No-one’s Little Girl
“This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” So reads the infamous illustration in Sniffin’ Glue. Punk came crashing into the UK in about 1976 and brought liberation for all, if by ‘liberation’ we mean commercial success, and if by ‘all’ we mean white men. The
Fallen Women
CW: references to sexual assault. The seductress, the prostitute, the murderess: these are but a few symbols which the Fallen Woman has taken throughout history – symbols which have reduced the women in question to unrelatable imitations, unreflective of lived experiences. The ways in which
Queer Manifestos
I was late at night, I was bored, and a stack of unread books was calling me. Among these was Breanne Fahs’ Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. As a queer woman, I immediately flipped to Fahs’ carefully curated section on queer manifestos. Instead of the more modern manifestos
The Scam of the Morning Routine
What does a Successful Person do in the morning? The answer, it would seem, if you read enough articles about the CEOs of fashionable start-ups, is a lot: they get up at 5:45am, drink a glass of ice-cold lemon water, run a marathon, take some grateful breaths in the shower, and still find time to [&
Bedtime Stories
“Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person,” a girl murmurs to an ex-boyfriend. She is digitised and sports beautiful bangs, a puzzle of pixels dancing across the nation’s laptop screens three weeks into lockdown. But the tragedy of it rings true: falling in love with
Aesthetic Unease
Tom Collister was twenty years old when he was sentenced to two and a half years at HMP Camp Hill, a sentence cut short by his suicide in 2010. Before the government shut it down, the prison was was infamous for its incompetency and nicknamed ‘Concentration Camp Hill’ by its inmates. Human rig
Bridging the Gap
For most of us, pharmaceuticals are a product to be consumed like any other. In the rush of everyday life, we are not expected to consider how the drug was developed, how the molecules are interacting, or how the proteins are bound. We experience the physical effects with little thought as to how th
Paraiso
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.” Philip Larkin On Tanjong Rhu Road, it is hard to know where the water begins. Geriatric taxi drivers will tell you that the tarmac you’re travelling on used to be jetty, and the tarmac up ahead a sticky pocket of bay where rotting wood and bilge wat
Revenge of the Muse
Near the end of the Tate Modern’s Dora Maar retrospective, the largest so far in the UK, there is a recording of a conversation between the eighty-seven-year-old Dora Maar and Francis Morris, now head of the Tate Modern. In the conversation, originally recorded for the Tate’s 1995 Picasso retros