Browsing by Author "Strouse, A.W."

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    Gender Trouble Couplets, Volume 1
    (punctum books, 2019-11-15) Strouse, A.W.
    Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity radically claimed that the sexed body is a fallacy, discursively constructed by the performance of gender. A.W. Strouse has undertaken to rewrite Butler’s classic tome into an octosyllabic poem. Inspired by the rhyming encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, Strouse transforms each of Butler’s sentences into Seussian couplets. This performative repetition of Chapter 1 of Butler’s Gender Trouble, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” deconstructs Butler’s deconstruction. Relishing in the campiness of rhyme and meter—in the bodily pleasures of form—Strouse’s Gender Trouble Couplets, Volume 1 is an imitation for which there is no original. Gender Trouble, perhaps, was poetry all along.
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    My Gay Middle Ages
    (punctum books, 2015-05-13) Strouse, A.W.
    In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse’s “gay lifestyle.” Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would “get in from behind” on cultural history, Strouse instead does a “reach around.” He eschews academic “queer theory” as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of “gross indecency”). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval.
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    Transfer Queen
    (punctum books, 2018-07-19) Strouse, A.W.
    Cruising the New York City subway, the Transfer Queen is on the prowl! These voyeuristic figure drawings—both poetic and visual—sketch the men of Gotham’s transportation system. A.W. Strouse and Patty Barth spy on strangers with a special kind of anonymous intimacy. Transfer Queen is ideal reading material for kinky commuters. But remember: “A crowded subway car is no excuse for unlawful sexual conduct!”