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 […]