Alexis Lothian

A large group of protestors against Trump in Edinburgh. Some are holding signs reading 'Nae Trump', 'Stop Trump, Welcome Immigrants' and 'No fascists, no rapists, no Trump'.

Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer speaks to anti-Trump protestors.

A sign held above a crowd reads 'Stop Trump, Migrants Welcome'.

A large group of protestors against Trump in Edinburgh. Two signs are visible, one reading 'Scotland hated Trump before it was fashionable', the other reading 'Stp Trump, stop the far right.'

Donald Trump is not welcome in Scotland.

A paperback volume, the journal Utopian Studies, with its orange cover and logo

Just received this at home, from the Society for Utopian Studies: Utopian Studies vol. 36 no. 1, Special Issue on Queer Utopias. Props @alothian.bsky.social, @tavia.bsky.social, Rebekah Sheldon. Tributes to José and to Frederic Jameson, as well. Looking forward to next issue where I have a review

China is cracking down on young women who write gay erotica At least 30 writers have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer tells the BBC.

I have been interviewed by BBC News concerning the recent Haitang Incident: after last year’s detention of over 50 women danmei writers who produce explicit male-male romances and erotica in China, more women writers have been summoned this spring for www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

this is terrifyingly plausible: if you want your AI to be taken seriously as an intellectual, you can't present it as a Stupid Woman

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy - Reactor Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover… Novelette | 7,540 words They were still three hours out when Perihelion...

The new Murderbot short story is up at Reactor Magazine: reactormag.com/rapport-mart... Edited by Lee Harris, art by Jaime Jones.

Guns or Fireworks America is not its government and normal does not mean right.

New article! On a complicated Fourth of July and not letting cruelty win sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/guns-or-fi...

Over and over, the language of “safety” put to work to protect epistemic and material violence. Sickening.

Utopian Studies 36.1 out now, with articles by Jack Halberstam, @sean-seeger.bsky.social & @alothian.bsky.social which I'm excited to read. Oh, plus my review of @danhf.bsky.social Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/utopian... #academicsky

“When the battle’s playing out on a hundred fronts at once, we have to remember that there’s no single court ruling, no existential moment, no single referendum on ‘transgender rights’ that’ll decide how this struggle will go.”
Jules Gill-Peterson in @wired.com+@them.us
www.wired.com/story/histor...

A white mug with the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction logo holds a spray of lavender next to a stack of the eight books shortlisted for this year's prize: North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins The City in Glass by Nghi Vo Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera The West Passage by Jared Pechaček Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson

We're thrilled to present the shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction:

US supreme court upholds Tennessee ban on youth gender-affirming care Ruling is devastating loss for trans rights supporters in case that could set precedent for dozens of other lawsuits

This is horrifying and will shorten trans lives.

At the same time, we know that trans people have survived attack and erasure many times over, providing each other with love, care, and basic needs. We won't stop or be stopped.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Event poster: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Large Language Models and the Returns of Critical Theory, June 19, 14-15.30. University of Copenhagen.

✨Looking so much forward to welcoming @whkchun.bsky.social at @ucph.bsky.social next week to discuss the politics of data loss w our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project. Please feel more than welcome to join us for Chun's public lecture June 19, 14-15.30 co-organized w @mariaa.bsky.social @aicentre.dk.

We’re at a point where the "news" (both local and cable) are adopting the propagandist rhetoric of the regime by describing what's happening in L.A. as "riots." They fail to acknowledge who actually incites and escalates the violence, namely ICE, the new Gestapo.

This is the spirit of Los Angeles.

This is California.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

#FreeDavidEndRaids

How to Protest Safely: What to Bring, What to Do, and What to Avoid If you’re planning to hit the streets, here’s what you need to know.

Americans are taking to the streets and showing up in US cities by the thousands to protest a plethora of President Donald Trump’s second-term policies.

In response? Tear gas deployed and protesters shot with rubber bullets in LA.

A WIRED guide on how to protest safely:

Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the a...

" I also believe that those of us who are older, whiter, safer from the threats of state violence do not have the moral ground to lecture the younger, browner and blacker, more directly impacted demographic on what they should and should not do." www.meditationsinanemergency.com/some-notes-o...

Important thread on why we need to invest in (buy) scholarly books if we want university presses’ publishing infrastructure to survive.

@michacard.bsky.social I really appreciated your intro too — and can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years since we did that panel at the Le Guin conference!

A Loving and Horrible Rage: t4t Love Praxis and Trans Rage in Gretchen Felker‐Martin's Manhunt Abstract. This article considers Gretchen Felker‐Martin's 2022 horror novel Manhunt as an example of trans speculative fiction that engages themes of trans rage and t4t love praxis. In the first secti...

Direct link to Damien’s article: read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/...

So excited for this amazing issue — and my brilliant former advisee Damien Hagen’s fabulous article on trans rage and t4t love in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt (trans horror version of feminist sf’s classic chromosome plague trope)

Here is the grad speech that NYU is now withholding the student's diploma for:

"As I search my heart today in addressing you all…the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine."

My response to the decision of Glasgow Pride to suspend participation by political parties.

In short, the culture war against our community has gone on far too long, and needs to end.

YouTube video by Mahindra Humanities Center Tanner Lecture One with Ruha Benjamin

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” —Baldwin’s words grounded my Tanner lectures at Harvard, “Imagining Beyond the Artificial Intelligentsia”🤖

Lecture 1, Who Owns the Future? youtu.be/ZseJigkUhuE?...

I’ve been looking forward to this book for so long and I know it’s going to teach me even more than I’ve imagined. I can’t wait to read and teach this desperately important work!

Thrilled to see this out in the wild— a true labor of love 💓 thanks to the Working Group & all the activists and academics whose work we drew on.

Content moderators are organizing against Big Tech Workers are fighting for working conditions and mental health support.

“Content moderators who comb through harmful material uploaded to online platforms have formed a global trade union alliance in a bid to improve working conditions.”

The sordid recent history of how media and political elites in Britain trampled trans rights and fomented today’s vicious moral panic

Sh’ma Koleinu: A joint message from Jews of Columbia across the ideological spectrum We, a diverse coalition of Jews at Columbia and Barnard, wholeheartedly reject the invocation of <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/additional-measures-to-combat-anti-sem...

Zionist and anti-Zionist students at Columbia join forces to denounce the administration’s weaponization of Jewish suffering to justify fascist crackdowns

Thank you to Ita Segev, beloved JVP-NYC member and anti-Zionist Jew who was born and raised in Jerusalem, for sharing these powerful words on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day.

🧵⬇️

First they reconfigured the information systems. Then they used that to reconfigure the political systems. Now, they are using both to reconfigure values and culture.