This is such a fascinating concept-the copy-isn't it? Think about it. There's the act of copying ... more This is such a fascinating concept-the copy-isn't it? Think about it. There's the act of copying that is defined by reproducing, duplicating, or in some way replicating something that already exists. But copy is also a noun, the product or object of the action, the act of copying. That the act and the consequence/product have the same name only hints at the philosophical weirdness of "copy". Copy what? Copy how? Copy who? Copy an original, cover a song, print a photo, photocopy a chapter, multiply cells, replicate a document, (re)represent, imitate, mime, reproduce, etc… Are we constantly copying?
While what feels like the entirety of the gay and lesbian movement is marching in unison towards ... more While what feels like the entirety of the gay and lesbian movement is marching in unison towards some vague notion of equality, the Against Equality collective has been quietly assembling a digital archive to document the critical resistance to the politics of inclusion. This pocket-sized book of archival texts lays out some of the historical foundations of queer resistance to the gay marriage mainstream alongside more contemporary inter-subjective critiques that deal directly with issues of race, class, gender, citizenship, age, ability, and more. In portable book form, the critical conversations that are happening so readily on the internet will no longer be withheld from those with little to no online access like queer and trans prisoners, people of low income, rural folks and the technologically challenged.
three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that c... more three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that challenges the political vision of mainstream gay and lesbian politics-especially inclusion in marriage, the U.S. military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.
In his book Uncivil Rites, Steven Salaita writes about the case of University of Illinois at Urba... more In his book Uncivil Rites, Steven Salaita writes about the case of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) assistant professor of biology, Leo Koch. In 1960, Koch published a letter in the Daily Illini "that challenged repressive sexual mores, decrying 'the widespread crusades against obscenity.'" 1 For this, he was denied tenure. Salaita, infamously fired by UIUC after being hired into a tenured position, wryly notes, "Ironically, had Koch criticized Israel in 1960, and had I condemned sexual puritanism in 2014, neither of us would have been fired. The topic is less important than the system." Indeed, from the vantage point of 2016, it seems ridiculous that a university would dismiss a professor for complaining about "crusades against obscenity" (and we can only hope for a time in the future when it will seem as ridiculous to fire someone for criticizing Israel). 2 The University, after all, is now Perfectly Queer. It's not just that nearly every discipline practically mandates that gender and sexuality be incorporated into research and teaching but that queerness is considered, well, not queer at all anymore. So is Queer Theory dead? Or has it simply become queer theory? What place if any does it have in the neoliberal university? This article contends that queer theory's supposed powers, of breaking norms and binaries, were never as disruptive as its adherents, including me, have claimed or assumed. Furthermore, queer theory, although not without its uses and pleasures, has been firmly
This chapter emerges from the reflections of a longtime organizer with several autonomous collect... more This chapter emerges from the reflections of a longtime organizer with several autonomous collectives. The author shares two letters he wrote to would-be allies; one that asked them for money in order to get his father back from Mexico, and a second that thanks those who supported his efforts. Each of these letters critique family separations and the politics of solidarity and “help.”
&... more &am…
A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer act... more A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer activist/archivist collective Against Equality.
This article is a conceptual and historical analysis of the place of queer theory in the neoliber... more This article is a conceptual and historical analysis of the place of queer theory in the neoliberal university. Quoting the special issue's editors Laurie Essig and Sujata Moorti: "For Nair, queer theory survives because of its ability to adapt to the needs of the neoliberal university, needs that have nothing to do with subversion and disruption, but rather allow universities to create huge profit streams at the top while relying on exploitative labor practices and debt mechanisms to do so."
Link here:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/05/whose-gay-history
Excerpt:
To be gay in Chic... more Link here:
To be gay in Chicago was once a potential source of shame and stigma, especially in the senior Daley’s administration. On April 25, 1964, police carried out an early morning raid on a nightclub called the Fun Lounge, to which the city’s gays flocked to mix and mingle. As John D. Poling writes in Out and Proud in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie had placed the club under surveillance, describing its activities as “too loathsome to describe.” The raid resulted in the arrests of 109 people. The Chicago Tribune reported the names of eight teachers and four municipal employees in the paper, ruining their and several other lives in the process.
