Wearing It On Our Sleeves

A Millennial’s Response to Christine Blasey Ford

Lately I’ve taken to wearing t-shirts, buttons, and pins that clearly identify me. “Dyke,” reads one, succinctly. “Black Lives Matter,” reads another, a gift from my girlfriend. “Fesbian Leminist” I include for an element of humor. It isn’t enough, I convince myself in the wake of the 2016 election, to merely ...
Read More
Wearing It On Our Sleeves

The Paradoxes of Identity Politics

A critique of recognition

1. Invention In 1975, Roy Wagner wrote a groundbreaking book called The Invention of Culture arguing, essentially, that the only cross-cultural universal was invention itself: creativity. Wagner’s book initiated a crucial sublation in anthropology -- arguably waiting to happen -- from cultural relativity to the relativity of Culture itself. “Culture,” and all those related notions ...
Read More
The Paradoxes of Identity Politics

His Body Shop

Issues around the market of self-care

In the past few weeks a new advertisement campaign has invaded the New York City subway. A brand that claims to solve “men’s issues” called hims covers the walls and advertising panels of subway stations and trains. Hims is a brand that sells products to address “men’s issues” such as hair loss, skin imperfections ...
Read More
His Body Shop

The Özil Affair and the Limits of Progressive Nationalism

Why liberal nationalists can’t have their cake and eat it, too

This July, German football star Mesut Özil resigned from the national team. His resignation provides a dramatic illustration of the crisis of multiculturalism in Europe. Özil, the son of Turkish immigrants, resigned with a public letter on social media. “I am a German when we win, an immigrant when we lose,” he ...
Read More
The Özil Affair and the Limits of Progressive Nationalism

Michael Kimmel’s Learning Moment and Ours

A prominent professor’s rumored #HeToo behavior prompts a fundamental rethink about gender and ethics

I first met Michael Kimmel in the early 1980s, when we moved in the same profeminist men’s movement circles. We were both starting out in our writing careers, trying to reckon with what feminist women were saying and trying to reconcile it with how we understood ourselves as men. I ...
Read More
Michael Kimmel’s Learning Moment and Ours

What Do We Even Want From One Another?

Anxiety, Permeation and Identity in the Age of a Slowly Imploding Liberalism

In a time identified by the breakdown of fantasy, xenophobic malaise, and the salve of identity politics, philosopher Luce deLire and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster take us to the limits of 'the self.' They muse on anxiety's collectivizing forces, the political instrumentalization of unsolvably fractured identities, and their permeation. They suggest ...
Read More
What Do We Even Want From One Another?

Gender Reveal Party Fail

On Cisnormativity and its disruptions

In late 2016, a YouTube video entitled “Gender Reveal Party Fail” went viral. The video shows a couple named Joe and Leela Krummel standing over a large box covered in pastel pink and blue polka dots. During the brief 31-second clip, you can hear a group of people chat excitedly ...
Read More
Gender Reveal Party Fail

The Rhythm of Resilience

A Deep Ecology of Entangled Relationality

Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma, edited by Jill Salberg and Sue Grand, takes a novel view in psychoanalysis using a trans-generational, social, political and cultural model to fathom trauma and its transmission. The view is radical in its departure from orthodox psychoanalytic trajectories ...
Read More
The Rhythm of Resilience

Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

A Female Gaze

Petra Collins is the most celebrated, most talked about female identifying photographer/director of my generation. Throughout her career her style has been attributed to the rise of what some are calling “the female gaze”, as an alternative to the one typified by Laura Mulvey in her essay “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative ...
Read More
Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

A Conversation on Get Out

Black Issues in Philosophy

Having recently viewed Jordan Peele’s award-winning Get Out (2017), political theorist Derefe Kimarley Chevannes was prompted to discuss the film with philosopher Lewis Gordon, whose writings include discussions of race in horror films and literature. DEREFE KIMARLEY CHEVANNES: Lewis, it’s a pleasure to have this discussion with you. As I begin, ...
Read More
A Conversation on Get Out

The African Decolonial Thought of Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí

Black Issues in Philosophy

Recently, the Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí has earned her place among many of the living in conversation with this stellar community of ancestors by virtue of her contributions to contemporary African philosophy. Readers who haven’t heard of her should take this opportunity to familiarize themselves with her work. Oyĕwùmí specializes in ...
Read More
The African Decolonial Thought of Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí

An Insider’s Account of Starbucks’s Anti-bias Training

The coffee chain closed 8,000 stores for diversity training. But just how effective was it?

Most media outlets spun this event as Starbucks’s public response to an incident in a Philadelphia cafe in April when the manager called the police when two black businessmen asked to use a restroom before they had made a purchase. When the officers arrived and interrogated them, white bystanders defended ...
Read More
An Insider’s Account of Starbucks’s Anti-bias Training