I Do Not Deny Certain Kinds Of

I Know That Some Subjective Experiences Of Sex Are Very Firm And Fundamental, Even Unchangeable. They Can Be So Firm And Unchanging That We Call Them "innate". But Given That We Report On Such A Sense Of Self Within A Social World, A World In Which We Are Trying To Use Language To Express What We Feel, It Is Unclear What Language Does That Most Effectively. I Understand That "innate" Is A Word That Conveys The Sense Of Something Hired-wired And Constitutive. I Suppose I Would Be Inclined To Wonder Whether Other Vocabularies Might Do The Job Equally Well.

When Some People Rejoin With “all Lives Matter” They Misunderstand The Problem, But Not Because Their Message Is Untrue. It Is True That All Lives Matter, But It Is Equally True That Not All Lives Are Understood To Matter Which Is Precisely Why It Is Most Important To Name The Lives That Have Not Mattered, And Are Struggling To Matter In The Way They Deserve.

A Different Kind Of Pleasure Surfaced In The Aftermath, The Pleasure Of Seeing The Towers Fall Time And Again, The Experience Of Being Entranced By The Visual Spectacle, And Then Also The Very Graphic Forms Of Public Mourning For Exemplary Citizens (taking Place At The Same Time As The Refusal To Mourn The Undocumented, The Foreign, Gay And Lesbian Lives Lost There, For Example). I Am Not Sure That The Guilt Over The Pleasure Re-installed The Good Citizen.

Obama's Failure To Close Guantanamo Is Yet Another Instance Where The Rhetoric Of Democratic And Constitutional Rights Proved Not Useful For His International Relations, Relations Which Are Always Pursued In Ways That Continue To Link And Fortify Securitarian Power With The Opening Of New Markets.

Do We Need Recourse To A Happier State Before The Law In Order To Maintain That Contemporary Gender Relations And The Punitive Production Of Gender Identities Are Oppressive?