Project MUSE®: WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 36 (2008) through current issueLatest Articles: WSQ: Women's Studies QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly1934-15200732-1562Latest articles in WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction and Editors’ Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972613
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To begin, we want to acknowledge the fraught and distressing sociopolitical conditions under which WSQ continues and this special issue has emerged. At present, it feels impossible to pretend at normalcy and trudge onward with a “business as usual” mindset. We are, in honest reflection, struggling to write this introduction—to put our minds to work, to be still enough to think and write amid the barrage of daily horrors designed to dizzy, exhaust, crush, and distract us. At the same time, navigating these horrors sharpens our resolve in the fight for justice, and the writing process reveals to us the way feminist research and creative work bolster and perform the action needed to survive and thrive amid rubble and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallIntroduction and Editors’ Note2025-10-24text/htmlen-USIntroduction and Editors’ Note2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®280692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Tributes to Nikki Giovanni and Dorothy Allison
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972614
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It seems especially cruel to lose one of our warrior poets, Nikki Giovanni, at a time she would find all too familiar—that is, when a democracy begins to appear too close to achieving some of what it has long promised for those denied so much, and the backlash manifests with cruelty and blindness. Yet she has left us guidance, so to speak, on what it means to live in a moment forever on the precipice of change and destruction.In Black Feeling, Black Talk / Black Judgment Nikki raps to us from the thick of it, making it seem easy to communicate such a whirlwind of thoughts, hopes, fears, suspicion, paranoia. This is no bird’s-eye view, no clinical, bloodless analysis of a generation in the throes of transformation.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallTributes to Nikki Giovanni and Dorothy Allison2025-10-24text/htmlen-USTributes to Nikki Giovanni and Dorothy Allison2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®138152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Abuela, Ija Desnuda Surgio del Sacrificio Triangulo Bermuda and Camino Umbligo (Coralina Triptych)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972615
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Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Abuela, Ija Desnuda Surgio del Sacrificio Triangulo Bermuda, 2022–23. Installation at the Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum in Miami as part of the Virgen Gruta, Mother Mold series. Mixed materials including human hair, vintage serape textile, coral, sponges, spirit bottles, seeds, foxtail palm stamens, used medical gloves, construction gloves, condoms, wood stud, neon lace window curtain, sand and building debris from the Surfside building collapse, nail salon glitter, spray paint, exterior house paint, building insulation foam, gypsum plaster, metal lathe, and industrial floor resin, 64 × 40 × 24 in.A photograph from the Virgen Gruta series, Abuela, Ija Desnuda Surgio del
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallAbuela, Ija Desnuda Surgio del Sacrificio Triangulo Bermuda and Camino Umbligo (Coralina Triptych)2025-10-24text/htmlen-USAbuela, Ija Desnuda Surgio del Sacrificio Triangulo Bermuda and Camino Umbligo (Coralina Triptych)2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®65812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Because I Am Flesh
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972616
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My figurative landscapes invite contemplation of physicality through meticulously painted fleshy compositions. I create raw, intimate spaces that explore the many complexities of physical relationships, with the self and with others. This series is a celebration of humanity and form.The tangled limbs and corpulent hills create a bewildering landscape, challenging the viewer to decipher how many figures are present, what parts of the figures they are seeing, and what genders may be represented. This ambiguity allows my work to question: What stereotypes and biases do we, consciously or subconsciously, bring to viewing a figurative work of art?By not including other objects, an environment, or personal identifiers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallBecause I Am Flesh2025-10-24text/htmlen-USBecause I Am Flesh2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®222062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Ancient Statuary Series and Figure Model Series
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972617
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From 1991 to 1996, Hayden photographed nude older figure models, sixty to eighty-four years old, in a studio, creating the Figure Model Series. The models were professionals actively working in art schools in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and western Massachusetts.From antiquity to the present, through artistic representation, we have amassed an image of our ideal selves. Hayden’s intention was to challenge these culturally sanctioned ideals of beauty and youth as well as image. As professional image-makers, the models and Hayden actively created an “image.” Informed by their own histories as image-makers and the immediacy of impending mortalities, they constructed a projection of the idealized pose altered by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallAncient Statuary Series and Figure Model Series2025-10-24text/htmlen-USAncient Statuary Series and Figure Model Series2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®55412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24500 years AGO
