Incest in the 1990s: reading Anais Nin's 'Father Story'

In the summer of 1933, diarist, author and critic Anaïs Nin joined her father for a short vacation in France. Nin wrote about the trip in her diary afterwards, referring to it as the ‘Father Story.’ In the story, she details how, aged 30, she embarked upon an affair with her father which would last for several months. Rather than displaying the signs of trauma that we have come to expect from the incest narrative such as dissociation, blame and recrimination, the ‘Father Story’ is more ambiguous in its tone. Part-tribute to the father, part-seduction narrative, part-confession, this is a story that resists categorisation – a resistance that has ethical, critical and formal ramifications for our reading of incest narratives. Upon its publication in the early 1990s, critics responded to the ‘Father Story’ as fantastical, excessive and vulgar. These responses form part of a wider American father story during this period; a story about memory, therapy culture, family values and the concealed rules of testimony. This article reads Anaïs Nin’s narrative as a text which raises fundamental questions about why certain father (and daughter) stories are culturally acceptable and others are not

Nostalgia and style in retro America: moods, modes and media recycling

This paper considers nostalgia as a cultural mode in contemporary America

Nostalgia and Retro-Femininity in Self-Presentations of 50+ Women on Flickr

This article focuses on interconnected issues of nostalgia and sexual politics of retro-femininity in the online photo-sharing practices of mature women who display eroticized photographs of themselves on Flickr. These stylized images mimic the retro-feminine ideal, borrowing heavily from visual conventions of pin-up and aesthetics of hyper-feminine vintage fashion. They represent both a longing for the past younger self and a romanticized view of a model of femininity of the bygone era. The self-presentations in question are examined in a relationship with debates over the agency of self-display within the online sphere, considering how the uneasy positioning of aging female body in the youth-centered contemporary culture complicates the reading of these images.</p

CREBBP Inactivation Promotes the Development of HDAC3-Dependent Lymphomas

Somatic mutations in CREBBP occur frequently in B-cell lymphoma. Here, we show that loss of CREBBP facilitates the development of germinal center (GC)-derived lymphomas in mice. In both human and murine lymphomas, CREBBP loss-of-function resulted in focal depletion of enhancer H3K27 acetylation and aberrant transcriptional silencing of genes that regulate B-cell signaling and immune responses, including class II MHC. Mechanistically, CREBBP-regulated enhancers are counter-regulated by the BCL6 transcriptional repressor in a complex with SMRT and HDAC3, which we found to bind extensively to MHC class II loci. HDAC3 loss-of-function rescued repression of these enhancers and corresponding genes, including MHC class II, and more profoundly suppressed CREBBP-mutant lymphomas in vitro and in vivo Hence, CREBBP loss-of-function contributes to lymphomagenesis by enabling unopposed suppression of enhancers by BCL6/SMRT/HDAC3 complexes, suggesting HDAC3-targeted therapy as a precision approach for CREBBP-mutant lymphomas.SignificanceOur findings establish the tumor suppressor function of CREBBP in GC lymphomas in which CREBBP mutations disable acetylation and result in unopposed deacetylation by BCL6/SMRT/HDAC3 complexes at enhancers of B-cell signaling and immune response genes. Hence, inhibition of HDAC3 can restore the enhancer histone acetylation and may serve as a targeted therapy for CREBBP-mutant lymphomas. Cancer Discov; 7(1); 38-53. ©2016 AACR.See related commentary by Höpken, p. 14This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 1