Since 2018, protests in Chile have heavily critiqued the neoliberal system, a legacy from the 1973 to 1990 dictatorship. These protests intensified in 2019 and were underpinned by feminist praxis, with an emphasis on gathering on the streets, taking up space, and calling for a change to the status quo. Cheril Linett, as creative director of Yeguada Latinoamericana, led radical performances that explicitly criticized the powers that sought to control Chilean society-namely the Catholic Church, the State, the police force-undermining their authority, engaging in radical playfulness that cannot be contained. In this article, I combine two concepts by Sara Motta, 'prefigurative epistemologies' and the 'affirmative storyteller', arguing that in her direction of two performances by Yeguada Latinoamericana, Cheril Linett transforms into a 'prefigurative storyteller' creating visions of the world that challenge cis heteropatriarchy. I contend that through the creation of hybrid beings-half women, half mares-Linett's Yeguada Latinoamericana distorts the somatic norm imposed by a society controlled by neoliberal and colonial legacies, forcing the audience to consider alternative realities of being and doing. As such, she pushes marginalized bodies and experiences to the fore, creating discursive and visual images of a world that resists through affective and collective action.
In Minor Salvage (2022), Stephen Hong Sohn theorizes a mode of Korean American life writing he defines by the process of salvaging the forgotten and unrecorded lives of civilians on the margins of the Korean War. Expanding upon Angela Naimou's definition of salvage as 'a creative and critical practice that animates every encounter with the ruined, junked and trashed', Sohn applies this mission of recovery and excavation to the experiences of Korean women, children, and refugees that survive primarily through individual memory. The work of writers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, and Diana Khoi Nguyen embodies Sohn's project of salvage through the interdisciplinary merging of fragmented images and texts with poetic forms. This disconnected juxtaposition of text and image, combining memories and personal experiences with documents salvaged from the wreckage of history, exemplifies what Sohn terms 'proximate memory assemblage'. Dict & eacute;e (1982) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; Hardly War (2016), DMZ Colony (2020) and Mirror Nation (2024) by Don Mee Choi; Autobiography of Death (2018) by Kim Hyesoon; and Ghost Of (2018) by Diana Khoi Nguyen engage in proximate memory assemblage by merging autobiographical writing with the collective cultural memory of the trauma and displacement resulting from the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The destruction and division of Korea and fractured diasporic identity as a consequence of forced migration is represented through literary and formal rupture, juxtaposing text with the often fragmented and contextless quotations, images, documents, and drawings salvaged from the wreckage of war.
Combined oral contraceptive pills (COCPs) are commonly used by reproductive-aged women with overweight or obesity, but their metabolic effects remain understudied. This pilot study examined the feasibility of recruiting and retaining women with overweight or obesity initiating COCPs and evaluated changes in body weight, body composition, energy intake (EI), eating behaviors, and cardiometabolic markers. Premenopausal women aged 18-40 years with a body mass index between 25 and 45 kg/m2 initiating COCPs (n = 10) or using nonhormonal contraception (NHC; n = 10) were followed for six months. Outcome measures included body weight, body composition, EI, eating behavior questionnaires, ecological momentary assessment of appetite and satiety, and fasting laboratory measures. There were no between-group differences in changes in weight, EI, or appetite. Binge-eating severity decreased in COCP users and increased in NHC users, though the within-group change in COCP users was not statistically significant. Exploratory analyses demonstrated increases in hemoglobin A1c and triglycerides among COCP users compared to NHC users, while bioavailable testosterone decreased in COCP users only. This study demonstrates high retention and feasibility among women with overweight/obesity undergoing intensive dietary and metabolic monitoring. Although weight outcomes were similar between groups, these preliminary findings identify potential metabolic signals warranting confirmation in adequately powered studies.
Pat Barker has acknowledged her indebtedness to Angela Carter, who was her creative writing teacher when she began working on her first novel, Union Street (1982). Despite Barker crediting Carter with being instrumental in getting the manuscript published, the question of if and how Union Street may bear the mark of Carter's influence is not one which has been explored. While this can perhaps be attributed to the very different form and content of the authors' fiction, it does not take into account the ways in which Union Street shares themes which recur in Carter's work: the subordination and marginalization of women; an exposing of the power structures which enable this; and the role of women's complicity in propagating these structures. As such, the subject of whether Carter's influence can be discerned in the work is one that warrants further scrutiny. While the element of 'demythologizing' in Pat Barker's portrayal of a working-class community in Union Street has been identified by scholars, to date this has also not been examined in depth. This essay addresses both of these neglected areas by exploring the subject of demythologizing in Barker's first novel by adopting an approach which utilizes Carter's non-fiction writing on myth as a framework in which to situate a reading of Union Street.
H.D., as the poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle was known, wrote End to Torment from March to July 1958, a fragmented series of diary entries that began as a rush of memories of her early love affair with Ezra Pound. The torment that is ending is Pound's time at St Elizabeths, the government security hospital in which he spent ten years. H.D. had read an article about his life there, and was intrigued by his relation with a young artist, Sheri Martinelli, destined like herself fifty years earlier to be left behind in America, and indeed End to Torment finishes with Norman Holmes Pearson's account of the Pounds' departure for Europe and freedom that summer. H.D., early the next year, wrote the poem Winter Love, the last poem in her last collection, looking back to her youth from old age, aware of the different lives she and Pound, Helen and Odysseus, as they are here, have lived, but also evoking their shared past and lifelong affection.
The British experimental writer, Ann Quin (1936-73), has gained notoriety in recent years for her unconventional prose that decidedly swims against the current of canonical writing from the time. While she lived a life that strayed beyond heteronormative ideals, scholars rarely categorize her as a queer author. Her fragmentary novel Three (1966) follows a tripartite relationship between a couple and their young female lodger, and its plot and form leave much to be queried. Taking an approach informed by queer theory, this article positions Three as a distinctly queer novel, using disorientation as a lens for reading Quin's experimentation with language. Mediated by its evocatively arranged garden objects, temporal flux, disorientating losses and gaps, and utopian dreams and reveries encoded in complex syntax, Three operates as a text with plentiful potential. Three calls forth both the uncomfortable and painful dimensions of nonnormative desires, as well as making clear what ambitious experiments in fiction can do: that is, propose a different, more queer-tender world.