The Chicago of today is almost unrecognizably different. The city has become a hospitable landscape for gays, especially the wealthy and powerful sort. Chicago is now home to numerous gay nonprofits and swarms with gay politicians, activists, and officials. It is home to gay men like Chuck Renslow, the founder of International Mr. Leather, a long-standing (since 1979) annual conference and contest for leathermen. It is also home to wealthy gay men like Fred Eychaner, one of the most powerful and influential men in the country, ranked as the sixth highest contributor to the Democratic National Committee. In 1998, Daley renovated, with great fanfare, the predominantly gay Lakeview neighborhood popularly known as Boystown. The $3.2 million facelift came with giant, phallic rainbow pylons that marked the area’s limits and was the ultimate sign that the city of Chicago loves its gays, at least of a certain type.
Within people’s lifetimes, then, Chicago went from police raids on gay lounges to taxpayer-funded rainbow streetscapes. All of which raises a baffling question: how did the city get from there to here?
It’s the question examined by historian Timothy Stewart-Winter’s new book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which looks at Chicago in the post-war years in an attempt to identify just how these dramatic changes came about.
The language of class in the adjunct struggle needs to be reevaluated. Adjunct should work in com... more The language of class in the adjunct struggle needs to be reevaluated. Adjunct should work in common cause with workers, rather than expressing their goals as the restoration of privilege.
Excerpt:
"Overall, reports and testimonies relating to adjuncts focus on such easily understood narratives of what amounts to what I call Class Shock: the feeling of inadequacy and anger that arises when one’s class aspirations have been trampled underfoot.
Understanding class shock takes account of the misplaced and often gendered rage and anger that comes to bear upon adjunct struggles. There are vastly different constituencies engaged in adjunct struggles. But we might all easily recognise one particular body of adjuncts whose fire-breathing and rage has been especially noticeable: men, mostly white men, often married, whether straight or not, whose anger at having arrived at the Gates of Academe after years of amassing debt and degrees is palpable. Some of this is evident in Greenberg’s account, where he openly declares that he deserves a shot at the American Dream. The narratives of female adjuncts like Van Dyne and Bruninga-Matteau are similar in terms of class shock, but are more likely to reflect quiet desperation and a sense of shame."
Book Review of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear.
Excerpt:
"In other ... more Book Review of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear. Excerpt:
"In other words, Gilbert, who has spent half her life as a professional writer, now believes that hers is simply a vocation. Yet, when she actually describes the trajectory of her career—and it has been a long and illustrious one—she treats it not as a mystical calling but as work. At one point, for instance, she relates how her editor at GQ, where she was then a staff writer, pulled a story she had worked on for five months, a travel story about Serbia on which the publication had spent a lot of money. The editor’s rationale was that he realized she was not the person for the job and there was no point in her pursuing it any further; he told her to simply move on to the next assignment. Gilbert’s point in relating the anecdote is that writers must always be prepared to end projects that aren’t working. But we might glean a different story here: that no one hires a casual, vocational writer to work on a travel story about Serbia for five months. The freedom to flit, to cut one’s losses and move on, is possible only when one has the backing of a serious institution and serious money, plus an editor who can sign off on half-a-year’s salary and travel expenses for a project that never sees completion."
Excerpt:
"If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or onli... more Excerpt: "If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or online publications which won't pay their writers but prides themselves on having all the bigbigbig names write for nothing: You are part of the problem of neoliberalism. You are making it possible for publishers to refuse to pay professional writers what they’re worth. We are seeing the adjunctification of the writing world, where a false scarcity of funds allows those in power to essentially blackmail their workers: You won’t work for the measly amount we’ve offered you? Fine, I’ll just get BigNameProfessor to do the same work for free."
