Forum:
This is an excerpt. Full text available at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/c-b-daring-j-rogue-deric-shannon-and-abbey-volcano-queering-anarchism.
Dedication
To all those struggling toward a world without bosses, borders, and boredom.
Preface
Martha Ackelsberg
Queering anarchism? What would that mean? Isn’t “anarchism”
enough of a bogeyman in this country that any effort to “queer” it would
only make it appear even more alien and irrelevant to mainstream
culture than it already is? Why do it? And why now?
Because—as this anthology makes evident in its multifaceted exploration
of the many dimensions of both anarchism and queer—we have only just
begun to understand the many possibilities offered by a queered
anarchism, both with respect to critiques of existing institutions and
practices and with respect to imagining alternatives to them.
It is a true pleasure to see this anthology—so long in the making—become
available to the reading public. As the authors note in their
introduction, there have been many books written on anarchism, and many
others on queer politics and theory. Interest in the activist
side of anarchism, in particular, seems to have increased in recent
years. And—at least within more politically progressive
communities—attention to queer activism has also grown. But this volume
is, I believe, the first to bring these two traditions—in both their
intellectual and activist dimensions—together and into conversation,
particularly for “lay,” non-academic readers. The project is certainly a
timely one, and the outcome of the years of planning demonstrates both
the wisdom of the editors’ initial goals and the value of the work they
stimulated.
The editors’ introduction sets the appropriate tone for the
volume—highlighting both some of the myths about anarchism and the
complexities of the term “queer.” I must admit that my enthusiasm for
their introduction (and for the work as a whole) is probably connected
to the fact that I share their explication of “anarchism”—its
destructive as well as its constructive urges, its multi-dimensionality,
and the ways it provides a framework for addressing what recent
(feminist) scholarship has referred to as “intersectionality.”[1]
Although anarchism has often been thought of as synonymous with
nihilism or, alternatively, as an extreme version of a kind of
libertarianism (à la Robert Nozick[2]),
most of the essays in this book locate themselves within the broader
tradition of what has been referred to as more collectivist or
communitarian anarchism—that which treats individuality and community as
mutually constitutive, rather than as in opposition to one another.
That tradition—exemplified in the writings of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter
Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman, and Spanish
anarchists—values freedom and equality, individuality and community, and treats freedom as a social product, rather than as a value/goal that is necessarily in tension with community.[3]
Such an approach—often difficult even to fathom within the liberal
individualist culture of the US—is wonderfully illustrated through the
unusual format/framing of a number of the chapters, e.g. “queering the
script” in the CRAC collective’s graphic presentation on sexuality, or
the mixing of personal and analytical materials in Sandra Jeppesen’s
essay on queering heterosexuality, or in Farhang Rouhani’s or Benjamin
Shepard’s essays on organizing, among others.
More generally, this book offers us, its readers, an eclectic mix of
topics, but also of genres, a mix that highlights and manifests the
multiple perspectives offered by anarchist approaches, particularly when
those approaches, themselves, are “queered.” The placement of somewhat
more traditional “academic” essays—such as those, for example, by Jamie
Heckert, J. Rogue, and Diana Becerra, or by Liat Ben Moshe, Anthony
Nocella, and AJ Withers—alongside the contribution of the CRAC
collective, or even of what we might term “analytical personal
testimony” offered by many of the writers—provides readers with an
opportunity to “queer” our own expectations of what constitute serious
intellectual interventions. In the process, as both anarchism and queer
theory propose, these challenges open us up to further explorations of
both theory and practice.
I will not attempt here to explore, or even point toward, the many
theoretical and practical questions offered by the essays in this
volume. The editors’ introduction does a fine job of surveying the
broader landscape. But I would note that one of the things I find most
valuable is precisely the range of topics addressed and the
authors’ explorations of the language necessary to communicate their
views in ways that are both respectful of the complexity of the
experiences discussed and, at the same time, committed to clarity. Queer
theory, in particular, can often be dense and obscure, seemingly meant
to be read (or at least understood) only by those in the academy who are
willing to spend long hours reading (and rereading) it. But the essays
in this volume communicate complexity without obfuscation, many of them
drawing on real-life, concrete organizing experiences to elucidate the
challenges to fixed categories and to binary thinking that have
traditionally characterized queer theory. At the same time, they
highlight the difficulties posed for an activism that attempts to move forward without re-inscribing those same binaries in the name of challenging them.
