sarahfonseca's reviews
343 reviews

This curiously recurring piece of discount bargain literature's provocative cover - do love me some 'Dick and Jane' and 'Death Becomes Her' homages? - caught my eye, so I had a couple of read-throughs.

Phew. I have never seen reckless endangerment of minors like this before.

As I wrote in The Los Angeles Review of Books this weekend, "It is unlikely that any reader, be they devoted MAGA hatter or benign suburban housewife, will pause to probe Irreversible Damage’s sources. If they did, they might realize that they originate, not from the peer-reviewed realms of medicine, science, and law, but from the partisan op-ed sections of Fox News and The Washington Post. It is even less likely that the parent of a transgender boy or gender outlaw daughter residing in a non-coastal community will make time to sufficiently research these laws and discover that they do not force anyone to speak on the governments’ terms — in fact, they champion the autonomy of the people, all people."

My full review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-constitutional-conflationists-on-abigail-shriers-irreversible-damage-and-the-dangerous-absurdity-of-anti-trans-trolls/

As a broad who has taken shelter in Virginie Despentes’ writing during her own perennial gender malaise, I initially mistook the title of Torrey Peters’ debut novel for a cheeky nod to Apocalypse, Baby, the 51 year-old dyke author’s hard-boiled novel wherein two female private investigators are tasked with finding a missing teenage girl. Yet as anyone who bothered with the book jacket copy can report (and as I soon learned mere pages in), the ‘baby’ in Detransition, Baby’s title is a literal one, nodding to a fetus conceived by transwomen at the expense of cisgender misfortune. A trans woman herself, Peters is a knowing mistress of the endless quotidian foils of the cis circumstance.

Still, in true Despentes fashion, Peters tosses the reader a helmet and instructs her to climb on for a bitchseat ride into the big city. For the reviewer, Detransition’s contemporary Brooklyn is a familiar one, full of friction and stickiness. There are heated conversations between exes in Prospect Park, recollections of Hey Queen!, and an amiable sex worker joke or two that left me radiant (and hoping all the more that someone passes this book onto Despentes). There is ample queer drama; all traversed with an adult grace that Detransition’s characters are grateful to experience. It’s here that we meet Reese, a Venus of Willendorf of a trans girl gifted with a maternal streak despite never permitting herself to be topped as such; Ames, formerly Amy, formerly Ames, a clever detransitioned transwoman in tech who once dated Reese but has now, despite the scientific odds, produced an unplanned, viable embryo with the cishet Katrina, his biracial divorcée boss.

It’s all deliciously femme, though not without self-critique. Some of the novels’ bitterest pills, literal and figurative, are thrust at the ganglions of Peters’ hard-headed sisters; call it Estradiol and Come to Jesus. Yet any true ire or embitteredness is directed at the cismen with whom trans women often engage out of necessity, nevermind their insistence on demanding a femininity that quickly becomes asphyxiating. “Life as a woman was difficult, so people gave up,” Peters writes of Amy’s detransition. Though a more thorough explanation comes with time, this alone should suffice. After reading one of the novel’s jabbing diatribes against cismen, I texted a friend to say, “Surprise, surprise. My Andrea Dworkin is a transfemme.”

Full review here: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/01/detransition-baby/

I began this as part of my Ratched monograph research and found myself loving every page despite its much-documented shortcomings. The book's argument for a return to a more natural way of living is undermined by Kesey's reluctance in affording his Black orderlies any sort of interiority or misgivings regarding capitalism and institutions. While true to era, this terrain is charted with much more grace and empathy in Girl, Interrupted's film adaptation than it is in Kesey's novel. Consequently, these are the aspects of the book that prevent it from being genuinely timeless.

Still, it's important to get why the 1960s were the halcyon days of buddy stories that often found their ways into the picture show. Not unlike Midnight Cowboy and Of Mice and Men before that, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is buttressed by its irreverent love of difference, though one that only extends so far...

This is my book, so I am biased. She can be purchased here: https://sarahfonseca.com/shop/ols/products/sea-queens-novella

I mostly read this to better understand how American Crime Story seasons were developed from nonfiction tomes for screen. Maureen Orth's is a great reporter whose research aptitude is as solid as her interview skills. Given that Vulgar Favors was written 21 years ago, the contemporary queer reader might be jarred by Orth's incomprehension of kink practices and her arguments that queer culture is a breeding ground for bad social hygiene. While her judgement is not infrequently clouded by this sort of titillation, Orth's book is important in its assembling of queer community voices, from Cunanan's friends to LGBTQ activists and writers like Achy Obejas. It's clear in reading Vulgar Favors that Ryan Murphy & Co. prioritized the murdered, the murderer, and gay male culture at the turn of the millennium; the origin text is far more inclusive, densely peppered with (at times, gossipy) anecdote after anecdote.

Vulgar Favors is worth the read to better understand the tension between queer community and law enforcement ca. the advent of the triple cocktails. Cunanan was able to skirt across the U.S. undetained because LGBTQ communities had no community-based alternatives to approaching homophobic police forces that could out and humiliate them; so the men who encountered Cunanan, reasonably, kept stiff upper lips. It's also curious how critical coverage of Cunanan's spree within LGBTQ community was often written off my LGBTQ advocacy organizations as homophobic, despite the orientation of the reporters. A few times, I had to ponder how we would act if something like this happened again; I'd like to think we're better connected as queer people now, in 2021, to keep one another safe.

A really solid primer on the best 0f 1980s American cinema, structured as an ongoing conversation between a mother and sun. Super heartwarming and outside-the-box. It's a relief to pick up a book and think, "Phew, this guy really loves women and the movies."