Elisa Gonzalez
Brutality and Opacity | Birthright Citizenship Under Attack
Elisa Gonzalez
Among the barrage of edicts issued by Trump in the early days of his second term was Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which seeks to redefine the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment by revoking birthright citizenship for the children of all undocumented, and some authorized, immigrants. Judge John Coughenour, the Reagan appointee who first stayed the order, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” So far,...
Fraud Everywhere
Elisa Gonzalez
On July 18, 2019, I dialed the National Visa Center 53 times. If the queue was full — it often was — the automated system played a short message, then ended the call. If it wasn’t, the system played a short message and placed me on hold. After two and a half hours, the person I eventually reached couldn’t solve my problem. Afterwards, I wept as hard as a despairing...
No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions
Elisa Gonzalez
In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...
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...
