Monthly Archives: September 2013

      Author’s Reply to Letters Regarding “Outrageous Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons” (PMC 6.1)   In response to a number of letters regarding my article on Richard Simmons, I would like to say that it was never my intention to condemn Mr. Simmons. In my opinion, noting someone’s gayness is in […]

  Mike Hill University of Michigan mikehill@umich.edu   Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (NY: Routledge, 1996), and Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994).   …it’s impossible to me to separate black studies from white studies.   –C.L.R. James   Whiteness Redux   When Timothy McVeigh’s photo […]

Sujata Iyengar Department of English Stanford University sujata@stanford.edu   “Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse,” a conference held at the University of Western Ontario, October 5-6, 1996, and the accompanying exhibition, “Speculations: Selected Works from 1983-1996,” by Barbara McGill Balfour.   When I told the Canadian Customs official that I was presenting a […]

  Tammy Clewell Florida State University tclewell@mailer.fsu.edu   Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.   In The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek offers a welcome intervention in current debates on postmodern ethics. It has been widely recognized […]

Lynda Hall University of Calgary lhall@acs.ucalgary.ca   Holly Hughes, Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove Press, 1996   Holly Hughes, one of the most acclaimed and popular contemporary performance artists and playwrights, publishes five of her works in Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler, including: “The Well of Horniness,” “The Lady Dick,” “Dress Suits […]

  Thomas Vogler University of California, Santa Cruz tom_vogler@macmail.ucsc.edu   Dressing the Text exhibition, travelling in U.S. through 1998, catalogue available by mail.   It is impossible to begin a discussion of the artist’s book without entertaining the issue of definitions. This is not the case with more well-known productions in the book art world, […]

David DeRose Center for Theater Art University of California, Berkeley dderose@uclink4.berkeley.edu   Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1996. 296pp.   I am squirming uncomfortably as I read the first few pages of Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the […]

Gregory Wolos Aplaus, New York Baltowolos@aol.com   It’s a 45 minute boat ride from the outer isle airstrip across the straits. The ferry’s railing cuts into my solar plexus, but I lean forward until my ribs ache. The pain and my excitement keep me breathless. Though I can’t see it through the cottony dawn fog, […]

  Paul Andrew Smith Cary, Illinois fedmunds@aol.com     Let the priest in surplice white, that defunctive music can, be the death-divining swan, lest the requiem lack his right. –William Shakespeare   Radio Free Alice wheels in, nurse in tow, logs-in early– 11:35 pm–I’m on till midnight.   Relief, I confess.   AITOR, types Radio […]

  Steven Jones Department of English Loyola University Chicago sjones1@luc.edu MYST is a registered trademark of Cyan, Inc.   The Myst Age   My point of departure is the fact that the 1993 Broderbund-Cyan CD-ROM game Myst has sold an estimated two million copies to date, making it among the most widely experienced hypernarratives (if […]

Penelope Engelbrecht Women’s Studies DePaul University pengelbr@wppost.depaul.edu   What do lesbians really want? Animated by an axiomatic awareness that the personal is political, lesbian thinkers in the 80’s and 90’s have extrapolated an astonishing variety of ideologies, theories, and praxes, individually manifesting implicit and explicit longings for everything from better sex toys and babies and […]

Heikki Raudaskoski Dept of Arts and Anthropology University of Oulu, Finland hraudask@cc.oulu.fi   It is mid-July 1945, and at the same time it is some time after March, 1973. The readers of Gravity’s Rainbow (those still aboard) have just passed halfway. A bunch of Argentine anarchists–having hijacked a German U-boat in Mar del Plata, Argentina, […]

Tony Thwaites University of Queensland tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.edu.au   [O]ne of the more striking features of the postmodern is the way in which, in it, a whole range of tendential analyses of hitherto very different kinds–economic forecasts, marketing studies, culture critiques, new therapies, the (generally official) jeremiads about drugs or permissiveness, reviews of art shows or national […]

Maria Damon Department of English University of Minnesota damon001@maroon.tc.umn.edu   To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb (Lenny Bruce, accompanying himself on drums): To is a preposition, come is a verb. To is a preposition, come is a verb. To is a preposition, come is a verb, the verb intransitive. To come. To come. […]

Arkady Plotnitsky The Literature Program and The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory Duke University aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu   Und darum: Hoch die Physik! Und höher noch das, was uns zu ihr zwingt,–unsre Redlichkeit!   –Nietzsche   The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of […]