ROUND UP JUNE 7-16, 2017

This week I wrote for Paste Magazine (which was back-dated sneakily to last week), Hooligan Magazine, and PopMatters.

• "Mascots [Movie Review]." Paste Magazine, June 7, 2017.

"The setup of Mascots is basically Best in Show transposed to center on the mascot competition, where we jump back and forth from among various hopeful mascotters, the judges, and the representatives of the “Gluten-Free Channel” in the lead-up to the main event, the “Fluffies.” Mascots happily features a good number of Christopher Guest’s usual suspects: Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Michael Hitchcock, John Michael Higgins, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch and Fred Willard, to name but a few. New faces include Zach Woods (In the Loop), whose poker face and self-conscious physicality make him ideally suited for the Guest style, as well as Tom Bennett, who was the best part of 2016’s hilarious Love and Friendship. Sadly Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara aren’t present, although the rest of the cast is more than game to get into classic Guest-ian shenanigans, even if some of the archetypes feel like retreads."

• "Restoring Queer Narratives in Art with Re-gayze." Hooligan Magazine, June 14, 2017.

"The project arose chiefly out of my own frustrations with my own art history education not making room for queerness as a thematic consideration within the work of queer artists. Often, an artist’s sexuality is offered as a coincidental and biographical tidbit of information that stands separate from their works’ meaning. Intuitively, I assumed that this was reductive and chose to investigate whether there was any scholarly work standing at the intersection of queer theory and art history. There certainly is, but that work exists within the work of academia mostly, so with Re-gayze, I was hoping to disseminate that information done by scholars in a more democratic fashion."

• "'The Handmaid's Tale' Is Important, Which Means It Has to Do Better." PopMatters, June 16, 2017.

"While it might, to some eyes, look different enough from anything based in reality—the Handmaids’ blood-red uniforms (and the clothed class system in general) or the lack of children out and about on the streets—the horrifying society of Gilead is pieced together from systems that are real. When I wrote that The Handmaid’s Tale was “unfathomable”, that really said more about me than about the show. Writers of color, among them the incredible Angelica Jade Bastién of Vulture, have opined that The Handmaid’s Tale lifts, wholesale, what actually happened to African-American women in the United States under slavery, and reframes it as a shocking, unimaginable dystopia by centering the story on the white women for whom the ingrained historical systems of ownership, subjugation, and rape were never a lived reality."