social theory
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Some Thoughts on Stuelke’s New Book
Patricia Stuelke’s newest book The Ruse of Repair, leaves me wondering—and without a clear answer, honestly—as to whether she bothered reading Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”…
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Recognition is the Gift that Keeps on Taking
Side note: I don’t love Trump. And the fact that this entry is about him frustrates me. I don’t believe in giving power/energy to people or concepts that are absorptive of what could be used creatively in my ordinary. We get enough of that in everyday life. For those who don’t read my stuff (and…
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Thoughts on Work
It’s been a long time since I’ve had the opportunity to write anything creative. I don’t mean that academic kind of creative. That’s different, right? Well, I want to share a few anecdotes. The first is about prescription drugs. The second is about Red Bull and my landlord. And the third is about loving my…
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Upcoming Presentation at Harvard
So…I have been invited to represent the work we do at the Always Already Podcast. I’ll be presenting at The Sound Education Conference at Harvard University on Saturday, November 3rd. Stay tuned for more details.
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Feminism and Dying: Reading Sedgwick Pt. Two
My desire to repair stems from a feeling that so many men in our lives–if only and maybe for a queer feminist like myself–are too often put at arms length. As if their masculinity is, in itself, toxic without any hope of redemption.
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Bill Maher’s Infantile Citizenship
This is the ethos of Maher’s show. It exploits the ahistorical fantasies of freedom for its effects at cohering together the fantasy of “real” America. It treats audiences as infantile citizens by using the iconicity of otherwise important aspects of American constitutional life to reroute audience’s memories and attention away from everyday suffering.
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Poem: 12 pt. Font
We discuss the text of our love. No. Not Calibri. No. Not Ariel. Yes. Times New Roman. That looks nice. That’s how you you sneak in your preference. Like an old guard full of fury, ready, making sense of things. Like so many key strokes read to strike. You construct a sensorium of express trains; Roller coasters…
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Queer Eye and Normative Dreams
Allow me to have a brief but queer detour on my way to Queer Eye. I think Fredric Jameson might have been right. (Wait, was it Jameson?) He argued that contemporary (or post-modern) culture sells “intensity.” It promises what Brian Massumi calls affect. For the normal person, the consumer of mass media, it sells an assortment…
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Black Student Activism and Slow Death: Revisiting the Effects of White Privilege
As is often the case for me, I started off writing about one thing and ended up with something completely different. This blog entry was to engage with white privilege discourse critically. But I wanted to do so with an eye toward understanding how privilege can be discussed without utilizing the affect of shame and…
The Trans Ordinary 