Introduction I met Valois Mickens and Zishan Ugurlu when I joined the tour of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company in 1997. We were on our way to Seoul, Korea for a month-long tour of The Trojan Women, an experimental operatic adaptation of the original Euripides play conceived and directed by Andrei Serban and composed … Read more
The beautiful process is when you look down over the roundness of your belly at your own thighs that are now soft and graceful, no longer taut like Flow Jo’s, and instead of dismay you say, “These are Mommy’s thighs.” You place your fingers in your own palm and notice that they remain forever elegant, … Read more
Daughter’s Wisdom In 2021, when my oldest daughter was four and a half, I was toweling her off after a bath when she thoughtfully remarked, “My heart is a girl. Is she four and a half, too?” I replied, “Your heart is four and a half. But it started beating when you were still inside … Read more
Like racism and sexism, ageism is not about how we look. It’s about what people in power want our appearance to mean. Ageism occurs when a group, whether politicians or marketers or employment agencies, use that power to oppress or exploit or silence or simply ignore people who are much younger or significantly older. – … Read more
In this special issue, “Race-ing Queens,” Guest Editors Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Treva B. Lindsey, and Sonja Drimmer have curated a selection of essays looking transhistorically at queens, queenship, and queendom from the margins. Their work is indebted to Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall who, in her foundational study, Things of Darkness: … Read more
Introduction Contemporary public imagination continues to turn toward Catherine of Aragon as a go-between traversing political and cultural borders of Anglophone and Hispanic culture. In our current media landscape, these tensions have bubbled to the surface in the Starz’s 2019–2020 historical miniseries The Spanish Princess. Based on Philippa Gregory’s novels The Constant Princess and The … Read more
On 20 October 2020, Variety magazine announced a forthcoming psychological drama about Anne Boleyn’s downfall, featuring the star of “Queen & Slim,” Jodie Turner-Smith. The announcement caused a stir online, primarily because Turner-Smith, a Black actress, was cast as Anne Boleyn. What followed was an onslaught of tweets, ranging from enthusiasm and skepticism to explicit … Read more
The hit pop musical Six, written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, reimagines the six wives of Henry VIII as a contemporary girl group. Six premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017, and has since toured through the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. A version was even staged on a Norwegian cruise … Read more
“¡Qué pena! ¡Qué dolor! ¡Sin heredero!”: What shame! What suffering! Without an heir! This lamentation appears in a seventeenth-century satirical Spanish dirge that decries alleged desgobierno or “dis-government” under Charles II, listing lack of succession among his perceived failures as king. Charles, who married twice yet died childless, would be the last Spanish Habsburg ruler. … Read more
Introduction In April 2020, Hola! USA magazine asked Ivy Queen, known as “La Reina del Reggaetón,” to name a “possible successor, the next powerhouse of urbano music.” The Boricua and OG reggaetonera responded: I feel like all of them are like my daughters, regardless of whether they speak well of me or not. Like every … Read more
