Culture Essays
Beautiful Ghosts, or We’ll Always Have Istanbul
THE MARKAZ REVIEW
Looking for love and her father’s past, a Turkish American journalist haunts the streets of Istanbul before and after Covid.
Being a Queer WOC in the Art World, as Seen on TV
HYPERALLERGIC
To Vaccine Selfie or Not to Vaccine Selfie?
HYPERALLERGIC
What Is the Lesbian Dick Pic?
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
To the extent that there’s a defining image of the current era in sex trends, it’s the dick pic. It’s increasingly normal to find that people who date — or maybe even just know — men have a few megabytes worth of dicks on their phones.
Funny Feelings
REAL LIFE MAGAZINE
“The stage presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents things that are real and sometimes not well rehearsed.” — Erving Goffman,The Performance of Self in Everyday Life
Joe Cool
THE NEW INQUIRY
Why isn’t the popular grocery store Trader Joe’s on social media?
Tinderization of Feeling
THE NEW INQUIRY
Tinder’s binary mechanisms can be a template for a whole way of life in which everything is an option and processing beats choosing.
Written with Eve Peyser
How to Win Tinder
THE NEW INQUIRY
Tinder involves managing the vulnerability of “putting oneself out there” by playing it like a video game.
Written with Eve Peyser
When Great Art Makes You LOL
HYPERALLERGIC
Is funny art actually funny? The answer, as we see it, is a rousing chorus of “it depends.”
Written with Alex Huntsberger
‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette’ Could Break Down Ideas About Monogamy
MEL MAGAZINE
Could reality TV open up a real conversation about relationships?
Naming a Radical Queer Girl Tumblr Aesthetic
.DPI, FEMINIST JOURNAL OF ART & DIGITAL CULTURE (CANADA)
Naming a Radical Queer Girl Tumblr Aesthetic focuses on Tumblr as a space of safety, creativity, self-expression, and escape for young queer women and women of color while considering the paradox of the Internet as subject to market logic.
Written with Brannon Rockwell-Charland
Bad Girl Criminality and American Teen Dreams
HYPERALLERGIC
In Bling Ring and Spring Breakers the adolescent characters form twinnages and girl gangs, acting as singular beings on a quest to “just be free and have fun,” to quote Selena Gomez’s character from the latter film. But what does it mean when “being free and having fun” means embodying the dangerously bored, brazenly entitled criminality of LiLo? In their quest to find themselves, these teen girls (and one boy) simultaneously accessorize and become accessories to (as well as agents of) crime — they become lethal bling. And in the case of Spring Breakers, they become a force of anarchist negativity that is both intoxicating and disturbing. In this America, the teen dream of finding yourself means losing yourself — and bad girls do it well.
Written with Megan Milks
All of the feelings: On the strange, confusing love between queer besties
FUSION MAGAZINE
Once upon a time, I had a bestie named Eleanor. We had just become teen girls, and we did everything together. We wrote short stories, drew pictures and biked nowhere late into the night. We spent hours at Eleanor’s house following the convoluted plotlines of the soap opera Passions, including the almost incomprehensible storyline of Timmy the midget and Tabitha the witch (they were a particular brand of besties, where one is constantly in distress and the other is constantly coming to the rescue.) It seemed like nothing could come between the intense bond that Eleanor and I shared. It was almost as if our identities were merging into one.
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