Excerpt:
"At the end of the day, Left publishing will increasingly be filled with lots of timid ... more Excerpt:
"At the end of the day, Left publishing will increasingly be filled with lots of timid writing that doesn’t require the hard skills that experienced writers might bring to their work (the ability to make cold calls to potentially hostile sources is itself becoming a dying skill). Publications which depend on star academic personalities are apt to forget that academics, even tenured ones, are not actually free to pursue truly brave and interesting work in public: They are always accountable for their public output to a university system which can make arbitrary decisions about their public statements. In the meantime, writers like me are desperately trying to make ends meet, rushing to meet deadlines, and tripping over ourselves to produce work that requires more than the tepid forms of cultural analysis that academic public writing tends to produce (yes, there are exceptions, but few). I’ve often used the term “scab” to refer to those who will write for free for places like Huffington Post, a giant corporation that could easily afford to pay every writer an astoundingly fair price but won’t. I think it might be time to also apply it to those who write for places like Jacobin for free or for very little, when working writers find it impossible to work for a pittance and their ability to ask for more is stymied by publishers who can hold over their heads the fact that Big Name Professor So-and-So would work for free; at the very least privileged writers need to demand excellent pay for their work to make sure publishers know the value of writing (and that opens up a whole other can of worms, but it will at least force publishers to think about valuing writing in monetary terms). "
A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer act... more A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer activist/archivist collective Against Equality.
This is such a fascinating concept-the copy-isn't it? Think about it. There's the act of copying ... more This is such a fascinating concept-the copy-isn't it? Think about it. There's the act of copying that is defined by reproducing, duplicating, or in some way replicating something that already exists. But copy is also a noun, the product or object of the action, the act of copying. That the act and the consequence/product have the same name only hints at the philosophical weirdness of "copy". Copy what? Copy how? Copy who? Copy an original, cover a song, print a photo, photocopy a chapter, multiply cells, replicate a document, (re)represent, imitate, mime, reproduce, etc… Are we constantly copying?
While what feels like the entirety of the gay and lesbian movement is marching in unison towards ... more While what feels like the entirety of the gay and lesbian movement is marching in unison towards some vague notion of equality, the Against Equality collective has been quietly assembling a digital archive to document the critical resistance to the politics of inclusion. This pocket-sized book of archival texts lays out some of the historical foundations of queer resistance to the gay marriage mainstream alongside more contemporary inter-subjective critiques that deal directly with issues of race, class, gender, citizenship, age, ability, and more. In portable book form, the critical conversations that are happening so readily on the internet will no longer be withheld from those with little to no online access like queer and trans prisoners, people of low income, rural folks and the technologically challenged.
three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that c... more three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that challenges the political vision of mainstream gay and lesbian politics-especially inclusion in marriage, the U.S. military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.
In his book Uncivil Rites, Steven Salaita writes about the case of University of Illinois at Urba... more In his book Uncivil Rites, Steven Salaita writes about the case of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) assistant professor of biology, Leo Koch. In 1960, Koch published a letter in the Daily Illini "that challenged repressive sexual mores, decrying 'the widespread crusades against obscenity.'" 1 For this, he was denied tenure. Salaita, infamously fired by UIUC after being hired into a tenured position, wryly notes, "Ironically, had Koch criticized Israel in 1960, and had I condemned sexual puritanism in 2014, neither of us would have been fired. The topic is less important than the system." Indeed, from the vantage point of 2016, it seems ridiculous that a university would dismiss a professor for complaining about "crusades against obscenity" (and we can only hope for a time in the future when it will seem as ridiculous to fire someone for criticizing Israel). 2 The University, after all, is now Perfectly Queer. It's not just that nearly every discipline practically mandates that gender and sexuality be incorporated into research and teaching but that queerness is considered, well, not queer at all anymore. So is Queer Theory dead? Or has it simply become queer theory? What place if any does it have in the neoliberal university? This article contends that queer theory's supposed powers, of breaking norms and binaries, were never as disruptive as its adherents, including me, have claimed or assumed. Furthermore, queer theory, although not without its uses and pleasures, has been firmly
This chapter emerges from the reflections of a longtime organizer with several autonomous collect... more This chapter emerges from the reflections of a longtime organizer with several autonomous collectives. The author shares two letters he wrote to would-be allies; one that asked them for money in order to get his father back from Mexico, and a second that thanks those who supported his efforts. Each of these letters critique family separations and the politics of solidarity and “help.”
&... more &am…
A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer act... more A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer activist/archivist collective Against Equality.
This article is a conceptual and historical analysis of the place of queer theory in the neoliber... more This article is a conceptual and historical analysis of the place of queer theory in the neoliberal university. Quoting the special issue's editors Laurie Essig and Sujata Moorti: "For Nair, queer theory survives because of its ability to adapt to the needs of the neoliberal university, needs that have nothing to do with subversion and disruption, but rather allow universities to create huge profit streams at the top while relying on exploitative labor practices and debt mechanisms to do so."
Link here:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/05/whose-gay-history
Excerpt:
To be gay in Chic... more Link here:
To be gay in Chicago was once a potential source of shame and stigma, especially in the senior Daley’s administration. On April 25, 1964, police carried out an early morning raid on a nightclub called the Fun Lounge, to which the city’s gays flocked to mix and mingle. As John D. Poling writes in Out and Proud in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie had placed the club under surveillance, describing its activities as “too loathsome to describe.” The raid resulted in the arrests of 109 people. The Chicago Tribune reported the names of eight teachers and four municipal employees in the paper, ruining their and several other lives in the process.
The Chicago of today is almost unrecognizably different. The city has become a hospitable landscape for gays, especially the wealthy and powerful sort. Chicago is now home to numerous gay nonprofits and swarms with gay politicians, activists, and officials. It is home to gay men like Chuck Renslow, the founder of International Mr. Leather, a long-standing (since 1979) annual conference and contest for leathermen. It is also home to wealthy gay men like Fred Eychaner, one of the most powerful and influential men in the country, ranked as the sixth highest contributor to the Democratic National Committee. In 1998, Daley renovated, with great fanfare, the predominantly gay Lakeview neighborhood popularly known as Boystown. The $3.2 million facelift came with giant, phallic rainbow pylons that marked the area’s limits and was the ultimate sign that the city of Chicago loves its gays, at least of a certain type.
Within people’s lifetimes, then, Chicago went from police raids on gay lounges to taxpayer-funded rainbow streetscapes. All of which raises a baffling question: how did the city get from there to here?
It’s the question examined by historian Timothy Stewart-Winter’s new book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which looks at Chicago in the post-war years in an attempt to identify just how these dramatic changes came about.
The language of class in the adjunct struggle needs to be reevaluated. Adjunct should work in com... more The language of class in the adjunct struggle needs to be reevaluated. Adjunct should work in common cause with workers, rather than expressing their goals as the restoration of privilege.
Excerpt:
"Overall, reports and testimonies relating to adjuncts focus on such easily understood narratives of what amounts to what I call Class Shock: the feeling of inadequacy and anger that arises when one’s class aspirations have been trampled underfoot.
Understanding class shock takes account of the misplaced and often gendered rage and anger that comes to bear upon adjunct struggles. There are vastly different constituencies engaged in adjunct struggles. But we might all easily recognise one particular body of adjuncts whose fire-breathing and rage has been especially noticeable: men, mostly white men, often married, whether straight or not, whose anger at having arrived at the Gates of Academe after years of amassing debt and degrees is palpable. Some of this is evident in Greenberg’s account, where he openly declares that he deserves a shot at the American Dream. The narratives of female adjuncts like Van Dyne and Bruninga-Matteau are similar in terms of class shock, but are more likely to reflect quiet desperation and a sense of shame."
Book Review of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear.
Excerpt:
"In other ... more Book Review of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear. Excerpt:
"In other words, Gilbert, who has spent half her life as a professional writer, now believes that hers is simply a vocation. Yet, when she actually describes the trajectory of her career—and it has been a long and illustrious one—she treats it not as a mystical calling but as work. At one point, for instance, she relates how her editor at GQ, where she was then a staff writer, pulled a story she had worked on for five months, a travel story about Serbia on which the publication had spent a lot of money. The editor’s rationale was that he realized she was not the person for the job and there was no point in her pursuing it any further; he told her to simply move on to the next assignment. Gilbert’s point in relating the anecdote is that writers must always be prepared to end projects that aren’t working. But we might glean a different story here: that no one hires a casual, vocational writer to work on a travel story about Serbia for five months. The freedom to flit, to cut one’s losses and move on, is possible only when one has the backing of a serious institution and serious money, plus an editor who can sign off on half-a-year’s salary and travel expenses for a project that never sees completion."
