GNSE CLASS OF 2020

In this thesis project, reflective memoir-style fragments are interposed with and incorporate critical theory and philosophical investigations into the experience of gender and race in spaces of precarity and isolation. The project concerns poverty and sex work in the border region, as well as the interactions between language, violence, and harm to cognition that arise in and from such conditions and in their meeting with wealthy white academia. It was completed under the supervision of Prof. Lauren Berlant.

Reviewers noted that Deimy's "brilliant and searching" essay "translates the flesh of the world of internal thought and external encounter into an experience of critical method at its most powerful and autobiography at its most tender and alive."