Herculine Barbin (1838–1868), whose memoirs Michel Foucault later published, reminds us that subjects are not simply born but become intelligible through discourse

Ongoing Discourse in Power, Knolwedge, and the "Truth"

This journal documents an ongoing engagement with critical theory and the social sciences. The writing is organized into three interconnected strands: theoretical essays that engage foundational concepts and thinkers; applied essays that use those concepts to interpret contemporary social, cultural, and political phenomena; and empirical essays that reflect on research, institutions, and fieldwork. Across these strands runs a common question: how do discourse, institutions, and knowledge shape the conditions through which subjects, truths, and social realities are produced?

About This Project

This project is an ongoing intellectual pursuit; a space to think through the ideas that have shaped, challenged, and unsettled my understanding of the social world. Rather than offering definitive answers, these essays revolve around a series of recurring questions:

Under what assumptions do we come to understand ourselves as possessing a coherent and authentic identity?
How does language produce meaning? Under what conditions do certain meanings become intelligible while others remain unspeakable?
Is there such a thing as a “true” gender, or is gender constituted through repeated performances—where, as Judith Butler suggests, doing becomes being?
Why does identity politics sometimes lose its political edge? What happens when identities become fixed categories rather than sites of contestation, and how might Foucault’s notion of biopower help us understand this shift?
What does it really mean to speak of power? Is power something we possess, or does it constitute the very subjects who believe they possess it?
What makes a discourse “counter”? How can practices that present themselves as liberatory, benevolent, or progressive simultaneously become disciplinary or exploitative?

Ultimately, this project is dedicated to anyone who has ever been told that identity is fixed, truth is self-evident, or the social world could not be otherwise. It is an invitation to question what appears natural, to examine how subjects are constituted, and to imagine that the ways we have come to understand ourselves might always have been different.