What I Wrote Or Was Mentioned In
Forthcoming, June 2016: “Marry the State, Kill the People: Hillary Clinton and Carceral Feminism,” [tentative title], to appear in this anthology, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton edited by Liza Featherstone. I’m hardly a Bernie Sanders supporter, but the very presence — nay, the very whiff of the possibility of the future existence of this book — is creating a furore amongst Clinton supporters. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic and Tom Watson, who teaches at Columbia University and is a co-founder of #HillaryMen, proclaimed on Twitter that the book was about hating women in power or those who seek it. Watson went so far as to say that we were clearly following Doug Henwood’s “school of hate” (referring to this controversy).
In other words: people who espouse feminist politics have no problems asserting that a group of feminists couldn’t possibly think for themselves and that women who are critical of women in power have vested interests in doing so.
Here are the relevant screencaps.
November 4, 2015: I reviewed Steven Salaita’s new book Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom for Electronic Intifada.
November 4, 2015: I presented at this panel at Loyola University, north campus, “Women: The Longest Revolution.” My thanks to everyone at Platypus for all the hard work in organising and my fellow panelists. I’ll post a video when it goes online. I spoke about trans representation, gay marriage, and the new campus climate around sexual assaults.
October 26, 2015: I wrote “America’s Prison Problem Is Too Complicated for Mark Zuckerberg” for Daily Dot.
What I’m Reading
I’m looking forward to reading this new book by Stacy Schiff, The Witches, on the Salem trials.
I’m excited about getting a copy of Colin Dayan’s With Dogs at the Edge of Life.
Also forthcoming: Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy and Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed’s The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.
This short video is a hilarious take on what happens when you ask people in non-creative fields to work for free.
My dear and brilliant friend (and very fine editor) Kate Sosin Oeser is embarking upon a project for which she would like to find suitable interview subjects in rural New England/the Northeast. A description (from Kate) is below; please read and circulate in your networks. This is a very necessary project and Kate is such an excellent person for the job.
Kate is looking to interview/ feature trans/ gender-variant people for a new journalism project in rural New England/ the Northeast. Kate is a self-identified non-binary trans person and LGBT reporter with a long history of reporting in the community.This new series aims to complicate mainstream media portrayals of trans life in a way that is respectful, empowering and interesting for trans cisgender audiences alike. Transgender people have finally begun to filter into mainstream media, but the images we see of trans activists and celebrities are largely binary transition stories set in cities and suburbs where LGBT community thrives. This series aims to go beyond the most basic or sensationalized narratives and into parts of the country where LGBT resources are scarcer for a more inclusive and nuanced collection of stories.
Corey Robin has this short piece up, an excerpt from David Remnick’s interview of Philip Roth.
“Entire editorial staff of Elsevier journal Lingua resigns over high price, lack of open access,” and hopefully this is a sign of things to come in the academic publishing world.
Liza Featherstone’s advice column at The Nation is now up and running; here’s “Asking for a Friend: Is It Me or Is It Capitalism?”
Nathan Cedric Tankus now has a regular column at JSTOR, and here’s his “A Nation Built on Debt.”
Michael Kinnucan wrote about Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy on marijuana legalisation for Al-Jazeera.
Mike Ludwig has a piece on TruthOut about the business of “rescuing” sex workers.
There’s a new animal species!
The MLA Subconference of 2016 will be in Austin, TX. You can contribute to their fundraiser here.
From the Archives
I’m slowly returning to queer/gay politics, especially the topic of gay marriage. Here’s a quick reminder of my politics on that, “The Secret History of Gay Marriage.”
I’ve been researching and reading about youth activism and social justice movements, which reminded me of one of my older pieces, “Fuck Love.”
And this, about fetishising youth organisers: “Stop Fetishising Youth Organisers.”
Noah Berlatsky’s piece reminds me of this short piece I wrote on why private prisons are not the problem.
Speaking of prisons, here’s my review of Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Houston saw the defeat of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). This was a political failure but, as usual, gays and lesbians were quick to look for relevant people of colour to blame and Carlos Mazza, of Media Matters decided to lay it all at the well-tended feet of Beyoncé .
Putting aside the clear racism that is becoming a habit with the mainstream LGBTQ community, equal rights ordinances are rarely anything more than symbolic. Here’s an older piece about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, “ENDA, We Hardly Know Ya.”
Given so much widespread insistence that no feminists could possibly be against Hillary Clinton, here, again are two pieces I wrote on her: “The problem with fixing Wall Street is it can’t be fixed,” about her entanglements with the world of high finance, and “What we don’t talk about when we talk about race in America,” which is about the general progressive/left failure on race matters.
I will also add that I’ve also written work critical of sexism against Hillary Clinton: “Hillary Clinton, Sexism, and Black Lives Matter” and “It’s Fiorina and Clinton, not Carly and Hillary.”
I wrote this, about the last (2015) MLA Subconference, “Solidarity without Affect: The MLA Subconference Enters Its Second Year.”
Speaking of academia and the adjunct crisis, it seems apt to repost this, “Class Shock: Affect, Mobility, and the Adjunct Crisis.”
This 2007 review of Christopher Lane’s Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness is one of my favourite pieces, and his book is one of the few I held on to in the move.
And, lastly: The world’s largest Cat Painting went on sale. I will assume that someone bought this for me as a surprise gift, so thank you. My friend A.H and I will be sharing it, shipping it back and forth between our houses.
Here’s “This Year” by The Mountain Goats.
Which brings me to my continuing shock that we still have a year to go before this dreadful election finally ends. Like Christmas, which now starts in July, presidential elections seem to be beginning in the second year of any presidency. This is how I feel.
