differences
a journal of feminist cultural studies | https://differencesjournal.org
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- Reposted by differencesIf you’re in the vicinity, we’d love to see you at Limits of Legibility #3!
- join us in Providence on March 6th for Limits of Legibility: History under Siege — a colloquium featuring Joan Wallach Scott, Omnia El Shakry, Gary Wilder, and Korey Williams: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...
- join us in Providence on March 6th for Limits of Legibility: History under Siege — a colloquium featuring Joan Wallach Scott, Omnia El Shakry, Gary Wilder, and Korey Williams: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...
- Reposted by differencesThe Weekly Read is “The Americanity of the 'American Lyric': Claudia Rankine in Ibero-American Translation” by Whitney Devos. The article appears in Lyric beyond Containment, a special issue of @differences.bsky.social (36:2-3). Read it for free: buff.ly/hj5wL6r
- Reposted by differences"Lyric beyond Containment," a special issue of differences edited by Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, is now available. View the TOC, read the intro, and "The Americanity of the 'American Lyric',"all freely available: buff.ly/3RkT2Hv
- Reposted by differencesOur special issue of differences is out! Claire and I were asked to suggest one article that would be open access, and (although it was VERY hard to choose) we picked Whitney’s, which is about Claudia Rankine’s “American lyric” in Ibero-American translation: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- differences 36.2–3 is out now — edited by Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, "Lyric beyond Containment" features essays from Jacques Khalip, David Marriott, Andrea Brady, Amy De'Ath, Whitney DeVos, Jan Mieszkowski, Ren Ellis Neyra, Susan Briante, more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by differencesI’m proud to be part of this issue
- differences 36.2–3 is out now — edited by Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, "Lyric beyond Containment" features essays from Jacques Khalip, David Marriott, Andrea Brady, Amy De'Ath, Whitney DeVos, Jan Mieszkowski, Ren Ellis Neyra, Susan Briante, more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- differences 36.2–3 is out now — edited by Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, "Lyric beyond Containment" features essays from Jacques Khalip, David Marriott, Andrea Brady, Amy De'Ath, Whitney DeVos, Jan Mieszkowski, Ren Ellis Neyra, Susan Briante, more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by differencesIf you’re ASAP-ing, join Claire & I & our assembled luminaries for the Lyric beyond Containment seminar on Friday! We’ll be sharing material from our forthcoming special issue of @differences.bsky.social, I’ll share a bit from Here Is a Figure, & there’ll be previews of some fab books in poetics!
- Reposted by differencesPublication date: Nov 4, 2025 🎉
- "Laughter […] lingers in the racialized, sexualized, and gendered spaces of abjection that drive the subject to the edges of meaning" — from our latest issue, read Iván A. Ramos's "Breaking Down, Breaking Together" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by 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/...
- "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/...
- Reposted by differencesThe 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
- Reposted by differencesWe 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
- Reposted by differencesTo 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
- Reposted by differences"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
- Reposted by differencesNew piece written with my most precious and treasured thinking partner, @samanthapinto.bsky.social. Thinking together about exhaustion, fatigue, and being feminist and bone tired.
- We thought we knew tired when we wrote this. Exhausted with @jennifercnash.bsky.social @differences.bsky.social doi.org/10.1215/1040...
- 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/...
- "Limits of Legibility: Questions of Blackness and Sexuality" is dedicated to the memory of Selamawit D. Terrefe.
- Reposted by differencesWe thought we knew tired when we wrote this. Exhausted with @jennifercnash.bsky.social @differences.bsky.social doi.org/10.1215/1040...
- Reposted by differencesThanks to the panelists and moderator for the second differences colloquium: The Climate of Critique. Video coming soon! @jttremblay.bsky.social @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social
- Reposted by differencesJoin 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.
- 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...
- "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/...
- "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/...
- Reposted by differencesReally looking forward to this event. See you there!
- 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 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...
- Reposted by differencesThe #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:
- "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/...
- Reposted by differencesSome 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.
- Reposted by differencesThis 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.
- Reposted by differencesIt'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/...
- 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/...
- "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/...
- "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/...
- 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
- "Black scientists have been here the whole time" — read @chanda.bsky.social's "The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "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/...
- "'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/...
- "I am in favor of faltering. We offer stories, take them back, revise them, start over, or continue in ways that periodically suffer interruption or trail off" — read Teagan Bradway (@teaganbradway.bsky.social)'s conversation with Judith Butler on our forum: differencesjournal.org/writing/quee...
