Plantation Neoliberalism
...the Brazilian “gradually disappeared from my visual field” is just a bit rich. Writing in the clear light of an early morning, one in which subjects and objects have re-achieved...
Beauty Blogosphere 6.29.12
...products, but even I'm skeptical of Hello Kitty collagen marshmallows. A girl thing: In an effort to dispel notions about women in science, the European Commission put out a music...
The Job of Consent
The Joy of Consent: a Philosophy of Good Sex (October 2023) tests the limits of consent as a heuristic for "good sex," exposing the wide berth between pleasure and what is legible to the law.
Thinking bad
...makes reading the book feel very much like a return to a 1990s zeitgeist. This jars a bit with the Internet-driven content he's dealing with. The approach feels out of...
Let Loose the Dogs of Love
...first piece in this digital trilogy, for Bookslut. I complimented you on how connected your books are. They are all obviously in conversation with one another, even when their form...
Chaos Orders Us: A Letter From Paris
Why, all across the globe, does everything that serves to preserve the tradition of the oppressed also serve to oppress COVID-19?
The Princess and the Brain
...Beheld. But by coming to this story as late as I have, the required reading is now beyond daunting. There are now not only Mantel's own well-regarded books, the speech,...
A Black Jack
...bit of underwater maneuvering, Chaplin and Kendel avoid the worst of the missile attack and realize they are now likely personas-non-grata in the US. (Meanwhile, another sub has followed protocol,...
Against the Normative World
...starts riffing: breath, prayer, the communal, the possible, beauty, collective desire. Can you riff on it for us a little? The best way I can think to reply to this...
“Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric”: Trans Assimilation and Cringe
When the right deploys cringe to control trans assimilation, trans people cringe at each other.
When Lovers Die
...indefinitely, is society’s implied ideal, from the birth certificate to the obituary announcement. Little kids chant the story of social reproduction like a mantra: first comes love, then comes marriage,...
Sunday Reading
...Pardon me for being a bit fixated at the moment. How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East The Sorrows of the Affluent; or, Notes Toward a Speculative Romney-Fiction...
A Very Long Winter
...actually turned out to be fascists. This was all a bit too complicated for them, so they turned away from the Ukrainian situation all together. Yet the West was not...
All Presidents
...a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations – a commitment to democracy and rule of law ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step...
Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
...Harris. Malcolm Harris: Your methodology is interesting—including as co-producers the subjects you’re writing about. Can you tell me a bit about how that works and why you choose to do...
Real Inauthentic Like
...a really neat trick. But let me back up a little bit. Smith's incredible first novel, White Teeth, very much partakes in straight-up lyrical realism, what she calls the “Balzac-Flaubert”...