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
The House Wife and The Good Wife
In a compelling and rich analysis of serial melodrama, Jason Mittell offers up a reading of the series in his new book on complex television. He claims that the series “complicates its gendered appeals through innovative genre mixing and storytelling strategies” (¶ 41). By this, he means that the show offers up stereotypically masculine and
#WhyINeedFeminism
#WhyINeedFeminism – Staci Stutsman (5 September 2014) Recently, the anti-feminist movement has gained increased visibility thanks to the popularity of the tumblr #WomenAgainstFeminism. Women have submitted photographs of themselves holding up signs that list all of the reasons that they don’t need feminism. These reasons range from “because no one should be shamed for being