Anarchism and Sexuality

Sexualities

13(4) 403–411

! The Author(s) 2010

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DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370651

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Introduction

Relating differently

Jamie HeckertAnarchist Studies Network

The state is a relationship between human beings, a way by which people relate to

one another; and one destroys it by entering into other relationships, by behaving

differently to one another.

Gustav Landauer (2005 [1910]: 165)

Walking home after a yoga class the other night, a car pulled up in front of me –one of my classmates offering me a lift home. Having lived only a year in thisneighbourhood where people seem to get through their days largely pretending thatstrangers don’t exist, I was moved by her warm generosity and hopped in.

She stopped the car in front of my house and we carried on talking.Unsurprisingly, she asked that question – ‘what do you do?’ I do lots of things,of course. Don’t we all? I know that the question usually means what do you do fora job, for money – that other truth of the self. As in sexuality, I have no easyanswer. Perhaps I am all too aware of how any answer implicates me in a capitalist‘moral economy’ of person-hood (Skeggs, 2004). Unemployed, I’m awfully low.A scholar, I’m a bit higher up. An anarchist, I want to be equals. Of course, thequestion may simply come from a desire to connect, to understand another’s world.I pause, and reply, ‘I write about anarchism and sexuality.’

‘Anarchism and sexuality!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do they have to do with eachother?’ A common response. I thought carefully, very aware of a variety of diverseand divergent approaches being taken to this intersection, not the least in thearticles for this special issue. I decided to go with what seemed to me to be themost obvious connection: relationships. Inspired by second-wave feminist critiquesof a supposed clear border separating the personal from the political, JeffreyWeeks’ subsequent challenge to a separation of the sexual from the social, andrecent writings linking anarchism and post-structuralism (as well as a number oflived experiences), I found myself replying to her question with a (somewhat rhe-torical) question.

‘How is it that we are meant to spend much of our day being told what to do, orperhaps telling others what to do, and then go home and be capable of listeningwith care to the desires of another, to our own desires, and to negotiate sex as

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equals?’ (Leaving aside, for the moment, other mechanisms of governmentality,other than domestic sexual practices and the irreducibility of sexuality to sex.)She understood immediately, perhaps because our yoga class is very much aboutrelating differently to ourselves and to each other. Drawing on the language of ourteacher, himself very much inspired by the radically anti-authoritarian philosopherJiddu Krishnamurti, she put it in terms of meeting another – listening bodily, withempathy, to what is currently alive in them, as opposed to responding to one’s ownthoughts of who another is, one’s image of another. For Krishnamurti, ‘relation-ship is direct, not through an image’ (2005: 23). Relationship, in this sense, side-steps and undermines a moral economy of person-hood and the ‘the subtle ruse ofpower’ (Butler, 1990: vii) on which it depends, for there is neither truth of the selfnor judgement. It is this approach which inspires one activist-scholar’s anarchicstrategy for shifting from a culture of domination to a culture of connection(Rosenberg, 2003), with which we are invited to hear within the language of judge-ment expressions of pleasure for needs met or the pain of life-sustaining desiresunfulfilled (e.g. food and water, equality and autonomy, love and learning).Likewise, this experience of direct relationship shares a clear affinity withRanciere’s anarchistic understanding of the democratic in contrast to the hierar-chical order, which he calls the police. ‘Politics,’ he argues, ‘only occurs when thesemechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition which istotally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function:the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone’ (cited in May, 2009:15). Relating as equals serves as a gentle form of direct action – engaging directlywith others to address oppressions rather than through representation, elected orimagined. Anarchism, here, acting as an ethics of relationships might also take usback to Gustav Landauer, subject of the first article in this issue. The state, cap-italism, empire, patriarchy, heteronormativity, the university – these are not simplyinstitutions; they are patterns of relationships. The question of how to transform,or even to destroy, the institution, may at the same time be the question of how torelate differently.

This is not a question that can be answered only in theory. It must be lived. I saymust, for I feel a deep-seated sense of urgency witnessing painfully unsustainablepatterns of relationships with ourselves, each other and the ‘more than humanworld’ (Abram, 1997). I say it too, for I have experienced much in anarchist exper-iments and in other practices of freedom for which I am deeply grateful and whichcannot be directly translated into words; the mediation of language cannot be thesame as the immediatism of experience. Still, language and theory can be guides.

In a talk entitled The Operating Instructions, the queerly erotic and profoundlyanarchic storyteller Ursula Le Guin laments how reading has become instrumental,‘so you can read the operating instructions’. No longer interested in the creativitywhich has been claimed by the market, she honours instead imagination. ‘All of ushave to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to betaught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get madeup for us by other people’ (2004: 208). Storytelling, and the listening of which the

404 Sexualities 13(4)


telling is a part, Le Guin argues, can be the guides we need. ‘Literature’, she con-cludes, ‘is the operating instructions’ (2004: 210). Might this apply, too, to schol-arly literature? The articles in this special issue have helped me to imagine my ownlife, to consider how I might relate differently. Perhaps they will do the same foryou.

***

This special issue arises in the context of a wider surge in anarchist academicwriting. Anarchist studies is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the journal by thatname is now in its 17th year, with sexuality being a topic of anarchist research fromthe inaugural issue (Cleminson, 1993). The rise of the alterglobalization movementhas fuelled a renewal of anarchism, not only as social movement and topic of study,but also as a theoretical tradition in its own right (Gordon, 2007). Or perhapsI should say traditions. Of course, anarchism has never been singular – specificanarchisms have arisen in different contexts in order to address particular relationsof domination. While in one sense, anarchism is a 19th-century European traditionof revolutionary thought and practice founded by Proudhon, Bakunin andKropotkin and finding its heyday in the anarchist movements of the SpanishCivil War and the uprisings of 1968, anarchisms are diverse. As Juliet Paredes ofMujeres Creando, a Bolivian anarcha-feminist group, once put it, ‘I’ve said it andI’ll say it again that we’re not anarchists by Bakunin or the CNT, but rather by ourgrandmothers, and that’s a beautiful school of anarchism’ (2002: 112).Contemporary anarchist studies, too, are diverse: intersecting, engaging and inter-twining in different ways with a wide range of subjects including anarchist activism(Franks, 2006; Gordon, 2008; Graeber, 2009), literary theory (Cohn, 2006), religion(Christoyannopoulos, 2009), disability (Waltz, 2007), criminology (Williams andArrigo, 2001), colonialism (Anderson, 2005; Schmidt and van der Walt, 2009),international relations (Prichard, 2007), environmentalism (Horton, 2006; Smith,2007) feminism (Acklesberg, 2005; Ferguson, 2008; Lisa, 2008) and of course,sexuality.

The seven contributions to this issue, and the three books reviewed, each engagein diverse ways with anarchism, sexuality and possibilities of relating differently.The first three articles offer theoretical and historical frameworks for engaging withquestions of the forms of anarchist sexuality, focusing in turn on marriage, poly-amory and asexuality. The next four articles engage with issues of sexuality withincontemporary anarchist activism across a range of urban geopolitical contexts,demonstrating different examples of (and calling for more) cross-pollinationbetween anarchist and queer. But before that, a return to some of the conceptualand historical roots of these potentially empowering relationships.

In his exploration of the historical relationship between anarchism and psycho-analysis, Jesse Cohn’s piece addresses the question of the forms libertarian sexualculture might take. Noting that anarchists recognize the importance of culturaltraditions for producing convivial social relations, he asks the controversial

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question, is marriage necessarily to be opposed? For Gustav Landauer, marriageand the family represented both a potential source of social ‘spirit’ and one com-ponent of a non-statist order. In saying this, he was strongly opposed to the anar-chist psychoanalyst (and possible predecessor of Reich) Otto Gross for whommarriage and family life were essentially structures of repression and therefore tobe eliminated. Cohn offers an illuminating and complex account of theseand other lives intertwined in the personal and political challenges of livingout anarchist ideals in relationships with others. I’m particularly grateful to thisarticle for its gentle reassurance that even famous anarchists didn’t live up to theirideals all of the time, but that they were still able to nurture radical social change,1

and for its remarkably queer suggestions for a Landauerian social psychology ofsexuality.

Deric Shannon and Abbey Willis’s contribution, like Cohn’s, raises questionsabout monogamy, this time, however, in relation to theory. Set in the context of asocial anarchist group where raising queer theory triggered a strong reaction,including a rejection of postmodernism as incompatible with anarchism,Shannon and Willis ask effectively, how can they be in love with anarchism withoutbeing married to one particular interpretation of it (i.e. forsaking all others)? Andso their essay, drawing on a rich history of queer and anarchist critique of marriageand monogamy, develops the metaphor of ‘theoretical polyamory’ as a method forqueering anarchism. Unpacking a clear divide between loving and thinking, theo-retical polyamory serves to avoid the economic reductionism sometimes found inanarchism, to emphasize the benefits of multiple loving and thinking relationshipsfor meeting individual and collective needs, and to rectify anarchism’s critique ofborders to include those around identities. In other words, when their primarypartner, social anarchism, becomes too rigid, too identity bound, they have otherloving-thinking relationships to turn to.

The third in this opening triad of articles emphasizing theoretical and historicalperspectives takes a radically different approach to the question of forms anarchistsexual culture might take. In an article inspired by intersections of radical feminismand anarchism, Breanne Fahs makes the controversial argument that for women,an anarchist politics of sexuality might be expressed as refusing sex altogether.Critical of the ways in which sexual liberation has come to mean conforming tonew norms of sexual expression (e.g. emphasizing clitoral orgasms over vaginalones), Fahs highlights a radical feminist tradition suspicious towards sex as amechanism of women’s liberation. Arguing for a recognition of sexuality as insti-tution intertwined with state power and its incumbent capitalist, patriarchal andracist patterns of domination, refusal to participate in it has correlations with otherradical refusals (e.g. anarchists choosing not to vote.) Drawing on the works ofValerie Solanas and radical feminist group Cell 16, Fahs argues that a withdrawalof energies from efforts to conform not only to sexist standards of sexual desir-ability but also to profoundly normative notions of sexual desire as natural andnecessary arguably frees women’s energies for other pursuits, not the least beingparticipation in movements for social justice. Finally, Fahs calls for a recognition



of contemporary asexuality as political, both for its potential to underminestate-centred rights claims based on sexuality and as strategy for resistingnormalization.

Opening the section on activism, Sandra Jeppesen also writes about resistance tonormativity, in this case a radical refusal to participate in homonormative consum-erism. Her article engages with, and opens for questioning, the concept of queercounterpublics. She offers three exhibits of anti-consumerist vomiting providingboth visceral rejections of counterpublics reliant on sex-oriented queer commercialspaces for their viability and a basis for engaging with questions of what hierar-chical and exclusionary relationships of race, class, gender and ability may be(re)produced by consumer-citizen sexual politics. In the first exhibit, vomit isread as emblematic of the unsustainable contradictions inherent in capitalism,and of the body’s rebellion. It also queers a border of public and private;Jeppesen’s second exhibit comes from a zine she co-wrote with a friend in the1990s, Projectile: stories about puking. Punk in style and content, the zine offersa counter discourses to those that construct the embodied reality of vomit as bothprivate and shameful. The third exhibit is taken from a direct action of the PinkPanthers collective, a queer anti-capitalist activist group in Montreal, linking race,gender and environmental destruction. The article is further structured through aseries of five sections, each opening up new questions about what constitutes aradical politics of sexuality. Concluding with ‘Queer autonomous zones and par-ticipatory publics’, Jeppesen emphasizes the queer/anarchist values of direct (ratherthan liberal) democracy, intersectional anti-oppression politics, ‘and open-endedprocesses of. . . becoming-liberated’.

Next, Laura Portwood-Stacer turns to the queering of sexual identity and pol-itics in the contemporary North American anarchist movement. Drawing on inter-views and ethnography, her article examines particular constructions of anarchistidentity and finds them to be queer indeed. Resistant to colluding with the hierar-chies and exclusions created by compulsory heterosexuality, homonormativity andmonogamy, the anarchists interviewed expressed their sexual identities in alterna-tive ways, emphasizing openness, queerness and polyamory (at least, in theory). Indoing so, Portwood-Stacer argues that these anarchists are enacting a queer per-formativity, making trouble for norms of gender and sexuality, which is at the sametime consistent with anarchist practices of prefigurative politics, putting into prac-tice in the present the desired values of a free society. The article goes on to dem-onstrate how the infrastructure of the anarchist movement (e.g. infoshops,bookfairs, summit protests, communal housing and skill-sharing events) preventsthis trouble-making from being limited to individual deviance, instead allowing itto act as a collective force for social transformation. The anarchist politicsdescribed here may well help to answer that perennial question, how can identitytroubling queer theory be practical? At the same time, Portwood-Stacer emphasizeshow a subcultural valuing of authenticity leads to a potentially oppressive ‘anar-chonormativity’. The provocative question she concludes with is: Might this queeranarchonormativity be wielded strategically?

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Continuing south through the Americas, Gwendolyn Windpassinger’s articleexamines queer debates in the Argentinean anarchist movement. Argentinacaught the attention of anarchists and other anti-capitalists around the world in2001 when economic collapse was met with a popular uprising, recuperation ofworkplaces by the workers and directly democratic and egalitarian structures fordecision-making in and across neighbourhoods, since popularized by Avi Lewisand Naomi Klein’s documentary film, The Take. Since the recovery of the officialeconomy, much of this radical infrastructure has dissolved. Still, the Argentineananarchist movement has been energized by these events, and it is in this context thatWindpassinger discovers the queer anarchism of Proyectil Fetal and its resonancewith both a history of Argentinean anarcha-feminism and the recent queer/anar-chist work done in Europe by Gavin Brown, Richard Cleminson and myself. LikeShannon and Willis, Windpassinger found that the deployment of queer theory byProyectil Fetal led to more conflict than communication with fellow anarchists whoprioritize the class struggle. At the same time, she sees great potential for queeranarchist analyses of sexuality, identity and power to contribute to the wider anar-chist movement in Argentina and elsewhere.

And finally, returning north to New York City, Benjamin Shepard expresses ashared concern that queer theory has become all too often abstracted from its rootsin social justice movements. Here, he calls for a renewal of queer theory inspired bycontemporary anarchist(ic) queer activist practices and the histories and theorieswith which they are entwined. Tracing connections from Victorian sex radicalsthrough gay liberation movements to today’s queer direct action groups,Shepard highlights long-standing and significant affinities between anarchists andqueers when it comes to sexual politics. Noting a number of examples where queeractivists have expressed profound frustration from experiences of wanting, and notgetting, some respect and understanding from queer theorists who write and talkabout them, Shepard suggests that academic norms result in a distancing from anti-authoritarian activism resulting in a divide between theory and practice, and asubsequent loss of praxis – theoretically informed action. Not only might activistsbenefit from an overtly politically engaged queer theory, but queer theorists mightfind renewed inspiration in the overlapping values of anarchism and queer theory:‘a rejection of the paternalistic state’, ‘DIY approaches to community building’, a‘critical view of capitalism’, ‘a politics of freedom’, ‘a critique of the normative’ anda ‘respect for pleasure’. Like Jeppesen, Shepard looks at three case studies of queeractivists challenging state and corporate control of public space and deployingdiverse methods to create autonomous queer counterpublics. Drawing on autoeth-nography and interviews with activists, he offers three colourful tales of sex in thecity. First, the Church Ladies, born out of Women’s Health Action Mobilization(WHAM) and ACT UP, sing outside abortion clinics attempting to diffuse ‘pro-life’ protests drawing on a long tradition of the political use of camp humour andplayfulness; second, at the 2009 Parade without a Permit, Shepard describes queerstaking to the streets reminding everyone that ‘Stonewall was a riot!’ and third,direct action coalitions form to defend public sexual culture, including both male



cruising and sex workers of all genders, in response to ongoing efforts by author-ities to promote gentrification. In conclusion, Shepard, alongside the other con-tributors to this issue, calls for greater engagement between anarchist and queerpolitics in order to develop mutually supportive relationships and to nurture mul-tiple movements for social change.

To conclude, I would like to return to the question of relating differently. Ratherthan simply expressing resentment that state, capitalist and heteronormative pat-terns of relationships (intersecting, as always, raciality, age, ability and ecology)make egalitarian and libertarian sex/uality difficult, the articles in this volume drawattention to rich and long-standing anarchist traditions of relating differently.However, as Shannon and Willis note, no tradition has all the ‘answers to thecomplex questions surrounding the political project of undoing all forms of struc-tured and institutionalized domination, coercion, and control’ and as Cohn,Portwood-Stacer and Windpassinger’s articles amply demonstrate, anarchists,too, find challenges in their relationships with each other. While both anarchistand queer traditions emphasize a critique of normalization and an appreciation ofdifference, communicating around areas of disagreement can trigger strong emo-tions with a consequent decrease in empathy and understanding (Rosenberg, 2003).Perhaps, then, becoming-liberated might involve relationship skills of listening withempathy. Otherwise, solidarity becomes an abstract ideal rather than a lived expe-rience. What might happen if the queer and class-struggle varieties of anarchists inBuenos Aires come to hear each other’s passions and concerns? Or the anarcha-queers and the LGBT folk who may be Othered in this identity construction? Whatadditional coalitions might be possible? But before rushing to invoke the radicalpossibilities for a better future, that heritage of phallacized whiteness (Winnubst,2006), I want to emphasize that clearly, this listening is already under way. It iswhat enables the diverse activist groups described in this issue to engage in mean-ingful solidarity, to organize non-hierarchically, and to find ways of expressingthemselves that others can hear and understand. What then is it about thesespaces, these queer anarchist counterpublics that enables listening (when theydo)? And can this be practised in other contexts? Can these spaces be createdanywhere? In universities? In my neighbourhood? What might becoming-liberatedmean in my life? In yours?

After reading Shepard’s account of activists’ feelings following the abstractionand theorizing of their experiences, I am deeply aware of both how much I appre-ciate being listened to and how much I love being able to listen to others. I hopethat this emphasis on listening with care will be a central element of all my rela-tionships, whether labelled personal, professional, political or ecological. Similarly,his article along with Jeppesen’s and Shannon and Willis’s, in particular, haveinspired me in my efforts of ‘writing differently,’ passionately, in academic contexts(Game and Metcalfe, 1996; Grey and Sinclair, 2006). Portwood-Stacer andWindpassinger’s articles bring my awareness to the significance of relating anar-chically; I’m moved reading them and realizing how being able to contribute toanarchist movements and scholarship opens new possibilities in other people’s lives

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(as well as my own). Finally, in laying out separate anarchist arguments for mar-riage and against marriage, for monogamy and for polyamory, and even for asex-uality, the combined articles in this issue affirm the creative contradictions withinanarchist traditions, emphasizing for me the importance of a diversity of tactics.Usually applied to questions about the ethics of fighting with police or breaking thewindows of Starbucks, it seems to me equally valid to the question of forms of(anarchist) sexualities and intimacies. Rather than simply tolerating the emotionaland political strategies of others that I find hard to understand, this inspires me tosee them as guides that might help me to imagine my own life, my own relation-ships, differently.

Acknowledgements

A warm thank you to the Anarchist Studies Network both for financially supporting theconference organized by me and Richard Cleminson in Leeds in 2006 that, in a roundaboutway, led to this special issue. Thank you, too, fellow ASN members for the ongoing intel-lectual and emotional support which have helped me both to carry on doing the research and

writing that I love and to have the energy to support others in their own efforts. Thank youto all the peer reviewers for your help with this, to the contributors both for your articles andfor your feedback on this editorial piece. How I love mutuality!

Note

1. Landauer was, just to name one example, a major influence in the foundation of theKibbutz movement (Horrox, 2009).

References

Abram D (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-HumanWorld. New York: Vintage Books.

Acklesberg M (2005) Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation

of Women. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press.Anderson B (2005) Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination.

London: Verso.

Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:Routledge.

Christoyannopoulos A (ed.) (2009) Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives. Newcastle upon

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Cleminson R (1993) First steps towards mass sex-economic therapy? Wilhelm reich and the

spanish revolution. Anarchist Studies 1(1): 25–37.Cohn J (2006) Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics.

Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press.Ferguson K (2008) Discourses of danger – locating Emma Goldman. Political Theory 36(5):

735–761.

Franks B (2006) Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of British Anarchisms. Oakland, CAand Edinburgh: AK Press.

Game A and Andrew M (1996) Passionate Sociology. London: SAGE.

Gordon U (2007) Anarchism reloaded. Journal of Political Ideologies 12(1): 29–48.



Gordon U (2008) Anarchy Alive! Antiauthoritarian Politics, from Practice to Theory.

London: Pluto Press.Graeber D (2009) Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press.Grey C and Sinclair A (2006) Writing Differently. Organization 13(3): 443–453.

Horrox J (2009) A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement. Oakland, CA andEdinburgh: AK Press.

Horton D (2006) Environmentalism and the bicycle. Environmental Politics 15(1): 41–58.Krishnamurti J (2005) Facing a World in Crisis: What Life Teaches Us in Challenging Times.

Boston, MA: Shambhala.Landauer, G (2005 [1910]) Weak Statesmen, Weaker People (trans. Robert Ludlow), Der

Sozialist. Excerpted in Graham R (ed.) Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian

Ideas – Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism 300 CE–1939, Montreal: Black RoseBooks, 164–165.

Le Guin UK (2004) The operating instructions. In: Le Guin UK (ed.) The Wave in the Mind:

Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination. Boston, MA: Shambhala,206–210.

Lisa (2008) Threads. Glasgow: self-published.May T (2009) Anarchism from foucault to ranciere. In: Amster R, Deleon A, Fernandez L,

Nocella A, Shannon D (eds) Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthologyof Anarchy in the Academy. London: Routledge, 11–17.

Paredes J (2002) An interview with Mujeres Creando. In: Star D (ed.) Quiet Rumours: An

Anarcha-Feminist Reader. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press/Dark Star, 111–113.Prichard A (2007) Justice, order and anarchy: The international political theory of Pierre-

Joseph Proudhon, 1809–1865. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35(3):

623–645.Rosenberg M (2003) Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA:

PuddleDancer Press.

Schmidt M and van der Walt L (2009) Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics ofAnarchism and Syndicalism. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press.

Skeggs B (2004) Class, Self, Culture. London and New York: Routledge.Smith M (2007) Wild-life: Anarchy, ecology, and ethics. Environmental Politics 16(3):

470–487.Waltz M (2007) Making room for difference: An anarchist response to disability. Fifth

Estate 41(374): 11–12, 40.

Williams C and Arrigo B (2001) Anarchaos and order: On the emergence of social justice.Theoretical Criminology 5(2): 223–252.

Winnubst S (2006) Queering Freedom. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Jamie Heckert is an independent scholar living in Poole on the south coast ofEngland. He is co-editor, alongside Richard Cleminson, of Anarchism andSexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power (forthcoming, Routledge) and contribu-tor to various activist and scholarly publications on themes including non-mono-gamy, queer research methodologies, anarchist ethics, identity politics and sexeducation. His key interest, both in research and other forms of practice, is thedevelopment of sustainable relationships with ourselves, each other and the land ofwhich we are a part. [email:[email protected]]

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Sexualities

13(4) 413–431




DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370649

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Sex and the anarchistunconscious:A brief history

Jesse CohnPurdue University North Central, USA

Abstract

‘We need form, not formlessness!’ In Gustav Landauer’s plaintive cry echoes a century-

old controversy among the most singular minds of an entire generation of anarchists –

Otto Gross, Erich Muhsam, Margarethe Hardegger – over sexuality and the ‘new

science’ of psychoanalysis. At stake in the dispute are questions that continue to

haunt anarchist thought and practice in the 21st century: What ‘forms’ can and

ought libertarian sexual culture take? What constitutes a libertarian politics of marriage

and the family? Does psychoanalysis constitute a complement to the anarchist tradition,

a crucial supplement to its logic, or a perilous substitute?

Keywords

anarchism, family, Germany, psychoanalysis

How could someone write a rebel’s book and be so mean?

Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak (2006: 43)

Margritlein, dear Margritlein, what are you doing with me? What am I doing with

you?

