Every Taxi Driver I Have Ever Spoken

I Think It's Important To Live With A Certain Danger And A Certain Risk.

I Think Maybe The Destructive Pleasure Got Turned Into The Destructive Pleasure Of War (something We See Still In The Images Of Us Soldiers Urinating On The Dead Bodies Of Taliban Soldiers). Something Of The Pleasure In Destruction Gets Unleashed, And Then Becomes Part Of War Effort Rationalised First As Revenge (or Justice Defined As Revenge). But Then It Takes New Forms, As We See Now.

I Do Know That Some People Believe That I See Gender As A "choice" Rather Than As An Essential And Firmly Fixed Sense Of Self. My View Is Actually Not That. No Matter Whether One Feels One's Gendered And Sexed Reality To Be Firmly Fixed Or Less So, Every Person Should Have The Right To Determine The Legal And Linguistic Terms Of Their Embodied Lives.

The United States Are Such A Large Place. And There Are Some States And Some Cities Where The Questions Of Gender Or Sexuality Would Not Be Asked, Or Where Scholars Or Academics Are Working In Small Little Corners Of The Universities Trying To Raise These Questions And Being Told That Either That They're Strange Or Not Appropriate Or Being Actively Opposed. There Are Other Places Where There Is Very Active Scholarship Going On. Certainly On Gender.

Intersectionality Has Made An Important Contribution To Social And Political Analysis, Asking All Of Us To Think About What Assumptions Of Race And Class We Make When We Speak About "women" Or What Assumptions Of Gender And Race We Make When We Speak About "class." It Allows Us To Unpack Those Categories And See The Various Kinds Of Social Formations And Power Relations That Constitute Those Categories.