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.
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.
Thanks to Dan Irving for a generous review of Normal Life in GLQ and to Rachel Levitt for this review of Normal Life in the inaugural issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. I also want to share a new interview that just came out at the Youngist. And finally, thanks to Jordan Flaherty for this excellent Al Jazeera America story about police profiling of trans people. I can’t figure out how to embed the video here so I’m sharing this image of a Trans Day of Action poster that I love instead.
The Journal of Legal Education just published my review of Colin Dayan’s book The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011). Have a look!
I wrote “Under the Cover of Gay Rights,” published in N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change in 2013. You can read it here.
Big thanks to Robert Nichols for interviewing me for the journal, Upping the Anti. You can read the interview here. Also, the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change just published a symposium issue about the Perry v. Brown same-sex marriage litigation. I have an article in it about pinkwashing. I also recommend you check out articles by Andrea Ritchie, Gabriel Arkles, and many more.
I’m co-teaching a class this semester with Prof. Katherine Franke about the law of occupation and colonialism. The class looks at the occupation of Palestine, US colonialism in Guam, Puerto Rico, North America, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, the US occupation of Iraq, and more. You can see the syllabus here.
I also wanted to share a new review of Normal Life by Ro Velasquez Guzman in Shameless magazine, and a new blogpost I wrote for SRLP’s blog about how recent debates about gun control and mental health relate to trans politics and criminalization. Finally, HUGE THANKS to Morgan Ztardust for translating “For Lovers and Fighters” in Spanish. The translation is here.
The Circuit, which is the online journal of the California Law Review, just published a response piece I wrote. I responded to an article that Prof. Russell Robinson wrote about the K6G unit at the Los Angeles County Jail, which is a unit designated for trans women and queer men. In my response, I suggest that the K6G unit, which was developed after a lawsuit brought on behalf of queer prisoners but has utterly failed to protect them, is a clear example of why we need prison abolition scholarship and politics in order to sufficiently analyze and confront the violence faced by queer and trans prisoners.
I wrote “The Only Way to End Racialized Gender Violence in Prisons is to End Prisons: A Response to Russell Robinson’s Masculinity As Prison,” published by California Law Review Circuit in December 2012. You can read it here.
