The History and Significance of Black Dolls
You may have heard of the doll test, during which black children, given the choice between a black doll and an otherwise identical white doll, often identified the white one as prettier and nicer.If...
View ArticleA Family Tradition
“Maybe it’s the glow from the new miniature lamppost from the Caroler collection my brother ordered that literally cast my mother’s dolls in a new light or the realization that they’ve been with our...
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Why Do Little Drag Queens Play with Dolls?
As a little gay boy, I played with dolls. I told everybody that when I grew up, I wanted to be a rock star, but it was my dolls that did all the work. My Barbies rocked. I redirected the camera’s gaze...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: To Be a Brony
The 1980s. The decade that gave me ten years of bad perms and MC Hammer pants also taught me to fear the secret lives of men. As kids we were warned to avoid a host of stranger dangers—windowless vans,...
View ArticleAll-American Girl
Over at the Paris Review, Brit Bennett profiles the role, or lack thereof, of black dolls among Americans today:Of course, you can still buy racist dolls. Golliwogs—blackfaced rag dolls—are still sold...
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The Rumpus Interview with Phoebe Gloeckner
Twelve years ago, I spent a day interviewing the artist Phoebe Gloeckner in her garage studio on Long Island. Her semi-autobiographical novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl had just been released. Based...
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Teddy Ruxpin
A fat and juicy cockroach scurries up the wall in the bathroom. This one is bold, a Burt Reynolds of cockroaches, and just as hairy. The cockroaches are cocky in The Apartments. My mother has trained...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Mira Returns to Athens”
The small two-bedroom flat where I lived until I was five is on the northern slope of Mount Lykavittos, between the neighborhoods of Ambelokipi and Neapoli. Back in Athens for the first time since my...
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Playing House: A Conversation with Megan Culhane Galbraith
Punctuating the essays in Megan Culhane Galbraith’s debut memoir The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book are a series of photographs that, on a surface level, represent lived...
View ArticleCreating a Fractured Whole: Megan Culhane Galbraith’s The Guild of the Infant...
When I was a little girl, my older sisters and I watched a movie on television, Our Very Own, a 1950 melodrama about adoption. For the rest of that day, they convinced me I was adopted, until I ran...
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