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Alternative and Mainstream Press Publications


I've been writing for alternative and mainstream non-academic publications for over ten years. Here are some of those publications, including my Punk Planet columns. There are some more recent columns that still need to be formatted and added here.

  • Punk Planet 66
    January/February 2005: Former friends turned patriots and a Reagan counter-memorial.
  • Punk Planet ??
    Thoughts on the 2003 documentary Afropunk (dir. James Spooner). If anyone knows what issue this appeared in, I would be grateful for the information.
  • Punk Planet ??
    A meditation on the second greatest underrated teen film of the 1980s, Times Square (1980), and the politics of being queer in public. If anyone knows what issue this appeared in, I would be grateful for the information.
  • Punk Planet 56
    July/August 2003: Drag kings, Boy Bands Against War, and how to lasso national affect for the powers of good.
  • Punk Planet 54
    March/April 2003: Transitions and high school reunions.
  • Punk Planet 47
    January/February 2002: This column pieces together entries I wrote in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, in response to popular and governmental discourses about mourning, militancy, and Muslims.
  • Punk Planet 45
    September/October 2001: I wrote about the best underrated teen film of the 1980s, The Legend of Billie Jean, and the politics of popular culture.
  • Punk Planet 43
    May/June 2001: This column is currently MIA.
  • Punk Planet 42
    March/April 2001: I wrote this about a trip to Alcatraz, and the politics of prison tourism. It was also reprinted at poppolitics.com.
  • Punk Planet 41
    January/February 2001: This is an experiment in collaboration. I wrote about the photography of violence (specifically lynching) and its subsequent reproduction as art book, record sleeve or humanitarian aid. Dwayne Dixon at the Literacy Through Photography program at Duke University responded, comprising the other half of this column.
  • Punk Planet 40
    November/December 2000: This was adapted from a keynote address I gave at a conference. It addresses riot grrrl and the failure of the "transformative" powers of love as a political strategy.
  • Punk Planet 38
    July/August 2000: This column is a number of pieces strung together with a common theme of disturbance, mainly mine, about the Ho Chi Minh protests, abortion rights activism, and growing up and older.
  • Punk Planet 37
    May/June 2000: I wrote this column about race and punk rock after watching Beyond the Screams/Mas Alla los Gritos, a half-hour documentary about Chicano/Latino participation in punk rock/hardcore.
  • Punk Planet 35
    January/February 2000: My summer road trip across the Midwest: strikes, hunger, personal histories, medical displays, and more.
  • Punk Planet 34
    November/December 1999: I read an essay in the previous issue about a theory for "moving beyond" race -- breeding racial difference into nothingness, or more appropriately, "lightness." A column about nationalist heteronormativity disguised as radical liberation, among other things, and talk about sex as a site for racial terror and desire.
  • Punk Planet 33
    September/October 1999: A topic I think way too much about: the interpenetration of sex, race, and capital. How do we account for sex? Does it have a history? Where does your vibrator come from, anyway?
  • Punk Planet 32
    July/August 1999: My first column, I wrote about Cuba, Viet Nam, and revolutionary nostalgia.

Orientalist Kitsch
An essay I wrote specifically for poppolitics.com about the 2002 Abercrombie & Fitch nation-wide controversy over a line of t-shirts. I argue for an analytic specificity in our activist responses to these historical revisions in American commodity culture.

100%...WOMAN!!"
I wrote "100%...WOMAN!!" for the amazing political zine called Make (2001, perhaps). It's a brief meditation about drag kings on nationally televised talk shows, and the ways in which bodies and performances are tightly scripted and limited by the episodes' structures of revelation.

Fuck Unamerican
I wrote this for Maximumrocknroll (No. 198, 1999) about the interpenetration of capital and revolution. Specifically, this column targets one company that claimed to be "liberating" its customers through their purchases.

Epicenter
I wrote this for Maximumrocknroll (1998) about the death of a not-for-profit punk record store I used to work at in San Francisco.

Why queer theory?
This was written in 1999 for David Gauntlett's media and queer theory site.

It's (Not) a White World: Looking for Race in Punk
This was published in the November/December 1998 issue of Punk Planet (no. 28).

Viet Nam: Journal/Journey
A series of journal entries, this was published in the February 1999 issue of Punk Planet (no. 29). I've written more along these lines that's not here. Maybe I'll add them someday.

Mulan
A piece I wrote for the San Jose Mercury News (I am not responsible for the title). This is my take on how to do feminist cultural studies in 1,500 words or less. It was also reprinted at poppolitics.com and The Media and Queer Theory Site.

Hair Trauma
A brush with the racial politics of revolution and pig-tails, recently re-vamped. I used to do this a monologue back in 1998, back when I still had aspirations of becoming a multimedia performance artist.


Contents © 1997-2006 by Mimi Thi Nguyen.