This dimension of both anarchist and queer politics—the (anarchist)
insistence that “means must be consistent with ends,” that the way to
create a new world is to take steps to create it, to live the
life we want to live—to my mind constitutes both its greatest
contribution to the theory and practice of social change and the greatest challenge to its instantiation. It is, I think, why (as the editors note) anarchism has both destructive and creative dimensions: ideally, the creation of the new itself destroys the old forms, by making them irrelevant or passé.
But, of course, that is only in the ideal world: as many of the essays
in this volume (and as the recent experience of the “occupy” movements)
attest, the “mere” creating of alternatives is often treated as
dangerous and/or threatening by powers that be, and responded to with
force and violence. Peaceful prefigurative politics[4]—whether
anarchist collectives in revolutionary Spain of the 1930s, the communes
of the 60s in the US, or the “free spaces” of food coops, book
exchanges, child-care exchanges, or “radical queer spaces”—may well be
ignored only until they start being successful, at which point they
confront the full force of the economic, religious, sexual, and/or
police powers to which they pose a challenge.
How do we begin to talk about these challenges—or the goals to which
they aspire? If we use the language of “empowerment”—even in the sense
of “power to,” rather than of “power over”—we find ourselves,
willy-nilly, in the discourse of “power,” and, perhaps, in the midst of
the very binaries that we are trying to avoid or challenge. How do
we challenge that binary—or others—without reinscribing it? As Ryan
Conrad put it, “How do we, as radical queer and trans folks, push back
against the emerging hegemony of rainbow flavored neoliberalism and the
funneling of our energy into narrow campaigns that only reinforce the
hierarchical systems and institutions we fundamentally oppose? How do we
reconcile the contradiction of our anger and fervent criticism of so
called equality when presently many of our material lives depend on
accessing resources through the very subject of our critique?”
The strength of this volume is not that it provides simple solutions to
these questions (if it did, we’d have a handy blueprint for
revolution!). Rather, the essays—each in its own way—persistently and
consistently ask them and explore the answers. In the process, they
queer not only anarchism, but our ways of seeing, and understanding, the
connections and mutual reinforcements among structures of political,
religious, economic, sexual, and other forms of power and hierarchy in
the daily worlds we inhabit.
Queer Meet Anarchism, Anarchism Meet Queer
C. B. daring, J. Rogue, Abbey Volcano, and Deric Shannon
The purpose of this book is an introduction of sorts—an “introduction”
in two meanings of the word. Queer politics and anarchism have not been
completely disconnected on the ground, but finding texts that draw out
these relations can be a difficult task. We think queer politics and
anarchism have a lot to offer each other and we’re excited by some of
the connections being drawn between the two by people in their writing,
organizing, struggling, and daily lives. So we want to suggest that an
introduction to the overlaps between anarchist and queer politics could
be useful at this juncture.
We also mean “introduction” in a different sense of the word. That is,
we’d like more of our anarchist comrades to be acquainted with queer
politics and we’d like more of our queer friends to be familiar with
anarchism, again, because we think these connections can be particularly
fruitful. We hope that this collection can be an introduction in the
sense of two ideas meeting one another, or perhaps getting to know one
another better, as we don’t mean to suggest that queers and anarchists
are two distinct and separate groups (they’re not). Nor do we really
want to suggest that queers or anarchists necessarily always have a
decent grasp of queer and anarchist politics respectively.
So to be clear, we’re not suggesting that this idea is particularly
novel. There are already many folks doing this work. If we just look at
the last five years or so—from “Bash Back!” to “Black and Pink” to
“Queers Without Borders” to name just a few—groups with a variety of
theories, practices, and lives have been staking out space within the
larger project of queering anarchism. Indeed, people with varying levels
of involvement in each of these groups, and more, have contributed to
the collection you now hold in your hands.
We put together this volume to help draw out some of the propositions
and debates within this overlap. And, importantly, we tried to collect
pieces that were not written for an academic audience. Much of queer
theoretical writing is dense and difficult. While we feel that dense and
difficult texts have their place, we wanted to provide a collection for
a general audience.
