Sarah Brouillette

Seminar: “Sexual Trouble on Triton and the Problems of Utopianism” Monday March 23rd, Carleton University, Dunton 2017 or online, 3-5pm M. E. O’Brien will dialogue with Alexis Shotwell on their respective engagements with Samuel Delany’s science fiction novel Trouble on Triton. O’Brien’s paper, entitled “Some, Each and All: Sexual Difference and Communism” is forthcoming in Pinko. It uses Delany’s work to consider the difficulty of sexual satisfaction in the dialectic of revolutionary communism, turning to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation to trace the non-dialectical, non-resolvable character of sexual difference.

2026 Myron Rusk Lecture in Civil Liberties: “Trans Freedom and the Utopian Horizon” Tuesday March 24th, 7-8:30pm The Grove, 280-18 Louisa St, Ottawa ON and online M. E. O’Brien will lecture on the relationship between gender freedom and capitalism. She will begin by identifying the current fascist assault on trans rights across multiple national contexts. After briefly tracing varying current strategies of trans survival, organizing and flourishing, she will turn to the role of trans futures and utopian longings in movement work. Drawing on her work in science fiction, family abolitionism, and her conceptual framework of “insurgent utopianism”, O’Brien will identify the kernel of revolutionary desire evoked in trans life. Trans freedom, she argues, necessarily includes a push against and beyond the private family, state regulation of gender and sexuality, and the generalized market dependency of capitalism.

save the dates and arrive early, Ottawa people -- M.E. O'Brien is coming to town later this month, and my superfan students & their crews are going to take up all the seats

(h/t Alexis Shotwell and @genderhorizon.com)

People criticizing Carney for hypocrisy but in the narrow technical sense of globalism, he’s perfectly consistent: transgressions of international economic law are more concerning than other violations. Protecting free trade and capital rights are the prime directives for guardians of world order.

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi | The dry and the wet burn together ‘The dry and the wet burn together’ is a Persian expression invoked when a fire spreads without discrimination. Once...

My most recent piece on the @lrb.co.uk blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

IPE Socialist Seminar The Genocide in Palestine: A socialist anti-imperialist perspective with Hassan Husseini Friday 6 March 2026 1-3pm Carleton University DT 1524

join us Friday

The image shows a Washington Post article. The headline reads **"Anthropic's AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud"**, with a subheadline describing advanced AI technology identifying and prioritizing targets in support of U.S. and Israeli military operations. The article is dated today at 5:00 a.m. EST and has a 6-minute read time. Below the headline is a photograph of a smoky, hazy sky over a city skyline at dusk or dawn, with the caption noting it shows smoke rising over Tehran after an explosion amid U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. The byline credits Tara Copp, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Ian Duncan.

Bad news for anthropic stans: your fav tech company is doing target selection for illegal US/Israeli imperial wars.

archive.ph/cX0GH

dang that must suck that someone else used what they created without them allowing it

"Cancel ChatGPT" movement goes big after OpenAI's latest move After Anthropic refused flat out to agree to apply Claude AI to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of American citizens, OpenAI jumps right into bed with the United States Department of War.

"Cancel ChatGPT" goes mainstream after Sam Altman takes the U.S. department of war deal Anthropic refused — in surveillance of U.S. citizens and autonomous weapons.

www.windowscentral.com/artificial-i... #chatgpt #openai #samaltman #apocalypse

Book cover of Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction by Amy De'Ath

Behind Our Backs is out!

"In this brilliant study of social forms, De'Ath shows how a surprisingly speculative strain of contemporary poetry explores unseen connections between the domination of value and the process of feminization."
—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

https://ow.ly/IJRh50YgW1o

"How the book came to function as a key representative of Canadian settler exceptionalism" -- a new study by my brilliant colleague Jody Mason
www.mqup.ca/Books/B/Book...

Beyond the Wage Relation – Spectre Journal Hugo de Camps Mora challenges Vivek Chibber's fetishized account of materialism in favor of the broader and more expansive conception Marx argued for.

Wrote this for @journalspectre.bsky.social in response to Vivek Chibber and the broader resurgence of economistic materialism. Drawing on the concept of fetishism, I suggest such approaches revive errors Marx had already sought to critique
spectrejournal.com/beyond-the-w...

🚨 If you're in Montreal for #ACLA, come see this outstanding seminar! On Saturday at 4:00, I'll be talking about the secondary school's fascination with dystopia in a paper called "The Individual vs. Society: Doublethinking High School English"!

I'll DM you

I assume you meant "Sarah when are we hanging out?"

Doing a mini east coast book tour, starting this Friday:

Montreal: Friday 2/27 at Librairie l’Euguélionne with @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social (6pm)

Brooklyn: Monday 3/2 at The Word is Change with @downevent.bsky.social (6pm)

Baltimore: Tuesday 3/3 at Red Emma’s with @keegancf.bsky.social (7pm)

The eternal push and pull of their doomed yearning Rax King on "Wuthering Heights"

Hell World's Chief Jacob Elordi Correspondent @raxkingisdead.bsky.social writes about Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights.”

"It seems to me she’s less interested in creating a mood of genuine eroticism than in detailing every possible type of goop that can drip out of a person."

Nearly all my thoughts about AI I’ve gotten from the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse and it’s helped make sense of it all so far.

I have so much to say about the LARB situation & I’m probably going to swallow most of it, but here’s the single most important thing about LARB’s history that none of the recent bitter (& sometimes justified) rage-posting has mentioned:

Epstein Family Values Melinda Cooper and Quinn Slobodian discuss the depredations of Jeffrey Epstein, America's billionaire patriarchs, and the far right

I'll be having a live online conversation about it with her for @equatormag.bsky.social next Thursday.

Register here:

www.eventbrite.com/e/epstein-fa...

my dad just told me about his invented device to hold an ice cream cone from DQ drive thru (he has Parkinsons and can't drive with one hand at all)

it's a toilet paper roll with just enough left on it that it fits snug in the cup holder

free idea for anyone who has faced this struggle 😊

Given the content of the piece, it would be wild not to acknowledge recent chats with friends about their working conditions at LARB. TBH I'm not sure what power infrequent contributors have in this situation--but this is a conversation I want us to be having.

The Artist Is Present (Online) | Los Angeles Review of Books Sophie Bishop’s new book tracks the pressures artists face to conform their ‘brands’ to the demands of the algorithmic boss.

I find Sophie Bishop's research on "influencer creep" very generative and have been turning to it a lot. So I was pleased to be able to write a review of her book here!

favourite book I read last year :)

www.versobooks.com/en-ca/produc...

On who my conceptual twin might be, that's info I'd love lol. This is great but Shuxi Wu does not work on media industries anymore: academic.oup.com/adaptation/a.... This by Jia Tan is amazing (great scholar) but the focus is streaming TV: journals.publishing.umich.edu/gs/article/i....

huge topic! I don't know that much about it but this is a useful overview that cites a lot of other scholarship your student could turn to: electronicbookreview.com/publications...

I assume you mean literature that is mainly online and/or produced by platforms' network effects (e.g. 'engagement' metrics, trend jacking, writing for SEO), and not what English literary scholars usually mean by "internet novel": novels about the internet:) ???

all time absolute banger

One of my arguments in my book Family Abolition is that idealizing traditional family values, death camps for children, and systematic child rape are all different sides of the same logic. I did not expect news headlines to spend the next three years relentlessly proving this right.