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972618
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As an Aniyunwiya (citizen of the Cherokee Nation) artist, my practice bridges the past and present to confront and reimagine colonial narratives. My work is rooted in decolonization, utilizing archival materials, reclaimed objects, and experimental forms to provoke dialogue around identity, history, and collective memory. Whether transforming treaties into erasure poetry or embedding Cherokee heirloom seeds into installations, I explore the intersections of trauma, resilience, and reclamation.My process is guided by Indigenous methodologies, emphasizing reciprocity and interconnectedness. I seek to disrupt Western linear frameworks, instead creating immersive works that invite viewers to engage holistically—with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmall500 years AGO2025-10-24text/htmlen-US500 years AGO2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®78952026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Crossed Legs and Nothing Is Dead Down Here
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972619
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Jesse Harrod’s work spans sculpture, painting, stop-motion animation, and other media, reimagining forms of gendered, sexual, and disabled embodiment. Their practice engages the intertwined histories of abstraction, sculpture, and fiber art, drawing from craft traditions like macramé, weaving, basketry, ceramics, and stained glass. Harrod’s work investigates how texture, color, and materiality can evoke intangible modes of identity and experience.Central to Harrod’s practice is a broader effort to explore abstraction and queer aesthetics. Known for their embrace of macramé, Harrod creates tactile, voluminous, and colorful works that function as both wall-based art and freestanding sculptures. Recent sculptures
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallCrossed Legs and Nothing Is Dead Down Here2025-10-24text/htmlen-USCrossed Legs and Nothing Is Dead Down Here2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®58122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24body, haunting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972620
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Informed by their medical art training, Lohitha’s personal work explores the body, disability, rage, spirituality, gender, sexuality, and all of the mess in between. While illness has impacted their life in irreparable ways, they are learning to relate to the body, not its ability to produce but as a collection of fluid desires, obscenities, offerings, and connections. Truly achieving peace with one’s body or ability is ongoing and complex; what happens when one stops fighting their own bodymind? Does your body become a part of mine, and mine a part of yours? Lohitha Kethu, body, haunting, 2023. Digital
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallbody, haunting2025-10-24text/htmlen-USbody, haunting2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®31522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24“Where Did Your Revolution Go?”: A Fleshly Narrative of Enghelab-e Jina
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972621
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See this body, and observe the entirety of the history.This text emerges from a question that has never left me: “Where did your revolution go?” Nearly two years have passed since the state murder of Kurdish Jina Amini in Tehran, Iran, in 2022, which ignited widespread unrest. Some called it the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, stripping it of its Kurdish revolutionary roots. Others saw it as a transnational “unifying axis for grassroot resistances” (Kermanian 2024, 797). Some named it “Ghiyam-e Jina” (Jina’s Uprising). Many embraced “Enghelab-e Jina” (Jina’s Revolution), reclaiming the term enghelab (revolution), which had long been monopolized and capitalized by the Iranian state to be used in a new way: a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmall“Where Did Your Revolution Go?”: A Fleshly Narrative of Enghelab-e Jina2025-10-24text/htmlen-US“Where Did Your Revolution Go?”: A Fleshly Narrative of Enghelab-e Jina2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®706082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24The Body in Paincraft: Queer, Crip Notes on Hurting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972622
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The etymology of the English word pain traces back to meanings associated with penal—pain’s early conceptualizations were inseparable from ideas of punishment. In Christian thought, pain and suffering were seen as payment to God, punishment for disobeying his authority, the most extreme form of which was hell in the afterlife, the burn of eternal fire. In the biblical story of Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, God’s punishment is doled out through the pain of childbearing and work. The Protestant work ethic took this notion and made work and pain-bearing virtuous endeavors that would be blessed by God with wealth.Dominant culture in the United States has internalized
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallThe Body in Paincraft: Queer, Crip Notes on Hurting2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThe Body in Paincraft: Queer, Crip Notes on Hurting2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®667102026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24“Fat Women Can Be, and Are, Sexy”: The DIY Fat Spectacular Aesthetic of April Flores and Carlos Batts’s Porn Work
