Culture

2 Broke Girls Showrunner Doubles Down on Racist Humor

The CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls has earned a reputation for racist... Read more »

Double Rainbow: Stepping Back

This blog series is rapidly closing in on its second week and I have only just gotten started. I have a lot in mind to cover—autistic gender and sexuality in parents’ guides, autism and sex ed, the pathologization of gender non-normative behavior—and I have barely scratched the surface of... Read more »

Childhood Obesity Campaign Still Bullying Fat Kids

You may have seen these ads last week from Atlanta’s Strong4Life Campaign, which attempt to let kids (and their parents) know that they are fat and shame/scare/bully... Read more »

Bechdel Test Canon: Saving Face

A look at Alice Wu’s Saving Face, a film about Chinese-American lesbian identity, that makes the case for why it’s much more... Read more »

The 99%: Trashy People Talking Trash on Trash Television, or Jersey Shore

Trailer trash, white trash—these ways of describing low-income people aren’t new.  They’re meant to make people quite literally disposable, a way of denying their humanity and their potential to offer anything of value. With Jersey Shore, though, we get the “trash” without... Read more »

Marimacho Seeks Hunky Heartbreakers!

The super stylish folks at Marimacho—the masculine clothing line for cis women and transmasculine bodies—are launching a new Tumblr! To kick things off, they’re hosting a... Read more »

Double Rainbow: Sweet, Sweet "Chocolate"

I’m about to wax rhapsodic about a cheesy, transparently manipulative martial arts film. But seriously: Prachya Pinkaew’s 2008 movie Chocolate is the best film I’ve ever seen that features an autistic protagonist. And it’s the only piece of media I’ve... Read more »

The 99%: "But look how far we

Yet, what Downton Abbey also offers for the modern viewer is the idea that, today, class differences have been overcome.  The stark separation between the lives of the family and the staff illustrate a segregation that is no longer overt in today’s society.  Few people have... Read more »

Pomp and Quirkumstance: Portlandia Season Two Airs Tonight, Air Your Thoughts

I have a complicated relationship with Portlandia. To start, I was born in Portland and I still live here, and I want everyone in the world to know that it’s a great city with more to offer than coffee and bearded white... Read more »

Pages

Politically Correct Language Isn't Just About Being Polite—It's About Survival

Photo by Phillipe Leroyer (Creative Commons). Two weeks ago, Jonathan Chait published the lengthy essay “Not a Very P.C.... Read more »

Sojourner Truth, Unveiled

The leaders of the [women's suffrage] movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban,...

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Know & Tell: The Literary Renaissance of Trans Women Writers

For so long, the people who wrote about us were not us. Finally, that is beginning to change. Read more »

One-Sentence Reviews of the Lesbian Netflix Canon

Lez face it: when you’re a ladygay like myself, cruising the internet for something to watch, you realize very quickly that there are a whole... Read more »