'Free'

In Grant Morrison’s 1989 graphic novel “Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, the psychotherapist Ruth Adams muses on the Joker: “It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here.” Later in the story, Dr. Arkham, founder of the Arkham Asylum, devours his wife and daughter after their brutal murder at the hands of an escaped asylum patient. He thinks to himself: “It all seems perfectly rational. Perfectly, perfectly rational.”

Morrison published “Serious House” because he wanted to kill Batman. Specifically, he wanted to kill the then-latest incarnation of the character, popularized by Frank Miller in the mid-1980s. Miller wrote Batman as a grizzled, violent, Freudian Vietnam vet, an iron-fisted punisher and pummeler of black and brown drug dealers and trannie hookers, the vengeful soul of ’80s white America, the defender of order and sanity in a cataclysmic age.

I Love Every Person's Insides

The trans electronic pop star SOPHIE only recently gained physical form.

Since 2013, she has made her name as an affiliate of the label and collective PC Music, a London-based group of electronic producers and vocalists. For most of her career, SOPHIE was ferociously anonymous. Her face, name, past, and identity remained hidden. But in 2017, she materialized, and since then her art has begged to be understood in the context of her now public transness.

Look, a Negro!

What does it mean to look at Kara Walker?

Since her first mural in 1994, this Negress has captured the minds, hearts, and genitals of her fellow Negroes, plastering them on the walls of the National Gallery of Art, MoMA, the Whitney, and countless galleries and institutions across the Nation. Auntie Walker’s murals are populated by silhouettes of what we are told are Black bodies. We are also told that they are Black bodies in anguish, suffering under the yoke of American oppression.

A Seat at the Table

In September, as Harvard implemented a new approach to handling cases of sexual harassment, a group of professors at Harvard Law School wanted a change.