Excerpt:
"If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or onli... more Excerpt: "If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or online publications which won't pay their writers but prides themselves on having all the bigbigbig names write for nothing: You are part of the problem of neoliberalism. You are making it possible for publishers to refuse to pay professional writers what they’re worth. We are seeing the adjunctification of the writing world, where a false scarcity of funds allows those in power to essentially blackmail their workers: You won’t work for the measly amount we’ve offered you? Fine, I’ll just get BigNameProfessor to do the same work for free."
Excerpt:
"At the end of the day, Left publishing will increasingly be filled with lots of timid ... more Excerpt:
"At the end of the day, Left publishing will increasingly be filled with lots of timid writing that doesn’t require the hard skills that experienced writers might bring to their work (the ability to make cold calls to potentially hostile sources is itself becoming a dying skill). Publications which depend on star academic personalities are apt to forget that academics, even tenured ones, are not actually free to pursue truly brave and interesting work in public: They are always accountable for their public output to a university system which can make arbitrary decisions about their public statements. In the meantime, writers like me are desperately trying to make ends meet, rushing to meet deadlines, and tripping over ourselves to produce work that requires more than the tepid forms of cultural analysis that academic public writing tends to produce (yes, there are exceptions, but few). I’ve often used the term “scab” to refer to those who will write for free for places like Huffington Post, a giant corporation that could easily afford to pay every writer an astoundingly fair price but won’t. I think it might be time to also apply it to those who write for places like Jacobin for free or for very little, when working writers find it impossible to work for a pittance and their ability to ask for more is stymied by publishers who can hold over their heads the fact that Big Name Professor So-and-So would work for free; at the very least privileged writers need to demand excellent pay for their work to make sure publishers know the value of writing (and that opens up a whole other can of worms, but it will at least force publishers to think about valuing writing in monetary terms). "
A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer act... more A critical reflection on the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 from the perspective of the queer activist/archivist collective Against Equality.
This book chapter is based on a co-authored multi-media talk by Against Equality to support the r... more This book chapter is based on a co-authored multi-media talk by Against Equality to support the release of the collective's 2014 anthology Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. It appears in the anthology Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (2016). This chapter provides an overview of the collective's politics and archival practices from 2009 to 2015.
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Papers by Yasmin Nair
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/05/whose-gay-history
Excerpt:
To be gay in Chicago was once a potential source of shame and stigma, especially in the senior Daley’s administration. On April 25, 1964, police carried out an early morning raid on a nightclub called the Fun Lounge, to which the city’s gays flocked to mix and mingle. As John D. Poling writes in Out and Proud in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie had placed the club under surveillance, describing its activities as “too loathsome to describe.” The raid resulted in the arrests of 109 people. The Chicago Tribune reported the names of eight teachers and four municipal employees in the paper, ruining their and several other lives in the process.
The Chicago of today is almost unrecognizably different. The city has become a hospitable landscape for gays, especially the wealthy and powerful sort. Chicago is now home to numerous gay nonprofits and swarms with gay politicians, activists, and officials. It is home to gay men like Chuck Renslow, the founder of International Mr. Leather, a long-standing (since 1979) annual conference and contest for leathermen. It is also home to wealthy gay men like Fred Eychaner, one of the most powerful and influential men in the country, ranked as the sixth highest contributor to the Democratic National Committee. In 1998, Daley renovated, with great fanfare, the predominantly gay Lakeview neighborhood popularly known as Boystown. The $3.2 million facelift came with giant, phallic rainbow pylons that marked the area’s limits and was the ultimate sign that the city of Chicago loves its gays, at least of a certain type.
Within people’s lifetimes, then, Chicago went from police raids on gay lounges to taxpayer-funded rainbow streetscapes. All of which raises a baffling question: how did the city get from there to here?
It’s the question examined by historian Timothy Stewart-Winter’s new book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which looks at Chicago in the post-war years in an attempt to identify just how these dramatic changes came about.
Excerpt:
"Overall, reports and testimonies relating to adjuncts focus on such easily understood narratives of what amounts to what I call Class Shock: the feeling of inadequacy and anger that arises when one’s class aspirations have been trampled underfoot.