Gustav Landauer, letter to Margarethe Faas-Hardegger, 6

February 1909 (quoted in Bochsler, 2004: 112, trans. mine)

1

By the 1970s, what had been an anarchist love affair with the radical psychoanal-ysis and sexual politics of Wilhelm Reich, although still very much in evidence(e.g. Amrod and Chernyi, 1996 [1976]; Brinton, 1974; Dadoun, 1975; Shively,1979), was increasingly troubled. American anarchist George C. Benello charged

Corresponding author:

Jesse Cohn, Department of English and Modern Languages, Purdue University North Central, 1401 S. US 421,

Westville, IN, USA

Email: [email protected]


that ‘erotic de-repression, even if it is expressed more broadly than in sexual terms,is in fact encouraged in contemporary capitalist societies, even though admittedlyin distorted form’ (1974: 65). Skepticism over emancipatory claims for the erotic,redoubled by the impact of second-wave feminism, led Judy Greenway (1975) tocomplain that ‘[l]ibertarians tend to take it for granted that sexual liberation is aGood Thing’, as if it were uncomplicated by questions of gender and power. Suchquestions were made harder to elide by books such as Andrea Dworkin’s WomanHating (1974) – a work fatally shaped by the author’s brutal encounters with thesexual double standards of anarchist men.1 A rising divorce rate seemed largelydisconnected from emancipatory and egalitarian movements. Advanced consumercapitalism, John Clark observed, rendered Reichian sexpol obsolete: ‘[C]apital. . .can sponsor its own versions of sexual revolution, not to mention its own varietiesof women’s liberation and minority rights. Liberation comes to mean rebellionagainst all the obsolete social forms which restrain the process of commodification’(Clark, 1981: 29). What had been called, by earlier generations of anarchists, ‘theSex Question’ was once again a question.

Around 1900, however, most anarchists who gave the SexQuestionmuch thoughthad one answer: in the sphere of sexuality, anarchism quite obviously meant freelove. ‘As if love is anything but free!’ snorted Emma Goldman (1910: 242). But didfree love mean, in the phrase of the French individualists, ‘l’amour plural’ (Armandet al., 1923: 6) or could it mean, in the interpretation of the Spanish collectivists, the‘free union’ – the consensual commitment of a couple to monogamy without Statesanction, dissolvable, like any other such pact, by the withdrawal of consent(Bookchin, 1998: 81)? Was this nothing but the continuation of marriage – a‘farce’, Goldman called it – under another name?Would this be an unfair or imprac-tical constraint on the desires of the partners, or was it the alternative that lackedfairness or practicality? Were jealousy and insecurity habits that could be unlearned,or were these also instincts, intractable as desire itself? It is in this context thatGerman-Jewish anarcho-socialist Gustav Landauer, while agreeing with Goldmanthat ‘love has always been free’, argued strenuously for the pact of free union.Against many other anarchists, including his friend, Erich Muhsam, Landauerurged anarchists to consider that marriage and family might be part of a post-revolutionary future. In so doing, he also faced opposition from comrades armedwith a newly emerged scientific discourse: the science of psychoanalysis.

Decades before the anarchists’ discovery of Reichian psychoanalysis, and wellbefore Reich himself, another German psychoanalyst and sex radical had broughthis ideas before the anarchist community. As Martin Green notes, the core ofReich’s work – his ‘theory of the orgasm, theory of character, and theory of char-acter analysis’ – is strongly anticipated by the work of Otto Gross. Indeed,although there appears to have been no direct line of influence connecting theone to the other,2 it is for all intents and purposes as if, via the rediscovery ofReich by Paul Goodman and others, ‘Gross too has lived on into our times’(Green, 1974: 283).3 Some observations concerning the continuities betweenthese thinkers will be instructive.



After six weeks of treatment with Gross in 1907, the anarchist poet ErichMuhsam (who subsequently became a lover of Gross’s wife, Frieda), spoke ofhis method as ‘the transformation of subjective sensations into objective values’.The patient was to be encouraged to think of himself or herself as a ‘doctor’; the‘doctor’ was to become a friend (Muhsam, 1984: 100, trans. mine). The point wasto deconstruct not only the hierarchy implicit in the doctor/patient relationship butthe separation between ‘theory, practice, and life’, as Sam Whimster remarks; ‘Inhis understanding of abreaction (or catharsis) the analyst should form a personalrelationship with the patient in order to help what for him was a human being, outof the prison of repression’ (1999: 16).

In contrast to Freud, as Marie Louise Berneri notes in the anarchist journalNow, Reich denies any biological basis for the forms of repression we impose onourselves; arguing from anthropological data, he finds that the Oedipus complexand the associated phenomena of socialization – the introjection of authoritariannorms and values – is of ‘economic and sociological’ origin, therefore subject tochange (Berneri, 1945: 57). At the same time, Berneri finds in him a ‘fundamentalbelief in human nature’: ‘man is only anti-social, submissive, cruel or masochisticbecause he lacked the freedom to develop his natural instincts’ (1945: 60). Likewise,for Gross, the unconscious is not, as it was for Freud, a storehouse of essentiallyanti-social energies kept in check only by the heavy hand of internalized socialnorms; rather, it is a treasury of ‘hidden values’ that are ‘preformed in humandisposition but repressed from consciousness through the psychic pressure of edu-cation and all forms of authoritarianism’ (Gross, 1977: 105). A ‘new ethic’, inreality that of a long-lost matriarchal civilization, is always already inherent inthe self, albeit repressed by cruel patriarchal morality: ‘the root of all authoritylies in the family’ (Gross, 2005: 282–3). Neuroses are simply the result of the cleav-ing of the psyche into ‘that which belongs to oneself’, that is, ‘that which is innateto the individual’, and ‘that which has been suggested to it, i.e., that which isinstilled in and imposed on us’ (Gross, 2005: 282, modifications mine).Naturally, then, all that need be done to effect social transformation is to allowthis unconscious content to express itself in individuals, tearing them loose of ‘theties of marriage and family life’; ‘[t]he psychology of the unconscious’, in revealingthe repressed, innate self, ‘is the philosophy of revolution’ (2005: 283, 281, empha-sis mine).

This reversal of repression, indeed, was the aim of Gross’s idiosyncraticpsychoanalytic method, which he practiced in the bohemian coffeehouses ofMunich (Jones, 1990: 163–4). According to Carl Jung (tasked, briefly, with treatingGross for his own mental illness) Gross’s ultimate step consisted in ‘turning peopleinto sexual immoralists’ – in other words, quite simply ‘lift[ing] repression by actingout [one’s] desires’ (Jung in Jung and Freud, 1977: 90; Whimster, 1999: 16).Thereby, Gross intended to ‘releas[e] an impulse for revolutionary protest’(Jung and Freud, 1977: 107). This de-repressive therapy frequently entailednot only the use of cocaine and opium (pastimes much enjoyed by Gross,like Freud before him) but flagrant violations of therapeutic ethics, including

Cohn 415


forming personal and sexual relationships with patients. Results were some-times rapid and positive – such as in the case of Muhsam’s six-week ‘miracletreatment’ (Nitzschke, 2001: 74–5, trans. mine) – but could also be destructive:two patients, one a live-in lover, committed suicide, apparently ‘with Otto’sapproval’ (Whimster, 1999: 17). ‘I can think of these things only with the greatestbitterness’, wrote Gustav Landauer in a 1909 letter to Muhsam; ‘I fear that somehave seriously wrecked their lives under his influence’ (in Muhsam, 1984: 747,trans. mine).

This grim observation seemed to ground Landauer’s dim assessment ofFreudian psychology in general, which seemed to him to be terribly scientistic,in the worst sense of the term – reducing living individuals to categories, mak-ing confident pronouncements about invisible mental entities without a traceof skeptical restraint. A charismatic young psychoanalyst could use Freudian‘scientific jargon’ to issue irresponsible prescriptions (Landauer, in Muhsam,1984: 746; Landauer, 1929: 382, trans. mine). Landauer’s associate LudwigBerndl, in a harsh review of Freud’s Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, likewiseridiculed what he saw as the hubris of the Freudians’ claim that ‘there is anentire science, a fully developed, attained metaphysics of this sexual soul’ andthat those who question it are merely manifesting ‘resistance’ (1911: 103–4,trans. mine). On the contrary, it was psychotherapy that represented superstition:Berndl mockingly compared it both to witchcraft and Catholic confession (1911:103). A number of Landauer’s works from this period reiterate this attack on‘the criminal madness of the psycho-analysts’ (in Berndl, 1911: 104), which hesaw as yet another symptom of ‘[t]he decadence and decline of our time’(Landauer, 1910a: 50–1). In a footnote to Berndl’s extended attack on psychoanal-ysis in Der Sozialist, Landauer specifically refers to ‘one of the worst Freudians’,generally thought to be Otto Gross (Landauer, in Berndl, 1911: 104; Mitzman,1983: 59).

Beyond their epistemological disagreement, Gross and Landauer werebound to clash over their conflicting moral visions. It is Muhsam, a friendto both Gross and Landauer, who perhaps best summarizes this moraldisagreement:

Landauer saw in the conjugally constructed family the condition for ‘order through

voluntary associations’, which, according to his definition, means the anarchist society

desired by both of us. I saw (and see) in marriage, as a socially protected arrangement,

the root of conformist constraint; in the equation of monogamous life with fidelity, the

falsification of fundamental moral ideas; in the acknowledgment of sexual jealousy as

a just and legitimate feeling, the promotion of the most terrible authoritarian drives;

and in the likening of love to mutual surveillance, deeply freedom-adverse and reac-

tionary interests that mutilate nature in the interests of a slave morality. . . . The gen-

eral statements of psychoanalysts – Dr. Otto Gross – about the nature of jealousy and

the coercive nature of the patriarchal family came very close to my ideas. (Muhsam,

1978 Unpolitische Erinnerungen: 666–7, trans. mine)



Landauer’s seemingly conservative view of marriage and family was not, however,a mere refusal to acknowledge the presence of domination and hierarchy in theseinstitutions, nor was it a mere aberration of or exception to his libertarian thought.Rather, it flowed directly from his theory of culture or ‘spirit’.

Anarchists from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Peter Kropotkin fully recognizedthe importance of culture – ‘social customs that bring [women and] men in contactwith one another’, as Kropotkin put it (2002: 137) – to guarantee peace and justicein the absence of the State, rather than relying on any putatively innate goodness,as has been routinely alleged. It is these customs, establishing the coherence andsolidarity on which any community ultimately depends, that would enable theemergence of a society capable of sustaining itself without the prosthesis of theState. At the same time, in so far as customs are produced and preserved by rep-etition, they continually risk becoming ‘crystallized’ or parasitized by self-privile-ging mediators (Kropotkin, 2002: 139, 201). Landauer redescribes this problem inthe language of German romanticism, speaking of ‘spirit’ (Geist):

Wherever men [and women] have been, they were . . . held together by a common

spirit . . .But this natural compulsion of the unifying quality and common spirit . . . has

always needed external forms: religious symbols and cults, ideas of faith, prayer rituals

or things of this sort. Therefore spirit in the nations always connected with unspirit,

and deep symbolic thinking with superstitious opinion. The warmth and love of the

unifying spirit is overshadowed by the stiff coldness of dogma. Truth, arising from

such depths that it can be expressed only in imagery, is replaced by the nonsense of

literalness. This is followed by external organization. The church and the secular

organizations of external coercion gain strength and grow continually worse.

(Landauer, 1978: 33)

Dominative institutions like the State, in short, spring from the decay of ‘spirit’into ‘unspirit’: where alienation and conflict vitiate society’s intrinsic forces ofsolidarity and community, extrinsic force comes to act as their ‘surrogate’, anduntil the former are regenerated, the latter is inescapable (38). Thus, as MartinBuber paraphrases Landauer, socialism seeks ‘whatever vestiges of this spirit yetlurk in the depths of our uncommunal age’ (49). Repositories of Geist includenational identities (even when these are wrongly identified with the State, andparticularly in the resistance of ‘old peoples’ to colonization), traditions ofmutual aid, art and culture, voluntary associations of all kinds – and networksof love and kinship, including what we know as ‘family’ (1919 Die Revolution: 22,1978: 114, 116). Buber approvingly quotes from Landauer’s correspondence:

‘It would be madness’, Landauer writes in a letter to a woman who wanted to abolish

marriage, ‘to dream of abolishing the few forms of union that remain to us! We need

form, not formlessness. We need tradition.’ He who builds, not arbitrarily and fruit-

lessly, but legitimately and for the future, acts from inner kinship with age-old tradi-

tion, and this entrusts itself to him and gives him strength. (Buber, 1996: 48–9)

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Far from representing the dead hand of the past suppressing a revolutionaryfuture, then, the family is, for Landauer, a reservoir of common spirit and a modelof voluntary association.

