Nicole Rudick

A synthesis of various media, concepts, and styles, the movement’s visual art and poetry deconstructed the elements of sound, language, form, color, and movement and stitched them back together in new ways to create objects and texts that followed the laws of child’s play—that is, laws by which any meaning is possible and none is required.

It’s not a revelation that stay-at-home moms are devalued socially and economically in American society, but it’s a problem that seems especially fraught right now, when money is an issue for many households, and a second income can make the difference. I know several women who took a year or more off to raise their children and who now seek to rejoin the workforce. But those doors are virtually closed to them.

A mere handful of novelists have attained nounhood. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch begat masochism. The Marquis de Sade lent his name to sadism. A humorous, four-line biographical verse, or clerihew, is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. And if you are a promiscuous and unscrupulous lover like Giacomo Casanova, then you, sir, are a Casanova.

Could it be that critics missed this undercurrent of female intimacy because they’re so used to seeing women hashed out as shopping-addicted, marriage-crazed bimbos, or exploited as oppressed, self-sacrificing older women/mothers? Score one for nuance.

Coburn’s chief of staff and longtime conservative activist Michael Schwartz spoke last year as part of a conference session titled “The New Masculinity.” According to Schwartz, pornography has the power to make young people gay. Schwartz claims a gay man, his friend, who was dying of AIDS, remarked that “all pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.”

Reading Alix Cleo Roubaud’s journal is like standing in a pitch-dark room and flicking on the light for a split second. The flash of illumination reveals only an impression of the furniture but forbids a thorough appreciation. The photographer recorded her thoughts, aspirations, and, most especially, her fears (she attempted suicide multiple times…)

The publication next month of a monograph on Birgit Jürgenssen marks the first in-depth consideration of the career of the Austrian artist published in English. The book arrives six years after her death and on the sixtieth anniversary of her birth—significant recognition for an artist many English-speaking audiences know little, if anything, about. Jürgenssen, like her better-known compatriot Valie Export, is part of the pioneering generation of feminist artists.