Understanding class shock takes account of the misplaced and often gendered rage and anger that comes to bear upon adjunct struggles. There are vastly different constituencies engaged in adjunct struggles. But we might all easily recognise one particular body of adjuncts whose fire-breathing and rage has been especially noticeable: men, mostly white men, often married, whether straight or not, whose anger at having arrived at the Gates of Academe after years of amassing debt and degrees is palpable. Some of this is evident in Greenberg’s account, where he openly declares that he deserves a shot at the American Dream. The narratives of female adjuncts like Van Dyne and Bruninga-Matteau are similar in terms of class shock, but are more likely to reflect quiet desperation and a sense of shame."
Excerpt:
"In other words, Gilbert, who has spent half her life as a professional writer, now believes that hers is simply a vocation. Yet, when she actually describes the trajectory of her career—and it has been a long and illustrious one—she treats it not as a mystical calling but as work. At one point, for instance, she relates how her editor at GQ, where she was then a staff writer, pulled a story she had worked on for five months, a travel story about Serbia on which the publication had spent a lot of money. The editor’s rationale was that he realized she was not the person for the job and there was no point in her pursuing it any further; he told her to simply move on to the next assignment. Gilbert’s point in relating the anecdote is that writers must always be prepared to end projects that aren’t working. But we might glean a different story here: that no one hires a casual, vocational writer to work on a travel story about Serbia for five months. The freedom to flit, to cut one’s losses and move on, is possible only when one has the backing of a serious institution and serious money, plus an editor who can sign off on half-a-year’s salary and travel expenses for a project that never sees completion."
"If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or online publications which won't pay their writers but prides themselves on having all the bigbigbig names write for nothing: You are part of the problem of neoliberalism. You are making it possible for publishers to refuse to pay professional writers what they’re worth. We are seeing the adjunctification of the writing world, where a false scarcity of funds allows those in power to essentially blackmail their workers: You won’t work for the measly amount we’ve offered you? Fine, I’ll just get BigNameProfessor to do the same work for free."
"At the end of the day, Left publishing will increasingly be filled with lots of timid writing that doesn’t require the hard skills that experienced writers might bring to their work (the ability to make cold calls to potentially hostile sources is itself becoming a dying skill). Publications which depend on star academic personalities are apt to forget that academics, even tenured ones, are not actually free to pursue truly brave and interesting work in public: They are always accountable for their public output to a university system which can make arbitrary decisions about their public statements. In the meantime, writers like me are desperately trying to make ends meet, rushing to meet deadlines, and tripping over ourselves to produce work that requires more than the tepid forms of cultural analysis that academic public writing tends to produce (yes, there are exceptions, but few). I’ve often used the term “scab” to refer to those who will write for free for places like Huffington Post, a giant corporation that could easily afford to pay every writer an astoundingly fair price but won’t. I think it might be time to also apply it to those who write for places like Jacobin for free or for very little, when working writers find it impossible to work for a pittance and their ability to ask for more is stymied by publishers who can hold over their heads the fact that Big Name Professor So-and-So would work for free; at the very least privileged writers need to demand excellent pay for their work to make sure publishers know the value of writing (and that opens up a whole other can of worms, but it will at least force publishers to think about valuing writing in monetary terms). "
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/05/whose-gay-history
Excerpt:
To be gay in Chicago was once a potential source of shame and stigma, especially in the senior Daley’s administration. On April 25, 1964, police carried out an early morning raid on a nightclub called the Fun Lounge, to which the city’s gays flocked to mix and mingle. As John D. Poling writes in Out and Proud in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie had placed the club under surveillance, describing its activities as “too loathsome to describe.” The raid resulted in the arrests of 109 people. The Chicago Tribune reported the names of eight teachers and four municipal employees in the paper, ruining their and several other lives in the process.
The Chicago of today is almost unrecognizably different. The city has become a hospitable landscape for gays, especially the wealthy and powerful sort. Chicago is now home to numerous gay nonprofits and swarms with gay politicians, activists, and officials. It is home to gay men like Chuck Renslow, the founder of International Mr. Leather, a long-standing (since 1979) annual conference and contest for leathermen. It is also home to wealthy gay men like Fred Eychaner, one of the most powerful and influential men in the country, ranked as the sixth highest contributor to the Democratic National Committee. In 1998, Daley renovated, with great fanfare, the predominantly gay Lakeview neighborhood popularly known as Boystown. The $3.2 million facelift came with giant, phallic rainbow pylons that marked the area’s limits and was the ultimate sign that the city of Chicago loves its gays, at least of a certain type.
