What I Wrote Or Was Mentioned In
November 11: Noah Berlatsky quoted me in a piece on why “Bernie Sanders’ Plan to Close Private Prisons Is A Distraction.” This is now the second time I’ve appeared in Playboy!
I’m only slowly getting back into writing about gay marriage. It seems like there’s some widespread consensus that gay marriage is over and we can all now move on to concerns like trans housing and medical care. And when it comes to gay marriage, the critiques are now focused on how it delimits private, sexual relationships. In fact, gay marriage’s economic effects are still to be felt. The current emphasis on relationships is based on the entirely errneous idea that gaining gay marriage now leaves us to focus on non-marital formations of sex and love, as if recognising polyamorous and polygamous relationships will somehow fix all our problems.
I fired my first shot against the new discourse on coupledom with a piece I wrote on
November 15: “On Power Couples
I’ve got a few reviews and a larger piece on the cost of free writing out soon, so look out for those.
From now on, I’m also giving you and myself some dates (deadlines for me) for future pieces.
December 1: Part 1 of my two-part piece on Suey Park, “The Reinvention of Suey Park and the Invention of Social Justice.” I’ve been working on this for several months now and Part 1 will be a shorter piece focusing on Park and Arthur Chu.
December 15: Part 2 of “The Reinvention of Suey Park and the Invention of Social Justice.”
In between, I’ll have several shorter pieces including “Spike Lee’s Chiraq and the Unmournable Black Body” and another on the renewed interest in polyamory and polygamy in the wake of the purported “end” of gay marriage.
What I’m Reading/ Watching
There’s been lots of news about activism on campuses, but one of the bigger pieces of news concerned Steven Salaita, who has finally settled his lawsuit against the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Here’s Salaita’s own words on the matter, “I Will Always Condemn Injustice, No Matter the State of My Employment.”
Here’s a letter from several concerned academics, asking the American Association of University Professors to continue with its censure of UIUC.
And this is the Electronic Intifada report on the settlement.
I had a chance to watch my friend and comrade Moses Tulasi’s new film Walking the Walk, “a documentary on the newly formed Indian state Telangana’s First Queer Swabhimaana (Pride) Walk.” It’s a short but incisive look at issues of class, caste, and inequality, the sort that generally don’t get discussed in profiles of queer lives and communities outside the West.
You can find a trailer here, along with information on how to arrange a screening.
I’m looking forward to Molly Geidel’s new book on the Peace Corps, Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties.
Truth Out has a report on how the lack of abortion rights compels Texan women to induce their own abortions.
Scott Walker and other governors think they can just stop Syrian refugees from entering, but my rad colleague and friend Sara McKinnon and others point out the reality behind their claims.
The Spectacle published an excerpt from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s forthcoming novel.
Indian Aunties have long been a (somewhat stereotypical) thing, and an Indian-Canadian artist is rendering them in Lichtenstein-style images.
The Washington Post just published these photos by Ansel Adams, taken when when he visited Japanese internment camps in 1943.
On Facebook, Brandon Wolfe-Huunnicutt kindly pointed to the work of Dorothea Lange, who also documented the internments. You can see more of them here.
From the Archives
November 19 was World Toilet Day. It seems only fitting to repost one of my favourite pieces, “Why Is America Turning to Shit?”
In light of the mystification of gay marriage and sex and relationships, here’s my “Your Sex Is Not Radical.”
Cats took over the G20. Well, okay, almost. Sort of.
If you missed it, here’s last week’s Weekly Roundup.
It seems like Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year. We haven’t even seen Thanksgiving turkey yet, but they’re already pushing Christmas fare in the stores. Here’s Grumpy Cat’s reaction, which I share (thanks, Tessa Paneth-Pollak!).