Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Girltrap: Disrupting the Game

Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Girltrap: Disrupting the Game

Disruptions of the border wall, conceptual and actual: massive hot pink seesaws with glittering bicycle seats and children playing teeter totter, confessionals, a massive greenhouse, a wildlife or horse race or xylophone or cactus map. Also “Reunite,” a yellow warning sign with a child running towards her parents with her arms held out, her parents racing towards her, their bodies frantic, desperate. Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, via their architecture firm Rael San Fratello, have spent more than ten years creating subversive responses to the U.S. Mexico border wall, and the whole idea of border walls, with interventions, dioramas, and games (including a 2017 board game called “Tunneling.”). These disruptions are fiercely playful, defiant, and moving.

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Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, full of twists and discoveries, offers a set of variations and reversals on the old English folktale of Mr. Fox and Lady Mary. Though it has a number of differences from the Bluebeard tale, it has a mysterious, powerful, murderous husband. In Oyeyemi’s version, there’s Mr. Fox, a writer, Daphne, his wife, and then Mary, his muse who comes to life and upbraids him for all the women he kills in his books. The stories within stories in this novel display multiple configurations of triangles, alterations in the power structure, and new versions of old relationships.

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