A woman is not a person, not in this America

E Jean Carroll, fighting back, and other links for your Sunday

Over the past week or so in America, a state senator was shot; Adriana Smith, a brain-dead woman in Georgia, was taken off life support after delivering a child via C-section, with her family having no choice in the matter; ICE deportations continued; people took to the streets to protest kings; and E Jean Carroll published a new book, Not My Type.

I wrote about Not My Type and the gendered violence of 2025’s America for MSNBC.

A woman is not a person, not in this America. Not now, when centuries of ground gained have been ripped out from under us. Our rights — the offering voters sacrificed because of “economic insecurity.” Our dignity — taken because a generation of lonely men couldn’t have access to our bodies.

For Carroll to publish her narrative in this America is a violently hopeful act. In the book, she asserts her control over a story that has threatened to subsume her, and us all. It’s not an easy peace or a perfect triumph, as this profile of Carroll in The Cut reveals, but it’s a dogged persistence of truth, life, and narrative. When I wonder how to keep going, this is the kind of model I look for and look to.

I read the book this week, and it oscillates between asides about fashion and trial transcripts. There are glorious pictures, and there is tragedy. It’s infuriating to read Trump’s lawyers trying to slut-shame Carroll, but it’s also fun to see her responses. The book, like Carroll, is a bit erratic, frustrating, fun, and wholly her own.

The violence of the state against immigrants and women reveals that the American anxiety that led us to this moment was never really about the economy — we are talking about racialized and gendered capital. Understanding the fight means understanding by what and whom Trump and his administration feel most threatened: immigrants, especially people of color; LGBTQ people rejecting rigid conservative notions of gender; and women refusing the roles of wife and mother.

This was, and is, about social order. An authoritarian realignment that seeks to take the people and bodies deemed aberrant and force them out or force them back into the places they belong.