Just yesterday, I was discussing the value and danger in identity categories in one of the Bryn Mawr courses being offered in connection with Judith Butler’s Flexner Lectureship, “Queens, Nuns, and Other Deviants in the Early Modern Iberian World.”  Some … Continue reading →

I am thinking about becoming a princess. It’s going to be harder than you might think. Raised Pennsylvania Dutch and Lutheran in the shadow of the women’s movement, I have always been self-reliant above all else. Since childhood, I scoffed … Continue reading →

“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” is superb. I want to turn this into a pamphlet and hand it out to people who are skeptical of the utility of critical theory and philosophy in daily life. By “coming out” (a phrase that … Continue reading →

In Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, he describes political philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of gesture—that is, action and that which constitutes performance—as “means without ends” (91). In other words, gesture is something that … Continue reading →

Almost a year ago, I launched a campaign on twitter called #ihadanabortion.  I asked women who were comfortable doing so to “come out” about their abortion experience using the hashtag to aggregate all the responses.  I hoped that this would … Continue reading →