Category: Capitalism, Class, Inequality

How to Be Poor

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date February 25, 2016

Excerpt: When we berate the poor for their “waste” or, for that matter, the rich for their “excess,” we are simply engaging in personalised narratives that do nothing to explain or even reveal the larger systems of power at work.

Capitalism, Class, Inequality On Books and Publishing

The Irony of Writing About Poverty On Medium

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date February 24, 2016

Excerpt: What is it about writing that we don’t see it as something that deserves compensation as labour? And why do we think that it’s okay to pay millionaires and billionaires with our labor instead of demanding that they pay us?

Capitalism, Class, Inequality Gay Marriage Queer Politics, Culture, and History Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

How Gay Money Became Gay Wealth: A Fable

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date January 27, 2016

Excerpt: This is not a woman who was hit hard by the taxes but, rather, someone angry that she had to pay them in the first place.

Capitalism, Class, Inequality Prison industrial complex

America’s Prison Problem Is Too Complicated for Mark Zuckerberg

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date October 26, 2015

Zuckerberg’s power and influence provides expensive cover for the brutality that the prison-industrial complex inflicts upon its inhabitants…

Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) - Piet Mondrian

Capitalism, Class, Inequality Politics

The problem with Fixing Wall Street Is It Can’t Be Fixed

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date October 16, 2015

More than ever in the history of capitalism, capital’s force is most evident in its invisible workings.

Capitalism, Class, Inequality Feminism Gay Marriage Queer Politics, Culture, and History Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

On Rentboy, Sex Panics, Feminism, and More

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date August 25, 2015

The gay press, such as it is, remains, with few exceptions, incapable of having the talent or the resources to do any kind of real investigative work on this story.

Capitalism, Class, Inequality Film, Art, Television, and Media

Travel, Passports, and the Differences between Expats and Immigrants

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date July 26, 2015

Update, March 24, 2025: I wrote this a decade ago, and while matters have become much more stark for immigrants–and even white Europeans and Canadians have been forcibly detained at U.S borders recently, their race no longer any protection–class distinctions between immigrants still emerge and, I would argue, are being solidified in particular ways. I will have more in the coming months, over a series of essays.

Academia Capitalism, Class, Inequality Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Rachel Dolezal and the Materiality of Race

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date June 13, 2015

The materiality of race, even as it operates as a legal fiction in several instances, functions to exclude, stigmatise, wound, and break, in a literal sense, as the past many months have shown.

Academia Animals Capitalism, Class, Inequality Labour On Books and Publishing Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Working Skin: Joseph Hankins Writes about Leather, Japan’s Buraku People, and Global Circuits of Identity Formation

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date April 1, 2015

“This is an attempt to trace the conditions that reproduce the logic of the suffering/savage slot, even as I position my own work within those conditions.”

Capitalism, Class, Inequality Queer Politics, Culture, and History

Introverts and the Kinsey Scale

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date November 9, 2014

Excerpt: Introverts are not Magical and Special People; they can be assholes like everyone else.