That said, we’d like to begin the book with some short introductions of
our own. Anarchism is littered with misinformation and distortions, so
any text introducing materials on anarchism might include a brief
explanation of where the authors are coming from. Similarly, anarchism
is admittedly a diverse milieu, not a unified movement, so while the
editors of this volume don’t have a strict and singular “unity” on the
meanings and dimensions of anarchism, we do hope that briefly sketching
out what we mean by the term can serve as a method for making sense of
the contents of this volume for readers unfamiliar with anarchism.
Similarly “queer” is a contested term, used in a number of different
ways and requires a bit of unpacking. We don’t hope to resolve large
debates within anarchist, queer, and anarchist-queer communities about
these definitions, meanings, and so on, but rather hope to provide some
insight on the pieces in this particular volume and, with any luck,
provide a framework for continuing much-needed discussion with this
short introduction.
Anarchism
Many volumes have been written throughout history explicating anarchism,
and the movement has seen many historical periods of retreat and
resurgence. We’re living in a resurgence of interest in anarchist ideas
right now. It’s a common trope that after the Battle of Seattle in
1999—when a loose coalition of environmentalists, trade unionists,
anarchists, feminists, and many others shut down the World Trade
Organization conference—anarchism has seen a bit of a rebirth, often
connected with the anti/alter-globalization movement. Similarly, the
Occupy Wall Street Movement was initiated by anarchists, among others,
and has had heavy anarchist involvement.[5] And mainstream news media, in both instances, have often demonized anarchists and spread misinformation about us.
This is certainly nothing new. Alexander Berkman, as far back as 1929 in
his introduction to anarchism, exclaimed that “Anarchism has many
enemies; they won’t tell you the truth about it…newspapers and
publications—the capitalistic press—are…against it.”[6] As such, he started his book with a list of what anarchism is not:
It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos.
It is not robbery and murder.
It is not a war of each against all.
It is not a return to barbarism or to the wild state of man.
Anarchism is the very opposite of all that.
Anarchism means that you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose on you.[7]
There is a rather long history of anarchism being distorted and many
anarchist writers have spent considerable years trying to clear up these
misconceptions.
“The Urge to Destroy”
Nevertheless, attempts to paint anarchism in purely peaceful terms miss
out on its destructive impulse. By this, of course, we don’t mean that
anarchists revel in wanton destruction like mainstream media often
depict in their caricatures of anarchists. But anarchists do hold a
critique of the existing society and attempting to hide or ignore this
puts unnecessary limits on anarchism. We might discuss anarchism in
terms what it seeks to destroy and negate.
The anarchist analysis of our present society, for example, has always
held that capitalist property relations are based on a legalized robbery
of sorts. That is, we allow (and our laws defend) a system in which
things like housing, food, water—the things that everyone needs access
to in order to live dignified lives of their own choosing—are privately
owned and sold for profit. Similarly, we allow the means of producing
these things, and everything else too, to be owned privately. And when
most of us go to work, we make the owners of these things even wealthier
through our labor. Anarchists propose to negate this legalized
robbery—the system that we call capitalism.
We also live in societies in which we are alienated from the means of
decision-making. While we are typically rented by bosses in our working
lives, we are ruled by political bosses elsewhere. If we go against the
dictates of these political bosses, we can be beaten, kidnapped, caged,
or even killed by police. And the decisions that affect our lives are
made by politicians that ostensibly “represent” us. Anarchists argue
that we should negate political representation—the institution that we
call the state.
Anarchism also argues for alterations to our selves, and anarchists in
the past have suggested that the process of negating our institutions
also involves a process of changing our daily lives and understandings
of the world. Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, for example, wrote
that “(b)etween man [sic] and his social environment there is a
reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men
what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To
transform society men must be changed, and to transform men, society
must be changed.”[8]
This means fighting against and in some instances unlearning relations
of domination including, but not limited to racism, ableism, sexism,
heterosexism, and so on. Anarchists, then, argue that we negate all
aspects of power over others—the systematization of domination we often
refer to as hierarchy.
