The Netflix hit Tidying Up with Marie Kondo has inspired so many people to purge their homes of excess that there has been a noticeable increase both in the number of items donated to charity and in the purchase of storage totes and bins. Kondo’s approach hinges on evaluating whether a belonging sparks joy, and if not, thanking it for its service and discarding it, ideally through donation. Tidying Up encourages the viewers as well as the participants, who are reorganizing th

I’ve been troubled by the remarks made about “diversity” by other straight white men in public spheres I occupy lately: namely being a Nebraska resident and an avid reader of comics. First, as a Nebraskan, I find myself troubled by the comments about Diversity made recently by Senator Steve Erdman (covered here by the Washington Post). Erdman writes: "Recent Left-wing movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, have undoubtedly put tremendous pressure upon the administr

My body became different. Over the span of a year and a half the body that I knew became smaller, got stronger, ate new things, felt different. Discussions of weight loss are often shrouded in the language of “newness,” as if the person inside the body went to a car dealership and traded their Toyota for a sleek new Lexus, furnished with that new car smell. Commentary surrounding the “new body” is eerily similar to that of trading out an older car for a new one: “congratulati

The concept of the imagination is embedded in the idea that there’s an autonomous human subject—a unified self—to do the imagining. But the self has become decentered, as we no longer take it for granted that the humanist version of a unified, a priori subject exists. Posthumanist theories have challenged the construction of the humanist dialectics that this concept is grounded in: mind vs. body, human vs. animal, self vs. other, subject vs. object. Moreover, postmodern theor

My weight loss journey began on a treadmill, an elliptical machine, a stair-master. I ran, pumped, wheezed, sweated exclusively in the cardio sections of every gym I visited. Girlish bodies with high ponytails, bright tank-tops, dark sneakers, sleek leggings filled these spaces. My body looked enough like theirs that, in the beginning, I understood this to be my place. The weight room belonged to boy bodies, boy builds, boy hands. From the treadmill, I felt boy eyes watch my