The following is drawn from a manuscript tentatively titled Reversi: a group of letters written to Em Bohlka, who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship fire. Reversi also engages with Othello as a core text, jumping off from that play … Continue reading “from Reversi“
Two years ago, shortly after the General Election of 2017, I wrote a piece about the UK election nights I’ve experienced over the years. It was a personal piece, reflecting on the strange mix of emotions they’ve evoked in me … Continue reading “The British General Election: The Nightmare before Christmas”
With her new book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia 2019), Wendy Brown joins more than a few scholars now reconsidering what we thought we knew about neoliberalism. Her previous book, Undoing the … Continue reading “On Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West“
Almost a decade ago, Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez published Los migrantes que no importan, first in Spain and then in Mexico, recounting his journeys with Central American migrants as they traveled through Mexico to the US border. It remains one … Continue reading “Introduction: On the Accumulation of Bodies”
My first encounter with Capitalismo gore was in 2012. Back then, I was living in Barcelona with a group of activists and academics, and we were asking each other about the violence in Mexico, represented in the European media through … Continue reading “Escape Routes to Capitalismo Gore“
I first encountered Sayak Valencia’s brilliant Gore Capitalism accidentally, sometime in 2012. During one of my visits to Tijuana, my hometown, I made a trek to Librería Sor Juana, the city’s feminist bookstore, where Capitalismo gore seemed to pop out … Continue reading “Finding Meaning in Gore”
In 2012, Los Angeles artist Rafa Esparza used the following materials to stage his performance STILL in LA’s Elysian Park: soil, artist’s breath, translucent balloons, jute rope noose, shovel, and a cardboard box. Only a few spectators experienced this performance … Continue reading “Time Dislocated: Masculinity and the Performance of Breathing”
J. Marion Sims describes the first time he saw a vesicovaginal fistula as if he had been gazing at a captivating portrait. “Introducing the bent handle of a spoon, I saw everything, as no man had seen before,” writes the … Continue reading “In the Flesh”
In Gore Capitalism, transfeminist intellectual Sayak Valencia gives us a vocabulary, a taxonomy to articulate a horror that before 2010 we did not have words to name in Mexico. We had the numbers, the statistics, the hard, cold data to … Continue reading “Gore Capitalism and the Contemporary Grammars of Violence and Resistance”
Gore Capitalism was first published by a small press in Spain in 2010. That was four years before the disappearance of the 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Guerrero. It was before the discovery of mass graves in … Continue reading “Countering Gore Capitalism”
I proposed the concept gore capitalism to explain the atrocious quotidian violence that has taken place on the Tijuana border for over a decade. Thus, operating through a theoretical, philosophical, and transfeminist framework, gore capitalism became a concept used within … Continue reading “Gore Capitalism Then and Now”
The Idyllic Childhood I grew up in this vulgar & expensive hotel. Rooms that look like wedding cakes. Each interior themed around a different history. This is the third reich room–a wallpapered legion of totenkopf’s. This is the English bourgeois … Continue reading “Four Poems from Conditions“
In his Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, the linguist Roman Jakobson writes about a treatise published in 1718 titled “Sur la fille sans langue” (“On the girl with no tongue”). The irony of this title was that the girl … Continue reading “Speech Work”
The British Indian Muslim reminds one of a Matryoshka assembly, a nesting of several closely related, yet discrete, wholes. The category, on the one hand, invokes the history of South Asian Muslims under the British crown from 1858 until 1947. … Continue reading “The Muslim Matryoshka: Vlogging Immigration and Citizenship in Brexit Britain”
every year my body fails me like some ship at half mast I am not exceptional every body does this circling what’s null then some Narrows passing through the little Places slipping everything aside my body is worse off than … Continue reading “house series 5. “
