Why Warren’s Speech Was Terrific

She galvanized the crowd by speaking the language of radical civic republicanism

In the press release announcing the endorsement, Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell stated that: “We’re lucky to have two strong progressive candidates leading in this race. Senator Warren and Senator Sanders have both shaped the ideological terrain on which this campaign is being waged. They have proven an ...
Read More

“The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete”

Putin, Geuss and Habermas

I was first alerted to Raymond Geuss’s sour anti-commemoration of Jürgen Habermas’s ninetieth birthday, “A Republic of Discussion,” coincidentally on the same day that Vladimir Putin declared the obsolescence of liberalism in a meeting with Donald Trump. Trump, with the exquisite cluelessness that has made him so easy to mock, ...
Read More

Banner Tales

Material culture and the making of solidarity

The miners’ strike workshops were developed alongside an ongoing project called Banner Tales, which is a collaboration between geographers and Glasgow Museums staff. This work has encouraged us to reflect on the relationship between material cultures and the makings of solidarity. In both projects we have been involved in using banners ...
Read More

The Unemployment Rate Is Not a Fact

Our country’s most trusted economic metric is only a political artifact.

The year was 1875 and Carrol Wright was upset. The mustached state senator from Massachusetts thought that American workers had a problem. Just not the problem that the workers thought they had. Following the financial Panic of 1873 and nosediving wages, Americans were launching wildcat strikes, torching railroad stations, and fighting ...
Read More

Committees Are for Straight People

LGBTQ people want equality now — here are three things you can do

Queer, trans, and gay people have long been refused work, denied advancement opportunities, and fired for reasons relating to their being out -- and sometimes too proud. Employment nondiscrimination protections matter but they do not address subtler forms of bias in hiring and promotion, such as whether LGBTQ people who ...
Read More

“After Stonewall” Exhibitions Remind Us That Queer History Shouldn’t Be Straightforward

Stonewall on show at the NYPL, the New York Historical Society, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum

For visitors to these commemorative exhibitions, the broad similarities largely stop there. While all three institutions have chosen the Stonewall riots as the epicenter of their curatorial narratives, their reasons for doing so differ. At the New York Public Library, the riots serve to anchor a larger narrative arc of ...
Read More

The Dishonest Images of the Anti-Abortion Movement 

Anti-abortion activists don’t seem to care about what a fetus actually looks like

The advertisement incorporates a number of visual and discursive strategies commonly deployed by abortion rights opponents. It relies, for instance, on oversimplified and misleading rhetoric as the vehicle for its messaging, a tactic identifiable across the spectrum of anti-abortion propaganda. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a fetus is incapable of feeling ...
Read More

Transsexuality as an Emotional Situation, Aesthetics and a State of Mind

A question of difference.

--- The problem of sexual difference is, for obvious reasons, of paramount importance in the field of Trans Studies. Historically, the psychoanalytic clinic has leaned on the symbolic oppositions between phallic/castrated, masculine/feminine, and absence/presence in understanding sexual difference. Patricia Gherovici’s recent book “Transgender Psychoanalysis” speaks to the new generation of people ...
Read More

Transgender Psychoanalysis

Lacan, sex, and sinthomes

--- On April 20, 2016, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek described “transgenderism” as an attempt to undermine sexual difference. In other words, he contended that transpeople are reducing what is, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, an unavoidable sexual impasse to an identity-based human rights discourse (that fits nicely into the neo-liberal capitalist order).[i] He suggested that ...
Read More

Being Against Biden

It is important to oppose him without demonizing him

Everything that has happened since his entry has confirmed this judgment. On the one hand, Biden has tripped over a series of hot-button issues -- #MeToo, the Hyde Amendment, and now racially coded language -- with his unique combination of tone deafness and stubborn self-righteousness. On the other hand, he ...
Read More