Q1 2026: The risk of truth to being loved
About this edition
The Question
Can you be loved for who you actually are, or only for who you've learned to be?
This edition explores the relationship between truth-telling, performance, and intimacy through an unlikely pair: Michel Foucault and bell hooks.
The Pairing
Foucault reveals how power trains us to speak sanctioned truths while concealing dangerous ones. Truth becomes performance: fluent, legible, rewarded, but rarely disruptive.
hooks shows what that training costs. Patriarchy, she argues, doesn't only constrain speech. It shapes inner life itself, teaching people (especially men) to reject feeling, vulnerability, and care.
Read together, they create friction: Foucault explains the structure of risk. hooks explains why so many people cannot take that risk, even when nothing visible prevents them.
The Practice
This guide is built around questions that don't resolve easily:
When does speaking the truth threaten what you depend on?
What makes that risk livable over time?
How do you remain present when honesty might cost you belonging?
What's the difference between truth that liberates and truth that isolates?
The reading guide grounds these questions in lived experience: coming out, navigating family expectations, resisting performances that preserve approval at the expense of being real.
Primary texts:
Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth and Parrhesia
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
What's included:
Free on the website: Digital excerpts and podcast conversations
For purchase: Complete printed reading guide including analysis of the texts, reflections, questions for consideration, recommendations for further reading, and a curated playlist.
Pre-order the physical reading guide now. Ships mid-February 2026.