differences

“What is a feminist theory of exhaustion?…We are exhausted from feminism but decidedly not taking a ‘break’ from its demands. We are doing it tired.” Incredible essay by Jennifer C. Nash & Samantha Pinto in @differences.bsky.social. Free to read: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Rather than attempt to make a case for identifying with ghosts or being able to feel their trauma, I am interested in how the feeling of being immersed within such uncanny spaces produces its own sense of distance and proximity—a critical as well as an emotional understanding—without creating a form of individual subjectivity. In the case of Kim’s trilogy, this is an uncomfortable type of thinking-feeling, one that makes us grasp what both the South Korean and U.S. governments have tried so hard to render invisible: the patron-client relationship between South Korea and the United States, the relation of prostitution to military and global capital, and the historical silencing of women forced into sex trafficking and prostitution."

"Kim’s work does not allow us to inhabit the virtual spaces we see before us. Instead, her rendering of space and the various ghosts that haunt those spaces seem to take possession of our bodies" — read Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli's "Spectral Forensics" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

Cover of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 36, Number 1 (May 2025). The background is solid yellow with a horizontal beige band across the middle containing the journal title "differences" in lowercase serif letters. Below the band, the issue’s featured dossier is titled "Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality," with contributing authors listed: Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Matthew Helm, Iván A. Ramos, Jennifer C. Nash, Samantha Pinto, Lee Edelman, David Marriott, and Selamawit D. Terrefe.

The Weekly Read is "On Exhaustion: Toward a Post-Care Feminism" by Samantha Pinto and Jennifer C. Nash. The article was published in Dossier: Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality, a special issue of @differences.bsky.social (36:1).

Read the article for free: buff.ly/XDrQAhF

Text reads Welcome to our newest staff members and has an arrow indicating that there are more images to come.

Headshot of Scott Jackshaw, Managing Editor of differences

Headshot of Erin Perfect, Processing Archivist

We are delighted to welcome two new Center staff. Scott Jackshaw joins differences as Managing Editor; Erin Perfect joins the archives team as Processing Archivist. Read about Scott : pembroke.brown.edu/news/2025-07... Read about Erin: pembroke.brown.edu/news/2025-05...
@differences.bsky.social

Differences — Council of Editors of Learned Journals Editors of differences were interviewed by CELJ Board members, Debra Rae Cohen and Eugenia Zuroski as CELJ’s newest featured journal!

To read: this interview of Elizabeth Weed and Elizabeth A. Wilson, differences editors, by Eugenia Zuroski, president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. www.celj.org/featured-jou.... differences is CELJ's newest featured journal. @differences.bsky.social‬
‪@elizwilsonemory.bsky.social‬

Cover of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 36, Number 1 (May 2025). The background is solid yellow with a horizontal beige band across the middle containing the journal title "differences" in lowercase serif letters. Below the band, the issue’s featured dossier is titled "Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality," with contributing authors listed: Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Matthew Helm, Iván A. Ramos, Jennifer C. Nash, Samantha Pinto, Lee Edelman, David Marriott, and Selamawit D. Terrefe.

"Dossier: Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality," a special issue of @differences.bsky.social (36:1), is now available! View the TOC and read "Ce n’est pas ça: Blackness, Sex, and the Set of Illegibles" by Lee Edelman, freely available through 9/5: buff.ly/FhdR7Ft

New piece written with my most precious and treasured thinking partner, @samanthapinto.bsky.social. Thinking together about exhaustion, fatigue, and being feminist and bone tired.

"Limits of Legibility: Questions of Blackness and Sexuality" is dedicated to the memory of Selamawit D. Terrefe.

Cover of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, volume 35, number 3. A pale yellow bar with the journal's title in black crosses over the top quarter. Below the title, black text on a yellow background offers the issue's subtitle: "Dossier: Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality."

differences 36.1 is out now — featuring a dossier of essays from Selamawit D. Terrefe, David Marriott, and Lee Edelman, alongside writing from Jennifer C. Nash, Samantha Pinto, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Matthew Helm, and Iván A. Ramos: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

On Exhaustion: Toward a Post-Care Feminism This essay is a critical response to the emergence of “care” as the antidote to the multiple crises that plague the present. The call for care— intramural care, radical care, mutual aid, etc.—has prol...

We thought we knew tired when we wrote this. Exhausted with @jennifercnash.bsky.social @differences.bsky.social doi.org/10.1215/1040...

From left: Axelle Karera (Emory), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown), Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York), Lynne Huffer (Emory), and Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory; moderator).

Thanks to the panelists and moderator for the second differences colloquium: The Climate of Critique. Video coming soon! @jttremblay.bsky.social @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social

Poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique." White and yellow text on black background. Logos in the bottom corners indicate that the event is sponsored by differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

Poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique." White and yellow text on black background. The description reads: "Ecocriticism has been seduced by metaphors of entanglement. Four critics challenge the increasingly dominant logic of relationality to think the climate crisis without displacing the social and racial antagonisms that found it." Below this description is a list of participants: Lynne Huffer (Emory), Axelle Karera (Emory), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown), and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York), with Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory) moderating. The event will take place on March 7th from 2pm to 6pm at Brown University in Pembroke Hall 305.

join us in Providence on March 7th for Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique — a colloquium featuring Lynne Huffer, Axelle Karera, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...

