Yasmin Nair

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Email Address: yasmin@bilerico.com

Location: Chicago, IL

Project Contributor Since: July 2007

Entries by this Contributor: 48

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. Her work appears in Windy City Times, where she is a columnist, reporter, photographer, and book reviewer. Her work has also appeared in Clamor (deeply beloved and deeply mourned), 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 Chicago and has friends there and elsewhere whom she adores, and who will gladly tell her when her work and life seem to stray away from the left to the “progressive” side.

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

Nair also blogs on
queercents.com