My hottie of the month for March is Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century politician, orator, political theorist, and philosopher. Burke is, perhaps, most famous for writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a work I had to read as an undergraduate history major. He is considered one of the fathers of conservatism, a political philosophy he embraced in response to the terrors of the French Revolution and its potential threat to England.
Because of his conservative leanings, I’ve never been particularly interested in him or his writings. Every now and then, I’ve tried to read a few selections from my anthology of Burke’s speeches and writings, but I’ve never been able to make it very far. So, I’m rather surprised to find myself suddenly interested in him and in late eighteenth-century English conservatism more generally.
This interest arose as I was working on my paper for GEMCS this past February. One reference led to another, which led to another, and before I knew it I was rereading parts of Reflections. While working on that paper, I picked up Frans de Bruyn’s “Anti-Semitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” published in Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2001. This excellent and interesting article looks at passages in Reflections in which Burke seems to embrace anti-Semitic rhetoric and attempts to explain the historical context for these passages and how they work rhetorically within Burke’s larger political argument. It’s a very informative essay that led me to another essay on conservatism in the period, which led me to start thinking about various other issues related to my current project.
I doubt that I’ll be teaching Burke any time soon. In fact, I’ve never been assigned him in a literature course (it was a history class that I read Reflections in). And he’s certainly not a major figure in my current project. But I am interested in using him and his writing to illustrate a couple of points about anti-Semitism at the end of the eighteenth century and about conservatism in general. In other words, he’s become quite useful to my project, even if he’s not a major figure in it.
So, I suddenly find myself interested in a political movement, conservatism, and a socio-political circle, one that includes Burke and Richard Cumberland, neither of which I ever thought I’d be writing about. For this reason, and certainly not because of his portrait above, I am celebrating Burke as March’s hottie of the month.
The Cockettes were led, at least for a time, by Hibiscus, shown here. They were known for their outrageous form of drag — outrageous in part because of their combination of male facial hair (in some cases), feminine clothing, and (arguably) excessive glitter. As one member of the group explains, whatever someone was doing the others would call for more. If you had one shirt on, why not five more? If you had some glitter, why not a lot of glitter. In many ways, this summarizes the whole Cockette lifestyle.
The paper is on Aphra Behn’s 1681 comedy The False Count. My interest in the play lies in its depiction of a group of men who disguise themselves as Turks and “capture” an Englishman, his wife, and his daughter. I’m trying to figure out how this play’s representation of “Turks” reflects Behn’s participation in partisan debates on the 
Our main reason for going was to see the Glenn Ligon exhibit, entitled “
The exhibit is small but fascinating. One of the works that stood out to me was End of Year Reports, a series of “thoughtful and brutally honest critiques of Ligon at age 12 and 13,” to quote the brochure. Here’s a picture that shows how the work looks hanging in the museum. It’s a collection of report cards in which his teachers comment about such issues as his refusal “to talk about his own recognition of his own sexual urges.” This refusal is interpreted as a kind of immaturity, and the teacher concludes that he will become more comfortable with his body and sexual desires within the next year, at which point he’ll interact with the other students — especially the girls — on a more social level. (We, of course, know that he in fact turns out gay instead, making the reports even more interesting.) What kind of teachers are these that they comment on his sexuality so directly? At first, PJ thought that these must be Ligon’s imagined recreations of his teachers’ thoughts, but the brochure indicates that they are his genuine report cards. They’re really crazy to read. It really makes me wonder what I’d say about my students’ sexual development (and so glad that I don’t ever have to)!
This exhibit is mostly of her recent paintings but also includes Benning’s 29-minute animated film, titled Play Pause. I didn’t watch it all, but the part I saw was fascinating. I wish I had stayed to see it all. It’s kind of simplistically drawn (or so it seems at first) and combines music, dual screens, and a non-narrative form to follow a group of characters around in bars, at home, at the airport, etc. We see various aspects of these characters’ lives, including their sex lives. As I’ve subsequently read online, this movie is a response to 911 and the loneliness she feels is intrinsic to her sexuality. Like I said, I really wish I had stayed and watched the whole thing. I did buy the book that accompanied the exhibit, so at least I’ll get to learn more about it.
The museum’s main draw is 
A Seahorse Yearis about what happens to a non-traditional family when their 16-year-old son is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The son, Christopher, disappears one day. He turns up later, but unfortunately the family’s nightmare is just beginning.
![IMG_8341[1]](https://live.staticflickr.com/8644/27753735444_2ca20d29d0_s.jpg "IMG_8341[1]")
This Gaudy Gilded Stage 