For millennia, sex workers have addressed human needs, while unnecessarily being made vulnerable. And while addressing these intimate, communal needs, they are subjected to nationalist, racist, economic and gendered violence.
May these poor, murdered souls be given all the respect, dignity, mourning and outrage their too-short lives deserve.
It is as unsurprising as it is blisteringly angering that in this “China virus,” “let’s go to war with China” jingoistic cacophony, of ~course~ there would be an explosion of violence against marginalized femme sex workers in intimate settings. Predictable and outrageous.
This is as sad as Sandy Hook or Columbine or Pulse, and I pray it is treated with *more* seriousness than any of those were, because those deserved a lot more seriousness than they got
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One thing I teach my students is you want to build a body of work you’re proud of.
In my career, I’ve had thoughts & a few pieces I regret + WILDLY uneven earnings at too many jobs.
But overall, I’ve made a body of work aligned w my values—& that does a lot for your peace.
It means the world to me when a Black trans teen writes to me about a piece I published about therapy in 2018, or someone whose sibling died of cancer writes abt a piece I wrote even before that. Only got a few hundred dollars for both pieces, written for different pubs...
...it’s hard freelancing and turning down bland & more stable work. But if you can hold on to do work in alignment w your values over time, you’ll grow, & your readers will grow w you & allow you room to grow. And you’ll feel good abt the work (even when your bank account hurts).
In hiring her, Condé Nast seemed to be going for representational politics/optics over substance. There is NO shortage of Black women, ppl of color, QTPoC etc who could have helmed this very important space & its recent, unique and wildly popular history of sharp analysis.
Instead, Condé seemed to be trying to reign in the Marxism, anal sex tips & labor coverage with someone who’d ~never been an editor~. The timing of the anti-Asian tweets couldn’t be more worse than this week, but zoom out please... nytimes.com/2021/03/18/bus…
Everything is a shameless marketing opportunity, isn’t it? Is there a platform that has done MORE to stoke Asian fetishization & promote white supremacist beauty standards for gay men than Grindr?!
Substack is increasingly a kind of anti-union (dis)(u)topia: package up a lot of writers, make them work against each other, encourage no one to talk about who is getting what $$ (this is a classic tactic to suppress income), through in a dash of “giving them the religion” hustle
As @mattdpearce put, $15 a month can get you subscriptions to 3 writers a month on Substack or like a subscription to a paper w hundreds of unionized journalists & support staff. I Subscribe to newsletters & am glad friends can make work for & with them. But...
...Substack seems to be a predatory platform built on extracting value from atomized writers in an “entrepreneur” model. I worry about them using their $ to poach stars who could be working in teams (even unions!) & encouraging everyone to go on their own w/o benefits or “jobs.”
In addition to the attacks on Critical Race Theory, I am closely watching the slippery use of the word “hate,” the polyvalent way it can mean everything or nothing, and what its use allows governments to do in a variety of ways
“Hate crimes” has always been a dubious category of concern, one which addresses certain harms and masks others (the James Bird/Mathew Shepard hate crimes bill was signed as part of a $700 billion military budget which financed great violence)
But I’ve been noticing pols on the left & write labeling speech or actions as “hate” in ways which elevate trivial matters, denigrate serious matters and conflate important topics which are worthy of nuance and distinction—while the “hate” label shields them from much scrutiny.
🧵 1. Beneath the hysteria of pop culture “cancel culture” is the belief that you—yes, YOU—ought to never question anything the dominant culture says you must view, read, take in, watch & believe.
2. As Horkheimer says, critical theory makes it possible “to liberate human beings from the forces that enslaved them.”
Cancel culture hysteria is the opposite of critical theory. It’s a reaction against critical race theory, queer theory, feminist reading practices.
3. From Dr. Seuss to Joseph Conrad, they want to fixate knowledge & pedagogy as perfected in a time when they (mistakenly) thought women, Negros, queers & the poor knew their place and questioned NOTHING. The cancel culture hysterics don’t want you THINKING or ever saying “no.”