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DURING THE QUARANTINE phase of the pandemic, New York City was deathly quiet. In this silence, I began to discover my own genderqueerness, which manifested by way of playing with clothing, adjusting the height of my heels, and picking up nail art. Two years later, I’m still playing around with nail art, but the experiment has blossomed into a research-based art praxis connecting the history of nail art to queer theory and phenomenology. I’ve leaned

WOMEN AND HONOR: Some Notes on Lying, an immense work of fourteen pages by the lesbian poet and white feminist Adrienne Rich, begins with a clarification in parentheses at the top of page one: “These notes are concerned with relationships between and among women.” Drawn from remarks Rich made at a writers workshop in 1975, Women and Honor was published two years later by Pittsburgh-based press Motheroot (RIP). My copy from Cleis Press was given

  It’s Alive premiered at Chicago’s Woods Theatre on April 26, 1974. To promote it, Cohen hired women to push strollers around the venue inside which snuggled tape recorders emitting growls. Audiences bit and there were strong ticket sales, but Warner Brothers executives found the film “distasteful” and hampered its most exploitable asset (a killer baby) with ambiguous advertising. Chicago Tribune Archive via nespaper.com. FEMINISTS, HORROR HOUNDS, metalheads, and cinephiles descended on Chicago’s Music Box

A detail from Stella Waitzkin: These Books Are Paintings. © Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust. Photo by Jennifer Baumgardner. IN THIS ERA of compulsory eyeball luring, saying no to self-promotion looks courageous to me. Perhaps this is why a deceased, somewhat-obscure modern artist named Stella Waitzkin so captured my curiosity recently. Her enduring subject was refusal—of feminine roles, the art business, throwaway culture. Her welcome mat read “GO AWAY.” She made art every day for more

Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1965. ⓒ Yoko Ono. Photo: Minoru Niizuma. YOKO ONO SELF-PUBLISHED Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings in Tokyo in 1964. In 1970, this visionary work of conceptual art was published in the US. Ono’s “instructions” were a radical approach to art because they centralized the participant in the work to manifest the piece, whether the artist was present or not. Some of the instructions

  Kyle Channing Smith ON OCTOBER 5, 2021, writer Joyce Carol Oates tweeted: “they” will not become a part of general usage, not for political reasons but because there would be no pronoun to distinguish between a singular subject (“they”) & a plural subject (“they”). language seeks to communicate w/ clarity, not to obfuscate; that is its purpose. After receiving criticism, she issued several rather thoughtful apologies and acknowledged the impact her words could have