Elevate Difference

Reviews by Melinda Barton

When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty

In When Did Indians Become Straight?, Mark Rifkin takes on a monumental task, exploring the intersections between sexuality, race, colonization/imperialism, sovereignty and nationhood as they apply to Native American tribes and their struggles over the centuries. As someone who is both of Native descent and gay, I was intrigued.

Best Lesbian Romance 2011

Best Lesbian Romance 2011 is just that: some of the best lesbian-themed romantic short stories you’ll read this year. Beyond just lesbian romance, this interesting compilation seems to center around variety.

Best Lesbian Erotica 2011

As the title indicates, Best Lesbian Erotica 2011 is a compilation of short erotic fiction from a variety of authors, both established and obscure. What the title fails to express is that this is not just yet another compilation of middle-of-the-road lesbian erotica. This edition, unlike others before it, centers on lesbian outsiders, the ones whose radical gender bending and subversive sexuality sometimes makes the rest of us just a little bit squeamish.

Elena Undone

When I discovered that the director of Elena Undone was the same Nicole Conn who’d directed Claire of the Moon, I was a bit nervous.

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

If eras, like essays, had main topics, the main topic of our era would be extremism. For the past nine years, there has been no escape from various extremisms. Both foreign and domestic, left and right, alien and all-too-familiar, these extremisms have been the topic of the week virtually every week since... Well, I guess I don’t need to tell you since when, do I? It would be difficult to offer any fresh perspective on the topic. After all, haven’t we heard it all by now?

Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success

Her Place at the Table, as its subtitle suggests, offers women a guide to leadership success in the modern work environment. Each of the “five key challenges” forms a chapter. The first challenge is drilling deep, gathering the information needed when deciding whether to take on a new job or project, or when negotiating the circumstances under which you take on a new job or project.

The Words of Extraordinary Women

I have a confession to make. As a little baby nerd-in-training, I would spend hours in the living room reading Bartlett‘s Familiar Quotations along with various other reference works that weren‘t really meant to be read in that way. Despite my complete lack of understanding of anything resembling cool and my utter ignorance of virtually everything pop cultural, I still knew that that wasn‘t something you went around telling people unless you aspired to pariah status.

My Sweet Wild Dance

It is always difficult for me, as a writer, to review another’s work. I find sentiment and solidarity too often hold sway, making me a bit kinder than I should be to those whose ghastly prose tarnishes the craft I have spent so many long years attempting to master. As someone’s whose known both praise and condemnation in my own career, I find myself, perhaps far too often, seeking some positive contribution I can offer to a fellow wordsmith, something which at least partially redeems the frequently soul-crushing process of reading critiques of one‘s own work.

And Then Came Lola

Based loosely on the art-house classic Run Lola Run, And Then Came Lola shows photographer Lola’s desperate attempt to get to a crucial meeting on time, with her girlfriend’s career and their relationship on the line if she fails.

The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America

In The War on Welfare, Marisa Chappell compiles a comprehensive record of decades of antipoverty and anti-welfare movements and coalitions, the policies and programs they influenced, and the biases that both shaped and undermined their objectives.

Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment

In Love the Questions, Ian Angus attempts to document the evolution of the university as a social institution, the problems presented by recent shifts in the structure and funding of the modern university, and possible solutions that will allow for modernization without the loss of the university’s most vital traditional roles.

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

In Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg offers an alternative to competitive memory, or the idea that the capacity to remember historical injustices is limited and that any attention to one injustice diminishes our capacity to memorialize another. Rothberg also disputes the idea that comparisons between atrocities erase differences between them and imply a false equivalence.

The Edge of Change: Women in the 21st Century Press

My bias as a journalist and editor made me want to love The Edge of Change, but the stubborn remnants of the journalistic outlook into which I was indoctrinated gave bias a real beating. So, in the end, I just liked some parts and hated others. The concept was great, but the construction was lacking.

An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots

In An Angle of Vision, we are presented with a series of extraordinarily well-written essays centered upon one of the most taboo topics in U.S. culture: class. More specifically, we are presented with first-person, female-centered examinations of two groups who are steadily disappearing from both the public discourse and the popular culture of the United States: the poor and working class.

