iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Éireann @eireannmor.bsky.social · 12h

do you subscribe to a print magazine? which and why?

993

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 12h

LRB, bookforum, looking for others so following this thread 🙏

120

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 15h

i’m just glad we reconfigured the entire postwar university to promote this before the bubble burst

1133

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 15h

wow how could anyone have possibly predicted this

2287

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Colin M. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 14/10/2026

it's not that mass politics and public opinion don't matter any more -- they just matter in different ways and configurations against state power in unconsolidated competitive authoritarian states, and pretending they're still playing the democratic role is bad news

05612

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

we are deep into the counterrevolution now

010

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

"The recommendations are asking the university to review several ... socio-cultural degrees, including those studying African, African American, Jewish, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Women’s studies."

"The recommendations are asking the university to review several language degrees, including those in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, Korean, & linguistics; and socio-cultural degrees, including those studying African, African American, Jewish, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Women’s studies. Global & International Studies and economics at the Penn State Liberal Arts College are also to be placed under review, according to university records.

1114

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

“What I sought to do in this essay … was to examine how literature approached a theoretical impasse that political theory simply ignored.” Emma is being far too modest here & this is a fantastic précis of an essay that shows how apprenticeship demolished the entire inner logic of contract theory 💥

1183

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

It wasn’t re: Sedgwick actually (organic, solitary, inspired by psomiades) but very psyched you’re doing BW soon—I’ve never taught it!

010

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Devin Garofalo @devingarofalo.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE out in the wild — and in time for Johnson’s birthday month! Don’t have editor copies yet, but amazing to see it exists! ✨🥳✨ (Impeccable work from our boom model, Krobus, who is now a member of the collective.) nupress.northwestern.edu/979889948066...

A black cat serving as a book stand for THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE, which sports a Barbie-pink cover.

36210

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Rubin's description of how a "gift of women" joins men into new relations of kinship ("brotherhood") is a pretty tidy account of why fraternities are machines for generating not just rape but gang rape & regulation likely won't help, since securing those relations is the institution's entire point.

The result of a gift of women is more profound than the result of other gift
transactions, because the relationship thus established is not just one of reciprocity,
but one of kinship.

021

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Okay last news-related thought, after an incredible discussion with KP and a handful of brilliant Georgetown senior English students, and inspired by KP's own comments in our short conversation afterwards; +

110

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

"But we are not only oppressed as women; we are oppressed by having to *be* women—or men as the case may be." [update: the great Kathy Psomiades, author of Primitive Marriage and my PhD advisor (!!!), will be joining the Zoom, unreal]

But we are not only oppressed as women; we are oppressed by having
to be women—or men as the case may be. I personally feel that the feminist
movement must dream of even more than the elimination of the oppression
of women. It must dream of the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex
roles. The dream I find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless
(though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to
who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love

291

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

yes it goes *so* hard and then, after this, just keeps going—astonishing 🔥

010

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

man this is the uncut true stuff, c 1975; incredible

Rubin: We cannot dismantle something that we underestimate or do not
understand. The oppression of women is deep; equal pay, equal work, and all
the female politicians in the world will not extirpate the roots of sexism. Lévi-Strauss
and Freud elucidate what would otherwise be poorly perceived parts of
the deep structures of sex oppression. They serve as reminders of the intractability
and magnitude of what we fight, and their analyses provide preliminary
charts of the social machinery we must rearrange.

2124

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

i feel like this absolutely sick shit is also an ad for the incredible ACLA seminar put together by Kasia & Elisha on "Voices Without Persons" @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social @elishacohn.bsky.social www.acla.org/seminar/f84f...

VOICES WITHOUT PERSONS:

What is voice without personhood? Voice typically suggests a person speaking, or, perhaps, a disembodied imitation of human speech, or a non-human entity that is anthropomorphized through the very act of speaking. Under what circumstances does voice elude the legal regime of the person, propose alternative modes of subjectivity or perception, or eschew categories of identity? How and when does voice constitute evidence for conceptually driven models of advocacy, identity, or critique, especially under fraught conditions of enunciation?

