Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 1635901308 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity. When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be.--The Freezer Door The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life. Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: AK Press ISBN: 1849350892 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle? Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention! Called "startlingly bold and provocative" by Howard Zinn, and described as "a cross between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a queer agenda" by The Austin Chronicle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is undoubtedly one of America's most outspoken queer critics. She is the author of two novels, including, most recently, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, and is the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation.
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: arsenal pulp press ISBN: 1551528517 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations—the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer. Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis offers crucial stories from this missing generation in AIDS literature and cultural politics. This wide-ranging collection includes 36 personal essays on the ongoing and persistent impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in queer lives. Here you will find an expansive range of perspectives on a specific generational story—essays that explore and explode conventional wisdom, while also providing a necessary bridge between experiences. These essays respond, with eloquence and incisiveness, to the question: How do we reckon with the trauma that continues to this day, and imagine a way out?
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: Seal Press ISBN: 9781580051842 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
"Nobody Passes" is a collection of essays that confronts and challenges the very notion of belonging. By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. "Nobody Passes" explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of "passing." In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create. Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, "What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'." The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: ISBN: Category : Assimilation (Sociology) Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
As an assimilationist gay mainstream wields increasing power, the focus of gay struggle has become limited to marriage, military service and adoption. By the twisted priorities of the gay mainstream, it's ok to oppose a queer youth centre because it might interfere with property values, or to fight against the inclusion of transgendered people under hate crime legislation because this might not appeal to straight voters. That's Revolting shows us what the new queer resistance looks like. It also challenges the commercialised, commodified and objectified views of today's gays.
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: City Lights Books ISBN: 0872868923 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy and the editor of the anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift and MaximumRocknRoll.
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: City Lights Books ISBN: 0872866068 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
The End of San Francisco breaks apart the conventions of memoir to reveal the passions and perils of a life that refuses to conform to the rules of straight or gay normalcy. A budding queer activist escapes to San Francisco, in search of a world more politically charged, sexually saturated, and ethically consistent—this is the person who evolves into Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, infamous radical queer troublemaker, organizer and agitator, community builder and anti-assimilationist commentator. Here is the tender, provocative and exuberant story of the formation of one of the contemporary queer movement's most savvy and outrageous writers and spokespersons. Using an unrestrained associative style to move kaleidoscopically between past, present and future, Sycamore conjures the untidy push and pull of memory, exposing the tensions between idealism and critical engagement, trauma and self-actualization, inspiration and loss. Part memoir, part social history and part elegy, The End of San Francisco explores and explodes the dream of a radical queer community and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it. "Mattilda is a dazzling writer of uncommon truths, a challenging writer who refuses to conform to conventionality. Her agitation is an inspiration."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals “Author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the artistic love child of John Genet and David Wojnarowicz, deconstructing language swathed in unbridled sensuality, while flinging readers into a disrupted, chaotic life of queer anarchy.”—Gay and Lesbian Review "Bring on The End of San Francisco! And Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose new book has reinvented memoir without the predictable gloss of passive resolution. This book is undeniably brave and new, and the internal energy churning at its core is like nothing you've seen, heard or read before. I swear."—T. Cooper, author of Real Man Adventures "We hear so much about coming-of-age narratives that we seldom think about going-of-age—the shutting down and closure, the making sense of where we've been. Written with grace, reserve and the honest tremblings that come when things matter, Mattilda shows us that The End of San Francisco is really the beginning of joy."—Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive "It would be easy to describe The End of San Francisco as a Joycean 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Queer' (although the book's intense stream of consciousness is reminiscent of the later, more experimental, Joyce) . . . but this is misleading. This journey of a life that begins in the professional upper-middle class (both parents are therapists) and the Ivy League and moves to hustling, drugs, activism—Sycamore was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation—and queer bohemian grunge, is profoundly American. At heart, Sycamore is writing about the need to escape control through flight or obliteration."—Michael Bronski, San Francisco Chronicle
Author: Matt Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: ISBN: 9780971084636 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
This book inhabits the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and truth. It's about choosing to remain dangerous and unrepentant, struggling to survive this ravaging world without losing a sense of integrity and charm. Moving from mid-nineties Boston, to post-grunge Seattle, to Giuliani's New York, Pulling Taffy is about searching for home and not necessarily finding it.--From publisher description.
Author: Juliet Escoria Publisher: Melville House ISBN: 1612197590 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
"For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Juliet the Maniac is a worthy new entry in that pantheon of deconstruction... Dazzling."—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW This portrait of a young teenager's fight toward understanding and recovering from mental illness is shockingly honest, funny, and heartfelt. Ambitious, talented fourteen-year-old honors student Juliet is poised for success at her Southern California high school. However, she soon finds herself in an increasingly frightening spiral of drug use, self-harm, and mental illness that lands her in a remote therapeutic boarding school, where she must ultimately find the inner strength to survive. A highly anticipated debut—from a writer hailed as "a combination of Denis Johnson and Joan Didion" (Dazed)—that brilliantly captures the intimate triumph of a girl's struggle to become the woman she knows she can be.
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Matt Bernstein Sycamore
Author: Juliet Escoria