- "To rage to the point of imagining or exacting revenge is to encounter the breaking point between respectability and fury" — read Anna M. Moncada Storti (@storti.bsky.social)'s "Racist Intimacies; or, The Femme Alter Ego and Her Retribution" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "This is the secret power of the ignored proton of interest: its ability to direct us one way and simultaneously take us elsewhere" — read Candace Moore's "Piqued: Compounded Interest and the Intersubjective Scene" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "In the end, I see Europa '51 as thinking through its own way of being limited. This has always been the meaning of critique" — from our latest issue, read Ramsey McGlazer's "Rossellini beyond Repair" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by differencesAn excerpt from NEGATIVE LIFE, out August 15, is up on the @differences.bsky.social website! Many thanks to @scottjackshaw.bsky.social and the journal editors. #envhum #film
- "We will not listen to the pastoral lesson. We will not remain at ecocriticism’s educative impasse" — read @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social and @jttremblay.bsky.social's "Ecocriticism against The Wall" on our online forum: differencesjournal.org/writing/ecoc...
- Reposted by differencesAn excerpt from NEGATIVE LIFE's intro is now live! Many thanks to @scottjackshaw.bsky.social and the @differences.bsky.social editors. The full polemic, co-written with @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social, is out 8/15 from @nupress.bsky.social.
- "We will not listen to the pastoral lesson. We will not remain at ecocriticism’s educative impasse" — read @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social and @jttremblay.bsky.social's "Ecocriticism against The Wall" on our online forum: differencesjournal.org/writing/ecoc...
- "We will not listen to the pastoral lesson. We will not remain at ecocriticism’s educative impasse" — read @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social and @jttremblay.bsky.social's "Ecocriticism against The Wall" on our online forum: differencesjournal.org/writing/ecoc...
- read more from Swarbrick and Tremblay in Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, forthcoming in August from @nupress.bsky.social: nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014719...
- differences 35.1 is out now! — featuring essays from Ramsey McGlazer, Joseph Darda, Candace Moore, Anna M. Storti (@storti.bsky.social), Joshua Falek (@cathexsis.bsky.social), and dee (dee) c. ardan: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by differencesWe are deeply sad to learn of the death of Elizabeth Freeman, author or editor of many books & journal issues with us, and former editor of GLQ. ow.ly/QStZ50S793w
- now available online: a recording of "Limits of Legibility: Questions of Blackness and Sexuality," a colloquium featuring Joan Copjec, Lee Edelman, David Marriott, and Selamawit D. Terrefe, moderated by Elizabeth Wilson — watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyn4...
- "Race and slavery cannot be easily integrated into Marx’s understanding of capitalism without his method, and its undergirding metaphysics, undergoing a significant shift" — read @s-msorentino.bsky.social's "With What Must Slavery Begin?" on our online forum: differencesjournal.org/writing/with...
- congrats to Dionte Harris, winner of the GLQ/MLA's "Crompton-Noll Prize for Best LGBTQ Studies Article" for "The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight" — read it here, free for three months: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "The subject of the unconscious is a subject that is out of language, and this does not change after a psychoanalysis" — read Tracy McNulty's "Inviting Catastrophe: The Welcoming of the Act in Psychoanalysis" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by differencesi saw this panel at MLA & it was gorgeous — so moving & rigorous & smart, a model of what it means to think with another person across time and even generations. beautiful that this is in the world now
- new to our online forum: "Thinking Sex with Jonathan Goldberg," a dossier edited by @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social and Madhavi Menon, featuring essays from Menon, Marcie Frank, Richard Rambuss, @zachsamalin.bsky.social, and Bethany Schneider — read it here: www.differencesjournal.org/writing/jona...
- new to our online forum: "Thinking Sex with Jonathan Goldberg," a dossier edited by @elizwilsonemory.bsky.social and Madhavi Menon, featuring essays from Menon, Marcie Frank, Richard Rambuss, @zachsamalin.bsky.social, and Bethany Schneider — read it here: www.differencesjournal.org/writing/jona...
- "Jonathan Goldberg brought thought and sex to a greater level of intimacy by working with and through language, literary and other" — read Marcie Frank's "Jonathan Goldberg's Intimate Imagination" here: differencesjournal.org/dossiers/gol...
- "What weaves its way through Sufi poetry is a conviction that desire is in fact the universal solvent, rather than the consolidator, of identity" — read Madhavi Menon's "The 'open Rs' of Layli and Majnun" here: differencesjournal.org/dossiers/gol...