Join us for The Climate of Critique in two weeks feat. Lynne Huffer, Axelle Karera, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson.

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "The 'I' is not something rhetorically convenient. It is a first-person register one cannot do without. There are disturbances in that register. It is at once utterly personal, if not existential, and linguistic, and the gap between those two registers is precisely the difficulty that the book meant to address: the abyss into which we sometimes fall, but also an opening that allows others to try out the same 'I' or substitute another one for mine. I do not know myself perfectly, but I sense that I am neither hiding behind abstraction for purposes of privacy nor am I fleeing into abstraction to escape a problematic embodiment. I am actually trying to connect with those who also tend to fail when they seek to give an account of themselves in a language that, strictly speaking, belongs to none of us."

"It was difficult to write Giving an Account of Oneself, since I included very little autobiographical detail" — from our latest issue, read Judith Butler's "Giving an Account: When, Where, for Whom, and Why?" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Generally, antinarrative theorists define queerness as a force of negativity that ruptures the illusory structures of identity (see Edelman, No and Bad). Narrative perpetuates these structures by promising a satisfying closure that will never arrive. Butler similarly challenges the desire for 'narrative closure for our lives' (Giving 64). They are especially critical of those who idealize a coherent, definitive life story as key to a healthy psyche. In fact, they go so far as to suggest that 'something we might tentatively call the truth of the person [ . . . ] might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form.' While they embrace the enigmas that exceed narration, Butler nonetheless refuses 'to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence' as a queer ideal. Rather than opposing incoherence to identity, Butler defines incoherence as the existential price of our relational being. In their words, '[O]ur ‘incoherence’ establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us.' We simply cannot do without incoherence. But too much incoherence can lead to painful or even unlivable states of fracture, and as Butler cautions, '[T]he suffering that belongs to conditions of dissociation should not be underestimated' (52). We need some measure of coherence to survive.

"If queer theory has struggled to think of narrative in these terms, it is perhaps because we have defined narrative as one line driven toward closure" — read @teaganbradway.bsky.social's "Renarratable Bonds: Queer Relationality in the Scene of Redress" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

Really looking forward to this event. See you there!

Poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique." White and yellow text on black background. Logos in the bottom corners indicate that the event is sponsored by differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

Poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique." White and yellow text on black background. The description reads: "Ecocriticism has been seduced by metaphors of entanglement. Four critics challenge the increasingly dominant logic of relationality to think the climate crisis without displacing the social and racial antagonisms that found it." Below this description is a list of participants: Lynne Huffer (Emory), Axelle Karera (Emory), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown), and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York), with Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory) moderating. The event will take place on March 7th from 2pm to 6pm at Brown University in Pembroke Hall 305.

join us in Providence on March 7th for Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique — a colloquium featuring Lynne Huffer, Axelle Karera, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...

The #WeeklyRead is “On Receiving Accounts from Others” by Sara Ahmed. The article appears in "Unaccountably Queer", a special issue of @differences.bsky.social (35:3) edited by Teagan Bradway

Read this article for free through March 31, 2025:

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Yet, as a historian, I doubt that self-determination through a radical politics of gender genuinely bonds people ontologically across time, geography, race, class, language, kinship, and religion, precisely because gender’s sovereignty is the historical product of colonial, anti-Black, and settler projects of domination. A multitude of colonial and capitalist histories remind us that the wish to kill ontological transness and its built-in failure do not produce a symmetrical, common condition worth affirming. In fact, histories of state power suggest the opposite."

"Another way of cohabitating and coming to justice out of historical conflicts will remain elusive so long as we turn to gender to change the world" — from our latest issue, read Jules Gill-Peterson's "Who Is the Subject of Gender Self-determination?" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

Basically the Same: Todd Haynes’s May December — differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies Haynes delights in imitation, as is his custom. His filmography comprises deconstructive approaches to the musical personae of David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Marc Bolan, and Bob Dylan (Velvet Goldmine, I’m...

Some things I enjoyed writing—in some cases, a while ago—that were published in 2024 (or just before).

(1) In December: "Basically the Same: Todd Haynes's May December," about repetition-compulsion and the “romance of intractability," on @differences.bsky.social's online forum.

Giving an Epistolary Account of Oneself: Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy This article reads the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as an account, following Judith Butler. Specifically, it argues that an epistolary subject emerges through th...

This special issue is filled with extraordinary essays and, in response to them, Butler explores more autobiographical territory than is their norm. Brilliantly edited by @teaganbradway.bsky.social. You can read my essay here and I wholeheartedly recommend the entire issue.

