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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Consider the exclamation mark Medieval in origin, this blink of ink has a gift for controversy A single point can signal a moment of joy or incredulity Use two or more, though, and risk being dismissed as shrill or shouty, especially if you are a woman   Feminist thinker and independent scholar Sara Ahmed has written 11 books, but her latest, Complaint! (2021), is the only one to employ an exclamation in its title Yet to immerse oneself in her body of work – which includes several public lectures, seminars and workshops – is to feel an intensification of everyday experience Her works are all attuned to affect, wilful subjects, and the phenomenology of trying to make yourself heard while living in a marked body: as an ‘unhappy queer’,’ a ‘melancholic migrant’, a woman and/or person of colour As Ahmed wrote in What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), ‘Sometimes, I feel like I am an exclamation point, as if in being I am shrieking’   In that book, a roving work of phenomenology, she examines ‘use as technique’ by closely examining a constellation of things, including an empty tube of toothpaste, a postbox, an arm and Jeremy Bentham’s desiccated body She shows how utilitarianism was historically used to shape the subjectivities of those deemed least desirable and most disposable – the poor, the incarcerated, the orphaned and the unhoused   What’s the Use? is the final book in a trilogy that began with The Promise of Happiness (2010), which looks at the regulatory uses of happiness, followed by Willful Subjects (2014), which valorises ‘wilfulness’ – a disposition towards disobedience, or to be ‘what gets in the way of what is on the way’ – as a way for feminists and minority groups to assert agency In its own way, each of her books tracks, with forensic care and attention, the peristalsis of power: what feeds it, what impedes it, what lubricates its sinuous passage through the halls of institutions and everyday life Bodies, for Ahmed, are a locus of feminist investigation Having an ‘out of skin’ experience – being at odds with the

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Art

January 2017

New Communities

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty...

Art

October 2014

For the Motherboard

Vanessa Hodgkinson

James Bridle

Art

October 2014

Please click on the links below to download, print and assemble (instructions in slideshow above) Vanessa Hodgkinson’s For the Motherboard:...

fiction

Issue No. 3

Rehearsal Room

KJ Orr

fiction

Issue No. 3

He was one of those people you see every day and start to believe you know when in fact...

 

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