Landauer’s anarchist conception of the family as a haven for Geist colored hisperceptions of the present. Even before the horrors of the First World War, inAufruf zum Sozialismus (1911), Landauer described the spectacle of the 20th cen-tury as one of ‘a veritable physical and physiological decadence’:

the proletarians are becoming dull, submissive, crude, external, and to an increasing

extent, alcoholics . . . [T]ogether with their loss of religion they are beginning to lose

every sort of internal feeling and responsibility . . . [E]very firm standard, every sacred

allegiance, every firmness of character is being lost . . . [W]omen are being drawn into

the whirlpool of superficial sensuality, of colorful, decorative lasciviousness . . . [T]he

natural, unintentional population increase is beginning to decline in all strata of the

people and being replaced by sex without children under the guidance of science and

technology . . . [A]ll this is beginning to turn into neurosis and hysteria in all strata of

society . . . [T]he voices of degenerate, unrestrained and uprooted females and their

male consorts are proclaiming promiscuity and seeking to replace the family with

the pleasure of variety, of free, unrestrained union, fatherhood with state motherhood

insurance. (Landauer, 1978: 114–16)

Here, in one of the most celebrated manifestoes of 20th-century anarchism, we wit-ness something disconcerting: anarchist discourse blends with genuinely reactionarynarratives concerning ‘decadence’. Without giving any rational argument, Landauerstrings together a series of images, making them all metonymous for and ultimatelysynonymous with one another, so that, by sheer association, a newly ‘unrestrained’female sexuality is made to bear the guilt for the demise of community.

This irruption of paranoid misogyny seems bizarre, disconnected from the restof Landauer’s argument. Surely it could be argued that 20th-century upheavals insexual norms, however disorienting or painful they may have been, were not just acollapse into ‘formlessness’ but the search of Geist for fresh forms adequate to itsdevelopment, disentangling the vivifying forces of love and joy from the cold appa-ratuses of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and capitalism; perhaps theywere (and are) a search for new kinds of family. Indeed, Gross appeals to thispossibility: ‘The times of crisis in advanced cultures have so far always beenattended with complaints about the loosening of the ties of marriage and familylife . . . but people could never hear in this ‘immoral tendency’ the life-affirmingethical crying out of humanity for redemption’ (2005: 283). What should makeLandauer deaf to such a cry?

2

What Buber omits to mention is that the woman to whom Landauer wrote thewords ‘It would be madness to dream of abolishing the few forms of union that



remain to us’, in a letter dated 1–2 April 1909, was his lover, Margarethe Faas-Hardegger. A brilliant young Swiss feminist, trade-union activist, and libertariansocialist, she had been enthusiastically active in Landauer’s organization, theSozialistischer Bund. She was married, with two children; he was married, too,with three children. By that April, his infatuation with her, kindled at their meetingin August 1908, was waning (Lunn 192). The letter was in response to an article shehad submitted for publication in Der Sozialist on sexuality, marriage, and moth-erhood – an article bearing strong traces of the influence of her new friend, OttoGross (Bochsler, 2004: 133). ‘Are we to publish this filth?’ he asks incredulously.‘As long as the paper is in my care, your article will not be published as it has beensubmitted’ (Landauer, 1929: 243–4, trans. mine).

How pertinent is this biographical context to the meaning of Landauer’s decla-ration that ‘we need form, not formlessness’? What he says privately to Faas-Hardegger is only a foretaste of what he will argue publicly, in the pages of DerSozialist, notably in two controversial articles, ‘Tarnowska’ (1 April, 1910a) and‘Von der Ehe’ (1 October, 1910b). In the letter to Faas-Hardegger, Landauer com-plains of her article that ‘the words ‘‘father’’ and ‘‘parents’’ do not appear once’:

Probably you yourself imagine that ‘father’, ‘parents’, are ‘bourgeois’ institu-

tions . . . because they are not entirely separate from private property . . . [But] socialism

does not think to touch such private property; nor does it have any reason to do so.

Only mad, dissipated Marxists would have the chair on which I write, the clothes in

which my body is dressed, and the house in which I live belong to the ‘collectivity’.

You have become infected by them, otherwise you would not write the sentence,

which is disgusting to me in the deepest way: ‘tomorrow the collectivity will provide

for us’. You probably do not mean all of us by this, only the women and the fatherless

children of these women: the children of the ‘collective’ and the women of the

‘collective.’

No, no, all that has nothing to do with me. It is what Proudhon, who never became

more furious than if this sort of ‘socialism’ was attributed to him, called Pornocratie.

(1929: 249, trans. mine)

The reference to Proudhon is telling. La pornocratie: ou, Les femmes dans les tempsmodernes, published posthumously in 1875, was the ultimate expression ofProudhon’s misogynistic tendencies, an extended rant against the feminism ofwomen such as Jenny d’Hericourt, which blamed the disintegration of moralityin ‘modern times’ on the unbridled sexuality of emancipated women. This is anarrative of sexual decadence not unlike Landauer’s own:

The connective spirit has been lost in modern times, and the voluntary and natural

bonds which this spirit creates have in part decayed . . . Such structures of voluntar-

iness are marriage, the family, the guild, the city, etc. Among such modern men, one

must be afraid to meet a cry of anger or contempt and be regarded as a real philistine

Cohn 419


if one regards marriage and family as a beautiful institution and a foundation for a

popular culture, one which belongs to the future as much as to the past. Already the

word ‘father’ has a bad sound in these circles, which are entirely governed by degen-

erate, wild, and deracinated girls. (Landauer, 1910a: 50, trans. mine)

This last phrase is repeated in his essay ‘On Marriage’ (‘Von der Ehe’, 1910b),where he speaks of the ‘degenerate, unrestrained and uprooted females and theirmale consorts’ who supposedly advocate ‘promiscuity’, ‘variety’, ‘lack of allrestraint’, and ‘state maternity insurance’ (Der werdende Mensch 1921: 67, trans.mine) – a litany of outrage Landauer will restate in Aufruf zum Sozialismus.

Landauer’s public invective always carefully avoids reference to any specific‘females’, but it clearly echoes the language of his private admonishments(Bochsler, 2004: 165). What is missing from the public version is the peculiarlypleading tone of his letters of 1–2 April 1909: ‘And now we beg you, Margarethe,beg you as nicely as we can: be silent! Be absolutely silent about these things now!’And further: ‘You are in a state of agitation, still forming, still becoming . . . Thisarticle that you have forced out of yourself is a relapse. I ask you: Let me help youfurther.’ In a coda, he briskly suggests: ‘May I annex the main clauses, the mood,and the meaning of your article and convert it to a dialogue (for us, approximately,a dialogue between you and me, for the objective reader, approximately, between afather and a daughter)? This would be a gift for which I would be seriously grate-ful.’ Still more strangely, he signs himself: ‘The Father’ (1929: 250, trans. mine).

Faas-Hardegger, according to her biographer, was ‘so deeply hurt by Landauer’sinsults that she becomes ill’ (Bochsler, 2004: 165). In the December of 1910, shepublished one more article inDer Sozialist, ‘Die Klage des fernen Kindes’ (‘The Cryof the Faraway Child’), a strange, poetic piece in which a nameless protagonistmourns the absence of a lost ‘father’: ‘I needed him as no one else needed him,and now I had lost him. My hands stretched and reached out into emptiness – hehas slipped away fromme’ (quoted in Bochsler, 2004: 180, trans. mine). Finally, as ifin obedience to Landauer’s injunction to be ‘absolutely silent’, she

withdraws completely into herself, unable to resist, but also unable to communicate

with the man. For several months she cannot address a line to Landauer. She

describes this condition as a ‘kind of rigidity, which attacks me when I am mentally

frightened’, against which she is completely helpless: ‘A sudden mental disappoint-

ment: I got so cramped that I sank immediately into silence.’ (Bochsler, 2004: 165)

In all of this, there is an uncomfortable echo of the description of life at home withLandauer given by his own daughter, Brigitte, more than half a century after hisdeath, in an interview: ‘Father dominated our home both spiritually and physi-cally . . . it was his constant seriousness that made me, as a child, regard him withawe. He was very strict’. In a house with three small children, this awe reinforcedthe quiet the parents required for their intellectual work: ‘In our home, as a rule,silence reined’ (in Avrich, 2005: 21–2).



3

What possible lessons can be drawn from the tangled histories of Otto Gross,Gustav Landauer, Margarethe Faas-Hardegger, Hedwig Lachmann, and ErichMuhsam? In so far as the personal is political, in the words of the old feministadage, what, if anything, can all of this hypocrisy and chaos have to teach us aboutthe history of anarchism, psychoanalysis, sex, and gender? Is this history anylonger, or have we strayed into gossip, the perennial pastime of imperial subjects,relegated to the position of history’s spectators?4

Perhaps Landauer’s story spells out the bankruptcy of a Proudhonian politics ofthe family as reflected in Landauer’s thought and praxis. Just as Proudhon’smoments of misogyny can be read, a la Reich and Gross, as the negative expressionof positive homosexual impulses converted into a will to power over others as wellas over oneself (Guerin, 1999), Landauer’s behavior in these affairs represents thetriumph by other means of the very sexual drives the primacy of which he means todeny: a return of the repressed. The lesson, then, would be that the unconscious ofLandauer’s social anarchism, its shadow, is the fantasy of the perfect patriarchalfamily in which control of the libido is guaranteed by the father’s uncontested ruleover women and children.

However, an exploration of the unconscious and sexual contents of GustavLandauer’s polemics against psychoanalysis and sexual liberation risks producingexactly what he warned that a too-simplistic psychoanalytic method would pro-duce: a caricature. Landauer’s credentials as a modern feminist are not entirelylacking. Birgit Seemann, biographer of his second wife, Hedwig Lachmann, pointsout that Landauer manifested what was in many respects ‘a progressive, contem-porary attitude’ toward issues of gender and power, particularly in terms of thepolitical alliances he sought and refused (Seemann, 1998: 202). Moreover, quiteunlike Proudhon, he ascribed special value to ‘women’s thought’ and saw a ‘fem-inine spirit’ as crucial to the social reconstruction for which he was calling(Landauer, 1921 Der Werdende Mensch: 249; Maurer, 1971: 136; Seemann, 1998:202). Nor, perhaps, was Landauer’s hypocrisy quite as great as it might seem. Heseems to have been quite frank with Lachmann about what was going on betweenhimself and Faas-Hardegger, who seems to have accepted it without jealousy, andit did not destroy their relationship, demonstrating what Landauer himself haddeclared in ‘Von der Ehe’: ‘When a mature man and a girl grown to great love haveunited themselves in marriage, their will to partnership and their mutual under-standing become so firm that they are inseparably joined, although each one is anindividual and can experience things in every sphere, even things that hurt andmust hurt the other person in the marriage’ (quoted in Maurer, 1971: 104).Ultimately, as Seemann concludes, ‘Gustav Landauer’s concept of marriage as afree ‘association’ of the sexes was probably most fully realized in community withHedwig Lachmann’ (1998: 202).

At the same time, the egalitarian commitments of Landauer’s sex-radical rivalswere not beyond question; they often appear thin at best, a surface behind which

Cohn 421


lurks a disturbingly callous and/or proprietary attitude towards women.5 In retro-spect, Gross’s theory of ancestral matriarchy resembles a rather self-serving het-erosexual male fantasy.6 Muhsam, who had become Faas-Hardegger’s lover in1909, rather than feeling wounded, as she was, by Landauer’s publication of‘Von der Ehe’, wrote in his diary that he was ‘very satisfied’ by this response tohis own points: ‘[This is] a very nice, reasonable article . . . I am very glad to needbear no more resentment against my friend’ (1994: 29, trans. mine). In subsequentyears, Muhsam and Gross would enter into a sexual rivalry over Gross’ wife,Frieda, that threatened to become violent (Linse, 1999: 137–8).

One might consider Gross’ erratic, hypocritical, and destructive behavior asevidence against his own rose-tinted views of psychoanalysis and free love. Eventhe pain and chaos caused by Landauer’s extramarital romance might be presentedas corroboration of the perils of a ‘formless’ existence; conversely, the relativewarmth and stability of Landauer’s marriage with Lachmann – their daughters,too, appear to have remembered both of their parents with real love in spite of their‘seriousness’ (Avrich, 2005: 34–7) – could constitute the argument of life for histheory of family as a surviving form of the ‘binding spirit’.