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972623
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The book Fat Girl (2013) captures the life story and artistic journey of Mexidorian performer April Flores.1 Through seven short chapters and visual storytelling, Flores gives her testimonio of what it was like to grow up as a “chunky” Latina kid in Los Angeles, California, and shows how sex work, particularly the photographing of the fat body, helped her gain a sexual confidence that she is now transferring to her fans. The 127-page volume includes images from Flores’s early modeling career taken by her late husband, Carlos Batts, who met Flores and photographed her for the first time in 2000. The book project was first conceptualized in 2005, when Flores and Batts were inspired by the book Porn Art 2 (Dahmane and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmall“Fat Women Can Be, and Are, Sexy”: The DIY Fat Spectacular Aesthetic of April Flores and Carlos Batts’s Porn Work2025-10-24text/htmlen-US“Fat Women Can Be, and Are, Sexy”: The DIY Fat Spectacular Aesthetic of April Flores and Carlos Batts’s Porn Work2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®714452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Tejano Drag Kings: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Culture Through Performance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972624
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Accessing our full authentic selves is precious. It is healing, and it is everyone’s fundamental human right. To restrict drag, an art form, in any way is a direct attack on my fundamental rights as an American and as a performer.I begin with the words of Tejano drag king Bobby Pudrido,1 who testified before Texas legislators on March 23, 2023, in opposition to Senate Bill 12 (SB12), which sought to criminalize drag “on the premises of a commercial enterprise, on public property, or in the presence of an individual younger than 18 years of age” (Texas Legislature Online 2023a). Despite the moving testimony of Bobby and other drag performers, Texas lawmakers passed SB12 in June of 2023, with plans to begin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallTejano Drag Kings: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Culture Through Performance2025-10-24text/htmlen-USTejano Drag Kings: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Culture Through Performance2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®697032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Black Anti-Bodies and the Trauma of Obstetric Racism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972625
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In July 2019 Bisola, a thirty-eight-year-old Black woman with a PhD, who already had one child, went to a teaching hospital in New York to give birth. In August, shortly after she arrived home from the hospital, Bisola wrote a letter that beganDear Sir or Madam:This is a formal complaint regarding care received at MNO Hospital from July 30, 2019, to August 3, 2019. As a research and teaching hospital I had faith my delivery will be safe, uncomplicated and care for my personhood would be taken into account. I was also under the impression that as a 38-year-old African American healthy woman extra care would be given to my case for the geriatric nature of the pregnancy, but also due to current research that shows
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallBlack Anti-Bodies and the Trauma of Obstetric Racism2025-10-24text/htmlen-USBlack Anti-Bodies and the Trauma of Obstetric Racism2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®897772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Criminalizing Sex Work, Criminalizing Mothers: Unpacking the Legal Frameworks Impacting Sex-Working Parents
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972626
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The criminalization of sex work has also led to numerous health and human rights violations, including threatening sex workers’ relationships with family and impeding their ability to parent.Sex work is the provision of sexual services in exchange for money, goods, or other benefits. While many equate sex work to prostitution (e.g., street-based work, escort services, brothel-based work) or pornography, as they are popularized in media, these are only two forms of a very large and diverse industry (Harcourt and Donovan 2005). There are many faces and forms of sex work (Harcourt and Donovan 2005). Like other occupations, individuals oftentimes engage in sex work in order to make money. Individuals who engage in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallCriminalizing Sex Work, Criminalizing Mothers: Unpacking the Legal Frameworks Impacting Sex-Working Parents2025-10-24text/htmlen-USCriminalizing Sex Work, Criminalizing Mothers: Unpacking the Legal Frameworks Impacting Sex-Working Parents2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®787422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24The Fermented Subject: Bodily Survival and Kinship-Building in Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972627
