Activity

67.  A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalized a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies? (When I was a first-year undergraduate I had a professor who said, to our grave disappointment, that there would be heartbreak e…

28.  This is something that earlier feminists knew well. Radical feminists did not rethink their ways of working, child-rearing, arguing, decision-making, living, and loving because they were bourgeois moralists.9 They were not confused about the structural nature of what it was they wanted, or abo…

27.  Is my talk of transforming desire moralizing in a different sense, in that it focuses too much on personal responsibility? Racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity: these are structural problems and—as we have learned to say—they demand structural solutions. That is surely right. It is als…

23.  Is there no difference between “telling people to change their desires” and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (willfully altering our desires in line with our politics)—or can it be an eman…

The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obliged to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination …