Yasmin Nair

Review of Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date October 4, 2014

The center of the carceral state is not, it turns out, the cold, frozen heart of the conservative dominated by an openly racist animus, but the warm, bleeding heart of liberalism, throbbing with feelings of goodness and tolerance.

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

Danièle Watts, Sexual Respectability, and Talking to Cops

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date September 19, 2014

Watts’ insistence on simply having experienced pleasure while fully clothed does nothing really to advance a more complicated idea of what counts as pleasure in public.

Film, Art, Television, and Media

Laverne Cox and the Cost of Celebrity

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date September 16, 2014

Feminism Race, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

It’s a Foetus, Not an Unborn Child

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date September 14, 2014

The mother is capable of making her own decisions and if she wants to abort a foetus, yes, a foetus for any reason whatsoever, she’s well within her rights to do so.

Academia

Steven Salaita and the Myth of Academic Freedom

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date September 9, 2014

For large swaths of graduate students, adjuncts, tenure track faculty, and even some tenured faculty, the notion of academic freedom has always been suspect anyway.

Yasmin's Media Appearances

Part TWO of My Interview with Hypocrite Reader: The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma: Part TWO of My Inteview with Hypocrite Reader

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date September 3, 2014

When we talk about rape culture, we erase all those differences, and we make it very difficult, we make it impossible, to really think about what engenders rape.

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

Celebrity Nude Photos and Sexual Assault: Some Thoughts

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date September 3, 2014

At the heart of all this manufactured outrage lies barely suppressed anger at the projected violation of white women.

Tags Celebrity, Hollywood

Politics

Gaza Is Not Ferguson

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date August 14, 2014

It’s popular and easy to talk and write about capitalism as being inherently racist and/or anti-Black, but the harder work involves an understanding of capitalism’s insidiousness, outside the mystifying tendencies of much of today’s race scholarship.

Tags Ferguson, Palestine, Police Brutality

Yasmin's Media Appearances

There’s No Rescuing the Concept of Equality: Part ONE of My Interview with Hypocrite Reader

Post author By Yasmin Nair
Post date July 26, 2014

“I am not interested at all in the idea of queer being somehow better than or more politically recalcitrant or engaged or more radical than anything else.”