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HIV, Monkeypox, and the Demonization of Queer People
Monkeypox has recently generated great buzz within the media as a frantic populace is jarred by images of blister-like pimples dotting the skin of affected individuals, a zoonotic disease now spreading outside Africa. As of July 29th, there have been 21,148 cases worldwide, with deaths appearing outside Africa. In tandem with the developments of new…
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Gendered Commodities: Identity-Formation by Consumption
“Many have found symbolic interactionism useful for understanding the construction of gender and sexuality. West and Zimmerman’s (1987) ‘Doing gender’ set the stage for the social constructionist research on gender and sexuality. The concept of ‘doing gender’ demonstrates the socially constructed nature of masculinity and femininity as developing out of repeated, patterned interaction and socialization…
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Queer Marx and the Assimilatory Machine of Capital
“[…] in its blind, unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labor, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. […] It is not the normal maintenance of the labor power which is to determine the limits of the working day; it is the greatest possible…
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Revolutionary Feminism Now
“[…] it is difficult not to be dispirited by the enormous reluctance women have shown historically to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression. The left tends to be evasive about the numbing violence intrinsic to revolutionary war, and feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian…
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Carcerality and Colonialism: Magic-Capital and the Politics of the Subjective Realm
Our modern world is laden with the bearings of science, technology, and the march or tendency towards infinite progress, as if the destined nature of humanity is the cyborg future envisioned by the dystopian stories of our time. Magic, and even the concept of the supernatural, is no longer preoccupied in the conscious, and the…
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Meaning as Substance: Navigating the Desert of Modern Language in an Age of Discontent
“Thorough, adamant and uncompromising privatization of all concerns has been the main factor that has rendered postmodern society so spectacularly immune to systemic critique and radical social dissent with revolutionary potential.” Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence “This construction [the virtual] is a new, topological body which is a projection of a non-topology into a topological arena. This…
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Virtual Consciousness: Lukács in the Modern Era
Class consciousness is a vital, but deeply misunderstood idea for the left. Many leftists today still conceive of class consciousness as an individualist descriptor for how much a particular individual is aware of their own oppression by bourgeois society. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Algorithmic Deification
[…] ideology reifies. Ideology turns what is always a process of becoming — which is open-ended and therefore changeable — into something that is fixed and permanent. That’s what reification is. And, of course, that’s crucial. That’s the very purpose of ideology. The very purpose of ideology is to close off the possibility that anything…
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Virtual Topology and the Gothic Flatline
The virtual has previously been characterized by this collective as spacial, but in recent weeks this has had to be re-evaluated. To characterize the virtual as a space in which people gather, with defined boundaries and borders is to fall into the exact thinking promoted by virtual control mechanisms. This narrative of the virtual as…
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Socialized Zombies: the Death of the Future
Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. –Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative” In the current age of neoliberal capitalism, our technologized world has grown more inundated with the wiles of…
the simulated collective
a group dedicated to discussing philosophy and current events.
the simulated collective 