As the pandemic rages, we are forced to acknowledge a world of beings too tiny to see. Though we’ve known since third grade science that they are there — bugs, germs, viruses — for most of us, most of the time, they are no more real than fairies or leprechauns. Suddenly, in this most scientific […]
Read More The invisible danger of Covid 19: An ordinary world made terrifyingly “other”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 […]
Read More The stupidity of happy people: Authenticity, suffering and personal disclosureAs 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 […]
Read More Rigidly queer: Essentialist attachment to fluid identitiesIn 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 […]
Read More Self-reinvention in 2020: Harnessing the power of forgetting