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Grace M. Cho dedicates her memoir Tastes Like War to “all of my mothers, each of whom fed me in her own way.” While we as readers don’t know these mothers that Cho refers to, “mothers” is understood here to mean more than one’s biological mother, and that to be fed is to be nourished by each person Cho has felt mothered by. This dedication precedes her chapter “Kimchi Blues,” in which Cho describes how food, and kimchi specifically, is situated in her bodily memory. “Kimchi Blues” is also a reflection on the domestic ramifications of assimilation, displacement, and war for twentieth- century Korean immigrants. Simultaneously, Cho’s memoir reminds us that the presence of brutality does not mean an absence of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallThe Fermented Subject: Bodily Survival and Kinship-Building in Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThe Fermented Subject: Bodily Survival and Kinship-Building in Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®532792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Colonial Residue on the Body: Making Sense of Puta Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972628
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I begin this revisitation and rumination on the body with a question that is central to the Body Matters special issue call for papers. How does the physical body redefine feminist scholarship? With the sex wars of the 1980s still haunting academic studies of sexuality and sexual labor, it is perhaps a mandatory endeavor to revisit and review Juana María Rodríguez’s contributions to our understanding of the racialized body in scholarship. More importantly, though, to think about how we might continue to broaden our intellectual engagement with sex work beyond a binary of exploitation and empowerment, to do proper justice to a more pertinent question in sex work: Who has the right to own their sexual labor and sell
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallColonial Residue on the Body: Making Sense of Puta Life2025-10-24text/htmlen-USColonial Residue on the Body: Making Sense of Puta Life2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®157772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Lessons from Precolonial Yorùbá Society in the Age of “Anti-Gender”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972629
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As I sit in Budapest, Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s current political rhetoric intensifies a national conversation about gender, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women holds an urgent contemporary significance. My fieldwork, which considers the experiences of Nigerian students who have migrated to postsocialist geographies, initially included a question about how “gender operates” in diasporic contexts and has been delightfully revised thanks to consultation with this classic. In The Invention of Women, Oyěwùmí takes us to precolonial Yorùbáland. Here, the colonial, Western gender episteme had not yet been imposed. People’s identities were not based on their anatomy. The Yorùbá language and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallLessons from Precolonial Yorùbá Society in the Age of “Anti-Gender”2025-10-24text/htmlen-USLessons from Precolonial Yorùbá Society in the Age of “Anti-Gender”2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®135632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Manufactured Obsolescence: Writing Centers Through the Lens of Housework
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972630
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A version of this paper was written and presented as part of the April 11, 2025, panel titled “Repurposing Women, Race and Class by Angela Y. Davis as Inspiration for Rhetorical B-Sides” at the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention. My copanelists included Professor Shereen Inayatulla (York College), Professor Michael T. MacDonald (University of Michigan–Dearborn), and Professor Andrew Heerah (York College). Our panel’s overarching theme offered “a rereading, a revisiting, and a remixing of Women, Race and Class by Dr. Angela Y. Davis, a text that continues to shape the way we experience and perceive the gendered, racialized, and rhetorically constructed world around us.” My
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallManufactured Obsolescence: Writing Centers Through the Lens of Housework2025-10-24text/htmlen-USManufactured Obsolescence: Writing Centers Through the Lens of Housework2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®194422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Revisiting Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart: BDSM as a Praxis of Care
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972631
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Published in 2010,1 Whip Smart chronicles the author’s personal experiences as a professional dominatrix working in a New York City sex dungeon while in college from 1999 to 2003. The book reads as both an autoethno-graphic excavation of lived experience and a self- (and other-)flagellating confession, as Febos explores themes of power, control, pleasure, pain, desire, and shame, across contexts of BDSM, sex work, substance use and recovery, academic achievement, and interpersonal relationships. In this review, I examine the function and practice of BDSM sessions represented in Whip Smart, through the lens of BDSM, sadomasochism, and sex work literature in queer and trans studies, to argue for BDSM as a praxis of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallRevisiting Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart: BDSM as a Praxis of Care2025-10-24text/htmlen-USRevisiting Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart: BDSM as a Praxis of Care2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®314362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Review of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer L. Morgan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972632