So anarchists do, in fact, embody a destructive urge—an urge to end
domination, to smash power over others, to destroy the means through
which working people are robbed and exploited. This communicates the
negative aspect of anarchism. Attempts to gloss these over, oftentimes
for the purposes of populist messaging, miss out on anarchism’s rich
history of bravely combating systems of exploitation and relations of
domination. But it is true that anarchism is not simply a negative
project. In addition to what anarchists oppose, we might also look at
what anarchists are for.
“Is Also a Creative Urge.”
While it’s important to acknowledge that anarchists wish to break with
the existing society and contain within them a negative politics, it’s
also important to recognize that historically anarchists have had a
generative politics. That is, within destruction is also creation. So
anarchism is also a creative endeavor—this has been demonstrated
historically through anarchist attempts to create alternative
institutions or, in the words of the IWW, build “the new world in the
shell of the old.”
In place of a system of private property and systematized robbery,
anarchists have proposed the social ownership of society or,
alternatively stated, the abolition of property altogether. This might
sound absurd in a society that treats property as sacrosanct, but
anarchists put forward a specific definition of property: ownership
claims on those things that one neither occupies nor uses. Anarchists
usually juxtapose this with possessions, or those things that we use or
the homes that we live in (i.e. no anarchist wants to take your home or
guitar away). This is how bosses and landlords exploit workers, by
claiming to own the things they do not use or the places in which they
do not live, then extracting rents and value from the people who do
actually use them. In place of private ownership, anarchists put forward
visions of a social system in which we produce for the needs of the
people instead of the profits of capitalists.
Similarly, instead of a state that stands above society, directing it,
anarchists typically propose federations of neighborhood assemblies,
workplace associations, community councils, and the like as coordinating
bodies comprised by the people. We would collectively make decisions
that affect our lives rather than having those decisions made for us by
politicians or left to the whims of the market. Functions of safety and
collective decision-making, then, would be organized through networks
“of participatory communities based on self-government through direct,
face-to-face democracy in grassroots neighbourhood and community
assemblies” instead of representation, police, prisons—in a word,
bureaucracy.[9]
And in place of hierarchical social relations, anarchists propose a
human community based on autonomy, solidarity, and mutual aid. Thus, the
struggle against the state and capitalism must simultaneously be a
struggle against white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and all forms of
oppression and exploitation. Anarchists propose a society based on a
highly egalitarian ethos because no human being should be granted power
and control over others. So, anarchists argue, it must be understood
that “the war against capitalism must be at the same time a war against
all institutions of political power,” because “exploitation has always
gone hand in hand with political and social oppression.”[10]
Replacing white supremacy, a world constructed for so-called “able
bodies,” patriarchy, heteronormativity and all relations of domination
would be new sets of social relations that do not arrange groups
hierarchically in terms of their access to economic, political, and
cultural power.
This very brief introduction is only meant to provide a broad look at
anarchism and we’d suggest to anyone who is interested to check out the
many anarchist websites, books, magazines, etc. to find out about it
themselves. Some anarchists might take issue with our portrayal above—as
we said, anarchism is a diverse milieu. We want to be up-front about
that, so as not to portray ourselves as speaking for the milieu when we
are speaking to our own interpretations of it.
Queer
“Queer” is likewise a contested term. Historically, it was often used to
describe something that seemed strange, or not quite right. In more
contemporary times, it was/is used as a slur against people who were
perceived to be lesbian and/or gay—particularly effeminate men. In
contemporary usage, it is often used as a reclaimed sort of shorthand
for various identities contained in the LGBT “alphabet soup”—themselves
contested groupings of sexual minorities with arguments over who
rightfully “belongs” within those identity categories and who might be
defined out.
Indeed, part of why “queer” began to be used as shorthand for sexual and
gender minorities of all kinds was due to some of these debates over
who “belonged,” in what contexts, and how we might think about our
sexual and gendered selves in ways that weren’t based on identities.
This explosion in writing about theory, bodies, gender, desire,
sexuality, and much more is often referred to as “queer theory” with a
simultaneous “queer politics” emerging on the ground, oftentimes in
similar historical moments. Groupings such as ACT UP and Queer Nation,
events such as the roving “Queeruption” festivals, and so on often
reflected radical changes in how participants thought about (the limits
of) identity.
