Recently, I have been reading personal accounts of men who sought after HIV from one another, what is often called 'bugchasing' and 'giftgiving', with the virus being the gift or bug. In Michael Graydon's study of this desire (looking at multiple forums dedicated to bugchasing), most who seek HIV are hoping to "attain a new state of being that transforms identity, social roles and relationships" (281). For those looked at by Graydon, HIV, through its cultural associations wit

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) ROBERT: So, we’ve made it to the final Mad Max post. We need to state from the outset that this post will contain SPOILERS about the fourth film in the series, Mad Max: Fury Road. For anyone that hasn’t seen it, we recommend that you do. It is truly a remarkable spectacle, even for those who don’t typically go for this sort of film. Either of us would probably be willing to loan out our copies. It is also perfectly fine to watch Fury Road even if you

Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK Beta Launch, 2014, installation view, (Photo credit: ArtMag 85) On March 3, the Humanities on the Edge lecture series will welcome visual artist Saya Woolfalk to speak about her work. Woolfalk will be the series’ 23rd speaker—and its first visual artist. Woolfalk’s art provides a unique perspective on HotE’s theme for this year, “Posthuman Futures.” In her artist statement, Woolfalk writes: “My work considers the idea that symbolic and ideological syst

The Road Warrior (1981): The sinthomosexual and his catamite. In the first post in this series, we covered some of the discussions surrounding the role and purpose of feminism in Mad Max: Fury Road. One thing is clear, there is as of yet no consensus or even settled terms of debate regarding this topic. For this post, we will review the first three films in the Mad Max quadrilogy. We will explore topics and themes that appear and overlap in these films. We hope, through our c

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s essay “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human’” makes a critical intervention into the discourse of post-humanism, positing the question, “What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond?” (215). Jackson’s thesis is that post-humanist calls to go “beyond the human” risk reinforcing the “Eurocentric transcendentalism” that post-humanism ostensibly rejects because these calls often do not take an appropr

Spoiler Alert: We are going to talk about the latest Mad Max movie. There’s really no way to do this without discussing some major plot points. We state from the outset that we like the Mad Max franchise. We believe there are some very high points in these films. We furthermore believe that at its worst, the films at least remain interesting and worthy of discussion. In brief summary, Fury Road deals with the battle-hardened Imperator Furiosa, played to shaved-headed perfecti

In her 2013 article “Immigration, Civil Rights, & the Evolution of the People,” Cristina Rodríguez explains how two competing notions of “civil rights” operate within the context of immigration. One of these notions relies on the idea of personhood to make rights claims for non-citizens on the basis of their humanity. The other follows an incorporation model, which involves a “reciprocal” relationship between rights-seeking non-citizens and the rights/preferences of the exist

If you were a kid in the 1970s or 1980s, chances are you have at least a vague recollection of Daniel Striped Tiger, the sweet, high-voiced, feline inhabitant of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. And if, like me and my partner, you have a child under the age of 5, you might also be familiar with Daniel Striped Tiger’s offspring who now has his own spinoff, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, on PBS. The animated show stars four-year-old Daniel Tiger wh

“Are you in the wrong bathroom?” This is a question I often get when I “androgynously” venture into a public women’s restroom—whether it is spoken aloud (as it was to me just this morning at the campus gym) or implied by an accusatory stare. What are people thinking when they ask this question? Perhaps the speaker assumes I am an adult who can neither read the sign that says “women” nor interpret the person-with-a-dress icon. Perhaps. But, frankly, I am somewhat skeptical of

I’ll wrap up my semester-long look at nostalgia with some insights on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” that occurred to me while reading Marcos Piasan Natali’s “History and the Politics of Nostalgia.” In this later essay, Natali criticizes the prevailing notion in 19th- and 20th-century thought that nostalgia makes for both “bad politics” and “bad history” (13, 18). On the “bad politics” front, we have Marx, whose belief in stages of history necessarily leading to a sociali