www.upress.umn.edu/978151791868...
10.03.2026 06:17
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I get that there are important ecological consequences to the war in Iran, but if that's the only or even primary lens through which you view what's happening right now you're exposing a more fundamental issue in your approach to climate change.
If Reform doesn't win this by-election, what are the odds someone runs a 'Matt Badloss' headline?
So, Jean-Pierre Dupuy really doesn't like cars, huh? Kind of unexpected in the Enlightened Doomsaying book.
Today's post-apocalyptic film is Split Second. It seems appropriate to watch a film set in the UK after 40 days and nights of rain. It's also grim that people were making films in 1992 that imagine a 21st century in which the US is opposing UN climate resolutions.
Two Women kissing in front of a line of police officers during a gay rights demonstration in Staten Island in New York in 1990. (Photo by Thomas McGovern.) Taken from "Making Out, Making Change: The History of Queer Kiss-Ins by Stef Rubino on Autostraddle
Hot for Revolution Caleb Ward Abstract Activists for feminist, queer, and disability justice commonly describe their work as motivated by an erotic desire to build a different world. This chapter argues that this is not merely a metaphor. Drawing on activist case studies and the work of Audre Lorde, the chapter shows that erotic desire and pleasure in social movements can foster political agency for people targeted by sexual oppression. It traces three political benefits of erotic passion in this context: personal empowerment, communal moral resistance against oppressive norms and justifications, and enhanced political imagination toward a world that supports sexual agency. However, because intimate relationships within movements are often distorted by dominant, pernicious ideologies around sex, these political benefits are only realizable when a movement is organized internally around a relational infrastructure – an ethos – that supports sexual agency and equality, responsive to the needs of those targeted by sexual oppression. Keywords: political agency, sexual oppression, social movements, sexual agency, Audre Lorde, feminism, disability, queer politics, moral resistance, political imagination
Members of the Lesbian and Gay community stage a Valentine‘s Day “Kiss-In” 14 February 1988 outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to present a message of their unity and love in the face of the “church condoning anti-gay and anti-lesbian violence”. (Photo by MARIA BASTONE / AFP)
What does it mean to be hot for revolution—to feel a desire to transform the world in your belly and your bones?
Here's my latest, on how erotic desire feeds political agency. I draw on AIDS activism, disability justice & other movements against sexual oppression.
philpapers.org/archive/WARH...
ESPECIALLY if interdisciplinary, theoretical, and/or continental approaches to TRS are your jam and you don't fancy a trip to the US in November, you should check out the full CFP. Obviously I'd love to see everyone in the RS panel, but there are many others!
www.isrlc.org/isrlc-confer...
The comments in question: 'In May, [Hunter Ash] wrote that the United States could resolve its racial disparities by “preventing the bottom 25 percent of the overall population from breeding.”'
When you work someplace that requires clarifying your position on eugenics, there might be a problem.
kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life
I do understand: you want permission. There’s a machine in the corner wrapped in human skin that makes things out of shit and blood to look like whatever you want (as long as you don’t look too closely). You gave one to your teacher and they didn’t notice. Your boss told you to use it after they laid off half the team and it was fine. You fed one to your kids and they liked it. You want to know you can use it sometimes without me thinking less of you. You don’t need me to believe it’s useful, you just want me to be polite about it.
Great post about generative AI. Happy Holidays. Don't say I never gave you anything. anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...
Happy that the Syndicate Symposium on my "Terror and Theology" (@mohrsiebeck.bsky.social 2021) is out! Given how many talk about the return of "Großraum" à la Schmitt again, it's weirdly timely. Unfortunately! Thanks so much to Ryszard Bobrowicz (@bobry.bsky.social) for putting it all together!
Starting 2026 with Day of the Dead which means I've now watched every mainstream English apocalyptic film up until 1990.
They've been sustained by the fantasy that all they have to do is escape only to realise that the same hellscape awaits them everywhere. There is no escape in the end. The fact that the lesson is delivered through song and dance numbers just distracts us from the bleak conclusion.
What makes the film sugarcoated nihilism is the final scene. The last three survivors manage to make it out of the town and one of them asks 'where to next?' And they realise there is nowhere to go.
The zombie apocalypse that eventually breaks out is a manifestation of this situation. They are literally trapped in the town, trying to break free, but everywhere they turn is a dead end. Parents and friends make sacrifices but it all seems for nothing.
The early scenes and musical numbers focus on frustrated romantic and academic ambitions. Everyone is trapped in an unnamed northern UK town (filming was near Glasgow).
My last Christmas film of the year was the incredibly enjoyable Anna and the Apocalypse (2017). The film is more clever than I think maybe even it realises. (Spoilers ahead)
DEFCON-4 (1985) is such a bizarre movie. First, they assumed 'DEFCON-4' means things are really bad (that's DEFCON-1). Second, there's a character named Boomer, so there are lines of dialogue where someone says 'ok Boomer' even though it's the 80s.
I've somehow managed to time it so that the Christmas holidays are lining up with a particularly bleak series of 1980s films about nuclear war. Starting your day with Testament (1983) doesn't really put you in the holiday spirit.
Thanks!
I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'm going to have to watch Wim Wenders' 4 hour 45 minute long Until the End of the World and I'm not really looking forward to that experience.
Later, they find a helicopter pilot to help them escape. When he insists on bringing his boyfriend, it's not an issue.
It's nice a break from the usual return to the state of nature and ever present threat of sexual assault.
The sexual politics of 1980s apocalyptic films are pretty terrible, but you get moments that are strangely progressive. In Miracle Mile, there's a transwoman in an early scene. She has lines in a very tense moment where people are yelling at each other, but there's no indication that anyone cares.
Like, would the average movie goer in 1988 know who all of those people?
Watching Miracle Mile (1988) and some random guy from a diner has been tasked with listing the prominent figures who should be evacuated before a nuclear strike. His list is:
Linus Pauling
Harry Belafonte
Danny Berrigan and his brother
Bobby Seale
Dick Gregory
That's an interesting list!
I just find it frustrating that there are lots of people in the UK and elsewhere devoting their lives to thinking about all those terrible things and someone like Carr thinks that the solution is obvious if we just use a little common sense.
Dissecting the comments of a comedian on a podcast/youtube channel is probably pointless and there are certainly worse things happening in the world.
I guess it could be a coincidence that he's going with countries that have Islam as their state religion, but, given his comments about gender studies, it's a pretty big coincidence. I guess he comes some credit for clarifying that he isn't suggesting the closure of gender studies.
Jimmy Carr gives examples of countries that we're 'importing' doctors from: 'Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, wherever'. The NHS does employ a significant number of people from Pakistan, but there are more Egyptian and Nepalese people working in the NHS than people from Bangladesh or Afghanistan.
I know it's low hanging fruity, but I imagine that taking money from gender studies would provide less funding than if incredibly rich comedians just paid their taxes.