Everyone Loves the Pope
My lover became the Pope. It was the twenty-tens and the Catholic Church wanted to rebrand with Newport cigarettes and Hermes chiseled calves. ...more
Posts Tagged: gender
Ready for Change: Discussing Sexual Assault with SafeBAE
The co-founders of SafeBAE discuss the challenges and victories of teaching students about rape culture, consent, and anti-bullying. ...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Gabrielle Calvocoressi discusses her new collection Rocket Fantastic, the fluid nature of gender, and the reader as collaborator with the text. ...more
Run for Her Life
Maybe you didn’t remember to get out of his way while pretending to be brave. It’s hard to be brave when you think a man is about to kill you. ...more
Transgressive and Unruly Women: Talking with Anne Helen Petersen
Anne Helen Peterson discusses her new book, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, her writing process, and academia. ...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Goldhawk”
In the last moment, the bird swerved away to the right. It soared high, wheeled in a circle, and dove again. This time, it pulled itself directly upward. Gold plumes flashed as it rose, wings churning as it turned. ...more
Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart
Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear. ...more
Spaces of Exception vs. Spaces of Redemption: The Films of Ana Lily Amirpour
Diasporic communities live inside a host nation, but they also live with difference. ...more
FUNNY WOMEN #155: Feminine and Masculine Words
A helpful trick can be to picture feminine words (pumpkin latte, duvet cover) as butterflies. Soft, delicate, hard to catch, and useless except near flowers. Masculine words are more like knives. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #96: Donna Baier Stein
Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor was a bad ass. Born in 1854, ‘Lizzie,’ as she was known, bucked social norms of her day. In an era when silver miners believed it bad luck to even speak to a woman before descending into the mines, Lizzie worked alongside her male counterparts in the damp, dark underground caverns.
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Understanding the Language of Female Breakups
Female friendship, however necessary it is in our lives, and for all the joy it brings us, for all its love and support and kindness and generosity, can be a real mindf***k when it ends. ...more
Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
...yet she did what she did, and in the process made the most successful album of her career. ...more
Spotlight: The Rumpus Review of Boundless
Brandon Hicks reviews Boundless, a new graphic novel from Jillian Tamaki. ...more
A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari
Geeta Kothari discusses her debut collection, American xenophobia, and the immigrant narrative. ...more
Reclaiming the Language of Pop Culture: Reversible by Marisa Crawford
Marisa Crawford’s Reversible is an evocative collection, showcasing the ways in which pop culture saturates us with meaning, and how it teaches us to become. ...more
A Funny Inevitability: In Conversation with Siel Ju
Siel Ju discusses her debut novel-in-stories, Cake Time, the difference between our online selves and real-life selves, and who she hopes will read her work. ...more
Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt
Jess Arndt discusses her debut story collection Large Animals, accepting love from other people, human bodies, and fear of the written word. ...more
Blur, Cross, Pulverize, Confront, Remember: Talking with James Allen Hall
James Allen Hall on I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, unmaking boundaries, and book titles. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
The PEN America World Voices Festival, a weeklong international literary festival that focuses on human rights, is ongoing in New York City this week, and this year’s theme of gender and power seems more pertinent and urgent than ever. While over 150 writers from across the globe gather at the festival to bridge borders through the power of words, Electric Literature has opened its Recommended Reading archives to those of us who can’t be in NYC, offering eleven short stories and a poem that examine gender’s power and its bonds, that question its limitations and celebrate its liberation.
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FUNNY WOMEN #153: So You Want to Be a Woman
If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the drapes should match the wallpaper. Fix what you got and then flaunt what you fixed! ...more
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Claudia Cortese Discusses Wasp Queen
Poet Claudia Cortese talks about her new book Wasp Queen and Lucy, the rebellious 90s teen whose voice inspired the collection. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, the art and literature magazine Paper Darts has a short story about the expectations and invasions of walking through the world in a female body. Not the obvious, more aggressive ones, the catcalling or man-spreading; instead, “Personal Space” by Susan Fedynak details the subtler, quieter transgressions, some perpetuated by other women, some perpetuated by ourselves, and often more insidious for it.
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What It Means to Hold and Be Held in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell
The book explores ambiguities—in terms of race, in terms of motherhood, but especially in terms of the body and the subconscious. ...more
Album of the Week: Arca by Arca
In 2012, after leaving their homeland Venezuela for New York City and then London, Alejandro Ghersi began playing music under the stage name of Arca. A former child star, Ghersi has collaborated with Bjork and Kanye West. Now, the twenty-six-year-old producer and composer is releasing their third, eponymous album—the first via XL Recordings, and the first to feature Ghersi’s compelling vocals, breaking their long streak of producing extremely experimental, instrumental works.
“Language Orthodoxy,” the Adichie Wars, and Western Feminism’s Enduring Myopia
Adichie is far more significant than her accusers seem to know. ...more
Personal, Political, and Poetic: A Conversation with Susan Briante
Susan Briante discusses The Market Wonders, her newest collection of poetry in which she draws on market indicators like the Dow Jones Industrial Average to construct a criticism of contemporary culture. ...more
Corinne Lee and Finding an Antidote to America’s Toxicity
Poet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world. ...more
Learning to Live Alone through the Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore
Characters like Mary and Rhoda hadn't been turned into stereotypes of single women in their thirties or career women or divorcees. They couldn't be: they were the first. ...more
Caroline Chege Is the Politician the World Needs
Against all odds, Caroline Chege is fighting for female representation in Kenya. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Than Nguyen discusses his story collection The Refugees, growing up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose in the 1980s, and the power of secondhand memories. ...more