Identity Archives - Page 3 of 11

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Coming Out of the World

The 19th-century activist tactic that queers should reclaim (again)

June 24, 2019 • by Holly Jackson

In opposition to generations of concealment and shame, the story goes, the Stonewall protesters came out of the closet and into the streets, agitating for the decriminalization of homosexuality, but more broadly, for the social transformation of gender and sex. Indeed, “coming out” was a core strategy for the achievement ...

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An Open Letter to My Best Friend About Abortion

I am not writing you this letter to change your mind.

June 19, 2019 • by Hannah Leffingwell

I don’t remember when I first realized I was “pro-choice” and you were “pro-life.” It’s not a discussion we ever had. We grew up in the same Colorado suburb, only a few blocks away from each other. In kindergarten, we started playing together. I like to think we became friends for ...

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Trans Bodies/Trans Identities

Arlene Stein and Tey Meadow in dialogue

May 24, 2019 • by Arlene Stein and Tey Meadow

Tey Meadow is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), an ethnographic and interview based study of the first generation of families actively facilitating transgender identities in youth. Arlene Stein is the author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity (Vintage 2019), which ...

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The Blessing of Invisible Pain

An Interview with Ada Limón

May 3, 2019 • by Victoria Richards

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Victoria ...

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Two Cheers for Ageism

Ten notes on the political, cultural and personal blessings and burdens of mortality, inspired by the greatest lecture I have ever heard

March 1, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The lecture is Hans Jonas, “The Blessings and Burdens of Mortality”. 1. I don’t want Bernie Sanders to be President of the United States, and I also don’t want Joe Biden. I abhor Donald Trump, and I am not excited about a possible President Elizabeth Warren either. They’re all too old. 2. I ...

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The Potential of the Queer

On José Esteban Muñoz

February 22, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

“I was a spy in the house of gender normativity.” - José Esteban Muñoz I too have been a spy in the house of gender normativity. This is what I saw: Work, eat, breed. That, in effect, is how production and consumption are supposed to operate. You have to do work in ...

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We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds

A response to Jen Manion

December 3, 2018 • by Dean Spade

Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, "The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary," proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm ...

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The Performance of Transgender Inclusion

The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary

November 27, 2018 • by Jen Manion

The first time someone asked me my pronoun was about a decade ago at a meeting of directors of LGBTQ centers from colleges and universities in the Northeast. Sitting around a table for our first session, we were invited to share our names, pronouns, and the school we represented. I ...

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Gender Ideology and the Brazilian Elections

Bolsonaro represents a hegemonic, masculine, and violent form of inhabiting the world

November 13, 2018 • by Mariana Prandini Assis and Ana Carolina Ogando

Jair Bolsonaro, the recently elected Brazilian president, is now well known, both nationally and internationally, for his misogynistic and homophobic declarations. During a parliamentary debate in 2014, Bolsonaro told one of the few women members of Parliament, Deputy Maria do Rosário, that he would not rape her because she was too ugly ...

Gender Ideology and the Brazilian Elections

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Omnipotent Leviathan – or Lost in Transition?

Russia’s approach to the past as portrayed in the recent Memorial to the Victims of the Soviet Repressions

November 7, 2018 • by Selbi Durdiyeva

A meme surfaced recently in Russia that says, “Today you should believe in the Russian Empire, the USSR, Stalin, Putin, and God, simultaneously.” The politics of identity at play in Russia are indeed illogical. We see former KGB officers and loyal Communist Party members now wholeheartedly praying in an Orthodox ...

Omnipotent Leviathan – or Lost in Transition?

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Why Nationalists Insist on the Gender Binary

The attack on transgender people is part of a bigger plan to reverse gender justice

November 6, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

Since 2012 religious groups of many stripes have started to use the term “gender ideology” as a means to polarize the conversation about gender justice, especially in relation to non-binary individuals. What Catholics like the German sociologist Gabriele Kuby want to see is a return to what is “normal” and ...

Why Nationalists Insist on the Gender Binary

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Iconoclasm Today

Overturning the icons of toxic masculinity

October 19, 2018 • by John Hudson

What difference would it make if Shakespeare’s work was written by a dark-skinned woman, a feminist courtesan-poet, from a family of second generation Jewish-Italian immigrants? When my book on Shakespeare came out in 2014, I was happy to get a supportive reception from Dr. Gina Luria Walker, professor of women's studies at the ...