The Torment of Queer Literature
Queer literature isn’t a box to unlock so that it can unlock me.
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Posts Tagged: transgender
It’s All about Positionality: Talking with Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Kayleb Rae Candrilli discusses their debut collection, What Runs Over, reclaiming memory through poetry, and the political act of being happy.
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Just Doing It: A Conversation with Mallory Ortberg
Mallory Ortberg discusses their new book, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, what it means to be a self-taught writer, and questioning gender.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis 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 […]
...moreThis Week in Essays
For the Guardian, Dina Nayeri explores the troubling expectation that immigrants should replace their identity with gratitude. At New York magazine, Bahar Gholipour covers the fine points of dredging up personal history when writing memoir.
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“Language Orthodoxy,” the Adichie Wars, and Western Feminism’s Enduring Myopia
Adichie is far more significant than her accusers seem to know.
...moreThis Week In Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
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The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
The individuality of body horror is its signature attribute. Nothing is more intimate than one’s own body, and by extension, one’s own physical suffering.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, VICE’s 2016 Fiction Issue is out, with work from exciting voices like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, and more. This year’s fiction issue, like the magazine itself, is an engaging, diverse, and sometimes in-your-face read with topics ranging from smart cars to campus rape, love triangles to the meaning of life. One […]
...moreAre You a Trans Ally?
Often well-intentioned cis folks like myself feel kind of overwhelmed by all there is to know and, not wanting to sound ignorant or hurtful, just kind of keep to the sidelines. But it doesn’t take a degree in gender studies to be a trans ally (nor does it require you to have an LGBTQ friend). […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: To Prey on Birds
I am alone. Alone with my small size, my cracking bones, and the guilt that wraps around my spine like a jungle vine. Don’t be hysterical, I repeat to myself.
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Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
They’re there but not there. They’re included but their stories don’t fully weave into the story.
...moreA Good Mom, a Progressive Mom, a Cool Mom
At Catapult, Rachel Klein shares her experience as a mother of a transitioning child: I was worried, like most people are at their core, about myself. I was not being a “good mom,” a “progressive mom,” a “cool mom”; I was being a self-preserving creature. I was worried, not about their identity but about mine. […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Skinning the Wildcat
My son was not born my son. My son was born my daughter.
...moreWritten in Ink
In a powerful essay at The Establishment, Evelyn Deshane discusses rejecting the medical narrative around transitioning, and how tattoos allowed them to reclaim their own body: When the physicality of my gender—that “place” that could be home—feels out of reach, tattoos are my way to be present in my body, and to control what happens to […]
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Regarding the Boy
What happens to a place when it can no longer define itself by its history, when it tears everything down? What is the rust belt without the plants, the factories? Who is the boy without his sister?
...moreBoylen and Barth
In the New York Times, author and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan describes how John Barth’s writing workshop helped her transition.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jennifer Baker
The more variation we see in life, the more it becomes less about seeing one type of book by marginalized people.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Over the last several weeks, The Offing has been releasing a stream of stunning work from its 2015 Trans Issue, and the collection of transgender/non-binary voices they’ve cultivated forms one of the most powerful issues of any magazine we’ve seen this year. One story that stands out as a star among stars is Casey Plett’s “Couldn’t […]
...moreAdapting the Novel-in-Progress for Rapid Social Progress
Of course, there’s no way to pierce the heart and mind of a reader except with a razor sharp slice of the singular. Maybe fiction and identity politics have this in common. We can only achieve kinesthetic, flesh-and-blood understanding with palpable, enumerated specificity. How does a writer who’d started a novel involving gender and identity […]
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In the best news ever for someone yet to be determined, J.K. Rowling has announced an open casting call for her Harry Potter spin-off. The Boy Scouts of America have (finally) unanimously approved a resolution allowing gay adults to […]
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SELF-MADE MAN #32: Grief is the Price We Pay for Love
My son, Mom said, even when it must have been so hard for her to rewrite the moment I was born, the one that belonged to her alone.
...moreCaitlyn is the New Clint: Why Jenner Matters
In all honesty, I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to the reality TV star formerly known as Bruce. Too young to recall Jenner’s decathlon-winning heyday, which launched him onto Wheaties boxes and into media stardom, and having neglected to keep up with the Kardashians, I’ve really never given a moment’s thought to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Monica Byrne
Monica Byrne talks about sex, gender, the insidious power of stereotypes, and putting relationships between women at the center of her novel, The Girl in the Road.
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The Rumpus Interview with Shawna Virago
Musician and songwriter Shawna Virago discusses her trajectory as an artist, deciding to use Kickstarter to fund her new album, and what it’s like to be top Google hit for “San Francisco dominatrix.”
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It Hurts Too Much: The Emotional Reality of Trans Murders in 2015
Are you sad? I hope so. Are you angry? You need to be. We need you to share this work.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
In the Saturday Essay, Kenny Ng evaluates the groundbreaking show Transparent and its attempt to raise awareness of transgender and genderqueer identities. In the show, Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor plays Mort, a lifelong family man who comes out as a transgender women named Maura. The show’s creator, Jill Soloway, negotiates complicated psychological territory. In the […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Transparent and the Evolving Culture of Shame
There’s a ray of nuclear longing at the center of Transparent…
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