The website is up! 

Yasmin Nair is a Chicago-based writer, activist, academic, and commentator.  The bastard child of queer theory and deconstruction, Nair has numerous critical essays, book reviews, investigative journalism, op-eds, and photography to her credit.  Her work has appeared in publications like GLQ, The Progressive, make/shift, Time Out Chicago, The Bilerico Project, Windy City Times, Bitch, Maximum Rock’n’Roll, and No More Potlucks.   Nair is well known - and either loved or hated, depending on whom you ask - for her critiques of a ridiculous gay movement which pretends that the right to marry, the right to kill as part of the U.S. war machine, and hate crimes legislation actually constitute some kind of leftist agenda.  Her writing and organising address issues like neoliberalism and inequality, queer politics and theory, the politics of rescue and affect, sex trafficking, the art world, and the immigration crisis. Nair is a leftist - not a progressive, not a libertarian, and certainly not a liberal - who is critical of a pallid and weak “left” which has ceded ground to petty matters of emotion and identity and turned away from a materialist analysis of inequality.

Nair is part of the editorial collective of Against Equality and a member of the Chicago grassroots organisation Gender JUST (Justice United for Societal Transformation); she was, from 1999-2003, a member of the now-defunct Queer to the Left.  Her activist work includes gentrification, immigration, public education, and youth at risk.  The spelling in the work archived here reflects the requirements of the specific publications. Having spent part of her early life in a former colony, she prefers British spelling over American and fights a daily battle with the Word program on her Mac, which suffers from a few kinks and insists that colour is spelt without a “u.” 

She is currently working on a book about affect and neoliberalism, tentatively titled Feeling Bad.  This website is an archive of her published work and provides updates on her latest and forthcoming projects and appearances.  While this represents much of what she has written, we are still in the process of uploading older articles and other work.  The tabs here are fairly self-explanatory, and the work is organised by genre.  I Don’t Live Here Anymore is a blog focused on political and cultural commentary.  Off The Books is a blog about books: it includes multi-book reviews and critical essays on the state of books and publishing.  Some, like “Such Beastly Love: Animals and Affect in a Neoliberal World,” will have been published as articles.  We’re gradually adding more images and keywords, so please bear with us; let us know if you find any broken links or are looking for a specific piece.

A last note: writing is Yasmin Nair’s main source of income.  While she relishes the freedom that freelance writing gives her, she suffers the effects of being an uninsured person in a country which still does not grasp the necessity for real health care reform.  The past year and a half has been especially difficult, with numerous ailments that, while not life-threatening, left her incapacitated and unable to work for substantial periods of time.  She is making up that lost time but if you like her work and politics and would like to show your support by helping her get back on her feet, please consider making a donation of any size, in cash or kind (gift certificates for office supplies, groceries, or chiropractor’s visits for a badly sprained knee are especially welcome).  There is  a “Donate” button among the tabs on the top of the home page, and we are working on confirming a Paypal account by the end of August.  If you can donate sooner, please contact us via the “Contact” page.

Nair’s thoughts and analysis of the diminished place of writers and artists in a neoliberal economy - and why they ought to be paid more fairly - can be found in a widely-circulated piece, “Make Art! Change the World! Starve!: The Fallacy of Art As Social Justice - Part I.” Part II is forthcoming.