Volume 35 Issue 3 | differences | Duke University Press

It's here!!! I'm extremely excited to share “Unaccountably Queer,” the special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies that I edited in honor of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking “Giving an Account of Oneself." read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

Cover of "Unaccountably Queer" a special issue of differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, volume 35, number 3. Yellow background with black text. A pale yellow bar with the journal's title in black crosses over the top quarter.

differences 35.3 is out now! — edited by @teaganbradway.bsky.social, "Unaccountably Queer" features essays from Gila Ashtor, Cassius Adair, Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Jules Gill-Peterson, and more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Trapped in the hold—surrounded by the dead and dying, perhaps, too, dead and dying—Blackness, Black women, and Black women’s sexualities were alive. In some ways, reading for that aliveness, that ongoingness inside Black female sexualities, is a question of method."

"To hold, to feel, to touch Black women’s sexualities, we must imagine and reimagine the event horizon of the ship’s hold and, for a moment, speculate" — read Kimberly Bain's
"HOLD : SPACE" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "If maritime metaphors grapple continuously with how to map Blackness’s trajectories—our relationships to space, the environment, our history, and each other—spacetime metaphors may be more interested in sensing and, thereby, elaborating new ways of knowing: they press on the ways we fail to adequately know and name the fullness of Blackness’s meanings, locations, enactments, and possibilities."

"What openings does spacetime provide that the maritime, perhaps, cannot as readily support?" — from our latest issue, read Petal Samuel's "Black Gravity, or a Hidden History of Empire" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

A list of the new advisory board members, which includes Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Eugenie Brinkema, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Anne Anlin Cheng, Rey Chow, Joan Copjec, Penelope Deutscher, Mary Ann Doane, Lee Edelman, Mike Fortun, Alexander R. Galloway, Leela Gandhi, Lynne Huffer, Lynne Joyrich, Wendy Allison Lee, Elissa Marder, David Marriott, Emily A. Owens, Thangam Ravindranathan, Denise Riley, Jacqueline Rose, Darieck Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Jared Sexton, Sara-Maria Sorentino, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Peter Szendy, Samo Tomšič, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Robyn Wiegman, and Alenka Zupančič.

After 35 years of publication, we’re updating our advisory board! The scholars gathered here share the journal’s commitment to critical thinking about difference, and we are thrilled to have their support. Take a look at the new masthead here: differencesjournal.org/about

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "This requires, as with black hole space-times, seeing what is not always obvious in a colonial academy: science is already part of Black thought. Black scientists are not a figment of Afrofuturist imagination. We are an Afrofuture, already arrived and still arriving. There is no need to transform the cosmos into a Black aesthetic. The cosmos is a Black aesthetic, has long been so, and will continue to be so. Using the framework provided by Hammonds in “Black (W)holes,” I write now to urge us to read ourselves where we already are, lovingly, as a story that never stopped unfolding. We are, as Sylvia Wynter has declared us, homo narrans, bios and mythoi (Wynter and McKittrick)."

"Black scientists have been here the whole time" — read @chanda.bsky.social's "The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: ""For my work, both in this essay and elsewhere, the questions that Hammonds asks throughout her remarkable essay on the unfathomable 'Black (W)hole' pinpoint not a political problem (though the exclusion of “us” would be considered as a political one for the better part of a decade), but a theoretical one, or a problem for queer thought. The construction of bodies outside of queerness proliferated popular theoretical paradigms like queer of color critique as an interventionist strategy—one that for all of its rigor and charm still produced itself in opposition to a vacant space masquerading as an impenetrable brick wall. There was simply no there, there. There is no 'queer theory,' no talk of sexuality without the imprint of centuries of commerce in bodies that mattered."

"What does it mean to labor in a field (figuratively and literally) under constant and reoccurring erasure?" — from our latest issue, read Sharon P. Holland's "Black (W)holes: A Problem for Feminist Thought" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

differences 35.2 is out now! — edited by Shoniqua Roach, "Inside the Black (W)hole" features essays from Moya Bailey, Sharon P. Holland, Amber Jamilla Musser, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

An excerpt from the article linked above, which reads: "Grasping the impact of 'Black Africa' on her gender reveals that there is no schism between gendering and ungendering. Ungendering scaffolds Morris's transition by wielding Blackness as the architecture of gendered progression, intimating precisely how 'antiblackness itself is sexuating' and how anti-Blackness is 'essential rather than subsidiary' to any notion of gender or sexual coherence (Jackson 8–9). The gendered indeterminacy Morris transfers to the Orient is inextricable from what Morris extracts from Africa. The fungibility of Africa endows Morris with the capacity to decide to be feminized in and by the Orient."

"'Black Africa,' as the perimeter of the possible, is that over and against which the metamorphic capacity of the Orient is produced" — read Joshua Falek's "'Everything I Wanted Not to Be': The Specter of Africa in the Trans Travel Narrative" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...