Elisa Gonzalez
The Air We Move Through | Rhetoric, Bureaucracy, and the Immigration Debate
Elisa Gonzalez
In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a privately operated immigration detention center in Irwin County, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint that alleged “jarring medical neglect” at the facility. The brief was 27 pages long, but it was only the contents of a page-and-a-half (section 4, subsection D) that caught the public’s imagination: hysterectomies conducted without the consent or knowledge of migrant women. Wooten’s account of a “uterus collector”...
A Defensive Posture
Elisa Gonzalez
For the last few years, I’ve privately called myself a “feminist-nihilist” or “nihilist-feminist,” which is both a bad joke and a halfway lie — if only because “nihilism” doesn’t actually mean what I mean. Nor do I mean apathy or indifference. My relationship to contemporary feminism resembles my youthful allegiance to a Christian god: something that must exist (for reasons that can be more or less defined as “better that...
“Steered by the Reactionary” | What To Do About Feminism
Elisa Gonzalez
For a long time now, we’ve had the sense that feminism is in trouble. In the years before the pandemic, its most prominent battles — the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, #MeToo, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, “Nevertheless, she persisted” — were about figureheads. These days, symbols no longer seem adequate, or even all that meaningful. The professions (teaching, nursing, eldercare) that have been most overtaxed and underprotected during the...
Essay | Poetry
Elisa Gonzalez
Before, no rain fell because I needed none — good in any case, because, Homer writes, Gods are daunting when they appear as they are. A student emails that class is a struggle (in a sense): I need help, he says, understanding the Problems of Mass Incarnation. In the garden, sunflower heads hoist and swing. Rain-shadow jumps through the door. Yesterday my bicycle ran over a yellow snake. Don’t we...