Leave your Message, not your Trash
On a frigid yet sunny day in January 2014, I happened to find myself a couple of blocks away from the annual March for Life in Washington, DC. I was in the capitol visiting the Folger Shakespeare Library for some research, and had arrived early in the morning for a long day of archival exploration
Unruly Instruction: Pedagogy, Feminism, and the Unruly Woman
Hello world! It is a pleasure to be the blogger this month for Metathesis and I look forward to sharing my thoughts on a few different topics with our readers. Don’t forget—if you like this blog YOU, TOO could be a contributor. Check out our CFP here For my first post I thought I would
Regeneration, Rebranding, Republicans; or, Reince Priebus is not your boyfriend
In case you were camping over the last three days, the Republican Party took control of Congress on Tuesday night. To paraphrase an oft-heard line on the Capitol floor, I’m not a social scientist—so I’m not interested in the actual, complex causes of the victory. I am, however, interested in the rhetoric around the victory, particularly
Coda: Asexual Awareness Week and the Future of Queer Theory
Last week, I completed the Safer People, Safer Spaces training my university offers to learn better ways to be an ally, whether you’re a member or a supporter of the queer community. One of the activities we did involved matching vocabulary words (like lesbian, heteronormativity, drag, M2F) to their definitions and then discussing what we
Queering LGBT History: The Case of Sherlock Holmes Fanfic
This summer, I fell for BBC’s “Sherlock” hard1 — hard enough to drive me back to fanfic. Fanfic has grown up in the past decade: it now has activists, “aca-fans” (academic fans), and copyright lawyers, and a nonprofit defending artists’ rights to disseminate transformative works, including fiction. My casual intention to fill the wait till
Overwriting History: “Just Reading” and the Case of John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman has been in my Twitter feed a lot lately. Apparently, when this Victorian cardinal wasn’t writing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the nineteenth century’s longest and driest autobiography (sorry, Newman), he wrote religious commentary that some people still find instructive. But it wasn’t all that long ago that Newman was in the
Recuperation as Resistance: The Icons of LGBT History
As I mentioned last week, the original premise of LGBT history month was to spend some time each day in October learning about a new LGBT “icon,” some from current LGBT history and some from the past (and some who are quite problematic, but more on that next week). “Icon,” to me, is a curious
A History of LGBT History
October is a beautiful month. My favorite bike trail smells like toast, crumbly apple crisp becomes a perfect midterm snack, and the trees are a rainbow of fire. When I walk past the striated maple on my way from class, I secretly like to think that maybe this is why October is LGBT history
Teaching Irony and The Office: A Reception Studies Approach
Last academic year, serving as a 2013-2014 HASTAC scholar, I began work on The Pedagogy Project (forthcoming). The HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) community asked fellow scholars to submit sample lesson plans or pedagogical strategies. I submitted a lesson that I use when I teach Twin Peaks, and I helped compile and
An Ambivalent “Fat Girl”: Weight Loss and Identity Categories that Don’t Quite “Fit”
We are finally exiting beach season, which fortunately means that celebrities looking hot or not-so-hot in bikinis will stop being news-worthy events. Unfortunately, who lost the baby weight, who gained ten pounds since the last Emmys, and who wore it best are year-round concerns. This fixation on celebrity fitness produces an interest in the infamous