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In Laboring Women, Jennifer Morgan uncovers the reproductive, productive, mental, and emotional labor of enslaved women in early American colonial history. Morgan asserts that enslaved Black women’s bodies were crucial factors in the ideological and economic justification for colonialism and the expansion of racial slavery. (Without these gendered, racialized, and othered bodies, racial slavery would not have been feasible for the powers that be.) The emphasis on the racialized and gendered body is important to Morgan because a part of her project is to fill the gap at the intersection of American colonial history, African American studies, and women’s studies, where a “slave” is usually male, “women” are usually
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallReview of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer L. Morgan (review)2025-10-24text/htmlen-USReview of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer L. Morgan (review)2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®122662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Review of Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History by Amy Gore (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972633
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Book lovers know that it’s not just the words on the pages that matter—there’s also the cover image that catches your eye, the font on the spine, or the way the book looks on the shelf. What’s less evident, though, are the many decisions writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers make along the way—and the power structures inherent in those choices. In the beautifully written and powerfully argued Book Anatomy, Amy Gore turns to the para-text, the material associated with, but still distinct from, the main body of the book that often remains outside of “the purview of literary criticism” (5). But these paratextual elements, Gore contends, are just as critical as the text itself. Book Anatomy examines five books
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallReview of Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History by Amy Gore (review)2025-10-24text/htmlen-USReview of Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History by Amy Gore (review)2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®120712026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Review of A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972634
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In her book A Short History of Trans Misogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson offers us a global history of trans misogyny, uncovering the layered history of a seemingly modern concept. While the book is short, its scope is large, spanning a discussion of hijras in colonial India, enslaved Africans brought to the United States, Indigenous two-spirit people, Black trans femme sex workers in antebellum New York and New Orleans, and the street queens of 1950s Los Angeles. The goal of such a “devastatingly global” history of trans misogyny is to decenter the narrative of trans-femininity emerging in the “progressive” metropoles of the West, to trace instead how the colonial patriarchal forces of Empire trans-feminized some of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallReview of A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson (review)2025-10-24text/htmlen-USReview of A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson (review)2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®132552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Review of How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Dana Luciano (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972635
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If this issue’s call for papers begins with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s question “Where does the future live in your body?,” then Dana Luciano brings readers into this question by figuring our bodies as in relationship to the stories we tell about the earth in a multidirectional present capacious enough to hold the deep futures and deep histories of geologic time. Luciano extends the fact of the body into the fact of matter, reminding readers that the earth, too, is a physical body and a body in relation. Luciano ascertains these relations through the stories people—differently situated across disciplining fields, racializations, and genderings—tell about geology and its subject matter.How the Earth Feels is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallReview of How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Dana Luciano (review)2025-10-24text/htmlen-USReview of How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Dana Luciano (review)2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®167952026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Review of The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown by Nina Sharma (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972636
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The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, by writer and educator Nina Sharma, is a timely memoir with community at its heart. The first few pages foreshadow this. Followed by gratitude to Sharma’s husband and parents is an understated dedication to her audience, who she recognizes as people “at the edge of a feeling,” or an awareness.Among the author’s reflections about her youth, her addictive behaviors, her triumphs, and her enduring love story is her pursuit of solidarity, a topic that may resonate with her identified readers, and all readers at a time of shock and awe. Proving that her encompassing message is not at the expense of her memoir, Sharma first revisits scenes of her childhood and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallReview of The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown by Nina Sharma (review)2025-10-24text/htmlen-USReview of The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown by Nina Sharma (review)2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®108142026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Damages
