The stupidity of happy people: Authenticity, suffering and personal disclosure

I remember a party in the early 90s where I met a woman who, within three minutes, was recounting her recent abortion and breakup with her boyfriend. Even against a backdrop of feminist camaraderie, this instant revelation was startling enough to make me wonder if she was drunk precisely because it is a social violation […]

The Tao of being one’s clumsy self: The satisfaction of living self-consciously

The basic existential notion that we are defined by what we do seems intuitively plausible. How I speak, dress, and move through the world is a better way than most to make sense of my identity, of who I, and others, take me to be. When I posit my very selfhood as being reflected through […]

Queer style and aesthetic mindfulness: Breaking the habit of being ourselves

When I was a kid, Alvin was a dog in my neighborhood with an underbite and a pushed-in snout. Mostly soft gray, but with wiry patches of whisker-like black fur sprouting up here and there, everyone agreed that this dog was ugly. Everyone, that is, except Alvin, who wandered from house to house with the […]

Lessons from a tempestuous romance with Coromandel

Though lots of people say we live in a post-modern era, common sense ideas about what’s “merely in our heads” versus what’s “actually out there” in the world haven’t really changed much. We know, of course, that when we’re in love, our “rose colored glasses” make the “external” world shimmer with magic. And we know […]

Rigidly queer: Essentialist attachment to fluid identities

As many of us have long noticed, when it comes to queer theory, and how to think about gender identity, we’re often playing a herky jerky dance across a chasm of contradiction and cliche. We argued across the essentialist/social constructionist divide for so long that many of us, it seems, finally just got bored and […]

Self-reinvention in 2020: Harnessing the power of forgetting

In many accounts of personal identity, there’s an emphasis on the critical role of memory to lash together, and hold firmly in place, our sense of who we are. In the midst of the unrelenting and inexorable changes, memory provides a sense of consistency, both to ourselves and others, assurance that who I am now […]

Social coercion and the red MAGA cap (from the bitch who didn’t wave back)

Located near the university and downtown, my neighborhood is far more likely to host signs proclaiming “Hate has no home here” than displays of GOP boosterism. And I could recall having seen enough red lawn signs in this guy’s yard to be unsurprised when he emerged from his well kept brick home in a bright […]