I love how many of you want to talk about being called out. There’s something happening right now with complicity—or maybe, being tired of complicity as our primary stance. When things are so dark, we have a habit of dropping our agency entirely, giving in. As Natalie Adler writes in the latest issue of Lux,

The vibe is “no ethical consumption under capitalism, babe, so let’s buy ourselves treats until we’re dead.”

Obviously, it me. I can absolutely feel how I get lazy in despair. We could argue about whether that is in fact laziness, but I’m using that word for now to get at the kind of flopping over into compliance that I see myself doing all too often. Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, etc. I’m interested in how to be realistic and self-compassionate without exactly giving in. So I’m excited by this rising critique of treat-based (non-) activism.

At the core of this critique I see a question of scale. In her critique of Jia Tolentino’s opinions on stealing, very helpfully makes a distinction between what it means to be complicit in trivial actions (iced coffee in a singe-use cup) versus complicity in, say, shooting someone. (Thank you for sending me to both the Berg and the Adler!) Berg writes:

Ethical concern should track impact, and moralizing trivial actions is dangerous. It exhausts both individual attention and collective energy, leaving us with little resources for things that matter more: clean energy policy, public transit.

This point was very helpful to me, and unlocked something in my capacity to pause my own habit of incessantly admitting my complicity through daily actions. Berg helps me to understand that this habit is primarily clouding the field— of conversation, of activism, of (already scare) resource—in such a way that the field then becomes entirely about our tiny individual action, successfully re-focusing us on the individual and thus away from the collective (corporate, institutional, governmental) critique that could actually effect broad-scale change.

Maybe I don’t need to be forgiven for my plastic cup. Maybe that’s a waste of precious time. Could we stop? What are we afraid of that keeps us doing that behavior? Certainly we’re afraid of being called out if we don’t mark our complicity first. But also—as someone interested in language and narrative—I’m wondering what’s hiding in our thinking when we crowd it with complicity. What thinking becomes possible when we stop crowding the field that way?

Which brings me to the latest book I found utterly delightful, Krys Malcolm Belc’s What I Made For Dinner, forthcoming in June. Belc’s prior book, The Natural Mother of the Child, was one of the very few pregnancy-related books I genuinely enjoyed when I was pregnant. Belc’s queering of parenthood in that book is insistently non-dogmatic, tenaciously nuanced and specific, refusing to take on the tired tropes of pregnancy and parenting while warmly welcoming what feels true to himself, even when it refuses a linear gender transition.

So I was not surprised to find the same generous aesthetic in Belc’s second book, a book formulated around cooking for his family during the pandemic, the food celebrities who guide him, and his decision to become pregnant a second time. In organizing each chapter around one food celebrity, Belc acknowledges in several ways the shortcomings of each of these people, and the way in which their performance of gender (they are all cis women) differs from his own. But, crucially (unusually) picking on them is not the point. Critiquing them is not what makes the thinking in this work sing.

The work sings because Belc is not trying to prove his betterness. He situates himself (within a family, a set of cultures, a neuropsychology, a place) without trying to be better than other people’s version of those things or mourning his version. Rarely do I come across thinking suffused with enoughness that has so little to prove. It’s a delight to read.

Belc narrates himself as complicit, but in a way that does not take up space in the story. For example, we see him watching a food video holding his phone in one hand and a new baby in the other when another kid comes up and asks what he is watching. No time is spent on feeling bad about this, children exposed to screens, blah blah blah.

Belc has bigger fish to fry (!) than feeling bad about the (figurative) single-use cup. The complicity is there in the impossibility of being a perfect parent at all times to four children, in the screen time, in the sourcing of food. It’s not ignored, but it’s not centered. The dailyness and domesticity of this book steadies and grounds it, preventing it from getting too limited on a singular, stable self. Though the book is marketed as a memoir, I’d call it more a book-length essay for its citational, spiraling theorizing of how we learn, how we shape one another, what drives us toward new information, and how to continue to orient toward curiosity and change, even in middle-age, even in the flurry of a demanding life.

