EMOTIONALLY NAUSEOUS

noun. 1. adorable and deplorable 2. a swamp of sincerity and sentimentality She's got great eyes. They're a real spooky green color. People leave you alone when you got eyes sharp like that. It's a color they give to witches in horror movies, to illustrate their evil powers.

[vag-enius]

The Femme Politics of Legally Blonde: An Interview with Dr. Rhea Ashley Hoskin

The Femme Politics of Legally Blonde: An Interview with Dr. Rhea Ashley Hoskin

This summer marks the 20th anniversary of Legally Blonde, the quintessential femme cult classic – or at least the closest we’ve got so far. I’ve already used this blog to parse out what Legally Blonde can teach us about femme theory, but for the 20th anniversary I wanted to hear from other femmes: surely it isn’t just me for whom this film was a shining beacon of femme joy and possibility?…

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[vag-enius]

Taking Sodom Road Exit Home

Taking Sodom Road Exit Home

To me, Fort Erie will always be a place of bootlegged 60oz-bottles, ladies’ nights, and pink vomit coloured by too many half-price vodka crans; and Crystal Beach, just a sandy bank riddled with fish carcasses. But to my mother Crystal Beach was the place she long ago spent her summers, training her white skin to soak up the sun with ease and witnessing the town’s heyday through the big, wondering…

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[vag-enius]

Crying in December

I think I've had a pretty good handle on my internet sad girl-ness until 2018, but what do you do with a problem like 2020? "Crying in December"

It is December and Mr. Dressup is making Christmas stockings out of construction paper on the CBC. The rise and fall of his vowels — remnants of that ‘Canadian dainty’ lilt. I hear my grandfather’s voice, “at all, a-tall, ah-Tall.” Mr. Dressup writes names on the stockings in perfect cursive, the kind my grandmother wrote my piano lesson transcripts in. The kind I see written across the lone,…

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[vag-enius]

35 Things Carly Rae Jepsen Taught Us About Scorp/Sag Intimacies

35 Things Carly Rae Jepsen Taught Us About Scorp/Sag Intimacies

co-written with Morgan Bimm

Morgan and I inhabit our own world in which Carly Rae Jepsen reigns as queen (other inhabitants include an unlikely combination of gay men and noise musicians), and November 21st is our highest of holidays: the day when our seasons overlap (Scorpio season becomes Sagittarius season), and the very day our Cusp Queen was born. In honour of her 35th trip around the…

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[vag-enius]

On Being an Indoor Femme

On Being an Indoor Femme

When we got the stay home order, my acrylic nails hadn’t been filled for over two weeks. The layer of shellac had already inched up far enough to reveal the half moons rising above my cuticles. And by then it was too late. There would be no nail fills for the foreseeable future. 

I looked down at my teal, coffin-shaped, acrylic tips in dismay. Our days together were numbered. 

They started…

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[vag-enius]

On Being a Dirtbag Femme: An Interview with Morgan Bimm

On Being a Dirtbag Femme: An Interview with Morgan Bimm

Morgan and I met in grad school, but our bond really solidified when we wrote an academic book chapter together about Carly Rae Jepsen. Through the process, we discovered we have so much more in common than just our love for intellectual curiosityabout Carly Rae Jepsen: we graduated from the same journalism program, rocked the same baby bangs, and even lived on the same street (at numbers 246 &…

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[vag-enius]

I made this zine about softness, feminism, and femme. And the ex girlfriend of my ex girlfriend designed and illustrated it! 

Until March 28, I’m donating 90% of the proceeds of its sale to the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape. Click here to purchase: https://andischwartzwrites.com/soft-femme-zine/

[vag-enius]

What We Can Learn About Femme Theory from Legally Blonde

What We Can Learn About Femme Theory from Legally Blonde

We may never agree on what femme means, except to agree that femme’s meaning is boundless. Indeed, much of femme writing so far has bounded beyond our previous understandings, has written into the space around femme. This writing has been important interjections, slicing in to the word and carving out a space to insert ourselves.

This is how I initially thought of femme theory — as a theory of…

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[vag-enius]

Dad's House

Dad’s House

My dad’s house was first built as a summer cottage along the U.S-Canadian border. Long before we moved in, someone hoisted it onto a flatbed truck and carried it north to a place called Puslinch, Ontario. In 1968, they built an addition off the north side but you wouldn’t know it to look at it—it remained a tiny, little bungalow.

My dad bought the house in late 1990, and it kept changing. The…

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[vag-enius]

Boys to the Back: On the Subtleties of Male Entitlement

Boys to the Back: On the Subtleties of Male Entitlement

I’ve been writing love letters to mosh pits since I was in high school. But this is not a love letter.

There are few things I love more than thrashing around at shows with my friends. This feels like the whole point of having a body, the best part of being material. We all become new best friends, dancing so close and so strange that we slam into each other.We fall down, we get scooped up by…

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[vag-enius]

Two Mantras for 28

Two Mantras for 28

Twenty-seven was a bad year for me. There’s no way around it; it’s quantifiable. Twenty-eight was also hard, but it was the year I started to make sense out of twenty-seven. It’s been a slog, and I know I am not done yet. I wrote these two mantras, named after tarot cards I pulled over and over throughout the year, to reflect on the lessons I’ve started to learn.

One: Eight of Swords

The…

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[vag-enius]

A Death Drive Toward Life? Or, Fun Fact: All My Planets Are In the 6th and 8th Houses

A Death Drive Toward Life? Or, Fun Fact: All My Planets Are In the 6th and 8th Houses

I almost flunked grade four because I couldn’t finish Tuck Everlasting. The book terrified me. The main character Winnie (later played by Alexis Bledel—I heard, I couldn’t watch the movie) was given the choice to live forever, or continue to age, live a human life of growth, love and loss, and, yes, eventually die. Winnie chose the latter. My 10-year-old self was like, nope, not mature enough for…

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[vag-enius]

Bisexual and Ambivalent!: A Queer Worrier and her Queer Worries

Bisexual and Ambivalent!: A Queer Worrier and her Queer Worries

My friend once called me out for posting a spate of ~misandrist~ content. She said she was trying to determine whether I had recently killed a man, or if was really happy with one.

I was really happy with one.

She assured me that she, too, “flexed her misandry muscles” the most when she was in a happy relationship with a dude. 

My friend’s commentary on the discrepancy between my online and…

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[catherinepapeillustration]

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

“Maybe home is nothing but two arms holding you tight when you’re at your worst.”

— Yara Bashraheel

[vag-enius]

four years ago I made some shitty art about my shitty feelings and today my big cranky baby Low Femme is on Feral Feminisms 🙃 check it outtt and the rest of this awesome-looking femme issue ✌🏻 http://www.feralfeminisms.com/low-femme/ 💗 #lowfemme #acafemmeic #feralfeminisms

[vag-enius]

thinking about how men can make careers/relationships out of doing the bare minimum, like how I cried with joy when my bf showed up to my birthday party and how I felt super cared for when he was able to admit to his ex gf that he was hanging out with me/I exist

lol