These were tailed by the building of queer theory, which put identity
categories under a critical lens. Some of the explosion of queer theory
is rooted in the work of the French intellectual Michel Foucault. In his
famous study of sexuality, Foucault found that “the homosexual,” as an
identity, could be traced to the rise of sexual science in mid
nineteenth century.[11]
Thus, the homosexual was an invention. This didn’t mean that there
wasn’t same-sex sexual activity before the mid nineteenth century, but
that where before we had an activity, it was transformed through complex
historical processes into an identity—complete with borders and, in
some cases, rigid in-groups and out-groups. Something a person does
(i.e., an act) was transformed into something a person is (an identity).
According to Foucault, the homosexual was created as a species of
human.
Our available categories of this thing that we came to call “sexual
orientation” became based on this historical process of
identity-creation, reducing complex desires and relations to the gender
of a person and the gender of the people that they desire. This is
important because identity is a basic part of how people come to
understand themselves and part and parcel of how we become “constituted
as socially viable beings.”[12]
These processes of socially constructing identities led to the complete
invisibilization of some people—which was another reason for the
development of queer theory and politics.
Think about it: We are told that we are hetero, homo, or bi—perhaps 100%
opposite gender attraction, 100% same gender attraction, or a 50/50
split. This is who we are. A good solid majority of our society has
internalized this coding and even made oppressive hierarchies out of it.
So understanding sexuality and gender in terms of rigid, easily
identifiable, and heavily policed identities effectively invisibilizes
and robs people who do not fit neatly into our available identity
categories of a viable social existence—not just for sexuality, but also
(and, of course, relatedly) for gender and sex. This has meant pushing
out people whose sexual desires were fluid or whose gender practices or
sex didn’t make discussions of “sexuality” coherent given our limited
ranges of choices and self-understandings. It erased people who did not
experience their gender in terms of neatly constructed boxes. We needed a
much more fluid, elastic, and broad category that was inclusive and
“queer” was, in many cases, an attempt to create that space—an
anti-identity, in a sense. Relatedly, “queer” was a word that could be
played with.
An Adjective and a Verb
“Queer” served as a space for critiquing identity and playing with
theory, bodies, power, and desire that didn’t need to be reducible to
easy definitions. The implications of thinking about sexuality, sex,
gender, and a universe of other ideas in relationship to queer theory
and politics are still up for much debate. We hope this collection
reflects that. “Queer” has also had a degree of elasticity in use—as a
noun, still at times, but also as an adjective and a verb.
Aside from a noun—another marker of identity—“queer” is often used as an
adjective. Rather than a description of who a person is, in this way it
is typically used as positionality. That is, queer can be seen as a
relationship, as a context-defined antagonism to the normal.[13]
Halperin, perhaps, describes this best when he writes, “Queer is by
definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the
dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.
It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a
positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality
that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men, but is in fact available
to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of his or her sexual
practices.”[14]
The normative expectations that exist in society create binary
divisions between behaviors deemed “normal” and “abnormal.” Whatever
behaviors (or desires, thoughts, etc.) fall into the category labeled
“normal” are dominant, intelligible, visible, and in many cases,
powerful. Other behaviors will fall into the “abnormal” category and
become subordinate, unintelligible, invisibilized, and suppressed,
reppressed, and oppressed.
What gets labeled “normal” will affect what gets labeled “abnormal.” If
there are shifts in one sphere, the other sphere will shift with it.
Queer, then, is what is at odds with the normal and lines up with the
category of “abnormal.” Since the normal can change, so can the
abnormal, the queer. This is why queer is called a positionality—what is
deemed queer is not fixed, it is contextual and related to what is
called normal. The reason the term “queer,” in this sense, isn’t
restricted to “gay” or “lesbian” is because many sexual practices are
considered abnormal—some that aren’t primarily based on gender (for
instance, particular ways of having sex—like BDSM—or particular ways of
fashioning or arranging sexual relationships—like nonmonogamy or sex
work). The normal sexuality, in our own society, isn’t just “hetero,” it
is a particular form of heterosexuality—a heterosexuality that has a
goal of a happily married couple in a permanent relationship, abiding by
the plethora of norms that make up what is referred to as
“heteronormativity”—a very specific type of heterosexuality that
reinforces the dominance of the ascribed set of norms: cohabitation,
procreation, marriage, monogamous coupling, etc. We might also, then,
analyze queer sexual practices and gender embodiment that recognizes
that “(h)ierarchies exist within heterosexuality”—allowing us a frame to
discuss nonmonogamy, sex work, BDSM, and so on both within same-sex
relationship and elsewhere.[15]
This doesn’t mean that all of these sexual and gender practices are
experienced in the same way or oppressed to the same degree. That too is
context-specific and also related to other identities that people might
be assigned or the class position that they might inhabit. Rather, it
is strategic for all people marginalized and oppressed by
heteropatriarchy to organize and struggle together. And that means we
need a lens through which to examine a variety of marginalized sexual
and gender practices. That does not mean that heteropatriarchy treats
all deviants the same. It means that there is no scarcity of liberation
and that if liberation, in the final instance, is going to be
meaningful, it must include us all.
