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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


Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

When I was fifteen I took my two little cousins into town and had them wait outside the tattoo parlour while a woman with blue hair pierced my belly button with a big red ruby that pooled inside like a roving eye They were crying when I emerged I was hardly able to breathe for fear of the pain On the way home on the bus, Amy sang Karma Chameleon and Simone looked out of the window at time passing as though watching life being silently obliterated I remember my belly looked so white and soft lying down with the jewellery like a well of fresh blood collecting I thought it quite beautiful though it often snagged on my jeans My girlfriend had once rooted the ruby out with her tongue; the next morning had stung When we found a baby kicking in there I had to take the jewellery out as my teenage belly stretched Having that metal inside my body had been as good as a wound My girlfriend and I had wounds to nurse, they comforted, they reassured; while they healed there was a warm place inside devoted to new cells and plasma After the birth, my belly was  a waste of space, a forlorn temple with no jewel or way in I couldn’t accept the tender map of pain left imprinted on my belly when my baby was born I would trace the stubborn, soft pulse of a network of trails in my deep skin with my fingers, willing and willing them to recede Nobody touched my belly then, not for a decade My belly was women’s business My belly was the place a baby once lived If I was carrion my belly would be the first flesh to peck and rip– my most vulnerable part– silvery white in sunlight, nobody’s prize The little nick of a piercing scar reminds

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

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

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

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Interview

Issue No. 19

Interview with Álvaro Enrigue

Thomas Bunstead

Interview

Issue No. 19

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer who lives and teaches in New York. A leading light in the Spanish-language...

feature

Issue No. 16

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 16

The political and internet activist Eli Pariser coined the term ‘Filter Bubble’ in 2011 to describe how we have...

Art

August 2013

The External World

David OReilly

Art

August 2013

  The External World from David OReilly.   BASIC ANIMATION AESTHETICS   For the purposes of talking about animation,...

 

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