Many thanks to Dolores Curia for publishing this two-part interview in Argentina’s Pagina 12.
And thanks to Silvia López for this review of Una Vida Normal in Revista Española de Ciencia Política.
And a picture of my dog, Bennie, to make this website less boring.
Hope Dector and I just released six new videos from our Queer Dreams series. These all examine the limits of marriage inclusion as a liberation strategy for queers, and the reasons it became so central to the agendas of the most well-funded LGBT advocacy organizations. I hope these will be useful tools for teaching and community conversations.
In 2014, Juana María Rodríguez organized an event called “Soapbox Manifestos” at the American Studies Association annual meeting and invited me to perform a manifesto. I wrote and read this Questionnaire which Undercommoning just published. I recommend looking at their site more broadly–lots of provocative thinking and wonderful tools there.
In other news, Original Plumbing recently contacted me for an interview about my 2002 bathroom arrest in Grand Central and my thoughts on the contemporary bathroom controversies and what has changed in trans politics. It was a fun conversation, and threw me back into thinking about some old times. I dug up the zine we made after that arrest, Piss & Vinegar, and some old photos for them. I’ll post the interview and more photos when it comes out.
Hope Dector and I have been making more things!
Animated GIFs featuring art by Micah Bazant. Please share!
Find them on Giphy here and here for sharing on facebook.
Queer Liberation: No Prisons, No Borders
Featuring Reina Gossett, Angélica Cházaro, CeCe McDonald, and Dean Spade. With art by Micah Bazant, Roan Boucher, Julio Salgado, Rommy Torrico, and Zuleica Zepeda.
I have gotten a bit behind at posting new work. Many new things have come out.
First, the new edition of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law is out from Duke University Press. It includes new reflecting on the mainstreaming of trans politics and new cover art by Xylor Jane.
Normal Life was published last month in Spanish from Bellaterra Press. You can find Una Vida Normal here.
In other translations news, I had a wonderful visit to the Center for the Study of Sexualities at the National Central University of Taiwan. My generous hosts translated some of my writing to Mandarin. Here is Chapter 2 of Normal Life, “What’s Wrong with Rights?” in Mandarin. Here is the article I co-authored with Morgan Bassichis and Alex Lee that appears in Captive Genders, “Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” translated to Mandarin. And here is an article with some US trans law basics in Mandarin.
My documentary Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! (1 hour long) came out in the summer of 2015. You can watch the entire film on the website and you can watch with captions in English, Spanish or Greek captions (Mandarin is coming soon!).
We also made short clips that address particular topics that are easy to share. These include “What is Pinkwashing?” “What is Brand Israel?” and “What is Normalization?” I put all of these and the full documentary online hoping that people will do free screenings in their own communities and on their campuses. I am happy to report that the documentary has already screened at festivals and community events around the United States and in Canada, Argentina, Japan, Korea, Greece, Holland and in the UK. It is playing on Cambridge Community Television tomorrow! You can read a review of the Pinkwashing Exposed in the recent issue of Make/Shift magazine.
Last month, The Scholar and the Feminist Online published a special issue co-edited by Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, entitled “Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Non-Profits and Beyond.” It is full of great articles and I highly recommend the whole issue. It includes a new article I co-wrote with Dr. Rori Rohlfs called “Legal Equality and the (After?)Math of Eugenics” that looks critically at the proliferation of new statistics about LGBT populations and how they are used in legal reform efforts. The special issue also includes six more short videos in the series that Hope Dector and I are making as part of our Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues project.
Finally, in November I participated in an Oxford Union Debate about whether states should recognize marriage. It was probably among the most uncomfortable events of my life, not only because I was wearing a tuxedo but also because I was on the “same side” of the debate with a raging zionist and a raging transphobe. Still not sure what to make of all that, but if you want to see what I said, here is the video.
I wrote this essay, “Legal Equality, Gay Numbers and the (After?)Math of Eugenics” with Rori Rohlfs for S&F Online: Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Nonprofits, and Beyond, edited by Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, in 2016. You can read it here.
