A Different Kind of Butterfly Effect: Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face
[Y]ou can’t grow up in a cultural milieu and be immune to what it loves.
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Posts Tagged: beauty
Body Inheritance
I needed my beauty to be invisible, either accidental or not at all.
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We Will Not Be Contained: Pretty Bitches and Too Much
There will always be another word used against us.
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Karmic Moments: A Conversation with Christina Chiu
Christina Chiu discusses her forthcoming novel, BEAUTY.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Lisbon, the Truncated City”
Our love of the superfluous is helpful in better understanding ourselves.
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A Decade of Surface over Significance: Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg
A former editor at V, Stagg is no stranger to the slippage between life and editorial.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #194: Sarah Rose Etter
“[H]opefully, the book is surreal but also universal.”
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Mixed Feelings: A Valentine to Aging Women
Letting go of these ideas about a woman’s value feels like the obvious thing to do, but it’s really hard.
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Smoke Screen
I am an oracle who, while dispensing answers to all those who seek them, cannot predict my own future.
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The Thread: Outside the Gaze
This is the story I needed as a young girl; this is the story we all need.
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Curse of Beauty
My daughter is beautiful. I wanted to be beautiful. And isn’t she a reflection of me?
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Mixed Feelings: Am I Too Fat For Love?
We don’t like to think that love traffics in the same biases that shape our culture—but of course it does.
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Outlaws in the Garden: A Conversation with Denise Newman and Hazel White
Poets Denise Newman and Hazel White discuss their most recent collaborative project, Biotic Portal, how they initially met, and loving their garden’s “outlaws.”
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Aurvi Sharma
Aurvi Sharma discusses her memoir-in-progress, finding inspiration in ancient women’s voices, and writing against erasure.
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An Experience and a Life and a Family: Talking with Scaachi Koul
Scaachi Koul on her debut essay collection One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, learning to be patient with her own narrative, and three rules for book tours.
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The Water Goddess
To exist solely now on land is to live always waiting to reenter the water—to feel soothed even by the sound of it falling. To live a life on land is to feel the loss of our former lives within our very faces.
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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!
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, a new Maggie Shipstead story at Virginia Quarterly Review explores love, infidelity, and the ways life can slip from under your feet like an avalanche. Bonus: there is also a literal avalanche. The story, “Backcountry,” follows a twenty-five-year-old ski instructor named Ingrid (#1 baby name for future ski instructors) who meets a fifty-plus-year-old […]
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Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Michelle Hoover
You see, when a man believes he has the power to grant a woman personhood by admiring her looks or her body’s use to him… he also believes he has the power to take it away. Trump believes he has this power.
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Kahlo vs. Kardashian: The Subversive Potential of the Female Self-Portrait
Where does the line between the self-portrait and the selfie fall?
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The Limits of Extreme Beauty: Nicolas Winding Refn and Neon Demon
Daylight here burns up the atmosphere. The dawn of a new day is, in fact, the end of everything.
...moreSelf-Reflection
At Lit Hub, Kathryn Harrison discusses her relationship with her reflection and the asymmetry in her face as she ages: Time passes, months, then years, and that bathroom mirror loses its power to frighten me. Still, I find it mysterious, and even wonderful, that there would be so stark and irrefutable—so apt—a symptom of nervous […]
...moreThere Is No Such Thing as the Ugly Cry
Rachel Vorona Cote writes about the aesthetics of crying for The New Republic: To cry this way—vigorously, heartily, vulgarly—reveals vulnerability at the same time that it conveys physical might and mettle. Our bodies can speak for themselves, says the ugly cry. Women do not exist merely through representation; we are neither watercolor nor clay. For […]
...moreThe Value of a Face
Rachel Vorona Cote writes about how people use beauty to undermine the words of women: I understood, as I continue to understand with distressing nuance, that too many men navigate the terror of women’s brilliance by reducing them to skin and bone. When a man’s argument, undressed of its trappings, is an effete protest against […]
...moreExtensions of the Self
Over at Vela Magazine, Rachel Wilkinson explores the cultural significance of women’s hair: Feminists have often identified hair grooming as the first lesson in gender socialization. Dolls are perfectly designed to aid girls in learning submission, letting them play-act the labor that will later be expected of them when it comes to appearances.
...moreBeauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
I never recoiled, in that first season, to hear the nice people on the bus say “beautiful baby,” to us in reverent tones. It’s a thanksgiving for safe passage, a prayer for all new defenseless things. But after a few months have passed … faint suggestions of the adult visage emerge. … And if you have […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Christine Sneed
Suzanne Clores talks with novelist Christine Sneed about Paris, beauty, and her latest book, Paris, He Said.
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Growing Up: The Rumpus Interview with Michelle Tea
Michelle Tea discusses life in recovery, the meaning of family, motherhood, and her new memoir How to Grow Up.
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