The Garden Statuary

For immigrants of any generation, or members of any underrepresented group, the pressure to define and explain one’s origin or identity is always complicated. In the novel Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai, birth and the body are reframed to justify the difficulties in classifying oneself. Through confronting conventions of birth and the use of shifting bodies, the novel challenges the notion of pure origins. In particular […]

The fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass both feature British children exploring mysterious Northern landscapes and encountering non-human and supernatural beings whose cultures and authority challenge British and Christian hierarchical understandings of existence […]

From the profane transformation of the body of the hanged man at the gallows into the body of the crucified Christ to the tainting of the Eucharist in the consumption of the body and blood of the dead, this paper intends to explore how examining the use of necrobotanicals through this lens of corrupted conversion offers a new perspective into Webster’s complex relationship with religious rituals in The White Devil […]

In Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, queerness circulates through the aesthetics of failure and fragility within the Cho family, and the losses that they desire and grieve as racialized and classed subjects. Racial melancholia, as formulated by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, circulates between members of the family as traces of emotional maps […]

The early modern tragic stage added to its cast of players the unruly member of the tongue. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy all dramatize the tongue’s power to transgress the boundaries of the body and interfere with bodily integrity […]