Performance of Pain
You cannot breathe; the world slows down around you; your chest tightens as you walk to your car. Once again, you feel as though you have failed to convince a doctor of your pain, and once again, you must face it alone. This is, unfortunately, the experience of far too many female patients, but the…
I’m not Lazy, I’m Ill
“I am not Lazy; I’m Ill”* Multiple sclerosis can feel like your body is gaslighting you. In high-stress mode, I lift my hands in front of my face to check if they are shaking. In Latino culture, we have a saying, “no me tiemba el pulso.” The literal translation is, “My pulse does…
Negotiating Nature: Mike Johnson, Richard III, and the God’s Honest Truth
Before he was elected Speaker of the House on 25 Oct. 2023, Mike Johnson seems to have eluded the spotlight with the fancy footwork of a ballerina dancing into it. Then, suddenly, people cared about his opinions on the issues most dividing Americans today. In a recent Fox News interview, Johnson explained his worldview only…