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Capitalism, Class, Inequality Feminism Film, Art, Television, and Media Queer Politics, Culture, and History Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship

Excerpt: Nanette assures viewers, especially straight ones, that queers and women can and must be understood and assimilated by first understanding us as uniquely and literally broken and bashed in.

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Feminism Film, Art, Television, and Media Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

All the White Ladies: The Real Dinosaurs of Murphy Brown

All the white ladies, from Hillary Clinton to Diane English to Candice Bergen and the fictional Murphy Brown, living in a past only they recall fondly and refusing to confront the realities of the present.

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Academia Queer Politics, Culture, and History

On Judith Butler and the MLA

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Categories
Academia Film, Art, Television, and Media Queer Politics, Culture, and History Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Asia Argento and Avital Ronell Or, Humans Are the Worst People

Naming power isn’t really enough if the primary aim is to simply shift power around, and #MeToo’s supporters and “leaders” haven’t really done all that much to change that conversation.  

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Updates

On Writing with Pain

The ongoing pain has forced me to reconfigure my schedule to prioritise the projects that need to get done—like finishing the proposal and producing work for my website and my supporters and subscribers—and to simply say no to anything that does not go towards all that.  

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Updates

An Update: On Schedules and Moving Forward

What I want instead is to bring back the idea of writing as something that has a muscularity and a will to bring about a different world. And if we are to do that, we need to understand it as both work and labor, and not pretend that to ask for payment is to be ungrateful about our place as writers.

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Chicago Chronicles

Hyde Park: Where Food Goes to Die

Excerpt: What kind of culinary omerta survives in Hyde Park to keep its restaurants at such a depth of mediocrity?

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Academia Film, Art, Television, and Media On Books and Publishing

A World of Shame: Time, Belonging, and Social Media

Excerpt: This is a murder mystery without a murder.  Think of it like a Brian De Palma movie from the 1970s: a streetwalker is found dead in an alleyway, and the detective assigned to the case is about to write it up as another transaction gone awry until he begins to see the clues that unravel a sprawling political conspiracy.  
The body is incidental.

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Film, Art, Television, and Media

Death by Celebrity: Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, and the Lives We Flee

Suicide isn’t something we can fully claim to understand, but it’s also not something we need to blame people for. 

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Academia Capitalism, Class, Inequality Labour

Exalted Slogans: The Curse of Radical Academic Discourse

Was there perhaps an indigenous tribe somewhere that had called upon Ciccariello-Maher to come save it, tweet by tweet, from persecution? None came forward to express gratitude for his bravery on their behalf.