Dandy Prof

a queerly fashionable guide to life on the tenure track

275 notes

queermelady:

Photos by Sophia Wallace

I am fascinated by the overwhelming dandyism in the queer women’s community in the bay. Particularly with folks of color who find ways of navigating non-normative gender through this style. I believe it is particularly appealing for its possible “androgyny” or genderqueerness and, well, because people look freaking hot. I’m not a huge fan of the bow tie, but I adore the play in style and the liberation of constricted gender norms and the possibility of redefining beauty aesthetics. 

“The dandy—conventionally defined as a strikingly attractive man whose dress is immaculate and manor is dignified—has been around since the late 18th century. Often misunderstood as superficial, the dandy is rather a space of creative possibility where men and women can perform a persona in ways that reach far beyond the narrow binary constructs of masculine and feminine. Indeed artists like Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, H.H Monro and less recognized women such as the American painter Romaine Brookes and her cohorts found Dandyism to be a liberatory space not only for appearance but more importantly, for a life of independence that did not necessarily adhere to a deterministic heterosexual model of marriage and children. Examples of modern dandies include Andy Warhol, Quentin Crisp, Grace Jones. My many years focusing on gender, race and constructions of beauty led me to dandyism as a radical position for art making and social critique. Indeed, dandyism’s subversive aesthetic of beauty disrupts normative gender in fascinating ways. Beauty is defined in almost all contexts as the domain of femininity which is commonly understood as frivolous, weak and passive. The dandy is neither traditionally feminine or masculine. Rather, the dandy is an aestheticized androgyny available to men, women and transgender individuals. Herein lies it’s power and it’s danger.”

http://www.sophiawallace.com/#modern

Awesome. Now go look at all of Sophia Wallace’s photo sets!

(via dapperanddandy)

2 notes

En route home from an academic symposium, reflecting on the privilege of having small, nurturing, mentoring spaces, especially those that go beyond mere “networking” or “professionalization.” Accumulation of social capital is important, yes, especially for those of us who are often locked out of the power centers of the academy, but equally important are the spaces where we can stop, rest, breathe, listen, learn.

En route home from an academic symposium, reflecting on the privilege of having small, nurturing, mentoring spaces, especially those that go beyond mere “networking” or “professionalization.” Accumulation of social capital is important, yes, especially for those of us who are often locked out of the power centers of the academy, but equally important are the spaces where we can stop, rest, breathe, listen, learn.

Filed under social capital

15 notes

RIP Adrienne Rich: feminist lesbian warrior poet

“The complex spectrum of things that go on between and among women has to be understood as also erotic. One thing I was trying to do in Twenty-One Love Poems was constantly to relate the lovers to a larger world. You’re never just in bed together in a private space; you can’t be, there is a hostile and envious world out there, acutely threatened by women’s love for each other. Women who are lovers have to recognize that—in the sense that I was trying to express in ‘From An Old House In America’: ‘I cannot now lie down/ …with a lover who imagines/we are not in danger.’ And that danger and threat is also internalized within ourselves. So many of these things enter in when two women are together: joy like none other, vulnerability like none other, the breaking of the core prohibition at the heart of patriarchy.

“Two friends of mine, both artists, wrote me about reading the Twenty-One Love Poems with their male lovers, assuring me how ‘universal’ the poems were. I found myself angered, and when I asked myself why, I realized that it was anger at having my work essentially assimilated and stripped of its meaning, ‘integrated’ into heterosexual romance. That kind of ‘acceptance’ of the book seems to me a refusal of its deepest implications. The longing to simplify, to defuse feminism by invoking ‘androgyny’ or ‘humanism,’ to assimilate lesbian existence by saying that ‘relationship’ is really all the same, love is always difficult—I see that as a denial, a kind of resistance, a refusal to read and hear what I’ve actually written, to acknowledge what I am.”

- Adrienne Rich, from Elly Bulkin’s “An Interview with Adrienne Rich,” Conditions (2), 1977.

Filed under Adrienne Rich poetry feminist rage

1 note

In anticipation of the new season of Mad Men (though it’s not like I’ll actually see any episodes for a zillion years until they make it to Netflix streaming…), I present some textual evidence of the sorrow and envy I experience because I no longer live in a city where beautiful celebrities, like, go grocery shopping with their kids like it’s no big deal.

Filed under envy mad men textual exchange the suburbs are killing us