Biography Nonfiction

Thinking Again

Following the publication In My Mind’s Eye, her acclaimed first volume of diaries, a Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2018, Jan Morris continued to write her daily musings. From her home in the North West of Wales, the author of classics such as Venice and Trieste cast her eye over modern life in…

History Nonfiction Reference/Guide/Manual Social Sciences

Hijras, Sangomas, and Their Translects

This essay focuses on hijras in India and on male women sangomas in Zulu gender-differentiated possession cults in South Africa. We approach these individuals through the travelling concept of “translects”, in the sense in which hijras and sangomas as “transgender individuals” cultivating a culture-specific, gender liminality use words to refer to themselves, their body parts,…

Biography Critique Essay History Humanities Journal/Diary Law/Legal Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

Coming Out of the Shadows and the Closet: Visibility Schemas Among Undocuqueer Immigrants

Centering the experiences of 31 undocuqueer immigrants, this study seeks to understand the ways that undocuqueer immigrants negotiate the boundaries of social performance by revealing or concealing their gender, sexuality, and immigration status. Findings of this study reveal how, in order to avoid the constant threat of rejection (both legal and social), undocuqueer immigrants engage…

Critique Essay Humanities Nonfiction Theory

Encountering Indeterminacy: Colonial Contexts and Queer Imagining

Queer draws our attention to excess, and to the inconceivable. At its queerest, queer slips from attempts at definition or codification. Facing negation, queerness remains undisciplined: it is what negation cannot actually erase, for negation requires it as a target for projecting power. And if discipline ever attempts to embrace what it once negated, queerness…

Fiction Science Fiction Short Story Theory

Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum)

This essay explores the ways that teleological narratives of transition come coupled with corresponding affective narratives that frame life “pre” transition as characterized by a reductively bleak emotional surround and cathect life “post” transition to a bright-sided promise of social ease, domestic comfort, and existential peace. Building on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism and…

Biography History Humanities Journal/Diary Nonfiction Social Sciences

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk

A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes,…