Progress This past year we’ve been saturated with rhetoric surrounding “progress.” Trump’s election was widely hailed as a “step backwards,” undoing the years of positive change that allowed Hillary Clinton to declare that “America is already great.” But this semester kitsch wonders: have we really been moving forward? Can we even conceive of history as linear? Jeremiah Kim questions whether the liberal embrace of immigrants is really so “progressive” in his article “Dismantling America’s Immigrant Fetish” (42), and in her review of 20th Century Women, “Why We  March” (17),  Laura Kern critiques the “progress” made by modern feminism since the … Continue reading Letter from the Editors

At our first editors’ meeting, we had the happy realization that this was the thirteenth year of kitsch‒and so our theme “13” was born. The theme, 13, inspired interpretations ranging from José Armando’s analysis of superstitions (“My Belief is Their Superstition”), to Fauna, Elise, and Annika’s takes on puberty and adolescence (“Shaving Off Gender Norms,” “Thirteen and Thriving,” and “What It Means To Be Thirteen”), to Agrippa and Melvin’s explorations of video games (“Thirteen and Online,” and “Leaving the Vault”). Of course, some of the articles branched out beyond “13”‒for example, Adam’s revealing take on the irony of two of … Continue reading Letter from the Editors, Fall 2016