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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Alvaro Barrington, Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay

Art Review

October 2019

Kevin Brazil

Art Review

October 2019

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival...

Essay

October 2018

The Uses of Queer Art

Kevin Brazil

Essay

October 2018

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded...

I was fourteen when I first transformed from Rosa into ~<*RoSaBubbLe*>~ Propelled by my adoration of Courtney Love – the lead singer of Hole, who I loved for many reasons but especially because she wrote on her stomach in eyeliner – I travelled down my first internet rabbit hole to the forums of the North American feminist magazine, Bust After school, in the living room I shared with my family, I would dwell in this private portal to a different world which could easily be shut on demand (just click the x)   Here, I found other young women, who were negotiating their similar-but-different lives Because of global capitalism we had a lot in common: they too went to Sizzler all-you-can-eat buffet for a treat with their grandparents, they too loved Courtney I didn’t speak (type) much because they all seemed more articulate than I was and because they were from North America and one was even from London, which seemed like centres of the world to me, back then in the suburbs of Sydney I learnt many things on these forums, but two have stuck with me most vividly The first thing I learnt about was zines, a decidedly low-tech cut-n-stick subculture which I readily embraced The second was something called ‘menstruation porn’, which is exactly what it sounds like I visited the slow-to-load webpage of very happy-looking bleeding people naked in the forest only once I think that, while intrigued, I was also repulsed (fully inhabiting the Freudian meaning of ambivalence), or maybe the dial-up cut out or my mum came home from the supermarket But knowing that it was there and being able to turn it over in my mind was enough Desire it seemed, was much more expansive than I had thought How curious In a world where I had already learnt to be frightened of men, the website taught me that they didn’t necessarily always get to determine how sex — and everything else — might go It was a small, quivering thought against the rest of

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Nora Ikstena's ‘Soviet Milk’

Book Review

August 2018

Kevin Brazil

Book Review

August 2018

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember...

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feature

Issue No. 15

A Weekend With My Own Death

Gabriela Wiener

TR. Lucy Greaves

feature

Issue No. 15

We all have tombs from which we travel. To reach mine I have to get a lift with some...

poetry

April 2014

Lives of the Saints

Luke Neima

poetry

April 2014

‘I’m tending to this dead tree,’ he tells me. Last time he was rolling the hard rocks down into...

feature

February 2011

Middle East protests give lie to Western orthodoxies

Emanuelle Degli Esposti

feature

February 2011

For thousands of individuals across the Arab world, 2011 has already become the year in which the political and...

 

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