Category Archive: Writing

Weston Teruya’s “The gracious city at its neighbor’s edge” at Pro Arts

  To be haunted and to write from that location, to take on the condition of what you study, is not a methodology or a consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as… Continue reading

Teaching Against the Prison Industrial Complex

  Introduction By Shana Agid, Michael Bennett, and Kate Drabinski Angela Davis begins her influential book Are Prisons Obsolete? by pointing out how naturalized the system of mass incarceration has become in the United States.… Continue reading

Locked and Loaded: The Prison Industrial Complex and the Response to Hurricane Katrina

Within days of Hurricane Katrina’s historic and devastative landfall on the Gulf Coast of the United States, New Orleans already had a new jail. Fashioned from the empty hulk of the bus depot,… Continue reading

Teaching Beyond “Tolerance”

  Introduction: Teaching Beyond “Tolerance” By Shana Agid and Erica Rand Love Is All Around? At the close of its 2007 summer session—just before we went to final copy on this issue—the U.S.… Continue reading

When We Became Normal: Transgender People in Pop Culture and the Politics of Normalcy

I am on a bus coasting along the Long Island Expressway. Because it’s a weekday morning, the bus is mostly empty. Just past Queens, I find myself watching glimpses of boy-on-boy sex on… Continue reading

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Boy: Transgeneration’s Meditation on the “Real”

I was sitting on a 42nd street window ledge at the end of a hot New York August afternoon when I looked up and discovered I’d hit the big time. I was on… Continue reading

“Fags Doom Nations” and Other Parables of Hate: Representations of “Hate Crime” and U.S. National Identity

In 1993, Brandon Teena, a white transgender man was raped and beaten, then killed in Falls City, Nebraska. In1998, James Byrd, Jr., a Black man, was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas and… Continue reading