Reading Belc, I was reminded of Ann Pellegrini and ’s Gender Without Identity, in which they frame “gender as having a history of becoming.” This frame accepts the influence of culture on our genders and upholds our capacities to continue to become.

Belc understands and admits the desire to feel slotted and needed in a role—one of the few places I’ve seen someone acknowledge this as a motivator to have children—but in that admission opens his work to more composite questions about desire, drive and survival. These move as themes in a “history of becoming” instead of toward closure. Pellegrini and Saketopoulou describe gender as a “highly mobile process,” which Belc shows us too, as he goes on and off and on testosterone, as he births a child and then finds himself desiring another, as he re-places his own neurodivergence in the narrative of his life choices, employments and capacities.

How does all this work on complicity? Reading Belc and Pellegrini and Saketopoulou together, I feel less lazy in despair. I see guides for continuing that are not about just giving in and getting treats (though Belc gets plenty of those!). I sense a morality that is less about marking our territory for self branding, and more about inviting ourselves into “mobile processes.” I think: I have done X, and there were reasons I did, conditions that caused that behavior—but what does it make possible now? It is possible we could mark the plastic cup as a choice we made or were influenced by without it being the endpoint in the confirmation of our politics.

I recently revisited my own so-called guilty pleasure food personality, of 101 Cookbooks fame. I’ve been having trouble re-finding my love of cooking since becoming a parent, so I’ve been taking cookbooks out of the library. The cookbooks then sit on the dining room table for my partner and I to leaf through over breakfast — I remember years ago in Oakland a friend calling us out on this shared habit, oh the weird joy of skimming cookbook while eating other food. Right now we have a few newer cookbooks on the table, along with Heidi Swanson’ entire oeuvre.

I’m attached to Heidi Swanson because she was really around when I was learning to cook. I read her blog in my tippy dumpstered plastic chair in the bay window on South Van Ness in San Francisco, back when most of my friends lived within a few blocks of me and hanging out was dreamily easy, and back when I was first falling in love with my partner. On one of our first dates, I merged two Heidi Swanson recipes to make us a mushroom soup. Heidi’s recipes were so simple she made me feel empowered to tweak.

I feel guilty about my affection for Heidi because she is the prototypical nice white lady floofing her tunic through Bay Area farmer’s markets and what does she even live on? ? Flipping through her cookbook Near & Far last week, my partner said, perfectly, “wow, she really just went to other countries and stole their recipes, huh?” Ah yes, Heidi Swanson, the ultimate colonialist 2010s food blogger. But Swanson is, for better and worse, a part of my “history of becoming”!

Thank god I was reading Belc’s book this month, too— it managed to interrupt me before I spent much time feeling badly about this. Yes, I have also made an effort to take out cookbooks written by BIPOC people and people who inherited the cuisines they are writing about. Will these library loans make a difference in the violence of colonialism? Absolutely not.

I’m glad to have help not messing around with complicity just to prove I can mark myself with it. As my friend Harriet said at her book launch last week: “now that I am free of this project, who knows what I will be able to do.” Amen. What could you learn if you were done proving?

Thank you for reading,

Leora

PS. If you too are lost in your cooking, I will say, I triumphantly managed to make a derivation of white beans and cabbage over orzo instead of potatoes — extremely advanced tweak!

I mentioned in my last post that I’d been spending some time with Alexis Kyle Mitchell, getting to know her work and its unique construction of intimacy. I’m excited to share this conversation between us, up today in Parapraxis, which begins from The Goal of Our Health, Alexis’ recent show at JOAN in Los Angeles.

The first time I saw Alexis’ work, I felt it knew me. It saw me, but also saw past me, a kind of spooky recognition, like it knew what I was hiding. I pulled out my old “Intro to Phenomenology” text from college—what was “Dasein” again? The first time I read Heidegger I had also felt it saw past me. It saw the world that already was but that I had not been fully equipped to recognize or communicate.