This seminar invites approaches to the complexity of narrative that might build on recent scholarship in literary studies on form, media, science/technology, and environment that typically operate at scales beyond the stylistics of voice, as well as debates about the centrality of voice as the foundation of lyric poetry. How can voice be conceived differently across cultural and linguistic traditions, historical moments, or even genres? How have distinctive voices such as lyricism, free indirect discourse, or first-person narration changed and expanded? Do concepts of voice, style, and medium necessarily involve the material conditions of personhood or impersonality? What aspects of narrative voice are not captured by media studies or the newest formalisms? How can attention to the poetics of narrative voice contribute to our disciplines' advocacy for literature's distinctiveness? What modes of critique could be animated by a turn to voice, the reader, or the addressee beyond concepts of the person?

1122

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Derek Gottlieb @derekgottliebphd.com · 13/10/2026

Toril is always must-read in general, but this piece in particular needs to be enshrined somewhere.

031

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Rubin on the catastrophic production of normalcy: "Just as the social forms of labor demand certain kinds of personality, the social forms of sex and gender demand certain kinds of people."

Rubin: Just as the social forms of labor demand certain kinds of personality, the social forms of sex and gender demand certain kinds of people

1141

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

its completely impossible!! i told them it was the deep end and we could jump in together and some of them were up for it! 💙

010

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

heyo my seniors all wanted to do an extra session on this entirely voluntarily and outside of regular class time, so maybe the kids are okay

Gayle Rubin's 1975 essay:
The Traffic in Women
Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex
The literature on women—both feminist and antifeminist—is a long rumination
on the question of the nature and genesis of women’s oppression and
social subordination. The question is not a trivial one, since the answers given
it determine our visions for the future, and our evaluation of whether or not it
is realistic to hope for a sexually egalitarian society.

4610

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Checking in on Jacobin

97967101

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

(surprisingly generous not bc TM isn't generous, ofc, but bc the subject might have fairly elicited a much less reparative or pedagogically-framed analysis)

1161

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

back in 2003, Toril Moi wrote a surprisingly generously-minded article for the Duke grad newsletter (!), i.e. directed at a specific grad cohort & institution, about the figure of the "theory boy," which has also always, for me, described the idiots of jacobin torilmoi.com/wp-content/u...

The situation I want to look at here is the graduate classroom, the kind of seminar that most of us in the humanities
engage in every week. (I shall discuss gender. But similar mechanisms can—and will—produce classrooms divided by race, sexuality or social class.) Every year some female graduate students
tell me that they feel overlooked, marginalized, silenced in
some seminars. They paint a picture of classrooms where the
alpha males—so-called “theory boys”—are encouraged to hold
forth in impossibly obscure language, but where their own
interventions elicit no response. These women, in short, say
that they are not listened to, that they are not taken seriously,
and that they get the impression that their perceptions of the
matter at hand are of no interest to anyone else.

Such experiences tend to reproduce a particularly clichéd
ideology in which theory and abstract thought are thought to
belong to men and masculinity, and women are imagined to be
the bearers of emotional, personal, practical concerns. In
a system that grants far more symbolic capital, far more intellectual power, to abstract theorizing than to, say, concrete investigations of particular cases, these women lose out in the battle
for symbolic capital. This is bad for their relationship to the
field they love, and it is bad for their careers in and out of graduate school. This is sexism, and all this goes to show that sexist
effects often arise from the interactions of people who have no
sexist intentions at all.

26911

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

surreal times. any attempt by polite institutions to address "polarization" will probably need to start from the fact that anyone involved in the decisionmaking or enforcement apparatuses of this administration, at any level, is a criminal and not an interlocutor

170

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

i'm so glad things straightened out S -- sounds like it was scary 💙

110

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Oh wow this is coming directly to my class— thanks you two! Also: yikes

010

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

no and no some more

38412

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

happy nobel prize to anne carson, who read emily brontë so hard & well that her poem about that encounter opens up your whole body 🙏💙 www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48636/...

Whacher,
Emily’s habitual spelling of this word,
has caused confusion.
For example

in the first line of the poem printed Tell me, whether, is it winter?
in the Shakespeare Head edition.
But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.
She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.

0586

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’m sure I’m not the only one that saw the video of this man putting himself between French national police and student protestors circulating yesterday.

5594143

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

tyler @walletcheck.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

holy hell this is so fuckin cool—it's like a dream come true to see Stuart Hall's mind at work

0122

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

🚨 ALERT 🚨: All of Stuart Hall's notebooks have been digitized and are freely available to browse and read??? stuarthalldigital.bham.ac.uk/archival_mat...

