Rethinking the Unbearable Weight of Self-Promotion

Their lack of awareness about those identities generally means their body falls into a multiplicity of default identities that uphold the social hierarchy of bodies. The luxury of not having to think about one’s body always comes at another body’s expense.

In Hegelian terms, we began with an urgent thesis: The world is fucked; I must — and can — save it. Hope will be my engine. But sooner or later we run into an immovable antithesis: The world will not be saved. It is what it is. And, as such,

As McLain put it, “We are not robots. We are just living in a constant state of trauma.”

At one point in class, a student expressed the belief that if every human is supposed to define and defend themselves as a fixed, rigid brand, then humanity itself was “being made less human”—less capable of changing and evolving, even in the face of pressing ecological and political crises.