Epistemic Injustice: Power & The Ethics of Knowing

In Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker identifies and explores the role of identity prejudice (based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) in producing both systematic and incidental epistemic injustices or injustices against people in their capacities as speakers, informants, or participants in the community’s sharing of knowledge.

Girl Crazy: Coming Out Erotica

Stories of self-discovery and coming out comprise the overwhelming majority of lesbian imagery in literature, television, and film internationally. Many of us lesbian types truly wish we could get a bit more exploration beyond those murky borders, but I know of few people who actively dislike the coming out story. After all, if it is done well, it can be quite romantic and caters to the notorious lesbian love for nostalgia.

Football Under Cover

I encountered one major problem with Football Under Cover very early on: it wouldn’t play either on my U.S. regional DVD player or through a few of the many video players on my computer. Eventually, I managed to get it to run in Windows Media Center and sat down to watch. The earliest scenes were so well done, I started to doubt my own memory.

The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial

No regular news consumer could avoid being informed of the failings of the educational system in the U.S. Every medium, new and old, is filled with the details of this country’s abysmal international rankings, the breakdown of school discipline, the costs of teaching to the test, the soaring dropout rate and the dearth of funding that leads school systems to abandon arts programs and other educational necessities. What is often left unexamined is one of the primary causes of many of these problems: de facto segregation by race and class.

Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority

As the title indicates, Patsy Mink is the story of a woman of the same name, the first Asian American woman and the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress. If her story began and ended there, Mink’s life would have been important enough to have made history. Fortunately for every woman who lives in the world she transformed, Patsy Mink’s story and her life were far greater than that. Born in Maui, Hawaii in 1927, Mink faced a world where opportunities for people who shared her race and gender were all but nonexistent.

Sheltered Life

Sheltered Life is a very confusing film to watch and to review. For the first hour or so, it’s brilliant. For the last ten or fifteen minutes, it’s absurd and rather disappointing. The acting ranges from the passable to the extraordinary as does the editing and cinematography. There isn’t much I can write without wanting to take it back a few sentences later, but be patient; I’ll try to find a point somewhere. The film is set in a domestic violence shelter in Canada where a wealthy mother and daughter find themselves after the mother takes yet another beating from her husband.

Utopia and Epitaph

Utopia and Epitaph aren’t quite what documentaries are supposed to be, but, surprisingly, that’s a very good thing. In most documentaries, there’s narration and context, exposition and editorializing. The filmmaker boxes the viewer in with a comfy explanation of why “this” matters, and guides him or her on the sort of journey of other people’s lives that allows the interested, yet uninvolved, tourist’s view of the world.

American Studies (Volume 48, Number 2): Homosexuals in Unexpected Places?

In this special issue of American Studies, the editors promise a review that will challenge the preconceived notions of “metronormativity” in the LGBT community. From Dartmouth in the 1920s, to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to the eroticization of the rural male in the work of a visual artist, to Small Town USA, the gays are everywhere. What is surprising about this is that we’re supposed to find this surprising. In the introduction to this issue, Colin R.

Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories

Are Girls Necessary? was an astoundingly great idea, exploring the lesbian in nineteenth and twentieth century lesbian-authored literature, even that which is not as explicit as the lesbian novels that make up the heart of the lesbian literary canon. The subjects of Abraham’s examinations are a veritable pantheon of lesbian, bisexual and feminist literary icons: [Willa Cather](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844083721?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkCode=as

Queer Queens of Qomedy (08/01/2008)

Lesbians, like feminists, have no sense of humor. Or so we’ve been told… repeatedly. Poppy Champlin and her troupe of hilarious women-loving-women are busting that stereotype wide open. In various venues across the United States, the Queer Queens of Qomedy are met with crowds of queer fans and a hail of riotous laughter. I joined in on the gayety this past Friday night at the historic Birchmere music hall in Alexandria, Virginia, and I must say I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.