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972637
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Please answer to the best of your ability. If not applicable, please leave blank.The Japanese substitute the space between the shards of broken vases with gold. You must be priceless to be broken. Hebrew was a dying language until 1945 when a father locked his son in a room and taught him each letter. He saved a people’s secrets. The universities in Iran have mats on the floors for women who wish to sit there. Sometimes I know my face has been corroded by acid. Then I run to the mirror and I am a man holding an empty chalice. As quickly as I am, they vanish. If you inject a pregnant woman’s urine into a frog, an autopsy will show that they lay two hundred to three hundred eggs. In India, ultrasounds are illegal
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallDamages2025-10-24text/htmlen-USDamages2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®175452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24The Rotten Department
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972638
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The following text is an exploration through memory and language of institutional (in this case, university) violence toward women’s bodies in my native country. By mirroring academic language and formatting, it confronts the very institution on its own turf. And yet the blank page becomes the negative space or the void that refuses to share the space or to put the spotlight on that same institutionalized violence. “The Rotten Department” is an excerpt from the forthcoming hybrid memoir and essay collection Naming the Body: A Queer Woman’s Restorative Mapping of the Self (Mouthfeel Press, 2026), translated from Spanish by Robin Myers.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallThe Rotten Department2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThe Rotten Department2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®115782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24The Facts of Comportment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972639
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The ’80s was Pop Rocks and soda—sparking a constellation in my mouth. The ’80s was Slip ’N Slide at lola’s in the summertime and collecting oily stickers. The ’80s was Jo Polniaczek. Jo was the tomboy character on the NBC hit show The Facts of Life. I was hooked from the beginning. At the time, I spent summers with my lola, checking out books and records from the library across the street and watching TV in her bedroom. The show was set in the fictional Eastland School.My life and the girls who went to Eastland couldn’t be more different. Eastland was an all-girls boarding school in upstate New York. The girls who went there usually lived in The City—penthouse apartments with doormen. While these girls had parents
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallThe Facts of Comportment2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThe Facts of Comportment2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®257092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24It’s My Body and I’ll Hack at It If I Want To
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972640
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Collecting experiences across past generations or past lives, I think we become archivists of the body by having bodies. Blood, like water, carries memory. Cells keep time and record macro phenomena, data. Cells talk to us, too; it is an unflinchingly loving and violent dictation that may help free us if we listen. Particularly in the disabled and gender-variant body-mind, we hold this love and violence in all their undulations. Every cell that makes up every function and dysfunction is a horror of material pain and an ecstasy of one’s truth. Too often, I cannot tell where the ecstasy ends and horror begins.When inhabiting a body that is of little to no use to normative social functions of marriage, reproduction
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallIt’s My Body and I’ll Hack at It If I Want To2025-10-24text/htmlen-USIt’s My Body and I’ll Hack at It If I Want To2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®153282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24On Palestinian Embodied Futurities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972646
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On February 8, 2025, Israeli army forces opened fire on Sondos Jamal Muhammad Shalabi, a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian woman who was eight months pregnant when she was shot and killed in Nur Al Shams refugee camp in the West Bank. The targeting of a Palestinian would-be mother and her fetus occurred within a context of escalating Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank that have so far left more than nine hundred people dead. To understand the significance of the death of Shalabi and her unborn, would-be child, we must place it alongside the murdered bodies of over 61,709 Palestinian men, women, and children whose lives were extinguished in Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza between October 2023
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/396/image/coversmallOn Palestinian Embodied Futurities2025-10-24text/htmlen-USOn Palestinian Embodied Futurities2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®208482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24