Then again, perhaps there is not only no simple lesson, but simply no lesson atall here. It is possible that reading these personal lives for their political meaningtoo crudely reduces the public and social qualities of politics to the shrunken,sordid dimensions of the private realm, collapsing the cognitive content of anar-chist ideas into expressions of the personal failures of a few flawed human beings. IfGross, Muhsam, or Landauer were inconsistent in practicing their principles, thisdoes not necessarily impeach the principles themselves. To argue from defectivepractices to defective principles would require a further demonstration that some-thing in the principles themselves foretells their flawed enactment, that they are insome way incapable of being lived out consistently.

If one way of defining ‘the unconscious’ is that which we must not allow our-selves to know, or that which we must behave as if we did not know, in order to dowhat it is that we do, then it is possible for certain principles to function as part of apolitical unconscious, to operate in such a way as to permit us to do things that wecannot admit that we want to do. The question is whether this element of self-deception is somehow inherent in one or another of these two anarchist discourseson sexuality – or in both. It seems to me that Landauer’s anti-psychoanalyticaccount of sexuality is actually less freighted with unconscious contents than isGross’s psychoanalytic account and can offer more to practice in our time. It is astronger, more coherent account in part because it is not ignorant of the facts andphenomena to which psychoanalytic theory attends.

First of all, Landauer’s rejection of psychoanalysis was not quite as total as itmight appear. Regarding ‘the theories and the practice of Freud and Gross’, hewrote to Muhsam as late as 1909, ‘I believe that in the theoretical aspect there is agood core’ (in Muhsam, 1984: 747, trans. mine). As Hanna Delf observes,Landauer’s theory of the psyche, like Freud’s, gave due respect to the power andreality of ‘unconscious mental processes’, the ‘autonomy of the drives and



emotions’ from conscious control (1997: 74, trans. mine; see also Despoix, 1995:17). Landauer denies the supposedly intact, unified nature of the Cartesian cogito:

Psychology teaches us . . . that there is actually no single soul, no ‘I’, only psychic

drives and forces that sometimes push up to the threshold of the sphere of conscious-

ness, sometimes below it . . . [T]here is no absolute, independent individual, there are

only psychic forces, as there are physical forces; consciousness is one of these forces,

but it is unable to exercise a despotic rule over the unconscious drives. (Landauer,

1986: 337)

What we call the ‘individual’ is, in fact, divided against itself, a conflictual unity.This is directly in the Proudhonian line: when Proudhon asks, ‘What is it, indeed,that we call a person? And what does this person mean when it says: me?’ heanswers: ‘a group’, ‘a composite of powers’, (quoted in Colson, 2001: 68, 121,62, trans. mine). It is Freudianism that insists on reifying these powers or forcesinto self-contained, organ-like entities, taking its own spatial and mechanical met-aphors for realities (Colombo, 1998: 68, 77). Landauer, like Proudhon, resistsmechanistic materialism, speaking instead of Geist, a transmissible meaningwhich is also a force that is no less real for its transcending the boundaries ofany individual body, no less concrete for its essentially cognitive character. Thismakes it easier for Landauer to theorize the collective, participatory dimensions ofpsychology – that is, its properly social dimensions. For Freudian theory, by con-trast, society, ‘civilization’, can only be ‘repression’ imposed on the biological indi-vidual from the outside – an imposition Freud reluctantly accepts (2005) and thatGross and Reich reject.

Secondly, it is significant that Landauer, while offering a reasoned critique ofsocial relations, nonetheless rejects ‘rationalism’ (1919: 37, trans. mine). In otherwords, he does not dispute Gross out of fear of the irrational – another name, inpatriarchal discourse, for the ‘feminine thinking’ that Landauer favors. The Geistthat he champions is not only ‘mind’ or cognition but ‘spirit’, emotion and moti-vating force. In ‘Volk und Land’, a key manifesto of Landauer’s SozialistischerBund, Landauer redescribed Geist in terms of Wahn, a difficult-to-translate wordthat is generally rendered as ‘illusion’, but which also means ‘delusion’ or ‘madness’(Maurer, 1971: 92). He does not mean by this that spirits are unreal, for they indeedmanifest a most powerful reality through the actions of people who are overtakenby them, but that they are phenomena of something more than cool reason. TheGerman word Wahn connotes a sense of yearning and anticipation entirely missingfrom the English ‘illusion’ and the like (the closest relatives appear to be archaicwords like ‘ween’ and ‘wanton’); that is to say, the symbols that are associated withWahn do not represent realities so much as they bring about realities. Albeit‘anchored in the past’, they are elements of the ‘anticipatory imagination’(Landauer, 1978: 93).7A contributor to the anarchist journal Do Or Die explainsLandauer’s conception of Wahn in terms of ‘the ancient, raw energy of the people,the kind of spine-tingling collective power that can still, despite everything, be

Cohn 423


experienced at football matches’ (Anonymous, 2001: 148). In Landauer’s ownwords, ‘Love is spirit; spirit is love; love and spirit are both forms of illusion[Wahn]’ (1907: 65, trans. mine). Where Freud’s ‘civilization’ sometimes resemblesa kind of forced-labor camp herded together by fear, Landauer is able to perceiveand imagine many, many ‘forms of togetherness’ brought together by love:

Love is a readiness and a reality that dwells within human beings; it created the family;

it and its dionysian voluptuousness gave birth to the tragedy and images of God; thus,

too, was the nature of Christianity, when it was alive, in the Middle Ages: love and the

binding, all-binding spirit among human beings. (1907: 65, trans. mine)

This is a profound recognition of the political rationality of the passions, even morereminiscent of Fourier than of Freud, Gross, or Reich.8

Finally, an important strength of Landauer’s account of the psyche is its empha-sis on development (Entwicklung). Left Freudianism tends to conceive of history aslittle more than the wreckage of a primordial Eden. ‘The highest ideas of human-ity’, writes Gross in his psychoanalytical exegesis of the Book of Genesis, ‘come tothe future from primitive times’ (1919a: 15, trans. mine). ‘[H]istory itself’, writesBookchin in his polemic against the new primitivists, ‘becomes . . . a steady ‘‘Fall’’from an animalistic ‘‘authenticity’’’ (1995: 48). While it is true that Landauer, too,rejects linear conceptions of ‘so-called progress’ (1978: 36) and finds great value intradition (‘[t]here is nothing worthier of admiration than an old illusion [Wahn]’[1907: 65]; ‘even the most ill-reputed or archaic institutions . . . because they are oldand have a tradition . . . have a glimmer, as it were, of beauty’ [1978: 93]), his notionof revolution is fundamentally constructive: ‘socialism must be built, erected, orga-nized out of a new spirit’, he insists (1978: 21). For Landauer, history, despite itsburden of loss and failure, is nonetheless Entwicklungsgeschichte, a meaningfulstruggle for development.

In parallel with his view of society as something fundamentally historicaland developmental, Landauer conceives of the self as that which is alwaysunder construction. His early critique of Max Stirner’s ultra-individualistanarchism, ‘Toward a Developmental History of the Individual’ (‘ZurEntwicklungsgeschichte des Individuums’), centers on Stirner’s postulation of the‘individual’ (Individuum) as self-contained, excluding the constructive dimensionsof selfhood. In place of the static noun, Landauer valorizes the adjective, ‘individ-uality’ (Individualitat), the product of an ongoing social process of individuation(1986: 348). This is distinct both from Freud’s authoritarian narrative of develop-ment via the humiliating ‘introjection’ of social norms, and from the invertedFreudianisms of Reich and Gross, for whom authentic selfhood is what is leftwhen one has expelled what was introjected. For those who have only turnedOedipus upside down, celebrating father-murder and mother-possession as victo-ries rather than catastrophes, there is ultimately no such thing as healthy adult-hood; the aim of therapy is to return to the plasticity of childhood, just as the aimof politics is to undo history (Zerzan, 1988: 35). From this perspective, it is



ultimately the very construction of ‘society’ – ‘a monolithic, all-encompassingdeath march’, as primitivist John Zerzan describes it in his Nihilist’s Dictionary –that is the root of all psychological problems (1994: 162, 56). Landauer arguesotherwise: it is ‘in making social psychology [that] we make the revolution’(Landauer, 1919: 28, trans. and emphasis mine).

What might an internally consistent, Landauerian social psychology of sexualitylook like? It seems to me that it would have the greatest affinity not only withProudhon’s work but with Spinoza’s – an even more important influence onLandauer (Delf, 1997; Lunn, 1973: 22–3). If Landauer relapsed, all too often,into dichotomies of spirit versus body and love versus sex, it is in the momentswhen he attended to Spinoza’s critique of Cartesian dualism that his work mightsuggest, in the words of Steven Barbone and Lee Rice, ‘a more adequate account’based on a thoroughgoing monism, a refusal to intellectualize ‘human cognitiveand appetitive powers’, and ‘avoidance of talk about a monolithic ‘‘humannature’’’ (1997: 265–6). Along these lines, a Landauerian theory might:

1. Refuse to regard sexuality as something primary, a first cause of which all elsecan be explained as the effect (Landauer in Muhsam, 1984: 747). That is to say:it would avoid the reductive ‘repressive hypothesis’ that Foucault sarcasticallysummarized as ‘Sex, the explanation for everything’ (1990: 78).

2. Regard sexuality, instead, in Proudhon’s term, as a ‘resultant’ – like everythingelse, including class, gender, race, and so on. In every case, as Daniel Colsonwarns us, that which seems to stand as a point of origin ‘only comes afterwards,is only an effect of composition’ (2001: 288, trans. mine). As Landauer puts it,‘we always run the risk of taking predecessors for ancestors’ (1919: 30, trans.mine).

3. Regard sexuality as a Bund, in several senses of that term:a. It is a form of bondage or containment within boundaries, a conceptual

policing-up of what is in itself irregular, untidy, resistant to categorization.‘All history, all comprehension is a simplification, a condensation’, Landauerwarns us; in truth, there are no ‘fixed and distinct things’ such as our com-prehension and our historical will-to-know demand from and project ontoreality (1919: 7–8, trans. mine).

b. It is a bundle, a grouping-together, a composite of different (and disparate)impulses and pleasures, cultural signs and biochemical signals, genes andinterpretations, and so on. Landauer called such products of cognition andlanguage ‘constructions of being’, and insisted that they were not merelyconceptual jugglings but had real consequences for lived practice: they are‘not only instruments of the comprehension but, above all, the creation ofeffective new realities’ (1919: 7, 9, trans. mine). As one such construct orBund, sexuality has no fixed, necessary unity; it has been composed, and itcan be recomposed in an indeterminate number of ways. As Colson declares:‘Because anarchism attempts to recompose the totality of that which exists, italso attempts to recompose the constitutive elements of sexuality into new

Cohn 425


arrangements. It attempts to give birth to new associations and new desirescorresponding to other needs’ (2001: 301, trans. mine).

c. It is a bond, a covenant or contract, a form of association or community,sometimes ‘happenstance’ or ‘hereditary’ (those into which we find ourselvesinserted), and sometimes ‘free’ (those we choose and create); it is a set ofsocial relations, and we can change ourselves by changing them (Landauer,1994: 9, trans. mine). In the words of one of Landauer’s most justly famousessays, even the State itself is ‘a certain relationship between human beings, amode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships,by behaving differently’ (quoted in Buber, 1996: 46). This process of exper-imentation can and should encompass ‘economic relationships’, ‘communityliving’, ‘upbringing’, and – Landauer declares in 1915 – relations ‘between thesexes’ (2005: 166).

A consistently anarchist social-psychological account of sexuality and family, inshort, might comprise a theory of ethically mindful experiments in the free recon-struction of relationships along egalitarian lines – more or less as Landauer sug-gested, ironically, when he wrote, in his strange, cruel letter to Faas-Hardegger: ‘Iwant to create new forms of life in common [Mitlebensformen], because those thatexist currently are too miserable, too cramped’ (1929: 249).