Further, along with the socially constructed nature of sexuality and
gender, as the intersex movement has taught us, we can also put sex
under this critical lens. Sex is also put into a binary framework in our
society, male and female, which fails to recognize the range of
hormonal, sexual, and even chromosomal makeup that people can embody
and, importantly, also ignores the coercive nature of the state’s
attempts to define our sexual selves for us at birth. This allows for a
more holistic politics of sex, sexuality, and gender. It also gives us
theoretical space to queer our naturalized assumptions about other
identities. Consider, for example, people who exist in the margins of
available categories for race and how it can make their existence or
identity incoherent or, perhaps, changing depending on the context they
are in—“white” in some contexts, perhaps Latino in others, and so on.
What might politics look like if we began looking at identities in ways
that do not treat them as fixed, monolithic, and eternal?
This antagonistic relationship with the normal has also led to an
anti-assimilationist ethic that often sets queer politics apart from
mainstream “G(lbt)” politics.[16]
So the “Holy Trinity” of mainstream gay and lesbian politics—same-sex
marriage, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and hate crimes legislation—are often
rejected and critiqued within queer politics.[17]
Much of this is reflected, as well, in queer tendencies toward a
radical politics that is critical of the state. After all, the state
forcibly assigns us identity categories and its enforcers mirror the
ways that bodies and desires are policed to fit neatly within those
categories. The state is also an enforcer of borders in much the same
way that our society demands strict and rigid borders around identity.
And queer people particularly suffer at the hands of the state in its
prisons.[18]
Indeed, while part of this ambivalence toward the state is a common
trait in queer politics, there is likewise often an ethic of
working-class liberation and anticapitalism within queer communities,
linking up nicely with anarchist values (another reason that a
collection such as this is long overdue!).
This position with regard to the normal is also embedded in how “queer”
is used as a verb, particularly in the process of queering. Since queer
theory and politics came primarily out of investigations into sex,
sexuality, and gender, often times the word is used to connote adding a
needed analysis of them to an already existing theory or set of ideas.
So we might start the process of queering anarchism in this way, adding a
needed critical analysis of sex, sexuality, and gender where it is
often either out of date or simply missing. Likewise, it can be used as a
verb to describe the process of making a given set of ideas strange, to
destabilize dominant understandings and underlying assumptions. So
queering anarchism might also refer to making anarchism strange,
creating new understandings of anarchism that re(de)fine it using
insights from queer theory and politics.
Queering Anarchism
In this collection, one can find all of these uses of “queer”—as a noun,
an adjective, and a verb. Rather than trying to fit all of these pieces
into a single, coherent definition of the word, we collected chapters
knowing that they would at times be contradictory. For us, the purpose
of this book was to create a collection that might move conversations
forward, and that meant allowing for a huge range of approaches to
queer, as well as a diversity of expressing those approaches. So the
reader will also find pieces that “queer the script,” so to speak,
attempting to use creative means to convey ideas outside of the format
of theoretical essays. This process of collection and editing took over
three years, spanned changes in the editorial collective, and likewise
saw some authors stick with us throughout and some lose contact with us
in that long process.
When we first put the idea together, we decided that, like most edited
collections, we would create discrete sections for the book. We sought
out pieces of theory, writings on practice, and reflections on life
experiences. In the end, however, we realized that nearly every chapter
contained all three of these. So we tried to place them in an order that
makes sense, showcases the diversity of thought in the collection, but
isn’t limited to discrete sections—they’d bleed completely into each
other if we tried anyway. We did, however, try to create an order that
would draw out familiar theoretical terrain and build on that in a
process that, with any luck, will give readers a chance to situate the
contents better as they travel through these chapters.
