Culture
Bechdel Test Canon: Please Give
Nicole Holofcener once again foregrounds female subjectivity in Please Give, which uses white women’s tears to comment on sisterhood, motherhood,... Read more »
Double Rainbow: Finding Autism in Popular Fiction
Of course one doesn’t have to go finding autism in popular fiction—it’s the subject of intense cultural fascination right now, so it’s just there, everywhere. In novels like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Jodi Picoult... Read more »
The 99%: Undercover Boss and the Undervalued Worker
Unions are supposed to help workers have jobs that are safe, fairly compensated, and have opportunities for upward mobility. But unions are having trouble doing that these days, in large part because so many legislators and executives (like the ones on Undercover Boss) are going so far to limit... Read more »
Double Rainbow: Autism and Horror
In mainstream film, autistic characters seem to appear most frequently in two types of movies: award-grubbing dramas and horror films. Both genres stick to a disappointingly narrow range of tropes.
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The 99%: Why the Real Housewives of Atlanta Aren
Few women of color are allowed to represent themselves on television with much nuance; frequently they are reduced to stock characters like mammies and Jezebels that deny them full, complex humanity. Successful women... Read more »
Double Rainbow: A Peek at Autism Speaks
Autism Speaks is an easy, easy target. And a literally huge one—it’s the largest and best-funded autism “awareness” and “advocacy” (I kind of want to just call it “autism-themed”) organization in the world. Autistic self-advocates rip into Autism Speaks every day because of the organization... Read more »
Adventures in Feministory: Civil Rights Activist and Writer Daisy Bates
Behind the scenes was Daisy Bates.
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Double Rainbow: Adam: "More like a child than anything else"
The 2009 romantic drama Adam features a relationship between a non-autistic woman and a man with Asperger syndrome. Any portrayal of autistic sexuality has the potential to be subversive, but unfortunately this particular movie squanders that potential and reinforces existing tropes about... Read more »
Bechdel Test Canon: Je tu il elle
Je tu il elle illustrates why such enthusiastic fandom and hushed reverence toward the work of queer Belgian director Chantal Akerman feels earned.
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The 99%:
For the Bluths, their wealth is a performance, but their class privilege is real. They live in a former shell of their old life: they share a model home built by the once-lucrative Bluth construction company that stands alone in an unfinished development. Beautiful inside and out, the home... Read more »
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