I.D. A (Professional)

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).

She continues to situate her work within transnational feminist cultural studies with her next project, focusing on fashion, citizenship and transnationality. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and author of multiple essays on Asian American, queer, and punk subcultures, digital technologies, and Vietnamese diasporic culture, published in academic collections, on-line publications and popular magazines.

I.D. B (Multisubcultural)

I'm a punk rock expatriate who still can't manage to get away. When I was a teenager I used to stare at blurred photographs of leather-clad punk rockers rioting in the streets, their arms in mid-motion throwing or breaking, the pin-ups of my suburban daydreams. Now I sigh (deeply) for theory and persons who can impress me with their critical acumen. If I'm lucky, they used to be the punk rockers too.

I.D. C (Historical)

I've done some version of this since 1997. The title of this site comes from a Bikini Kill song called, "Suck My Left One," and it goes like this: Sister sister, where did we go wrong? / Tell me what the fuck we're doing here / Why are all the boys acting strange? / We've got to show them we're worse than queer! Because political and cultural critique is a part of my everyday life, this is what my site has consisted of (mostly) over the years: keeping my critical tongue sharp and making my brain work. Ask me why and I'll quote Michel Foucault, who once said:

Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: Why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence.... The essence of our life consists, after all, in the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.