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View full thread"I was reading as if I were eating it, hefting it with my hands to my mouth, the texture and smell and taste of [Jonathan's] book itself nourishing me" — read Bethany Schneider's "Jonathan Goldberg, Craftsman" here: differencesjournal.org/dossiers/gol...
- "What can be said of psychoanalysis, of its form of existence, of what it has led to, and of the crossroads it faces? First and foremost, it can be said that psychoanalysis has managed to survive" — read Gustavo Dessal's "The Social Bond Adrift" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "If Freud was correct and the event is not past, but an active, present force, then black nihilism names this present force, the repetition of severing and disrupting" — read Calvin Warren's "Black Transmission: Toward a Hieroglyph-Analysis" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- join us in Providence on March 15th for Limits of Legibility: Questions of Blackness and Sexuality — a colloquium featuring Joan Copjec, Lee Edelman, David Marriott, and Selamawit D. Terrefe, moderated by Elizabeth Wilson: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...
- differences 34.3 is out now! — edited by Elizabeth Stewart, "Social Bonds and Catastrophic Acts" features essays from Calvin Warren, Tracy McNulty, Stefan Ecks, Gustavo Dessal, Anthony C. Wexler, Rosaura Martínez Ruiz, and Peter Goodrich: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "For asylum seekers the border exists as a strangely dematerialized psychical reality, one in which the asylum seeker is cast outside of the border even if they are geographically within it" — read @zahidrc.bsky.social's "Border Hysteria" on our online forum: differencesjournal.org/writing/bord...
- Reposted by differences
For the launch of its online forum, differences has published a short essay that began life as a contribution to Muriel Spark @ 101, at Harvard's Novel Theory seminar, hosted by @drbibliomane.bsky.social. Thank you to two extraordinary academic communities.- in "Muriel Spark's Conceits," Timothy Bewes argues that Spark's novels "discover the means or the possibility of a thought that is subjectively uninhabitable," a thought "that only the novel form is capable of" — read it here: differencesjournal.org/writing/muri... /2
- Reposted by differencesI surrendered to my repetition-compulsion and wrote about Todd Haynes's latest, the glorious MAY DECEMBER, for @differences.bsky.social's new online forum. With thanks to @scottjackshaw.bsky.social for the editorial insight.
- "I am not so much led to my identity as led astray by the unconscious," writes @jttremblay.bsky.social — read "Basically the Same: Todd Haynes's May December" here: differencesjournal.org/writing/basi... /3
- we're delighted to announce the launch of our online forum, featuring contributions from Timothy Bewes, @jttremblay.bsky.social, Petra Kuppers, Irving Goh, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli: differencesjournal.org /1
- in "Muriel Spark's Conceits," Timothy Bewes argues that Spark's novels "discover the means or the possibility of a thought that is subjectively uninhabitable," a thought "that only the novel form is capable of" — read it here: differencesjournal.org/writing/muri... /2
- "I am not so much led to my identity as led astray by the unconscious," writes @jttremblay.bsky.social — read "Basically the Same: Todd Haynes's May December" here: differencesjournal.org/writing/basi... /3
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View full threadread an excerpt from Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s in-progress “Alice Henry, and the chronicle of the fall of the western plateau,” a graphic novel set in the debris fields of the future: differencesjournal.org/writing/slid... /6
- in our latest issue, @patrickteed.bsky.social argues that the "turn to the carceral positions slavery as the prison’s antecedent rather than as the regime of power that gives the prison its form" — read "Whither Abolition?" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- "Religion […] is continually made and unmade in relation to the complex discursive fields in which it circulates" — read @lhulseth.bsky.social's "Family Corporation v. Minstrel Feminism: Reproducing Religious Freedom from Hobby Lobby to Notorious R.B.G." here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- in our latest issue, Elizabeth Freeman's study of sadomedicine offers "a way of reading with symptoms, even with one’s own, rather than through or against them" — read "Parasymptomatic Reading: Medical Kink, Care, and the Surface/Depth Debate" here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
- Reposted by differencesNot beating the psychoanalysis allegations. nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014719...
- "Asexuality and psychoanalysis prove strange bedfellows. Strange, because they rarely speak. Stranger still because when they do speak, they seem to speak at cross purposes" — read @stevenswarbrick.bsky.social's "Epicures in Kissing: Asexuality in Venus & Adonis": read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
