‘Time Is a Mother’ by Ocean Vuong
PENGUIN PRESS, APRIL 2022, 128 PP. In February, I attended a reading by the poet Ocean Vuong in New York. There were dozens of us gathered, diligently masked and packed shoulder to shoulder, as he arrived at the podium and opened his new book, Time Is a Mother. His voice was familiarly haunting and […]
Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity’ by Paisley Currah and ‘Sexed Up’ by Julia Serano
NYU PRESS, MAY 2022, 256 PP. In 2007, the biochemist and genetic researcher Julia Serano published the spellbinding Whipping Girl, in which she coined the term transmisogyny to name and therefore describe the discrimination directed at trans women as part of a general hatred of women. A year earlier, Paisley Currah coedited the first decisive […]
‘This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music’ edited by’ Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon
HACHETTE, MAY 2022, 272 PP. Advice: if you ever talk to Kim Gordon, don’t ask her what it’s like to be a “girl in a band.” “The often-repeated question throughout my career as a musician made me feel disrupted, a freak or that we are all the same,” she notes on Instagram when announcing […]
‘Woman: The American History of an Idea’ by Lillian Faderman
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, MARCH 2022, 600 PP. In a hair under fifty years, American women’s history was born, died, and is being reborn as something else. Call it the history of gender if you like, or the history of sexuality and the body. What it means to be a woman today has become uncertain, […]
‘The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century’ by Amia Srinivasan
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2021, 276 PP To what extent is sexual desire innate? It’s a tricky question for science to answer, given the difficulties of disentangling a sexually mature person from their social influences. (As the British neuroscientist Gina Rippon points out, gendered socialization physically changes the brain.) Attempts to control for socialization—in […]
‘Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995’; edited by Anna von Planta
Liveright, November 2021, 1024 pp. Patricia Highsmith’s novels—often psychological thrillers with queer themes—were a master class in the twisted human emotions that lurk beneath the surface of social respectability. A talented painter and illustrator, she often alerted readers to the hidden malevolence of her characters with a simple, visual detail. Architect Guy Haines spots a […]
‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’ by Big Thief
4AD, FEBRUARY 2022 The title of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Big Thief’s fifth studio album, is a phrase which asks to be read twice. Appropriately, it has two births: the lyric first appeared on the track “anything,” off frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s solo album songs. The transcendental universe of Lenker’s songwriting is […]
‘The Swimmers’ by Julie Otsuka
Knopf, March 2022, 192 pp. Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, is not about swimming, however it might try to make you believe that it is. Otsuka, award-winning writer of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, takes us to an underground swimming club whose members operate with a near-religious reverence. […]
‘Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance’ by Moya Bailey
NYU PRESS, MAY 2021, 248 PP. When Moya Bailey—now an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University—first coined the term misogynoir in 2008, she was a grad student investigating how representations of Black women in popular culture influence their treatment in society and medicine. “It was in writing my dissertation that I landed on […]
‘Manywhere: Stories’ by Morgan Thomas
MCD January 2022, 224 pp. The dedication of Morgan Thomas’s debut fiction collection Manywhere reads, “For Bea, who introduced me to Frank, and for anyone who’s gone looking for themselves in the archives.” That spirit of searching drives this keen and coruscating set of nine short stories centered on Southern queer and genderqueer people, all […]