While I am writing, the question of same-sex marriage is still a heated debate in most parts of the US (currently eclipsed by healthcare, of course), and will probably remain as such for the next few years (hopefully, not more). The debate has always struck me as a curious test for the imagined integrity of the law: not simply the US Constitution, but the heternormative law as a system that is precisely codified as a difference from what it fa...

I just received from the university counsel, almost a year after the events, a copy of an anonymous denunciation of me sent to my dean by some cowardly scumbag writing on behalf of “Concerned Graduate Students” from the e-mail address “jazzsmith55@yahoo.com.” Alluding darkly to “what happened to one of our graduate student friends” (unnamed, of course), the letter informed the dean that “you should know that Professor Saussy sleeps with his s...

After recently hearing the German word “das Baby” I began thinking about a cultural studies book I don’t want to write and probably wouldn’t even want to read (sounds like a printuculture post): The History of “Baby” or, to give it a more contemporary ring: Baby: A Natural History. How Baby Got Brought Up? The story would begin with Baby’s slow, near-fatal suffocation of its older and larger sibling Babe. The OED’s oldest examples of “baby” go...

Or: “What traveling means to me” I have returned home from my trip and am unpacking. Home’s familiar textures and smells are comforting and reassuring if a little dull. After three weeks of imposing on people with more real estate our apartment feels smaller than I remember but my hands, with memory of their own, can still find the light switches in the dark. Each trip is an emotional journey, beginning with excitement, anticipatio...

Last month, I turned 30. A few months prior, I ended a serious relationship. Understandably, I was a little afraid. What if I never got married and had kids? I have never been a kid-person, but would I regret reaching the end of my life and never having had that experience? A friend of mine who has a child told me, “The older you get, the more you realize you’re not that different from other people.” Meaning, I would probably regret it. Most p...

At the wedding of my oldest, dearest friend last summer, I learned that she was planning to take her husband’s name. I learned this during the rehearsal dinner not from my friend, but from grad school friends of hers. It came as a surprise to the three of us, and we talked about it for several animated minutes. All of us had kept our names, and we had taken it for granted that J would too. I think we all felt that J should have discussed it w...

Exactly a week from today, my sweetie and I will have been together 10 years. That’s a long time in Hollywood, but far from impressive on any marriage longevity scale, I realize. In fact, it’s not even that we’ve been married for 10 years (it’ll be 7 years this August); no, next week is the 10-year anniversary of our first date. Still, a decade together is a nice milestone, something not to be taken for granted, and although we don’t celebrat...

Short track speed skating first came to my attention during the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. I was half-way around the world in Paris, France, where I’d gone to join my boyfriend, who was studying abroad and researching his dissertation. I had arrived right before the New Year, and it was early February; my sweetie had proposed on my birthday just a few weeks before (I accepted), and as if to test the “in sickness” part ahead o...

Oscar and Kyala have moved on. Toga, their three-month old Jackass penguin, stolen from their home at the Amazon World zoo on December 18th, is presumed dead. Kyala has laid a new egg, and they hope to put this whole horrible ordeal behind them. It's time for healing. When Toga had been gone about 10 days, Oscar and Kyala started to build a new nest. In one of the many news stories covering this development, Kate Bright, the zoo manager--and ...

My wife recently requested I put the hurt on Sufjan Stevens. Out of contrariness, I defended him. His music is mild but inoffensive, entirely suitable for sweater shopping or hanging Christmas ornaments down at the old folks’ home, and he has clearly put some thought into choosing his arrangements and instrumentation. Why not live and let live? Where’s the harm? But no husband or natural-born son could be spiteful enough to defend Bright ...

Ringtones are perhaps the smallest works of art in existence. I don't consider them songs in themselves but rather miniature representations of the works they are adapted from, like portraits reduced for a stamp or coin. Without words the song must at last stand naked and be judged purely as melody and rhythm, an instrumental unable to hide behind the alibi of Muzak schmaltz and saccharine. At best ringtones have ten seconds to do their wor...

Ours has been a New Yorker-free household. Neither my husband nor I grew up in homes where the magazine was read; we didn’t come into film consciousness reading Pauline Kael, nor dream of life in NYC reading “Talk of the Town.” So the fact that we finally filled out one of those little subscription cards and actually put it in the mail this summer is not just a matter of course, it’s a noteworthy event.