We should all be so lucky to come across art even once or twice in a lifetime that recognizes us in this way: that calls us into more being, further being. And Alexis’ work (unlike Heidegger’s) doesn’t choosing to ally itself with Nazism—! This work actually engages, instead, with critically expansive thinking on eugenics and fascism. Alexis’ work asks each of us to be better thinkers about our own choices, how we participate in innately flawed and impure systems of organizing and identifying ourselves.

I never feel shamed by Alexis’ work, even when it calls me out of some kind of hiding. More, it asks me to be honest about what I’m hiding or cloaking. Perhaps that honesty means continuing to keep some things cloaked. An authentic narrative is never whole. An authentic person can never be revealed in their entirety.

Since the first time I saw Alexis’ film The Treasury of Human Inheritance, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is showing me about intellectual and political rigor, disability and weakness, and how much of the personal is necessary to make meaning and kinship. I’m grateful for our conversation in Parapraxis for how it investigates what we inherit in our bodies and minds, how we integrate knowledge, and the patterns (spiritual, intellectual, medical, relational) that we use to bring meaning to difficulty.

What does it mean to feel recognized by someone else’s work? And how does this parallel (and not parallel) what it means to feel recognized by someone else’s experience? How much of a self must be revealed in order to cultivate connection, while leaving space for the un-categorizable, respecting the unsayable, refraining from violently enforcing the categorical? Alexis’ work is a guide for me in these questions, (already long-term, continuous obsessions of mine). The Goal of Our Health reveals a shattered, chameleonic version of self that I feel at home with, honest alongside.

To be honest as shattered, honestly shattered—a goal of this newsletter if there is any! In a reading group that grew out of Alexis’ exhibition, we recently finished discussing Jasbir Puar’s the Right to Maim. I was nervous to come to the final meeting because finishing this book left me profoundly sad in a way that blotted out my capacity to say almost anything “Smart” about the text. Puar’s analysis of debility and violence felt not only pertinent but immersive—in the nearly-ten years since Puar’s book was written we have been drenched in the tactics of debilitation. It is useful to have this framework, but also horrifying how much worse it has gotten. (It’s important to note that an update is coming, with Puar’s thinking renewed and extended in This Death Is Not One, forthcoming from bilna’es, including a new preface on the thinking of The Right to Maim applied now.)

“I’m feeling pretty depressed,” I shared with the group hesitantly, “about how effective critical texts can be.” I know that academic text is not activism, and that reading groups are not activism, and the most energizing reading groups I have been apart of over the years are adjacent to organizing, overlapping with people’s political work and fueling it. They also fuel and correspond with our feelings, political or otherwise.

So it was gratifying that other members of this group also expressed sadness, even depression, as a primary result of finishing Puar’s book. It is gratifying and exceptional when I find myself in intellectual and critical community that welcomes feeling and affect because we know these are effective and we want to be affected.

In this political moment, it is extremely easy (if not imperative) to be blanked out, obliterated, numbed, exhausted. When I do feel this way, I try to forgive myself and understand it as part a range of adult reactions. Reading Melanie Klein a few weeks ago with a different group of brilliant thinkers, a friend was able to explain the “depressive position” in a way that has never clicked for me before: as a necessary posture we take when we realize that people are flawed and we cannot get everything we want from them. That the world (in any given moment) is flawed and we cannot get everything we want from it.

Again, I understand and try to accept when I feel numb, or when numbness is my primary reaction. But whenever I have the opportunity to be deeply affected, I try to take it. I try to participate in it. I try to notice what parts of my self come alive or activated—even if I ashamed or deeply sad as part of this activation.

In preparation for our conversation in Parapaxis, Alexis mentioned to me that her recent work (and balance of creative work vs other kinds) has made her a less compartmentalized person than she’s ever been. I feel I’m being de-compartmentalized by engaging with Alexis and her work, and I hope it picks you apart a bit too. You can engage with some of her work online, and her next show opens in October 2026.

Thank you for reading,

Leora

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