This essay explores the persistent cultural demand that queer women “prove” their sexuality through performance, disclosure, or conformity to a heteronormative society. Lesbian identity is not one contingent on validation, or the male gaze.
This essay examines how Beloved links the theft of Sethe’s breast milk to her later infanticide, revealing both acts as responses to the violent destruction of Black maternal agency under slavery. Through close analysis and engagement with scholars like Hortense Spillers and Rebecca Stone, the essay argues that Morrison reframes Sethe’s actions not as monstrosity but as the tragic logic of a world where motherhood is made impossible. Ultimately, the piece explores how milk, murder, and memory intertwine to expose slavery’s assault on the Black maternal body and the radical struggle for selfhood that follows.
OnlyFans, despite framing itself as a platform of sexual autonomy, ultimately reinforces patriarchal power through what I term “Simulated liberation.” Drawing on Andrea Dworkin, Laura Mulvey, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Gramsci, the essay demonstrates how the platform’s promise of empowerment is constrained by surveillance, the male gaze, and market-driven norms. What appears to be choice or agency is revealed as participation in a hegemonic system that aestheticizes women’s exploitation while selling it back to them as empowerment.