We begin with Ryan Conrad, who has done quite a lot of work critiquing
assimilationist strategies and the equality rhetoric of the mainstream
gay and lesbian movement. Conrad uses his critique of these
assimilationist goals to suggest that we might expect much more than
equality under the existing institutions—in fact, we might create a new
world. J. Rogue spells out lessons anarchists might learn from the
transfeminist movement, suggesting ways that we might update our
feminism and build an anarchist gender politics that is nuanced and
holistic. Abbey Volcano pens an intervention into radical queer politics
arguing to be watchful of inverting hierarchies and basing our politics
solely on simplified oppositions. Stacy aka sallydarity reviews
existing theories of gender, drawing out a queer anarchist analysis that
can serve as a framework for paths out of our current gender practices
and understandings. Jamie Heckert explores ways we might queer anarchism
and make it strange. In the process, he expresses a need for a creative
politics not solely defined by antagonistic oppositions. Farhang
Rouhani tells the story of opening a queer social center and the
messiness involved in attempting to create and maintain such
spaces—where identity categories are simultaneously questioned, created,
destabilized, and sometimes celebrated by participants. Jerimarie
Liesegang ties the struggle against the state together with the
liberation of trans people and shows that the state is intimately
involved in coercive gendering and gender assignment suggesting that
trans liberation requires the abolition of the state.
Next, Benjamin Shepard argues for queering anarchist organizing that
might lead us toward a politics of pleasure. This links up nicely with
harm reduction approaches to organizing for better worlds and thinking
about queering politics to provide new ways of conceiving of political
interventions. Gayge Operaista argues that class struggle must be a
central component of queer organizing, asserting in the process that
class is not a simple “identity” and that we need to organize as a class
against capitalism. The CRAC Collective queers the script, providing a
comic that details conversations among people about how sexual and
gender politics relate to their political activity and their lives as
radicals and anarchists. Stephanie Grohmann investigates how the economy
is involved in our contemporary constructions of sexuality and gender
and argues that we might “queer the economy” or shift our understanding
of economics to recognize its place in other spheres of
life—particularly our gendered and sexual lives. Sandra Jeppesen
provides a personal narrative about how queering anarchism might happen
in the lives of people who tend to have heterosexual relationships, but
do not identify with straightness and heterosexuality.
Finally, Susan Song writes about the intersections between polyamorous
sexual practices and relations, and anarchist politics. Diana C. S.
Becerra writes a media analysis of Sex and the City, paying
close attention to how pop cultural forms construct our understanding of
gender and sexuality. She compellingly argues that anarchists might use
these kinds of analyses to pinpoint the ways that culture influences
our understanding of our selves and our relationships with others. C. B.
Daring argues that anarchists should have an analysis of sex work that
doesn’t mirror the moralism that is often connected with “radical”
analyses of labor in the sex industry. Jason Lydon ties in anarchist
queer politics with a need for resisting the prison-industrial complex.
He puts forward an anarchist queer perspective on abolition. Liat
Ben-Moshe, Anthony J. Nocella, II, and AJ Withers suggest that we
recognize parallels between disability and queerness, making the case
that we might not just queer anarchism, but queer-crip anarchism,
connecting fights against heteronormativity and other forms of
oppression and exclusion with struggles against ableism. Saffo
Papantonopoulos contends that straightness is not an identity, but a set
of social relations and for liberation to be total and consistent with
anarchist principles, those sets of social relations must be uprooted,
exposed, and destroyed. Hexe playfully relates BDSM practices to
anarchism using this relationship to draw out kinky paths to queering
anarchism.
We think the strong connections between anarchist and queer politics are
striking. But, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
We hope this collection serves as a smorgasbord of sorts, providing
insights into how we might alter the landscape of this often miserable,
violent, and boring world and bring into being different ones. We think
the case here is supported quite well that there are many more fruitful
engagements to emerge from this meeting of queer and anarchism—and a
variety of other partnerships along the way.
Report Topic
