Cultural CritiqueArticles

Writing from her situated experience as a queer, polyamorous, pansexual African woman, Sihle Tshangela Mazibu reads self-discovery, desire, freedom, and healing in The Sex Lives of African Women.

Drawing on fieldwork and historical material from Zambézia, Mozambique, Carmeliza Rosário asks how kinship, language, and social roles unsettle universal models of gender as individual identity.

An interview with Anna Bogutskaya prompts a closer distinction between identification, approval, and the marketing of female rebellion as an empowering personality.

Through Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy, Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante explore how Africanfuturism repurposes colonial infrastructure to imagine queer and feminist life.

Oxford scholar Charlotte Cooper-Davis follows The City of Ladies into contemporary installation and performance, raising a further question: whose bodies and memories can shape an imagined city?

Anna Bogutskaya’s BFI programming note becomes a starting point for examining female agency, curatorial framing, and the difference between a good woman and a compelling character.

This article traces the historical evolution of modern masculinity, revealing the politicization and pathologization of the 'strong man' fantasy on a global scale, and critiques how patriarchy shapes oppressive roles for both men and women.

Mingus writes from disability justice to critique how beauty, normality, and desirability organize bodily value, proposing a liberatory politics of moving toward the ugly.