Writing a Hard and Passing Rain

This essay is an experiment in “auto-critical” writing (after Maggie Nelson and others) that puts together ideas about intersectional critique, feminism, and queer utopias in a dance of identities, stories, and lists. The intersecting and yet discrete storylines connect the abstract and concrete, the mundane and the life shifting, the visible and the invisible, even while they hold these things apart. I take as my provocation the question posed in the essay about auto-critical scholarship that turns one thing into something else, balancing “both sides” of that equation, and pausing to enjoy the “hard and passing rain” of writing, future-bound, our desires and designs for our lives.