Yasmin Nair is a writer, activist, media and cultural critic, 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, Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Detention, Deportation, and Illegalization, and Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies.
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, a bastard child of deconstruction and queer theory, received her PhD from Purdue in 2000. She has worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a beat reporter, columnist, and freelance journalist. She has produced hundreds of reports, reviews, and long-form essays, most of which are archived or linked to on this website.
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 mention (except in moments such as this). Nair has 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. 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, 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, is under contract to write a book on Puzzling (about jigsaw puzzles) for Duke University, and writing a Young Adult novel about coming out.
Nair is a shameless and relentless self-promoter and will happily appear on your show/blog/media outlet without pay. 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. (Exceptions may be made for very small, underfunded activist spaces, and only if no one else is paid either.) 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, at least one from Yale, and other Very Prestigious Institutions (she lost count).
She can be found on Twitter (@NairYasmin) and Facebook (Yasmin.Nair), LinkedIn, and Instagram (Bekargyan). “Bekargyan” is Hindi/Urdu for “useless knowledge.” She is no longer accepting friend requests on FB, except from people she knows well, but you can always use the “follow” option there.
If you would like to support her work, you can do so in several different ways, with or without money. You can also give gift subscriptions in her name.
Nair lives in Chicago with her two cats Toby and Frida and her dog Tipsy, all of whom are technically dead.
She is represented by Rebecca Friedman, of the Rebecca Friedman Literary Agency.
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.