Categories
Updates

Current Mood: An Update

On the one hand, hurrah, lots to write about.  On the other hand, it feels like a real struggle to produce work that takes on nuanced, critical positions that don’t simply pretend that everything that’s happening is part of a new horror.

Categories
Academia Queer Politics, Culture, and History Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

From Queer To Gay: The Rise and Fall of Milo

Excerpt: What brought Milo down was not his queerness, which had always been flamboyantly on display and fetishised by the Right and the Left, but that he became, with the few short seconds of a video clip, irrevocably gay.

Categories
Capitalism, Class, Inequality Labour Politics

Saints Alive!: The Left Wags Its Finger, And Nothing Changes

Categories
Capitalism, Class, Inequality Feminism On Books and Publishing Politics Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit: The Rebecca Traister View of Gender and the World

Single status is now no longer a blight upon the land but a set of Very Useful Functions that keep the economy running smoothly.

Categories
Updates

Known Knowns and Complete Unknowns: A Quick Update

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

Joshua Marston’s Complete Unknown: Or, When Critics Respond To A Woman Who Lives Like A Man

Both Variety and the Times describe Weisz’s character as a “femme fatale,” even though there’s no hint that she enters her various lives by feminine wiles.


Categories
Feminism Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

“March as Feminists, Not As Women” Now Up On Verso’s Blog

A women’s march is terrified of or angry at a monstrous man, a feminist one understands how to vanquish the system that birthed him. Tomorrow, march as a feminist, not as a woman.

2017 Women's March in D.C.
Categories
Capitalism, Class, Inequality Feminism Politics Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Should You March Against Trump?

Update, January 19, 2025: I wrote this in 2017, the day before Trump’s first inauguration. While he defeated a different candidate this time (even worse than Hillary Clinton, and whose loss I predicted the day after her “nomination“), the urge to forget history remains as fierce as ever. Trump, we are told, again, is a stunning break in American history–when he is in fact a continuation of it. The way ahead is to take a long, hard look at the massive failure of our imagination, and our refusal to create sustainable alternatives to Trump. The left is mired in its belief that, somehow, “identity politics” gave rise to Trump, but the truth is that it failed to provide a clear and sustainable alternative to him. Blaming people who are not white, cis, heterosexual men gets us nowhere. I’ll have more on that in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, stay safe.

Categories
On Books and Publishing Queer Politics, Culture, and History

Lambda Literary Stops Being Literary

Lambda, you have no damned right to call yourself “literary” by any measure.

Categories
Capitalism, Class, Inequality On Books and Publishing

Killing You Softly with Her Dreams: Arianna Huffington’s War on Sleep

“I cried to dream again.”

Caliban, The Tempest