Yasmin Nair's Living Expenses

$8,199 of $7,500 goal

Raised by 199 people in 43 months

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Updates 3

Yasmin Nair CHICAGO, IL

Dear friends and supporters,

I'm writing to ask you to support my fundraising campaign to assist with rent and urgent living costs.

Due to several ongoing challenges, including health problems that have compromised my mobility and the state of journalism and the writing world, I've fallen behind many months on my rent. My very generous and patient landlord has made it clear that I need to start to catch up on my overdue balance by April 1 if I'm to stay on. Meeting my goal within the next month will help me stay in the apartment and help provide some stability for the coming year.

Your support will:

Help me establish much-needed stability as I continue to pursue my writing career. I've consistently produced work that has explored facets and perspectives that very few have explored in public discourse. That has meant taking critical, nuanced, and incisive positions on matters like immigration, sex work, and queer politics. The principles I uphold in my writing are followed through in my activism, which includes serving as the (unpaid) Policy Director of Gender JUST, where I work hard to keep the organisation running after steering it through a challenging rough patch. As a co-founder of Against Equality, I've been part of a collective which challenges the mainstream while pushing for alternatives to marriage, prison, and the military.

Focus on getting more paid projects. As a journalist, I've covered the Chicago queer scene for Windy City Times and my work has appeared in numerous journals, publications, and anthologies. Besides event-reporting and book reviewing, my series of interviews and hard-hitting analyses of Howard Brown Health Center was the earliest and the most detailed coverage on that institution. This year, I've already been commissioned and/or had interest shown in several projects, including one on queers and sex offender registries and another on immigration. An exciting new series of long interviews with prominent writers and activists is also forthcoming. Unfortunately, the publishing world has lagged in valuing the labour of writers, and I've been amongst those challenging the current model. Some publishers, like Tracy Baim at Windy City Times, are working with innovative funding strategies, but times are still rough. My current appeal is part of this larger context,and I encourage you to consider ways to resist this volatile and often exploitative system.

Give me some breathing space so that I can finally begin to shop around my book project, Strange Love: Neoliberalism and Affect!

Please donate what you can. I know not everyone can donate money. Above is a wish-list of things you can donate.

Please, also, circulate this amongst your friends: I know many of you have constantly supported me by linking to my pieces - please ask your friends to donate if they can by vouching for me in any way you see fit. EVERY bit counts.

Ours is an unfinished revolution, as this picture of my feline companion shows. This has been a good year, and I'm genuinely excited about the months ahead! Please help me continue my work.

A note about sharing this via FB on this site: Please, if you would, share this on FB by copying this url into your status box: http://www.gofundme.com/Yasmin-Nair, with any short note you'd like to write. Unfortunately, hitting the FB button on the upper right-hand corner above only indicates that you like it, but after a few seconds, no one will actually see this on your timeline to read. That makes all the difference in terms of how many more people might read and donate. My thanks for your extra time!

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Update 3

33 months ago

Dear All,

Please forgive me if you've seen this message more than once.

I'm writing to you with an exciting update, which is not about donating but actually subscribing to my work and making it more sustainable. With your past support, I've managed to make it possible to create enough work in the past months to start a subscription service.

Still looking for a Holiday gift or, two, or more? Would you like to help fund the Revolution AND support genuinely radical writing? Give yourself and/or loved ones a gift in the shape of a subscription to my website, and receive exclusive content.

For January: "Every Time a White Girl Cries, A Unicorn Dies," "Are Academic Writers Scabs?" and more - all for as little as $1 a month. Subscribe for more, and get podcasts, webinars, and archived material every month.

For details, see the link below. For the first month, which will start in January, please just send a one-time amount in the subscription range you prefer, and we will then manually set you up for a recurring subscription. You can find more details here:

http://www.yasminnair.net/content/announcing-strange-love-and-portal-revolution

Here's to completing the Revolution in 2014! And many, many thanks for all your support, which made this possible!

Yours,
Yasmin

Revolutionary Kitteh

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Update 2

42 months ago

WE GOT THERE! With your help, I managed to make it to the goal, and a little more.

I will have more to say about all this - you know I'll always have more to say. This last month has been exhausting but also deeply humbling and gratifying, and your support, no matter what form it took, has been overwhelming.

Your support allows me to begin catching up on rent and gives me some breathing space, for about a month, to figure out the next steps.

Please consider it a sign not of greed but a simple statement of facts that I would be grateful if those who've waited, to still give what you can. I started this campaign with $2.20 at the beginning of March, and the vast majority of what I raised, with your help, has already gone towards bills, rent, and essentials. I could not be here without you.

I know you share with me a sense that, while this is a victory of sorts, it's also, sadly a sign of our precarious times that so many of us, no matter what our professions, always live on the brink. I write this amidst news that a friend's friend has been displaced by a fire, and it saddens me, as it does you, that we live in a country, and a world, where a slight slip on ice or a blaze leaves people bereft without the security net that is surely no less than a right.

I'll also be writing more about the state of writing in general. Writing is not my hobby: it's how I earn my living. But too many of us have internalised the logic that it's not something you actually *do* as paid labour or that it should be something that brings an actual income. The existence of large and small corporate models that generate free writing and the fact that so many writers are willing to be scabs by writing for them in exchange for "exposure" tells us about the extent of the pervasive rot.

But for now, there is writing to be done, exciting leads to be followed, some chocolate gelato to be had, and still more writing - the thing that keeps me alive and which you have supported so generously.

My thanks, again. And here, again, is Brooklyn Feral Cat with a Valentine.

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