Category: Issue 12

On February 4, 2020, my breasts were surgically removed via bilateral mastectomy. This was my fourth surgery in three months following a diagnosis of cancer in my right breast in October 2019. I was 40 years old. Though I briefly considered breast reconstruction, I knew instinctively that I could not tolerate a reconstructed breast, not […]

Pornhub’s new venture Classic Nudes challenges art’s hierarchies by focusing on and recreating its most erotic moments through pornography. “Porn may not be considered art,” the site asserts, “but some art can definitely be considered porn.” Images of artworks from six leading institutions are accompanied by witty and pun-filled text and audio commentary as well […]

Charlotte Temple should have known better. She should have listened to her teachers and her parents. She should not have run away with Lieutenant Montraville. She should neither have listened to nor believed his promises of marriage. She definitely should not have fucked him on the boat to America. And if she had done all […]

In the first weeks of a Fall 2019 class on U.S. Literature and the Law, my students and I paused while we were discussing Cheryl Harris’s landmark essay “Whiteness as Property” (1991) to look around us. We were unpacking what Harris meant by describing whiteness as the “conceptual nucleus” of American social life. The essay […]

So I will let it alone, and write about the house. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”   I am not the first woman to go mad looking at a wall. I was staying home with our toddler, pregnant and depressed. Most days, I pushed the stroller past houses, calculating their value. Walking was cheaper […]

My father’s library took up most of his office and much of our living room–hundreds or thousands of books lovingly acquired over the course of his life, a hard core of hyper-masculine, mostly Jewish writers of the 60s and 70s surrounded by a much larger library of pulp fantasy and science fiction. Because the library […]

I love pop music. I love the eighteenth century. When these things collide, I am in heaven. Ascend with me on this bop-filled playlist of ten eighteenth-century-influenced music videos. As we’ll see, artists use images of eighteenth-century culture for a variety of interesting ends. Dizzee Rascal and Madonna reimagine the French court as a BIPOC […]

Your duvet, flung with stars, lies horizontal on the bed, the soft parts gathered in the bottom corner, like a hibernation. But when I pull on it, to flatten the curves you pull on a corner that is not a corner: ball yourself like twisted cellophane. I lift your book, fractured around eighty year old glue […]

I’ve spent the last decade or so of my life writing a book about women and plants–specifically, eighteenth-century British women and their investment in botanical knowledge as a generative force for their own intellectual and emotional development. A few chapters of this book, Botanical Entanglements, think about the relationship between women and botanical representation in […]