2024 Is the year of the cougar-com

People
December 13, 2024

I ONLY SLEEP IN SILK

Image Magazine, Los Angeles Times
May 2024 - in print and online

Lux for Life: Barbie Edition

Lux Magazine
July 2023 - newsletter

When I was a kid, my mother considered Barbie both symptom and symbol of capitalist patriarchy. I could see her point. Ur-Barbie had huge boobs and tiny skirts. In our family, the ideal woman wore long pants and hijab. If she had a rack, you definitely couldn’t tell. Barbie threatened what in Iranian Revolutionary parlance was called Westoxification. And so, in the couple-thousand square feet of carpeted Ohian split-level that delineated my parents’ rule, there was a Barbie ban.

That was, at least, the official line. In reality, decorum required that my sister and I be allowed to keep any gifts offered by our also modest, also Muslim, aunties, and no one else seemed to take Barbie’s petty indulgences so much to heart. She liked stilettos and red lipstick, so what? Birthday after eid after birthday, the shoebox of Barbies grew heavier.

Fast forward a few decades, and I was ready to dismiss the Barbie movie as white supremacist postfeminist schlock. I expected the diversity of the cast to act as a curtain behind which this plastic ableism and overvaluing of whiteness could hide. But alas, the film anticipates just such critiques and, with deadpan sarcasm, deflates them. First comes the now already iconized line, “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of equal rights and feminism have been solved.” Later, the epithet “white savior Barbie” is leveled at our blonde hero. Where the script shines is in its sendup of normative masculinity. Ken’s origin story flips the Christian narrative. He was made as her mate — or “accessory,” as the movie puts it. In a nod to theorist Laura Mulvey, the usual cinematic gaze is inverted. Here it’s the male who lives for the female gaze. “Barbie has a great day every day. Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.” 

Yes, the movie is a two-hour ad for Mattel. But even there it undoes itself. Ken learns about male privilege on a trip to Century City, an L.A. neighborhood anchored by a mall. Back in Barbieland, he proselytizes patriarchy. The lesson is simple: patriarchy is learned, and moreover, connected to capitalism. There’s no arguing with that.

designer moth holes

Lux Magazine
June 2023 - only in print

SEX IS UNIVERSAL, BUT IT STILL NEEDS A TRANSLATOR: SELLING THE IRANIAN FEMINIST POET FOROUGH FARROKHZAD

Lux Magazine
October 2022 - in print and online

If Forough has been sexualized by her Farsi readership — and not only in Iran but also in the American academy — in translation this attention to the female body often takes on an Orientalist tone.

can a transparent purse cut through the deep polarization in L.A. bag culture?

Image Magazine, Los Angeles Times
August 15, 2022

There is a transparency to this city — to its sky, to its poolside patio bars, to its wide roads — that seduces and deceives you, . . . A transparent bag similarly claims to offer an unfiltered look into one’s life — except that the joy lies in curating the mess.

I like my bling to match my skin. But this turquoise ring is my inheritance

Image Magazine, Los Angeles Times
April 21, 2022

Aestheticizing whiteness — whether in the color of a metal or the clarity of a stone — bolsters white power. Embracing yellow is a way to embrace brownness.

THE TRANSLATOR I NEVER WANTED TO BE

GRANTA
November 02, 2021

Translation is an act of service. Not to the author, nor to the national literature that’s being translated, but rather to the language into which one’s translating. Bent to match the musicality of Farsi or weighted with the strangeness of a fresh idiom, our English is enriched.

Brushwork

Lux Magazine
November 2021 - only in print

Thighs dicks clits nails breasts butts balls — these are among the body parts rendered by the painter Sarah Faux’s brush, framed in close-up, so that at first they seem but abstract shapes. Stay a moment and your mind will make sense of sex scenes, pure and simple, masc and femme bodies in every combination, plus the occasional accoutrement — including in my favorite of her paintings, “Whatever I see I swallow,” a butt plug in black. Mostly her palettes are pleasurably rich: fleshy shades of brown and pink; sandy reds reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe; poppy yellows, purples, and grays worthy of a gel manicure.

—Review of Whatever I see I Swallow, solo show by painter Sarah Faux