This anarchist conception of sexuality and family as a search for neueMitlebensformen is not without some precedents. Even Paul Goodman, whooften sounds like the dutiful child of Gross and Reich, seems to have learnedsomething from his own experiments with relation (and perhaps also fromSpinoza, whom he, too, studied with great interest). His early infatuation withReichian psychoanalysis and sexual politics, expressed in a glowing review ofReich’s The Function of the Orgasm, drew the scorn of radical sociologists C.Wright Mills and Patricia Salter, who accused him of a naıve trust in ‘instinctualnature’, that is, the unrepressed libido, as a force for social transformation. Ratherthan crumbling before the advance of erotic liberation, capitalist institutions werealready learning how to commodify the erotic: ‘the machinery of amusement’, theyobserved, ‘seizes precisely upon ‘‘sex’’ and exploits it as the central value of ‘‘fun’’and ‘‘glamor’’’ (Mills and Salter, 1945: 314). Stung by their criticisms – andalarmed by the rise of an anti-intellectual counterculture that at times deeply dis-mayed Goodman – he seems to revised his accounts of human nature, distancinghimself from the repressive hypothesis, retreating toward a more modest theory ofhuman nature resembling what Peter Wilkin calls ‘weak’ essentialism (1999: 192).Goodman insisted that Mills and Salter had misunderstood his anarchism, whichassumed ‘human nature’ only as ‘a potentiality’; anarchists could criticize coerciveinstitutions for making the worst of our biological potentiality without therebyappealing to any innate human goodness (1945: 315).

The results of this revision were salutary, and they contributed significantly tothe aspects of Goodman’s work that would remain relevant in an age of the wide-spread commodification of sexuality and destruction of families. By 1965, he could



say that ‘[t]he moral question is not whether men [and women] are ‘‘good enough’’for a type of social organization, but whether the type of organization is useful todevelop the potentialities of intelligence, grace and freedom in [women and] men’(1965: 19).9

If this formulation, too, is an expression of anarchist desire, we are in luck.

Notes

1. In the 1960s, Dworkin was attracted to the ‘beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution’ ofJudith Malina, but was confused by Goodman’s misogynistic behavior (it is to Goodmanshe refers when she remarks, in her memoir, ‘How could someone write a rebel’s book

and be so mean?’); traveling to Amsterdam to interview anarchists participating in theProvo movement, she was to be disillusioned after marrying one of them, Cornelius(Iwan) Dirk de Bruin, who beat, abused, and stalked her until their 1972 divorce

(Dworkin, 2006: 43, 16, 2007).2. Although Green emphasizes that the affinity between Gross and Reich ‘was not a case of

influence so much of as coincidence of cultural factors’ (1974: 283) – in particular, their

shared status as rebels against Freudian orthodoxy – Bernd Laska insists that it is‘entirely possible’ that Reich at least knew of Gross, and argues that ‘the similarity ofmany of the key ideas of Gross and Reich suggests that Reich knew Gross’s work.’

(Laska, 2003: 158, 134, trans. mine).3. Russell Jacoby, too, finds in Gross ‘a predecessor to Wilhelm Reich’ (1986: 40), as do

Julia Mengual (2006) and Bernd Laska (2003).4. See Edmundson (1998: 26).

5. See Linse (1999: 140) and especially Van den Berg (1992, 1993, and 1996).6. It might seem bizarre that a self-proclaimed anarchist, presumably opposed to any form

of hierarchy, would look to matriarchy as a social model any more than patriarchy. The

idea of matriarchy (or Mutterrecht, ‘mother right’) to which Gross refers, however, isloosely derived from the speculative anthropology of Johann Jakob Bachofen; in fact, itseems to confound what Bachofen imagined to be two distinct historical stages of devel-

opment: a state of universal sexual promiscuity (‘hetairism’) and a female-dominatedorder that imposed the law of marriage upon it (Bachofen, 1967: 94–5). Gross, on theother hand, imagines that a female-centered society was one based on total promiscuity:‘Matriarchy does not impose barriers or standards, morals or controls upon sexuality. It

does not know the concept of fatherhood and does not require verification of paternity’(Gross, 1919c: 22, my translation). This would seem a rather ideal situation for a manwho, after having impregnated Else Jaffe, wife of his friend Edgar Jaffe, with whom he

was staying at the time, proceeded to hop in bed with her sister Frieda Weekly, and so onand so forth. (Noll, 1994: 154). In this light, the swipe Landauer takes at Otto Gross in‘Von der Ehe’ is not entirely unfair: ‘Out of the plight of mothers who are left miserable

and exposed to shame in their pregnancies, they make a new theory of sexual ethics underthe name of mother-right, which, as I have said, wishes nothing more than to abolishfatherhood’ (1910b: 151, trans. mine). Moreover, we might speculate that the image of a

matriarchal society, an all-accepting (m)Other who suspends the Law of the Father, alsoseems like the fantasy of a man who spent his entire adult life rebelling against a car-toonishly authoritarian dad, Hanns Gross – ironically, a famous criminologist (Green,1974: 33–4).

Cohn 427


7. In terms remarkably appropriate to Landauer’s discourse, Howard Richards helpfully

redescribes ‘spirit’ by analogy with the linguistic phenomenon of what are called ‘perfor-matives’. Whereas ‘constative’ uses of language describe the world, and therefore can beevaluated in terms of their truth (correspondence to the way the world is) or falsehood

(failure to so correspond), performative ‘speech-acts’, such as – significantly – the utter-ance of the words ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony, bring about changes in the world, and sohave no truth-value; they are, however, susceptible to being evaluated in terms of theireffectiveness or lack thereof. Likewise, in moving and motivating people, ‘spirits’ have

tangible, concrete effects (Richards, 1996: 143–4).8. In a recent political re-evaluation of Freud, Elizabeth Ann Danto identifies Wilhelm

Reich as among those influenced by Landauer, via the mediation of Reich’s friend, Lia

Laszky, and calls Reich’s work a ‘clinical application of Landauer’s ideas’ (Danto, 2005:79–80). While Danto is not the first to have made comparisons between the two, she failsto explain or support the otherwise counterintuitive suggestion that we should see Reich’s

Sexpol as the practice of Landauer’s principles (rather than Landauer’s own lifelongpolitical activism), and she doesn’t seem very sure in her grasp of Landauer.

9. See also his later reassessment of Reich’s biologism (Goodman, 1958: 9) and his lengthyaside on ‘human nature’ at the beginning of Growing Up Absurd (1960: 3–11).

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Jesse Cohn, author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics,Aesthetics, Politics (Susquehanna University Press, 2006), is an Associate Professorof English at Purdue University North Central, where he teaches courses in literarytheory, fiction, and popular culture. He is currently at work on a book tentativelytitled Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-Present. Address:Department of English and Modern Languages, Purdue University North Central,1401 S. US 421, Westville, IN, USA.

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Sexualities

13(4) 433–443




DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370655

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Theoretical polyamory:Some thoughts on loving,thinking, and queeringanarchism

Deric ShannonUniversity of Connecticut, USA

Abbey WillisTransformative Studies Institute, USA

Abstract

This article argues that queering anarchism means complexifying it. Concretely, we

propose that we can apply some of the ways that we (might) love to the ways that

we think about political theory. Thus, we build the metaphor of ‘theoretical polyamory’

to suggest that having multiple partners (or political theories) is a way of constructing

more holistic and nuanced movements than might be implied by solely relying on

anarchism for the answers to the complex questions surrounding the political project

of undoing all forms of structured and institutionalized domination, coercion, and

control.

Keywords

anarchism, non-monogamy, polyamory, queer

sexuality outside the field of monogamy well may open us to a different sense of

community, intensifying the question of where one finds enduring ties.

Judith Butler

If, after all we’ve learned from queer theory about ‘identity’, we refuse to dispense

with the idea of ‘political identity’ altogether, the least we can do is queer it, recognize

its fluidity and, more importantly, recognize that it can be non-monogamous.

Abbey Volcano


Deric Shannon, Department of Sociology, Manchester Hall, University of Connecticut, 344 Mansfield Road,

Storrs, CT 06269, USA


Shortly after joining a social anarchist group, the two of us were asked to weigh inon a statement of principles in which the section on ‘Gay Liberation’ was beingchanged to ‘Queer Liberation’. We were glad we were asked for our input and bothput a lot of thought into our contributions to the discussion. We strategized,reflected, carefully crafted our responses and did everything in our power tomake the suggestions palatable and understandable.

Queer theory, after all, has a lot to offer anarchism. It shows some of the waysthat we become ‘constituted as socially viable beings’ (Butler, 2004: 2). It alsoaddresses the many ways that we are denied that social viability through the dis-cursive construction of identities that often function more as cages than descrip-tors. If anarchism is consistently to critique and dismantle all institutionalizedhierarchies, then it must not only offer alternatives to capitalism and the state, itmust also offer ‘a radical reorganization of sexuality’ – one that does not chainpeople down with supposedly stable identities as a result of their sexual and/orgender practices, then create hierarchies of value out of those identities (Heckert,2004: 101). Further, we saw the opportunity as a way to expand our group’sunderstanding of heteronormativity, to problematize ideologies of normalcymore generally, and to allow for an analysis that encompassed more than thatwhich would fall under an ‘LGBT’ identity model.

But something went wrong in the dialogue. Shortly after mentioning the ‘F-word’ (that is, Foucault), one particular member in the group shut down. He sentout his objections to the email list complaining that postmodernism is so muchintellectual junk. He explained that since to postmodernists the theory of classstruggle is an oppressive grand narrative, then postmodernism is incompatiblewith social anarchism.

This certainly wasn’t a new or unexpected reaction. Many folks from the liber-tarian socialist/anarchist tradition have criticized the ‘posts’ variously as ‘trage-dies’, ‘catastrophes’, and the like (for two good examples, see Albert n.d.; Zerzan,1991). That ‘is at least part of the reason we spent so much time crafting our owncontributions to the subject – better not to alienate one’s audience from the outset!Again, however, unfortunately we made the strategic mistake of mentioning the ‘F-word’ and the resulting discussion was less than constructive (at one point we wereaccused of using the email list as a ‘debating society for grad students’ – effectivelydelegitimizing things we have experienced quite materially within our own bodies).

More importantly, it brought to mind a number of questions for our own polit-ical identifications. How do we simultaneously exist as anarchists and as peoplewho are influenced by post-structuralism – or, for that matter, feminism, criticalrace theory, radical environmentalism, queer theory, various Marxisms, animalliberation, and so on? Why do our social anarchist comrades feel the need topolice our political identity and which theoretical traditions we borrow from?More importantly, why do so many of our comrades feel comfortable dismissingentire theoretical perspectives, making sweeping denunciations and condemnationsof them, rather than taking what is valuable from a variety of systems of thoughtand not limiting ourselves to one?


This essay attempts to respond to some of those que(e)ries. It is about creatingan open-ended revolutionary project without easy answers and with a willingness –an eagerness – to ask uncomfortable questions. It is about having humility andbeing more willing to engage than to denounce and about building a recognitionamong us that we don’t have to be trapped in a political partnership that does notsuit us or confined by an identity that we did not choose. It is about anarchism,sexuality, and finding value in relating the ways that we love to the ways that we(might) think.

Queering anarchism

In queer theory, the very idea of the queer is a shifting terrain that cannot be pinneddown to some single definition. Rather, as Halperin (1995: 62) writes,

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dom-

inant. 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-a-

vis the normative.

Thus, the theoretical space created by ‘queer’ allows us to go beyond LGBT iden-tity models to examine the ways that ‘(h)ierarchies exist within heterosexuality aswell’ (Heckert, 2004: 111).

This leaves queer theory (and identification) open to a range of sexual and/orgender practices not covered under the LGBT umbrella. Further, it begs the ques-tion why some practices have historically come to constitute an ‘identity’ whileothers have not. As Sedgwick (1990: 8) writes:

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital

activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that

include preference for certain acts, certain zones of sensations, certain physical types,

a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a

certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender

of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the

dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of ‘sexual orientation’.

Thus, part of the project of queering anarchism is to widen anarchism’s analysis ofsexuality to include non-normative sexual practices that include, but are not limitedto, those implied by markers such as ‘LGBT’. After all, an analysis using an LGBTidentity model often encourages thinking about heterosexuality as ‘devoid of pol-itics, embroiled in no relations of dominance and subordination, and to affect noform of coercion’ (Brickell, 2000: 171).

Marriage rights, a major goal of LGBT (or, perhaps more correctly, gay andlesbian) identity-based groups, is an excellent starting point for showing thestrengths of queer political practice. As Warner (1999: passim) eloquently explains,

Shannon and Willis 435

marriage is based on exclusion. Indeed, the legal benefits of state-based marriage‘equality’ are refused to any grouping, regardless of the grouping’s sex and/orgender configuration, if the relationship is not dyadic/monogamous. This effec-tively creates an institutionalized hierarchy that could exist within heterosexualitythat is made invisible using identity models that are organized primarily aroundgender. Queer politics, a politics based on difference, allows us space to analyzedifferences that could exist within heterosexual practices and create a politicalpractice based on inclusion and critical of the state-enforced monogamy inherentin marriage.

