My dad — who in another life must have been a DJ — was the one who provided the boom box and mix tapes (yes: tapes) for these long afternoons at the water’s edge, and this album is one that I will always associate with summertime, heat, sand, and the smell of food cooking on the grill.

Here’s one of my favorite songs from said album.

The latest heat wave broke last night and we’re supposed to have a more manageable weekend ahead of us — hopefully I’ll have enough brain cells left to complete all the half-finished book reviews I’ve got in my queue.

What are your favorite songs of summer, Harpies?

Actually, as you’ve probably gathered by now, it’s a wee bit more complicated — and in my opinion, brilliant — than that. Something Jay Smooth suggests might even be a game changer in the way we talk about peoples’ sexual desires and relationships.

As someone who experiences my own sexuality in ways that don’t seem to fit into the neat and fixed identity categories our culture has developed to contain desire, it’s lovely to see our collective conversation moving in this direction.

I think it’s possible for us to honor the experience of people for whom strong sexual inclinations feel like an innate core of their being, a driving force of their identity, alongside the experience of folks for whom sexual experience is more particular, contextual, relational, fluid.

I really hope that those of us who desire a more expansive vision of human sexuality (anything outside of heteronomativity) will be able to work together toward a more inclusive future, rather than policing each other along the identity vs. fluidity boundary lines.

A friend of mine sent me this historically-minded music video that a student of her husband’s brought to class recently. While I don’t follow Lady Gaga’s career all that closely, I’m fascinated by the visual details in this production. They were clearly based on some of the photographs and ephemera of the woman suffrage movement which are preserved at the Library of Congress.

For example, compare the picketing scene in the video to this photograph from the LoC collection:

Women suffragists picketing in front of the White house (February 1917)

I’m also reminded of Katja von Garnier’s Iron Jawed Angels (HBO, 2004) which used anachronistic music to great effect as part of the soundtrack to tell the story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. It remains one of my favorite popular-culture uses of the struggle for female suffrage, which doesn’t gloss over the internal fissures along age, class, and race lines.

Do you have any favorite depictions of the suffrage movement (in the U.S. or elsewhere) in popular culture? Share ‘em in comments!