Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
On the genre of “Raising Awareness about Someone Else’s Suffering.”
A propos of absolutely nothing, a few texts I’ve found helpful in unpacking the aforementioned genre, in no particular order...
Great Dads
Meet the Great Dad. He's come to make you forget feminism ever existed.
Beauty Blogosphere 3.9.12
Miss Iran 1978, criminalizing street harassment, Care Bears in Spanx, and the best British commute for mascara application. (Sheffield, duh.)
The spurious infinite
the function of the discourse is not in fact to create “fear, shame, envy, an impression” etc.
Trouble at the Language Lab
Ben Marcus’s novel The Flame Alphabet is a disaster novel about what happens to the avant-garde in the age of the MFA.
The Grandiose Vacuity of "Rock the Lips"
The emptiness of the red lipstick campaign to mark International Women's Day is so monumental that it teeters on genius. Put a pout on it!
Kitchen Wisdom
In precapitalist times wealth was considered neither a rational consequence of thrift and smart investment nor evidence of some inborn excellence. Rather, it was regarded as status enjoyed at the sufferance of providence and was therefore subject to revocation. A sudden turn of Fortune's wheel and Dives became Lazarus; Lazarus, Dives. Giving charity appeared, then,
The Fight and the Whale
In an oddly therapeutic podcast, comedians Tom Scharpling and Marc Maron confront their fears of aging disgracefully, losing their boundaries, and becoming irrelevant
Introducing the Journal for Occupied Studies
"The Journal for Occupied Studies is an independent contribution to the global Occupy movement, one which springs from the New School for Social Research in…
Get Thee to a University
As the value of higher education starts breaking bad, the unprecedented number of degree-holding women reach a milestone and assume a millstone.
no sex, no rimming, no happy ending, no electricity, no blood sports. just lamecore stuff.
According to this prelude, the first operation was an aggression (not a defense).
Recommended Reading
Five book selections on women and beauty: Simone de Beauvoir, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Linda Grant, John Berger, Aileen Ribeiro.
Pinterest and the acquisitive gaze
Pinterest indulges the fantasy that we can nail down a thing's meaning by "buying" it when we are actually destabilizing it further
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
Liquid Border
An excerpt from The Law of the Sea by Annalisa Camilli
United States v. Scott Daniel Warren
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
Fash at Sea
The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over
Operation Streamline
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.
In the Water
An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility--they might become our neighbor
Cross-Border Operations
It is no longer plausible to describe the state’s borders as geographically fixed or the state as distinguishable from capital or “markets.”
Empire Records
Guantánamo Diary's missing passages connect it with the US empire's deeper history of far-flung capture and detention networks