I’m willing to take unpopular stances not because I want to be a contrarian but because I’m interested in pursuing the truth of an analysis with integrity (and I have no patience for false modesty).
First, thank you to all the new subscribers, and to those who’ve signed up for updates through my listserv.
This update will include some important details, including more specifics about the subscription plans.
As I wrote earlier, I’m no longer offering paywalled articles because it’s simply not a feasible option. You can read about the reasons here, in “Blood and Mucous: The Winter Update.” I will, over the next few weeks, start unpaywalling the articles I’ve got up. I was quite sick in the last few months of 2018, and I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to deal with any (and possibly heated) comments that came my way with pieces like “Anal Sex and Its Discontents: Emma Sulkowicz, Lawrence v. Texas, and the Histories of a Sex Act.”
The unpaywalling does not, however, mean that I’ll no longer be writing for this website. In fact, in 2019, I’m pursuing a set of writing projects, including several long-form ones, exclusive to my website. I’ve divided up the year into thirds, with specific pieces slotted for each time period and I’m combining a few long-forms with several shorter pieces. The first long-form I’m tackling is “When the Supermarket Died,” about the end of the local Chicago grocery chain Treasure Island, with a focus on the effects in Hyde Park. On Sunday, September 30, 2018, shoppers were surprised to find that all six of the stores owned by the Kamberos family had been permanently shuttered. Over the next few weeks, it would also turn out that the Kamberoses were being sued by workers for labour violations.
I live in Hyde Park, home to one of the six TI locations. While shoppers around the other closed stores have plenty of other options, the closure affects Hyde Park much more because the neighbourhood is now left without a conventional supermarket. There’s still Whole Foods, but that’s not exactly affordable on all fronts (even after the Amazon takeover, which did bring down prices of some items) and it doesn’t carry everything an average person needs in a supermarket. Hyde Park is also on the south side, a food desert which already suffers from a dearth of affordable and easily accessible grocery stores. In looking closely at the closure of Treasure Island in Hyde Park (I’m already interviewing local residents), I want to trace a complicated history of the American supermarket in relation to shifts in culinary and cultural trends, in the context of urban planning, race, and gentrification (I’ve already written a critique of Hyde Park restaurants, “Hyde Park: Where Food Goes to Die;” this new piece on area grocery stores will be longer and more historically inflected).
As I work on this long piece and others like it (a more detailed timetable is forthcoming, once I’ve come to a better sense of my rhythm and pacing in producing different kinds of work), I’ll be combining my experience as both a researcher and an investigative journalist with analysis. It’s the kind of work I’ve been eager to do for a while now, and the kind that isn’t likely to find an easy home in a time when most places are looking for a way to slant everything as a Blame-Trump narrative.
I’ll also be producing several shorter pieces ranging from 1500-3000 words. These include “I Am Not a Public Intellectual”, “On Menopause: A Longing,” (you can guess what that is about), and several others. I’ll also be writing longer pieces about Handmaid’s Tale (the new season starts in April) and why “Polyamory Is Gay Marriage for Straight People.” My output each week will vary—some weeks I might produce a few shorter pieces, some weeks only one long one or none, or perhaps a long piece and a short one, but I will, by the end of April, have a substantial body of new work on this website. Last year, I resolved to have no fewer than two 3000 word pieces every week — this was entirely unreasonable (most magazine pieces are that long, and take at least a couple of months), so I’m trying to set more reasonable expectations for myself. I will send and post an update every Tuesday, regardless. This week I’m working on a couple of short pieces on Mary Poppins Returns and Aquaman (the latter will take up an unexpected theme).
As I move forward, I’m recalibrating my social media “presence” (I’ll write about why in a piece entitled “A Wall, Not a Square”). I have no plans or desire to get off social media, and you can follow me on Twitter (@NairYasmin) or on Facebook. I’m going to renew my Daily Post (pieces from my archive) but in general I only post when I have something substantial to say or announce (I have long periods of silence, apparently a big no-no if you want to be “in the game”), so if you’re interested in keeping up with my work, please sign up for my listserv if you haven’t already (you can contact me directly or use this website).
I’ll have more details on all this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, thank you, again, for all your support. If you’d like to keep supporting me, please either donate or subscribe or, if you can’t do either (believe me, I understand!), please help me keep my work out there by linking to it or sharing it with your networks in any way possible.
In the months to come, I’m going to be more aggressive about asking for support. You shouldn’t support my work because I am currently broke as fuck—that will change and, besides, pity is never a good basis for sustained, long-term support. Rather, you should support me because you know you won’t see my kind of work anywhere else, and it deserves support because I write really, really, really well, and because my work is innovative, clear-eyed, and uncompromising in not simply taking some easy and acceptable ideological position: I’m willing to take unpopular stances not because I want to be a contrarian but because I’m interested in pursuing the truth of an analysis with integrity (and I have no patience for false modesty). For instance: in “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship,” I didn’t just write a critique of the show but a 14,076-word piece that situated Nanette within larger contexts of the history of Netflix, lesbian comedy, art history, and the conditions and demands of living in trauma in the world. I never even bothered to pitch the piece to anyone because I knew there wouldn’t be a place for it in the conventional publishing industry for something as long and complicated (I’ll have some interesting news on that front soon). I wrote that piece over a few months and within waves of various illnesses (which slowed things down) and mostly from my bed, mostly in pain—but I’ve rarely been happier writing, and in the months and years moving forward, it’s the kind of deeply probing work that I want to do. I hope you’ll continue to support me as I pursue it.
Lastly, and I’ll have a separate post about this: I was on the Champagne Sharks podcast talking about, well, everything regarding sex and play and sex and race play and the play Slave Play and polyamory and everything in between. I loved the conversation—it was like hanging out with my favourite cousins (even when we disagreed, we respected each other)—and I’ve not laughed quite so much in any other media appearance. You can hear it in TWO parts here. Part One is here and Part Two is here.
And in case you missed it, here’s my recent “On Nostalgia, Sex Work, and the Dancing Girls of Lahore.”
Update, February 7:
You can read Jason Momoa, Aquaman, and the Queer Art of Friendship here.
And here’s “Mary Poppins Returns, and Not Much Happens.”
Coming soon, by this weekend: “Cindy McCain: When Adoption Looks Like Child Trafficking” and “Liam Neeson, Space, Time, and Race: A Cautionary Tale” (not the take you expect, trust me).
I’ll have more in the coming weeks. Till the next.
Image: John Tenniel, illustration for Alice Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, 1865.