Stuart Hall notebook: NOTES ON THE REPRODUCTION OF IDEOLOGIES AND THE MEDIA (Orange notebook, "Summit Students Pad")

Stuart Hall notebook page with headline: "Problems for a Marxist Theory of the Media" and a series of bulletpoints. Lined notebook paper with black handwriting.

4358199

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Maria BOO!stillos @mariabustillos.com · 07/10/2026

There's no such thing as 'creatives' and also it is not a noun! Art and culture = human beings making and sharing things, that is all it is

0144

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

[“kids don’t read books anymore!” Well try *this* on for size: a 300+ pp monograph densely packed w verrry long close readings!!!]

030

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Thanks so much Matthew— wd love to know what you think if you get a chance to get into it 🌿

010

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s true and I loved it!! 💙🎉

010

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

no but looking it up now-- thank you! I see that my citation of your great post about Canvas didn't become a link, sorry! [I have so appreciated & learned from your work on this topic over the years, Dan, online and in print 🙏]

010

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

All of the above will seem quaint & hilariously outdated (it already does!) under the corporate consolidation of information we're embarking on now: total algorithmic control of worldviews, ideological shaping of mass culture on a scale we've never known, & for which we have no theoretical roadmap.

171

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

AO Scott: "The audience necessary to sustain original and ambitious work is narcotized by algorithms or distracted by doomscrolling." // The horror film eyeball [end]

A.O. Scott, on retiring as film critic for the NYT, 3/17/2023: “The current apocalypse [in the film industry] is that streaming and Covid anxiety are conspiring to kill off moviegoing as we have known it, leaving a handful of I.P.-driven blockbusters and horror movies to keep theaters in business while we mostly sit at home bingeing docuseries, dystopias and the occasional art-film guilt trip. Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. The cultural space in which the movies I care most about have flourished seems to be shrinking. The audience necessary to sustain original and ambitious work is narcotized by algorithms or distracted by doomscrolling. The state of the movies is very bad.”

Composite picture of ten film posters that all show a closeup of an eyeball

160

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"In addition to owning Canvas, KKR also owns Simon & Schuster, OverDrive, bankrupted Toys R Us, and bought nursing homes that became sites of abuse & neglect" —@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social // Christmas Under the Stars

Post by Dan Sinykin about the ownership of Canvas, Simon&Schuster, etc all by KKR-- i.e. the capture of media by private equity

Slide taken from now-lost twitter post that shows all the Hallmark Christmas movies together, with nearly identical white couples in nearly identical poses

161

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Ultra-Concentrated Media / "The routine translation of everything...into the schema of mechanical reproducability." +

Chart showing "Ultra Concentrated Media" and showing the consolidation of media companies c. 2015? Again now completely obsolete

161

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

delighted to share with you a few slides from my powerpoint on the culture industry, which I first made in 2015 (?), pre-AI, and have added to, little by little, over the years, as the processes of homogenization have intensified & the smothering sameness of mainstream ideas become more choking: +

Slide from Culture Industry lecture: The Culture Industry / Art Under Late Capitalism. "The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry" (99).

Diagram from mid 2010s showing the consolidation of media conglomerates in publishing-- now hilariously (?) obsolete

23712

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

every single one of these linked processes stems from thinking of education in general, & higher ed in particular, as a resource frontier: a virgin territory or untapped resource of as-yet uncaptured potential wealth that now must be harvested / optimized / extracted. this mindset is our true target

2267

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

this insight helps make sense of a surprising number of situations that seem to have nothing at all to do with schoolyards

050

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Jack Lynch @jacklynch000.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Rutgers athletics is running a deficit of more than $100 million a year. When I was chair of the English department we rarely lost even HALF that.

3181

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

[edit] The book Venn I am going to suggest: This is WHO: American Oligarchs by Andrea Bernstein + This is WHY: Caliban & Witch + This is HOW: Capital Is Dead by McKenzie Wark anyone you see missing in that formulation is in: Golden Gulag.

747176

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Signs that your society has abandoned all value systems that aren’t related to money: don’t tear up the deep sea floor for cash,, because it is too expensive

050