New Essay and Zine
“Dykes, bitches, harpies, sluts! Every street is flooded with them! Overflowing! They fall down from trees as walnuts, burdensome with vicious promise: thunk, thunk, thunk, crash. They gush out from stinking gutters. They radiate out from the beams of street lights. Everywhere there are women: their voices, their faces, their hands, their teeth, their livers. Their intestines are lashing out from under porch steps with venomous fangs. Women’s screams condense the air into fog and the fog obscures the terrain. Everything that seemed transparent to power is rendered relentlessly opaque.”
In my newest essay Songbird, insurrectionary: continuity and escalation on the fronts of border regime, I offer historical and current political analysis on the movements of border regime. Importantly in this piece, I locate racialized women and children as the inventors, developers, and most skilled practitioners of the insurgent tactics used to disrupt campaigns of ethnic cleansing of the past and present.
The text, the zine, and the audioessay are now available for my Patreon supporters and for purchase on my ko-fi shop. It will be published on this site and free to download next week, though do please consider using ko-fi to tip if you are able to and appreciate the work. Half of the proceeds from ko-fi sales of the zine will go to No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, who you can also donate directly to here.
New to the Library
Books
Anzaldúa, Gloria- Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Articles
Hill, Rickey- The Bogalusa Movement: Self-Defense and Black Power in the Civil Rights Struggle
Personal Update
So much is changing in my life! I have been working so so hard on this essay since January, and in March especially dedicated nearly every scrap of my capacity I’ve had to its craft. I am relieved to be finally done with the writing work of it, and really excited to share it with you all. I have been working to challenge myself and bring more poetics into my work, allow certain abstractions to stand without detailed explanation. It’s been both difficult and delightful, as most worthwhile challenges are. I really hope you enjoy the resulting work.
I am feeling quite burnt out and out of words at this moment. Since publishing on Saturday my body has received the “job done” message and collapsed on the other side of the finishing line. I’ve been sleeping a LOT. I’m about to get back to it. However, there are two HUGE updates I must share with you all. The first: my first fitted wheelchair has been delivered to me! I have only used it a little since it arrived (the post-job fatigue is seriously a beast) but it is already apparent how much easier it will be for my tender and injured joints to use. I hope it will make my world a little bit bigger! Even with insurance coverage, it came with a hefty price tag. If you have the means and the desire to help me get it paid down you can do so here, and you have my deepest appreciation. Second, and even more importantly, the judge’s decision on my disability case came in, and I WON!! This is such a big deal for me, something I needed to go right very badly in order to expand my options and my autonomy. I am still waiting (and could be waiting for up to 60 days) for the determination on how much I will be receiving and when. It would be lovely if I had that information by my next update here, but only time will tell. Regardless, that this process is at an end and finally resulted in a favorable outcome is HUGE and I am so relieved.
I don’t keep any of my work behind a paywall, but as an ailing transgender dyke who wants to continue to create and share this work as long as I am able, I am also in need of financial support. If you appreciate what I share and have the means, please consider signing up as a monthly supporter of my Patreon, donating to my Ko-fi shop, or sending a little love to one of my tip jars on Venmo or Cashapp:
