Latest stories

Transcending Boundaries: A Mother’s Work

T

Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from 2000, which was exhibited at his high school “Senior Art Exhibition.” Now...

I Came By

I

Babak Anvari’s 2022 film I Came By tells the disjointed story of graffiti artists Jay and Toby. Set in the contemporary United Kingdom, the story addresses colonialism, race, and the curious characteristics of modern, industrial societies in this follow-up to Anvari’s 2016 debut film Under the Shadow. In many ways, I Came By resembles recent films like Get Out (Jordan Peele), Intrusion (Adam...

A Painfully Honest Portrayal of Beauty

A

Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm) The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled tension, presenting an image of discomfort, pain, and human frailty. Yet beauty is...

Excess Emotion and Queer Subjectivity in Pericles

E

Pericles (1608), one of Shakespeare’s and co-author George Wilkins’s romances, dramatizes the tumultuous life of Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. Over five acts, it stages his acquisition of love, its tragic loss, and its ultimate rediscovery. Strikingly, the play opens with incest—Antiochus, the king of Antioch, instructs Pericles to solve a riddle whose answer reveals that his daughter is “an...

“Unbury Your Gays”: Queer Phantoms in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth

At its root, the “Bury Your Gays” trope is simple: in a work with an overt or implied same-sex couple, by the end of the story at least one of the lovers “must die or otherwise be destroyed” (Hulan 17). Today, it is often used in film for shock value, as seen with Tara’s death on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2002 and Lexa’s death on The 100 in 2016, which drew mainstream attention to and backlash...

A Patriotic Reflection of a Broken Image

A

The nature of quilting implies a coming together of disparate elements to create a pleasing and cohesive whole. Rachel Clark’s quilt, These Colors Should Run, utilizes these formal qualities to reimagine the American flag, conveying an unsettling and paradoxical image of a nation in disrepair. Clarke is a Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies whose research focuses on...

Under the Shadow: Islamic Horror and Shadows of the Djinn

U

In the last 25 years, the American media landscape has been flooded by stories of war and conflict in the Middle East. In the perspective of many American spectators, the Middle East is a chaotic and even frightening place full of terrorists and extremism. While such terrors exist in the Middle East, attending to the intersection of colonialism and war can tell a different tale of terror in the...

Attempting to Wrangle Video Game Genre Adaptation

A

When used in relation to video games, the term “genre” primarily functions as a descriptor of the types of interactive play present in the text—e.g. role-playing, shooting, driving, etc. Games’ systems of interaction often become the main identifiers by which they get categorized. While a plethora of genres defined by narrative and theme are represented in video games, this classification is...

Interracial Couples as Outcasts in Loving

I

In the 2016 movie Loving, the interracial couple of Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) experience discrimination under segregation in 1950s and 1960s Virginia. Outside forces (i.e., people in the community and institutions) continuously try to separate the couple, making it difficult for them to be together. These outside forces use a mix of nonverbal and verbal...

Revelatory Liminality in the Metamorphoses’ Myrrha Episode

R

[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire,  which she  ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal...

Subscribe

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 4 other subscribers

Recent Posts

Social Media