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This article explores and theorizes how design professionals and academics can incorporate a tactile vocabulary into their processes and thinking. As our two-dimensional, tablet era has limited our...

Critics dealing with Oscar Wilde's collection of fairy tales, A House of Pomegranates, have tended to focus on "how and why a single fairy tale might simultaneously appeal to adults and to children" (Marsh 73). In order to emphasize the different impact of the stories, Michelle Ruggaber points out that the title of the collection itself harbors sin- ister allusions, as it refers to the ancient myth of Proserpine, in which pomegranates are explicitly connected with the underworld (143). In "The Star-Child," the fourth and final story, a pomegranate tree indeed marks the entrance to the wicked Magician's underground dungeon (Wilde 280), which becomes the scene of shame and torment. In contrast to Proserpine, who must spend at least part of every year in Pluto's company, the Star-Child eventually is able to leave the dank, dark confines of his prison by performing a number of good deeds, which allow him to redeem himself and escape his ugly fate at the hands of his tormentor. However, this respite is only temporary; even though he manages to ascend to his rightful place in life, his trials and tribulations have been so taxing that he dies "after the space of three years" (284). This article will outline the inequalities of the relationship between the Star-Child and his temporary master, known only as the Magician, in order to argue that Wilde's fairy tale should be read as the formalization of a queer interval that traumatizes the Victorian norm of maturation. This is not to suggest that "Wilde's Victorian readers (would) seem to have found (any)thing untoward about the fairy tales" (Duffy 328); nothing, at least, that hinted at the "homoromantic dimensions" which

Tracing the elaboration of the zombie in modern cinema—from George Romero through Bruce LaBruce—this chapter argues for a queer reading of the zombie as challenging the hetero-centrist structure of reproductive futurity that Lee Edelman outlined in his 2004 book No Future. The chapter exploits the uncertain ontology of the zombie (being neither dead nor alive) to make the point that, like “queer,” zombie-ness connotes a certain sense of transversality; zombies cut (or gnaw, rather) through definitions of various kinds with each bloody contact. The zombie virus is transported from wound to wound, and the visceral instantiation of the queer zombies in this chapter reaches an apex when the cinematic wound of zombie cinema intersects, flows into, the traumatic reality of the AIDS epidemic, as is shown in the analysis of LaBruce’sOtto; or, Up with Dead People.

Who hasn’t fantasized about the end of the world? There is something about the destruction of all conventions and physical and ideological structures that fascinates the human imagination. David Agranoff’s novel The Vegan Revolution… With Zombies sets out specifically to imagine what a world without the agricultural food industry would look like. In Agranoff’s imagining, the vegan revolution is brought about by a regular zombie apocalypse. A new drug has been introduced that allows the meat industry to create what in the novel becomes known as Stress Free Food. Making animals immune to suffering, this drug has the unfortunate side effect of making any human who consumes Stress Free Meat into a zombie, craving a different meat altogether: human.1 Presumably, the drug is administered not only to cows but also to all other animals in the agriculture industry, and, as such, vegans2 are the only ones not affected by the zombie virus. As a consequence, vegans of the world are now left to fend off the hordes of rampaging and hungry undead that will not be satisfied by a Big Mac.

BURIED LIVES: Incarcerated in Early America. Edited by Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2012.Buried Lives is a highly narrative volume, exploring the imprisoned lives of early America. The essays comprising the volume trace the carceral experience from the oppressive physicality of prison architecture; through the overt and subtle bonds of power within the jails, almshouses, and prisons; to the corporality of dis- ciplined and punished bodies. The volume reevaluates the methodology of Michel Foucault, David J. Rothman, and Michael Ignatieff, who tended to view the prison experience in mostly institutional, authoritarian terms, rendering mute the voices of actual inmates. The thesis of Buried Lives rests on the assumption that in order "to understand the nature of carceral institutions, the power that they wield, and the role that they have played in shaping the modern state," we must pay "[c]lose attention to the words, actions, and injuries of those confined behind bars" (282). The essays in Buried Lives make clear that inmates in early America did not constitute a cohesive minority group: vagrants, prostitutes, slaves, abolitionists, and military prisoners all get their due in Buried Lives. This multifaceted scope contributes to the urgency and importance of the volume, as it exposes the often ingenious ways in which prisoners resisted their incarceration and formed new social bonds behind bars.Buried Lives is divided into two sections: "Brokering Power behind Bars" and "Writing the Carceral Experience," each containing five essays. In the first section, Simon P. Newman and Billy G. Smith's essay, "Incarcerated Innocents," details how structures of power in Philadelphia's joint alms- and workhouse became vulnerable to inmate influence due to the fluid infrastructure of the building itself. Housing both the "deserving poor" and criminalized "vagrants," often side-by-side, the dividing line between the innocent and the criminal populations blurred substantially, leaving holes in the punitive matrix for inmates to exploit. Jennifer Lawrence Janofsky's essay, "'Hopelessly Hardened': The Complexities of Penitentiary Discipline at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary," shows in fascinating ways how inmates at Eastern State in the early to mid-nineteenth century resourcefully managed to turn the physical circumstances of their incarceration to their advantage, disrupting the rule of silence by using the heating and plumbing pipes of the prison to communicate with one another; inmates thus "forg[ed] interpersonal relationships" by exploiting the "architectural deficiencies" of the otherwise state-of-the-art prison (109). …