Within people’s lifetimes, then, Chicago went from police raids on gay lounges to taxpayer-funded rainbow streetscapes. All of which raises a baffling question: how did the city get from there to here?
It’s the question examined by historian Timothy Stewart-Winter’s new book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which looks at Chicago in the post-war years in an attempt to identify just how these dramatic changes came about.
Excerpt:
"Overall, reports and testimonies relating to adjuncts focus on such easily understood narratives of what amounts to what I call Class Shock: the feeling of inadequacy and anger that arises when one’s class aspirations have been trampled underfoot.
Understanding class shock takes account of the misplaced and often gendered rage and anger that comes to bear upon adjunct struggles. There are vastly different constituencies engaged in adjunct struggles. But we might all easily recognise one particular body of adjuncts whose fire-breathing and rage has been especially noticeable: men, mostly white men, often married, whether straight or not, whose anger at having arrived at the Gates of Academe after years of amassing debt and degrees is palpable. Some of this is evident in Greenberg’s account, where he openly declares that he deserves a shot at the American Dream. The narratives of female adjuncts like Van Dyne and Bruninga-Matteau are similar in terms of class shock, but are more likely to reflect quiet desperation and a sense of shame."
Excerpt:
"In other words, Gilbert, who has spent half her life as a professional writer, now believes that hers is simply a vocation. Yet, when she actually describes the trajectory of her career—and it has been a long and illustrious one—she treats it not as a mystical calling but as work. At one point, for instance, she relates how her editor at GQ, where she was then a staff writer, pulled a story she had worked on for five months, a travel story about Serbia on which the publication had spent a lot of money. The editor’s rationale was that he realized she was not the person for the job and there was no point in her pursuing it any further; he told her to simply move on to the next assignment. Gilbert’s point in relating the anecdote is that writers must always be prepared to end projects that aren’t working. But we might glean a different story here: that no one hires a casual, vocational writer to work on a travel story about Serbia for five months. The freedom to flit, to cut one’s losses and move on, is possible only when one has the backing of a serious institution and serious money, plus an editor who can sign off on half-a-year’s salary and travel expenses for a project that never sees completion."
"If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or online publications which won't pay their writers but prides themselves on having all the bigbigbig names write for nothing: You are part of the problem of neoliberalism. You are making it possible for publishers to refuse to pay professional writers what they’re worth. We are seeing the adjunctification of the writing world, where a false scarcity of funds allows those in power to essentially blackmail their workers: You won’t work for the measly amount we’ve offered you? Fine, I’ll just get BigNameProfessor to do the same work for free."
"At the end of the day, Left publishing will increasingly be filled with lots of timid writing that doesn’t require the hard skills that experienced writers might bring to their work (the ability to make cold calls to potentially hostile sources is itself becoming a dying skill). Publications which depend on star academic personalities are apt to forget that academics, even tenured ones, are not actually free to pursue truly brave and interesting work in public: They are always accountable for their public output to a university system which can make arbitrary decisions about their public statements. In the meantime, writers like me are desperately trying to make ends meet, rushing to meet deadlines, and tripping over ourselves to produce work that requires more than the tepid forms of cultural analysis that academic public writing tends to produce (yes, there are exceptions, but few). I’ve often used the term “scab” to refer to those who will write for free for places like Huffington Post, a giant corporation that could easily afford to pay every writer an astoundingly fair price but won’t. I think it might be time to also apply it to those who write for places like Jacobin for free or for very little, when working writers find it impossible to work for a pittance and their ability to ask for more is stymied by publishers who can hold over their heads the fact that Big Name Professor So-and-So would work for free; at the very least privileged writers need to demand excellent pay for their work to make sure publishers know the value of writing (and that opens up a whole other can of worms, but it will at least force publishers to think about valuing writing in monetary terms). "