Archive - Year - 1998

(Note: This essay is a shorter version …)* [1] In January 1995, a University of Michigan sophomore known as Jake Baker posted a short story to an Internet site devoted to explicit fiction.[1] In January 1995, a University of Michigan sophomore known as Jake Baker posted a short story to...

I'm not much on rearwindow ethics" –Grace Kelly, responding to Jimmy Stewart's belated ethical/optical crisis, in Hitchcock's Rear Window Sadistic Gaze [1] Two recent and influential feminist discussions of Paul Gauguin's Pacific oeuvre have no time for ambivalence when it comes to analysing Gauguin's imbrication in the aesthetic practices and...

[1] Recently, on an electronic discussion list operated by the American Conference for Irish Studies, one of the members posted a request for information on "the alleged homosexuality of Michael Collins," one of the primary leaders of the Irish struggle for independence in the early twentieth century and a major...

[1] In the Spring of 1988 a group of women in the contiguous border cities of San Diego and Tijuana established a collective to which they later gave the name Las Comadres. 1 For three years they met at venues on both sides of the border, exploring its complexity from...

[1] Avant-garde chronicler, arbiter, and participant Carl Van Vechten produced myriad texts during a career deeply imbricated in those issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality that continue to complicate critical understanding of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Replete with nested voyeurisms and repetitions from novel to scrapbook to photograph, Van...

[1] I really like to watch soap operas. As a self-respecting feminist academic, I realize I am supposed to be ashamed to say so, but for reasons I hope this essay will make clear, I am saying so at once. I am not using "soap opera," as do many scholars,...

"But don't you wonder to find me scribble so much about family and birth?" –Pamela Andrews, in a letter to her parents Scribbling about childbirth [1] In The London Hanged, a painstaking catalogue of eighteenth-century juridical practice, Peter Linebaugh briefly laments the absence of equivalent work on childbearing of the...

Updated 1/4/1999 [2] The 1 1/2 million Hazaras, Shi’ites in a Sunni country, Mongols among Indo-European tribes like the Pushtuns who make up 99% of Taleban’s core membership, were the last bastion of women’s rights in the country. Among the Hazaras you found women officials, teachers, doctors, medics, even soldiers;...

Deviance versus Distinction (1) The emergence of a suburban role for men during the first half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain gave homophobia a new and potent role as part of middle-class masculinity. The century as a whole witnessed a marked increase in the systematic surveillance and persecution...

"A Case Very Near the Borderline" (1) Hollywood's Production Code explicitly banned "miscegenation" from the American screen for nearly thirty years. 1 The files of the Production Code Administration (PCA) which document the interpretation of that ban, however, demonstrate the PCA censors' utter confusion as to the meaning of the...