Letters to the Editors
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Letter
The Law's Fundamentally Violent Character
Dear UTA, As a radical lawyer and legal scholar with over a decade of experience in activist legal defense (and – full disclosure – as a former Upping the Anti Advisory Board member), I eagerly awaited your last editorial. However, despite its historical breadth, “The Courtroom and the Street:...
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Letter
Solidarity & Internationalism
Dear UTA, It was with utmost appreciation that I read Shourideh Molavi and Niloofar Golkar’s analysis of the 2009 revolutionary movement in Iran. The radical Left’s unfortunate confusion with resect to Iran did not, of course, begin with the recent movement. One can hardly find a greater betraya…
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Letter
We Are the Ones
Dear UTA, When I saw Victoria Law’s article, “Protection Without Police: North American Community Responses to Violence in the 1970s and Today” in UTA 12 (conveniently on the back of the toilet of a sweet friend’s bathroom) I jumped for joy, or something like it. I’m a feminist nerd, so I…
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Letter
No Raw Energy
Dear UTA, It’s certainly the case that, in North America, the Right has been more successful than the Left in mobilizing and expanding its constituency in the wake of the current economic crisis. And clearly there’s a dimension of affective investment that’s crucial to understanding it’s app…
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Letter
The Way Out of the Desert
Dear UTA, In “The Right Desires: Their Base and Ours,” you laid out with stark clarity the situation we face with Right-wing populist movements in Canada, the US, and Europe. Progressive forces must engage in counter-recruitment; we must recognize the real anger and fear that motivates Right-win…
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Letter
Religion and Disaffection
Dear UTA, Your Editorial regarding the political magnetism of the right is a welcome conversation piece for a Left too often unable to grasp that political subjectivity is messy, contingent, and unpredictable, and evades the tidy categories of the secular. “The criticism of religion is the beginni…
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Letter
Building Character
Dear UTA, Recently, I sat in a comfortably soft chair in the large, open sanctuary of the Japanese Gospel Church of Toronto my grandparents’ church. They’d been attending this church for decades, ever since they’d come to Canada. I was there because it was the last service they would attend be…
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Letter
Subjectivity, Normalization, and the New Enclosures
Dear UTA, I was very pleased to read the interview with Ladelle McWhorter in UTA 11. Her stimulating work on bodies, power, and the effects of sexual, gendered, and racial difference is vital to understanding the ongoing (re)production of domination and the possibilities for resistance. McWhorter’...
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Letter
Racism and Sexual Oppression Today
Dear UTA, A central concern amongst critical queer and trans activists and academics over the past decade has been the increasing collusion of mainstream lesbian and gay organizations with racist forms of cultural representation and production, imperialism, state power, and economic injustice. It se…
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Letter
The Black Bloc and the New Society
Dear UTA, First and foremost, thank you for the contributions made in the editorial “Behind the Mask: Violence and Representational Politics” (UTA 11). In the midst of heavy criticism and dismissal both from within and outside movement circles, it was refreshing to read an article that was suppo…
