Yasmin Nair is a writer, activist, and academic. She is a co-founder, with Ryan Conrad, of the radical queer editorial collective Against Equality, and the Policy Director of the Chicago queer radical collective Gender JUST. Her work has appeared in publications like The Baffler, In These Times, Vox, and Electronic Intifada as well as in several anthologies including Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Detention, Deportation, and Illegalization.
Nair also writes for and is an editor at large at Current Affairs. As with AE and GJ, this is an unpaid if honorary and ceremonial position—much like that of the Queen Mum but without the fabulous, stolen jewels or the latent Nazi sympathies.
Nair received her PhD from Purdue in 2000. She has worked as an adjunct instructor, a beat reporter, columnist, and journalist for Windy City Times and Clamor. She has produced hundreds of reports, reviews, and long-form essays, most of which are archived or linked to on this website. Nair, a bastard child of deconstruction and queer theory, takes culture (film, television, social media, and politics) seriously and as a manifestation of issues like class and gender rather than as material for hot takes.
Nair’s work emerges from an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and abolitionist perspective but she is also critical of the banal form of identity politics that suffuses most woke left writing. She can lay claim to several identities—queer, disabled, brown, housing-precarious, female, vaguely foreign, a woman with terorist hair, a crazy cat lady, and others she may have forgotten but chooses not to use to justify her arguments. For her refusal to engage her own identity, Nair has often been described by many on the left as “fucking evil” and an “ultra-leftist”; she takes delight in being both.
Nair is devoid of any false modesty.
To understand her politics and work, the reader is advised to read her “A Manifesto,” written for the storied Evergreen Review. A sampling of her work can be found here. This tells you a bit about this website, and a list of categories can be found here.
Her exact age is indeterminate, since she declared herself 26 sometime in the 1990s and has not aged since. She has described herself as a fish-shaped, ancient demon, walking out of the water on cloven hooves, my gills flapping furiously as they turn into nostrils.
She is currently working on a book titled Strange Love: How Social Justice Was Invented, and Why It Needs to Die. The work looks critically at social justice movements, including those organised around immigration, gay marriage, and feminism.
Nair is a shameless and relentless self-promoter and will happily appear on your show/blog/media outlet without pay (she may, if required to travel long distances, ask to be subsidised for travel expenses). But she will not write for free or make formal presentations at your academic institution or nonprofit for free, under any conditions, or without an advance. Even the prospect of writing for a “prestige” publication or university will not change her mind: she has refused offers from many, including two from Harvard–yes, that Harvard.
If you would like to support her work, you can do so in several different ways, with or without money. And this tells you about the website.
Nair lives in Chicago with her two cats Toby and Frida and her dog Tipsy, all of whom are technically dead.
Many thanks to Liz Baudler, Ryan Conrad, Cara Hoffman, Ghassan Moussawi, Gautham Reddy, Richard Hoffman Reinhardt, Gil Spears, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz for reading several (and much longer) drafts.