Texts in the Gothic literary tradition often explore taboo subject matter, such as violence against women and same-sex desire, as a way to challenge and even sensationalize cultural anxieties, questioning and rejecting the status quo. Despite centuries between the Gothic’s peak and today, the Gothic...
Colonial architecture serves many purposes for the colonizer, but none more universally acknowledged than to reflect the power of the colonizer. Common construction methods and features of colonial architecture are repeated globally across different empires, such as the use of vernacular materials, presence of cultural...
In The Deep, Rivers Solomon loosely adheres to the science fiction genre to confront the relationship between post-colonial ideologies and the persistence of memory in a novella deeply coded with genderqueer possibilities and reclamation of racial fantasy. Adapted from a song of the same name...
Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Jeanette Winterson’s “The Poetics of Sex” both engage with the concept of the lesbian utopia. An important ideal in lesbian feminism, the lesbian utopia positions relationships between women as nonviolent and equal, promising an escape from the...
In “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich and “Pearl Diver” by Mitski, the speaker narrates a deep-sea dive during which the diver undergoes a shift in identity as a result of a quest. The speaker in each text describes the dive, drawing lines of...
While popular music is dominated by artists embracing party culture and —in the view of neoliberal morality— its subsequent vice of drug use, Kid Cudi’s 2009 hit “Pursuit of Happiness (Nightmare)” examines the subject as a complicated matter. In collaboration with Ratatat and MGMT, the...
The Aestheticism movement of the nineteenth century emphasized pleasure and experience. However, it also perpetuated a gendered hierarchy between the spheres of men and women: men dominated the public while women faced confinement within the domestic. Male artists and flâneurs had the privilege of observing...
Rose Macaulay’s poem “The Shadow” explores the experience of civilian uncertainty, trauma, and helplessness during World War I aerial bombings, focalizing the interiority of civilians. Impressionist techniques of onomatopoeia and sparse diction elucidate trauma’s impact on civilians, marking their distress as inarticulable. The anticipatory dread of...
Diasporic identity is scarcely singular, yet Gianna Patriarca’s poetry collection Italian Women and Other Tragedies and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story collection How to Pronounce Knife share particularly striking similarities in their portrayals of diasporic mothers and daughters. The domestic space of home shapes the shared...
The release of Beyoncé Knowles’s sixth studio album, Lemonade, signified a turning point in the conception of Black female identity within popular music. Described as a “shot heard around the world” by scholar Zeffie Gaines, the multimedia experience of Lemonade serves as an ode to...