Journalism

"The achievement of racial, economic, gender, and sexual justice require safe, legal abortion. . . . States have a compelling interest—a profound obligation—to defend the right to abortion."

"Legislation is a major weapon of the anti-abortion movement — of any movement. Still, the opponents of abortion have long recognized what feminists once knew: Legislation follows cultural change. Laws encode the zeitgeist, but they don’t create it, and they’re enforced only so long as the culture endorses them."

“'Nothing is more material, physical, corporeal than the exercise of power,'” said Foucault. But the pandemic illuminates something more: nothing is more economic than the exercise of power upon the body. Even in our digitized, financialized economy, wealth, which is power, is accumulated through the use and misuse of bodies."

"What does solidarity look like when our bodies cannot come together, in public, to agitate for a better world?"

"Goodman’s voice—colloquial and pompous, belligerent and disarming—was as vividly American as Whitman’s or Baldwin’s. 'He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time,' Hayden Carruth wrote. John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich admired his poetry; Ned Rorem set much of it to music. . . . Why did he suffer so long in obscurity and emerge so briefly?"

"Willis was one of the great public intellectuals of her generation.. . She was virtually incapable of writing a poor sentence or conceiving an unsurprising insight. Her rigor was unmatched, her fearlessness an inspiration. In every piece, wit lilted like an aria over a basso continuo of moral seriousness."

The lollipops and little skirts are tropes of girlhood and that turns viewers on, but no one is fooled that the models are anything but adults. And the women in chains? Might they also exist in a world where pain is an enticing idea, but only an idea — a place where whips draw no blood?  I have no way to evaluate these things, no context in which to put them . . . But I am able to formulate a few hypotheses. For instance: desiring something is not always the same as wanting it."

"Nineteen-seventy is an inauspicious year for a young heterosexual feminist to launch an ambitious career of promiscuity."

"Migrant Justice calls Lopez the subject of 'human rights and workers’ rights abuses.' Law enforcement and prostitution abolitionists call Rose a victim of sex trafficking — a slave. In fact, simply doing sex work — even if not by 'orce, fraud or coercion' — defines Rose as a victim under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).  His exploitation is viewed as economic, hers as moral. To supporters, Lopez needs organizing. And Rose needs rescue. "

"To torture is to strip a person not only of rights but of the humanity to which they attach. Dehumanization is torture’s definition, its prerequisite.  Is torture effective? The question is akin to asking if slavery is good economic policy or forced sterilization is an effective means of slowing population growth."

Marriage—forget the “gay” for a moment—is intrinsically conservative. It does not just normalize, it requires normality as the ticket in. Assimilating another 'virtually norma' constituency, namely monogamous, long-term, homosexual couples, marriage pushes the queerer queers of all sexual persuasions—drag queens, club-crawlers, polyamorists, even ordinary single mothers or teenage lovers—further to the margins. 

"Much service work falls into the category of personal service—anything from cutting hair to caring for babies. It is close work, performed in private places, work in which body touches body. A 2012 survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) of 2,086 nannies, caregivers, and housecleaners in fourteen metropolitan areas found that majorities of domestic workers suffer abuses by their employers, from substandard pay to 'verbal, psychological, and physical abuse.'"