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Polluted Erotic Ecologies

From the November 2023 Print Edition

Sometimes life is stranger than art. Suppose you were a novelist, and your book's protagonist is the genderqueer founder of a web start-up who calls herself Sebastian. Suppose the novel charts this character’s further transformation into a stay-at-home mom now going by her birth name of Mary and . . . . Continue Reading »

Judith Butler’s Trouble

From the May 2023 Print Edition

A Berkeley student approaches two older women. She has a flier in her hand. “Hey, happy No-Pants Day!” she exclaims, in the state of undress to match her words. One woman waves her off. The other is Judith Butler, perhaps the most famous theoretician of gender and its undoing. Butler laughs and . . . . Continue Reading »

Deleuze on Desire

From the April 2020 Print Edition

Andrea Long Chu, a biological male, explained in a 2018 op-ed for the New York Times why he desired radical surgery that would equip him with ersatz female genitalia. Chu was on estrogen and had already been castrated. He wrote: Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last . . . . Continue Reading »