[1] DP: Let me start by thanking you for agreeing to talk about your book with me. I found Semiotics Unbounded a really fascinating attempt to synthesize a lot of material in the field of semiotics that will be unfamiliar to many of us (especially in the U.S.) who were...

[1] A 1987 profile in Newsweek meditated on the unlikely early success of Danny DeVito in Hollywood: “DeVito has…becom[e] one of Hollywood’s hottest—and most unlikely—success stories. In a town of pretty-boy leading men, he has triumphed despite being typecast as five-foot and fiendish” (Reese, 72). An interviewer for Peopleregistered similar...

“I cannot continue to use my body to be walked over to make a connection.” –Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, xv There is “[n]o sense talking tough unless you do it.” –Estrella, Under the Feet of Jesus , 45 [1] In her 1980 preface to This Bridge Called...

[1] KLEIN: In your book WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota you chronicle the history of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a woman’s art collective and gallery based in Minneapolis. In the introduction, you write that “thirty years after the founding of the WARM collective no studies about...

[1] I can still remember the first time it happened. I was either thirteen or fourteen, I don’t know that, but I do know that I was sitting in a chair in the kitchen with my back to the folding doors leading down the long slate hallway. I was somewhere...

Indeed if one is to be a man almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. -Norman Mailer, The White...

Bodies, stardom, narratives [1] The questions that compel this essay concern the relationship between bodies and narratives: the narratives available to certain bodies and the disruptive impact of those bodies on narratives. My focus is the embodiment of the spunky heroine of the romantic comedy film–the feisty screwball leading lady...

Figure 1 MOORTI: Private Lives, Proper Relations offers a new lens through which one can understand some key late twentieth century African American women’s fiction. Your book primarily argues that the hidden arena of intimacy is thoroughly politicized for African Americans, that the black domestic sphere is shaped by interlocking...

Work, play, art, science, literature, sex, education … digitization leaves nothing untouched. Social relations are being transformed by the development of telecommuting, hypermedia systems, and the new world of on-line information. In particular, everything in the vicinity of sex, gender, and sexuality is being dramatically rewired (Plant,Babes in the Net).I...

[1] To find work as a flight attendant in the 1960s took more than affability, patience, good looks and an openness to travel. While all these traits were certainly essential, there were also more pernicious criteria that made this field rife with discrimination. African Americans were only reluctantly hired at...