beauty
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There 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…
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The 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…
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Extensions 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…
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Beauty 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…
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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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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: All Bodies Count
Personal representation weighs heavily on the disabled because we don’t often see each other out in the world.
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The Itch
It is always a delight to use a thing for something other than its intended purpose, thus cheating the whole nomenclature system.
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Beauty as character
In an elegant and bracing piece for the New Yorker, recent Rumpus interviewee Adelle Waldman looks at the way men look at women. Beauty isn’t an ornament, either for the women who possess it or the best chroniclers of it. In…
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The Only Woman in the Room
At the Tazewell County Justice Center, on a Monday night in May, five women gather for a creative-writing class. They microwave plastic cups of instant coffee, then drag chairs up to the conference table where we’ll write.
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The Unsettling Visions Of Thomas Disch
“Fantasy is not avoidable. The very act of writing fiction is a sin, a lie. One of Disch’s most haunting stories, ‘Getting Into Death,’ is about a writer (one who uses two pseudonyms, at least one of which Disch used…