In the summer of 2021, as an unemployed theater and performance studies scholar and mother of a four-year-old with a partner working two full-time jobs to provide for us, I often find myself wishing to escape from my life. Specifically, as my back seizes up and my son requests me to play a third “unboxing Batman toys” Youtube video of the day, I wish to escape my body, to escape my perspective, to escape the pandemic, to escape the everything and the everywhere of the current, long, multi...

Although celebrated for its support of male modernists—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound—Shakespeare and Company was run by and mostly for women. Sylvia Beach opened the bookshop and lending library in 1919, inspired by her romantic partner, Adrienne Monnier, who owned the French-language bookshop and lending library, La maison des amis des livres. [1] Beach’s assistants were all women: Myrsine Moschos, Margaret Newitt, Eleanor Oldenberger, Paulette Lévy, Ruth Camp—to name only a few...

Amid a wave of academic writing about whiteness at the end of the twentieth century, Richard Dyer’s White (1997) helped to make visible the artificial construction of whiteness as a racial imaginary. Before Dyer, it was all too easy for whiteness to remain invisible in a dominant white culture that equates whiteness with normativity: “There is a specificity to white representation, but it does not reside in a set of stereotypes so much as in narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and...

It was 1:14pm central standard time on a Friday. There was a meme on reddit. An image of what looked like knights around a stone table. They held their swords out, guiding them in coalition, not, in this meme, in “brotherhood,” facing the center of the table. A redditor annotated each sword: one sword labeled “gamers,” another “college students.” The remaining three swords, the swords in the middle of this phalanx, were labeled “trans women,” “trans men,” and “nonbinaries.” Each of these coalitional swords that are not, and refuse, brotherhood point to the table’s center which the redditor also annotated: “wearing oversized hoodies.”

A creature luminous and vexed, the firefly flits in melancholic briefness, brilliant yet burning out, its light’s little lifespan mocked by the starry fixtures of the sky. The firefly’s illumination is a chemical process, like the flash of a camera but without the photograph’s sense of permanence and history. Instead, summer by summer, children chase down these natural lanterns and collect them in mason jars, glass enclosures for viewing their darkening demise. Aquariums of lost energy.

From the start, I wanted Claude Cahun to be like me, or I saw myself in them, and used the pronoun that would make this misrecognition seem the most true. It would be possible to write a different sort of essay than the one I’m writing now, without any recourse to autobiography. This other, more academic essay would make a strong case for Cahun as a key figure in transgender history. But my argument for why Cahun’s pronouns matter is situated in the drama of more personal misrecognitions, mine and those of others, played out between the queer historical past and the present tense of its archival recovery.

As a scholar of early-twentieth-century literature, I have not found it necessary to address contemporary political issues in my work. However, the election of Donald Trump has forced me to change my thoughts about writing in general and more specifically, about publishing on modernist women writers. In the present academic climate, many who read and teach in the perpetually unpopular field of women writers also contend with heavy teaching loads, difficult family commitments and/or precarious employment.

One of the remarkable—yet often overlooked—features of aesthetic experience is its capacity to enact both promises and threats. Neither enlisting itself unequivocally in social utopias, nor allowing itself to be jettisoned in favor of a morally, politically, or epistemically more salutary alternative, the aesthetic domain is a field of pleasure and pain, of ignorance and knowledge, of brutality and life-sustaining agency. Its alliance with invidious forces and histories notwithstanding, the aesthetic enables us to confront tensions in the realms of epistemology,

When Orlando falls into his transformative trance at the mid-point of Virginia Woolf’s romp of a novel, he is an agent of the British Empire in Constantinople, at the moment of receiving his newly conferred Dukedom. The ceremony is a pageant of Empire, which gathers “people of all nationalities” to celebrate Orlando’s status, while the text makes frequent reference to the show of British superiority in this event. Yet, awakening as female, Orlando also awakens to life with the Gypsies, abandoning, for a time, not only the ambassadorial dwelling and its trappings of imperial power, but also his/her national identity. Orlando “dressed herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex” and then rode off where s/he had “often . . . longed to be” (103–04). In the following chapter, upon her return to England as female, Orlando discovers the ongoing disjunction between outward gendered appearance and inward sex, and the narrator remarks that “often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above” (139).