Anna DeShawn…Real Talk

Yasmin Nair

Yasmin Nair is an academic, activist, and writer. Which mostly means that she struggles to pay rent while living the glamorous life of a freelance writer. She is a member of Gender JUST. Her work has appeared in in Windy City Times, where she is a columnist, reporter, photographer, and book reviewer. It has also appeared in Maximum Rocknroll, Clamor, Discourse, GLQ, make/shift, Mediations, and Time Out Chicago. Her writing and organising address neoliberalism, inequality, and the politics of rescue and affect; the immigration crisis; queer politics and theory, and the contours of a ridiculous gay movement that pretends that the right to marry, the right to kill, and hate crimes legislation actually constitute some kind of leftist agenda.

Nair writes frequently and explicitly about and for sex, and identifies herself as a queer lesbian who loves cock. But she does not believe that sex — having sex; wanting to have sex; or fighting for the right of people everywhere to have sex — actually leads to any kind of revolution. While there is a politics to sex, it cannot be mistaken as a political project unto itself and there is nothing inherently radical about sex. She argues that the central problem facing us today is that of economic inequality. Nair lives and works in Uptown.

She is currently working on a book about the use of affect and emotion in public life.

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