Thus, non-monogamy as a site for theoretical exploration of anarchism andsexuality is a strategic choice for us. First, it is strategic because we want to par-ticipate in this larger process of queering anarchism and believe that a good startingpoint is including non-normative sexual practices that are not primarily organizedaround gender in our explorations. Secondly, non-monogamy already has a longhistory within anarchist theory and practice. Noted anarchists from EmmaGoldman to Alexander Berkman to Voltarine de Cleyre practiced non-monogamyopenly and many turn-of-the-century anarchist women ‘condemned the institutionof monogamy’ outright (Leeder, 1996: 144).

Finally, non-monogamy also serves as a strategic metaphor for some ofthe conversations about politics and thinking that took place as a result ofthe incident we opened this piece with (among others). Thinking about politicaltheory in terms of loving and romantic attachments is also nothing new toanarchism (see, for example, Ehrlich, 1981). Some of the questions that plaguedour relationships with people (whether same-sex or not) began having increasedsignificance for the way we thought about political theory (i.e. How could I pos-sibly get everything I want from a single partner? Do I want a ‘primary’? and soon). This particular formulation, then, is an attempt to apply some of those ques-tions to how we think about politics, as we agree that ‘(s)exuality is not separatefrom these other issues which are more commonly considered political’ (Heckert,2004: 101).

Unpacking the divide between loving and thinking

Another aspect of the larger project of queering anarchism would be applying someof the insights of post-structuralist political theory to anarchism, as it undergirdsmuch of the queer political project.1 Again, this is nothing new for anarchism (seee.g. Day, 2005; Kuhn, 2009; May, 1989, 1994, 2009; Newman, 2001, 2007).However, this seems particularly salient for this theoretical project for a coupleof reasons.

First and foremost, anarchism and post-structuralist political thought share thedesire to break down borders (Heckert, 2010). While anarchism is typically seen tobe concerned with physical borders (i.e. smashing the state), increasingly, andespecially since the late 1960s and with the influence of the Situationists, manyanarchists have applied this analysis of the state-form to the ways that we create


and maintain borders within our heads (for some examples in queer anarchistyouth culture, see Ritchie, 2008). One of these borders that we wish to helpsmash by playing with theory in this article is the border in place between theway we love (or fuck, as it were) and the ways that we think about politics.Indeed, the way that we love has had (and continues to have) implications forhow we think about politics, as should be clear by the end of this piece.

Secondly, post-structuralist political thought allows us to show how knowledgeand power function alongside one another. Queer theory has borrowed heavilyfrom Foucault in this endeavor, especially his work on sexuality, to show howdiscourses of knowledge are created, produce identities and docile bodies and, insome cases, reinscribe the very identities that oppress us. Further, post-structural-ism criticizes knowledge claims that suggest a reaching of ‘The Truth’. This hasmanifested itself as criticisms of the grand narratives through which past theoristshave tried to explain an incredibly complex human history in some unified fashionas well as criticisms of claims at having ‘The Solution’ to the complex relations ofruling we have come to live in.

For us, this has meant that queering anarchism means complexifying it. Many ofthe criticisms we have gotten from (a rather loud minority of) comrades regardingqueering our political project are focused around class struggle being THE instru-ment to bring about radical social change. Under this economistic (and, in ouropinion, more Marxist than anarchist) view, the struggle between workers andbosses and the replacement of capitalism with socialism will somehow magicallybring about an end to environmental destruction and patriarchy. It will likewiseend confining notions of gender or ‘sexual identity’ and hierarchies made out ofthose notions. As well, libertarian socialism will somehow ensure that ‘disabled’people will be treated as if they are every bit a worthwhile human being as the ‘able-bodied’ and it will end racism and white supremacy.2

These criticisms of economic reductionism are not meant to suggest thatwe see no need for class struggle (we do) or that we are not committed to socialism(we are). Rather, we are opposed to the suggestion that there is a single answerto a complex problem – that of institutionalized hierarchy and domination andour struggle to dissolve those kinds of social relations. This also means that,as anarchists committed to this struggle, our project requires a certain degreeof humility. That is, perhaps other perspectives answer some questions bet-ter than anarchists can (or have). This has certainly been the case in our studiesof feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, radical environmentalism, animal lib-erationism, queer theory, and so forth. This brings us, then, to theoretical poly-amory and applying the lessons we learn from how we love to how we think aboutpolitics.

Theoretical polyamory: What it is and what are its benefits

Our intention here is to play with theory a bit through metaphor. We believe thatplay can be deadly serious, fun, and help move us forward – particularly playing


with the ways that we think and feel. Nevertheless, we also want to add an initialcaveat before sketching out this theoretical space. One of the things we havelearned through reading queer theory (and living queer lives!) is to be suspiciousof labels. Still, we require a certain amount of signification in order to communicateour ideas. Thus, any labeling that we do within this piece should be recognized asfluid and not static. By the time the reader actually sits down to read this essay,we may well have developed new interests and political commitments. Likenon-monogamous sexual practices, a non-monogamous theoretical outlookshould recognize that relationships do not always endure.

First and foremost, the question that might come to mind is this: Why ‘theo-retical polyamory’ and not ‘non-monogamy’? Part of this is because the usage of‘polyamory’ has come to mean a greater emotional connection among multiplepartners. Taormino for example, defines ‘polyamory as the desire for or the prac-tice of maintaining multiple significant, intimate relationships simultaneously’(2008: 71, emphasis ours) while she also warns, however, that ‘(s)etting up falsedichotomies such as sexual versus emotional, casual versus committed, or playfulversus serious just gets us into a whole heap of trouble’. That said, we are fiercelycommitted to our politics and don’t see them as mere dalliances. We want ourpolitical commitments to be significant and intimate.

Secondly, ‘non-monogamous’ practices have come to describe a range of sexualpractices that sometimes includes unprincipled behavior. For example, a cheatingpartner in a relationship where there is prior agreement about not taking on loversoutside of the partnership could be said to be non-monogamous. We want princi-pled, emotional, honest, and intense relationships with our political ideas. And wewant to include an honesty about the ideas that we develop relationships with,never feeling like we have to hide that we might have political commitments andinfluences not shared by our comrades.

Theoretical polyamory, then, is the belief that we can have multiple partnerswhen it comes to political theory.3 One theory could not possibly adequatelydescribe the complexity of our relations of ruling. One theory could never hopeto prescribe the ‘proper’ mode of resistance. Moreover, it is problematic to suggestthat such a ‘proper mode’ could even exist given the ways that hierarchies emergesometimes in very random ways. Those things said, there are benefits to havingpolyamorous relationships that illustrate quite well what this might mean fortheory.

In polyamorous relationships, for example, one might choose to have a primarypartner. Perhaps someone wants to share greater intimacy with a particular person.Some folks might feel more comfortable having relationships with others if theyhave the safety of a primary. Likewise, sometimes our personal attachments to aparticular partner are so strong that it just makes sense to nestle in with that personand make them the center of our romantic attachments.

Our experience has certainly been similar with theory and political commit-ments. As we construct our own version of theoretical polyamory, we recognizesocial anarchism as our primary partner. Anarchism is the political theory that


radicalized us and we have a special bond and attachment with it because of that.Further, we believe in formal organizations, participation in mass movements, andstruggles to alter the structures of society (though we keep in mind Foucault’s(1980: 60) admonition that ‘nothing in society will be changed if the mechanismsof power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on amuch more minute and everyday level, are not also changed’). All of these arehallmarks of social anarchist approaches to politics.

However, one of the benefits of polyamorous arrangements is having multiplepartners to meet the needs that one’s primary may not meet. In relationships, thishas meant that we may value our time with a given partner because we are outra-geously sexually attracted to them. Perhaps yet another partner is willing to sit andtalk to us for hours about our favorite role-playing game or sport. Stillanother might share our love of obscure analog free jazz recordings from the1920s. And so on.

Again, one can see the immediate connections between the ways that this ben-efits our relationships with how we think about politics. Perhaps it would not havebeen such a shock for us to mention that we are influenced by Foucault to ourcomrades if they were used to looking outside of a single theoretical perspective forquestions and answers to the problems, as anarchists – as people concerned withsocial justice, that we all face. Further, as mentioned earlier, love affairs with otherperspectives have been common within anarchism. It’s time we start being moreopen, principled, and honest about these outside relationships!

Finally, one of the benefits of having polyamorous relationships for us is thechance to experiment in a variety of ways with desire. Perhaps one, for example,has some level of opposite sex/same sex/gender/genderqueer attraction but not atthe level of complete sexual intimacy. Perhaps one is interested in making out withsomeone of the opposite sex, but not necessarily having penetrative sex. As Kinseynoted years ago, there is not some exact hetero/bi/homo categorical distinction.Rather, there are a range of desires within our sexual practices. As well, as the transand intersex movements have shown and ‘pomosexuality’ (see especially, e.g.Queen and Schimel, 1997) demonstrates, there are possibilities for experimentingwith these desires in nearly infinite ways.

Such is our attraction to Marxism, to name one example. For starters, Marx,although often economistic and reductionist, outlined quite well the position wehave experienced for the vast majority of our adult lives as exploited laborers in acapitalist economy and the need for a struggle between classes to resolve this.Likewise, Marxists, especially neo-Marxists, have done some amazing work withideology and culture that anarchists (and queers!) could learn a lot from. FromAlthusser’s (see e.g. 2001) conceptualization of state ideological apparatuses toGramsci’s (1971) articulation of cultural hegemony to Habermas’s (1987) idea ofthe colonization of the life-world, Marxists have given us tools to analyze the waysthat assumptions about our social worlds become naturalized and a part of every-day reality. Nevertheless, the fetishization and uncritical acceptance of the stateform as a guiding principle in social (re)organization within Marxism is certainly a


turn-off for us. Really, we can only see ourselves going so far with Marxism andtypically prefer the company of our primary partner.

Concluding thoughts

This piece is an argument against dogmatism using the metaphor of polyamorousrelationships to highlight how this might be applied to political thought. As anar-chists, it is part of our ongoing contribution to queering anarchism and widening thefield of struggle to give critical analysis to sexuality. It is also an argument fordrawing connections between the ways that we love and the ways that we thinkand breaking down these divides between thought/action/loving, and so onthat we have come to accept in a world organized on the principles of hierarchy,coercion, and control. Part of that control is made visible when we demonstrate howthese categorical distinctions come to be naturalized and begin questioning thenecessity of drawing distinctions between different methods of engagement withlife and ideas.

Further, we hope to raise some questions in the process about our goals. Formany of our social anarchist comrades ‘the’ goal is libertarian socialism to beachieved through ‘the’ instrument called ‘class struggle’. But how will statelesssocialism alone bring about an end to hierarchical social forms that do not neces-sarily emerge from structures such as the state and capitalism? How do we create apolitical practice that also opposes domination as it is enacted through the con-struction (and maintenance) of discourses, knowledges, and identities? How mightwe live our lives in ways that create new cultural forms and subjectivities that webuild on our own terms (inasmuch as that is possible) rather than accepting theidentities, cultures, and subjectivities that we have inherited from a sick and hier-archical world in which humanity is perpetually at war with itself, the environment,and the entire non-human world?

To answer some of these questions, we suggest that we step outside of anarchismand borrow liberally (radically?) from many perspectives. We suggest that wedevelop multiple relationships with a variety of theories so we can act creativelydepending on the context of the struggle we are involved in. As feminists, anti-racists, radical environmentalists, libertarian socialists, and a host of other ‘polit-ical identities’ we are well aware of how inadequate any one perspective is todescribe ourselves, our relationship with political ideas, and a complex and radicalpolitical project that could not possibly be contained within a single theory oridentity. Perhaps in the end, this means a collapse of ‘anarchism’ itself and anembrace of a political anti-identity in much the same way ‘queer’ was meant asan answer (or, perhaps, a bigger question?) to questions about gender and sexualidentity. We cannot foretell our own futures, though we are open, as always, todeveloping multiple relationships and recognize that they do not always endure.Let’s just hope that our multiple partners can manage to get along!


Notes

1. Much has been made of whether it is correctly termed ‘post-structuralist’ or ‘postmod-

ernist’ and in what contexts. We prefer to see postmodernity as a condition as outlined byLyotard (1979) and the concomitant and diverse theoretical insights with this conditionas ‘post-structuralist’ theory.

2. Lest we be accused of caricature, we want to mention that despite these experiences witha minority of comrades, ‘social anarchism’ is certainly made up of many ideas itself. Thiskind of reductionism is not inherent in social anarchist theory and politics, but does tendto come out of its more sectarian elements. For a particularly good example of this

‘broad’ social anarchism, see Franks, 2006. For a good look at historical struggles againstreductionism within social anarchism, see Ackelsberg, 2005.

3. Because of both personal experiences and thinking, we want to make it clear that the

authors do NOT ascribe to the view that monogamous sexual relationships cannot bequeer, are bad, and so on. In fact, we think it necessary for anyone who identifies withqueer positionality to take steps to ensure that new categories and identities that we

develop in response to what currently exists do not become new normative standardswithin our own communities. Thus, some of what we believe about theory and politicsdoes not necessarily comfortably sit within the metaphor that we have created about howwe do relationships.

References

Ackelsberg MA (2005) The Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the

Emancipation of Women. Oakland, CA: AK Press.Albert M (n.d.) Post-modernism. Z Magazine, Online. URL (accessed 14 June 2009): http://

www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/albertold10.htm.

Althusser L (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly ReviewPress.

Brickell C (2000) Heroes and invaders: Gay and lesbian pride parades and the public/private distinction in New Zealand media accounts. Gender, Place, and Culture 7(2):

163–178.Butler J (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.Day RJF (2005) Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements.

Toronto: Between the Lines.Ehrlich C (1981) The unhappy marriage of marxism and feminism: Can it be saved?

In: Lydia Sargent (ed.) Women and Revolution. Cambridge, MA: South End Press,

109–133.Foucault M (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977.

New York: Pantheon.Franks B (2006) Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms.

Oakland, CA: AK Press.Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International

Publishers.

Habermas J (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two. Lifeworld andSystem: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.


Halperin D (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Heckert J (2004) Sexuality/Identity/Politics. In: Purkis J, Bowen J (eds) Changing

Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age. Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 101–116.Heckert J (2010) Love without borders? Intimacy, identity and the state of compulsory

monogamy. In: Barker M, Langdridge D (eds) Understanding Non-Monogamies. NewYork: Routledge, 255–266.

Kuhn G (2009) Anarchism, postmodernity, and poststructuralism. In: Amster R, DeLeon A,Fernandez L, Nocella II AJ, Shannon D (eds) Contemporary Anarchist Studies: AnIntroductory Reader of Anarchy in the Academy. New York: Routledge, 18–25.

Leeder E (1996) Let our mothers show the way. In: Ehrlich HJ (ed.) Reinventing Anarchy,Again. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 142–148.

Lyotard JF (1979) La Condition Postmoderne. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit

(The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).May T (1989) Is post-structuralist political theory anarchist? Philosophy and Social Criticism

15(2): 167–182.May T (1994) The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park, PA:

Pennsylvania State University Press.May T (2009) Anarchism from foucault to ranciere. In: Amster R, DeLeon A, Fernandez L,

Nocella II A J., Shannon D (eds) Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory

Reader of Anarchy in the Academy. New York: Routledge, 11–17.Newman S (2001) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of

Power. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Newman S (2007) Anarchism, poststructuralism, and the future of radical politics.SubStance 36(2): 3–19.

Queen C and Schimel L (1997) Pomosexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and

Sexuality. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press.Ritchie N (2008) Principles of engagement: The anarchist influence on queer youth cultures.

In: Driver S (ed.) Queer Youth Cultures. Albany: State University of New York Press,261–278.

Sedgwick EK (1990) The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Taormino T (2008) Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. San

Francisco, CA: Cleis Press.Warner M (1999) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zerzan J (1991) The catastrophe of postmodernism. Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 30:16–25.

Deric Shannon is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Connecticut,where he studies prefigurative politics and radical social movements. He is a longtime anarchist militant with roots in groups such as Anti-Racist Action and FoodNot Bombs. He is a co-editor of the book ‘Contemporary Anarchist Studies: AnIntroductory Reader of Anarchy in the Academy’ and the author of numerousarticles and book chapters, typically on radical political thought. He is a member ofthe Worker’s Solidarity Alliance (Connecticut chapter), Queers without Borders,


and co-runs the independent record label, Wooden Man Records. He is currentlyworking on an edited volume titled ‘Queering Anarchism’ with Abbey Willis, JenRogue, and Christa Daring. Address: Department of Sociology, Manchester Hall,University of Connecticut, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.

Abbey Willis is an organizer and writer in Hartford, Connecticut. She is a proudmember of Queers Without Borders and the Workers Solidarity Alliance.Currently she is organizing around reproductive freedom and radical queerissues locally and writing on non-monogamy, queer theory, and smashing thesoul-crushing wage system that we call ‘capitalism’. Abbey loves graphic novelsmore than most things, and she would love to become a midwife, eventually. In themeantime, she is applying for graduate training after completing a graduate cer-tificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also co-editinga forthcoming book on queering anarchism with Deric Shannon, Christa Daring,and Jen Rogue.


Sexualities

13(4) 445–461




DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370650

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Radical refusals: On theanarchist politicsof women choosingasexuality

Breanne FahsArizona State University

Abstract

This article examines how women consciously choosing asexuality might inform both

radical feminist politics and anarchic concepts of positive and negative liberty. By resi-

tuating some of the lesser-known narratives of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ radical feminist

movement (e.g. Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto and Boston’s Cell 16 and No More Fun

and Games), asexuality is shown to disrupt key intersections between sexuality and the

state, particularly institutions that control reproduction, pleasure, and women’s bodies.

Using interview data with Cell 16 members, content analysis of early radical feminist

writings, and theoretical and historical analyses of separatism, the piece argues that, by

removing themselves from sexuality, women can take a more anarchic stance against the

entire institution of sex, thereby working toward more nihilistic, anti-reproduction,

anti-family goals that severely disrupt commonly held assumptions about sex, gender,

and power.

Keywords

anarchy, radical feminism, asexuality, Valerie Solanas, Cell 16

I do not believe that sex has an inherent power to transform the world. I do not believe

that pleasure is always an anarchic force for good. I do not believe that we can fuck

our way to freedom.

Pat Califia Macho Sluts (1994: 15)

Why am I the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be equal of his brain? Why is

my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my hus-

band? . . . There are two reasons why . . . These two things, the mind domination of the

Church and the body domination of the State, are the causes of sex slavery.

Voltairine de Cleyre, ‘No Authority But Oneself’, cited by Sharon Presley (2000)


Breanne Fahs, Arizona State University, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Glendale, AZ 85306 USA



The various intersections between sexuality and politics – between the struggle toclaim the body as a site of political and social power while also valuing its role as asource of pleasure and physical experience – has represented a central dilemma inthe feminist movements of the past 40 years. To conceptualize sex as an institution,that is, linked with state power, connects relatively personal practices with largersocial and cultural narratives. As the 1960s’ women’s movement situated the bodyas a key site of political struggle, particularly within radical circles, sexualitymarked the potential for power, freedom, and liberation. The freedom to besexual and not face dire reprimands, particularly for women, overlapped withmany other previously denied freedoms. The second wave rejected women’s rele-gation to chastity, reproduction, and non-orgasmic sex, first by advocating bettercontraceptive options for women (e.g. widespread use of the 1960 birth controlpill), and then by asserting women’s entitlement to clitoral orgasms and moresexual pleasure. Mobilizations for less sexual repression and more sexual autonomyappeared throughout the USA. Sexual freedom for many women became synony-mous with the freedom to have more sexual activity, partners, sexual positions,sexual speech, and physical pleasure. In the shadow of the sexual revolution,women allegedly underwent a transformation from subdued, suburban, sex-less housewives to revved-up, urban, highly sexed liberated women (Foley et al.,2002).

Left out of this master narrative of the sexual revolution, however, are the manyother interpretations activists espoused for integrating sexuality and political free-dom, particularly as radical feminists referenced the political goals of anarchism.Consequently, more sex became grossly insufficient for liberation. Certainly, anar-chists have long been divided between individual anarchism, emphasizing freedomfrom the state – what Berlin (1969) called ‘negative liberty’ – and social anarchism,advocating both negative and positive liberty, sometimes simultaneously, as amechanism for freedom. Similarly, radical feminists fought for ‘freedom to’ asmuch as ‘freedom from’, simultaneously advancing ideas about women gainingand blocking access to others. These radical circles attended to distinctions between‘power over’ (domination and oppression), ‘power to’ (freedom to do/act), and‘power with’ (collective power to do/act. See Allen, 2008). Indeed, thoughsecond-wave feminists made sexual and political advances with far-reaching con-sequences, most of which went uncontested as gestures of genuine social progress,other versions of the sexual liberation story have fallen into obscurity.

This article resituates some of those lesser-known radical narratives in order toshow that not engaging in sexuality may link with anarchist politics, separatism,and alternative forms of social change. As the 1980s’ sex wars fractured feministsinto two competing camps (sex positives vs. sex radicals, who disagreed vehementlyabout ‘fucking our way to freedom’), these missing discourses of radical feministmobilizations toward asexuality became even further silenced, raising several ques-tions: Why do feminist historians promote a monolithic narrative of the sexualrevolution that championed sexual expressiveness? Can we have an anarchist pol-itics of sexuality based on asexuality and ‘negative liberty’? What if women stopped



having sex permanently? Would this symbolize a form of political rebellion orfurther sexual repression? How does asexuality inform modern sexual politicsand institutions, particularly surrounding gay rights and gay identity?

Certainly, while celibacy (i.e. temporary periods of sexual abstinence) has a long,politically significant history within social and religious movements, asexuality (i.e.permanent, identity-based sexual refusals) has received little attention, particularlyfor feminist politics. This article addresses what asexuality has meant, and mightmean, to feminism by critiquing the single agenda promoted when sex intersectswith state politics: the maintenance of traditional gender roles based on pro-repro-duction and pro-family agendas. I examine feminist disagreements about challeng-ing state and cultural constructions of women’s sexuality, as well as the damagingconsequences of this discourse for women (e.g. control of prostitution, regulationof sex toy distribution, imposition of severe birth control onto women of color andso on). This analysis shows how current sexual politics serve the state’s interests.Next, I revisit early radical feminism and its relationship to asexuality and sepa-ratism by drawing upon two often forgotten or obscured entities: Valerie Solanas’writings, and the political goals of radical feminist group Cell 16. Using analysis ofSolanas’ SCUM Manifesto along with interview data and texts from radical fem-inists affiliated with Cell 16, I (re)situate asexuality and separatism as viable optionsfor an anarchist sexual politics. I conclude the article by situating asexuality asrelevant to contemporary sexual politics, particularly gay marriage debates anddisagreements about ‘biology vs. choice’ models of queer identity. Limitations ofasexuality, particularly in its unfortunate mirroring of anti-choice, abstinence-only,right-wing discourse, also figures centrally in my concluding analysis, as conserva-tive social forces constrain and powerfully co-opt feminist options for constructingsexual politics. Nevertheless, when women stand against sexuality – whether viaseparatism, temporary periods of celibacy, or asexuality as sexual identity – thisstrongly decenters the naturalness and inevitability of sex by revealing differentways that women can exercise social and political power. By removing themselvesfrom sexuality, women assert an anarchic stance against the institutions that engen-der sex, thereby working toward more nihilistic, anti-reproduction, anti-familygoals that severely disrupt commonly held cultural assumptions about sex,gender, and power.

Part I: Sex and pleasure as freedom?

In part, because the sexual revolution figures so prominently in our collectivenarratives of sex and social change, little attention has focused on dissentingvoices arguing against sex as a means of liberation. For example, in the vaginalvs. clitoral orgasm debates (disagreements that gained wide publicity and notori-ety), radical feminists fought vehemently for recognition of clitoral orgasms, yetmany other radical feminists cautioned against substituting one form of oppression(tyranny of the vaginal orgasm) with another (tyranny of the clitoral orgasm).As Jane Gerhard (2000) said,

Fahs 447


The vaginal orgasm, attained exclusively through intercourse, had long been a keynote

in the clamor of expert ideas about female sexual health and normality . . . During

these early years of women’s liberation, when feminists came of age in and through the

rhetoric of sexual liberation, the female orgasm came to signify the political power of

women’s sexual self-determination. (Gerhard, 2000: 449)

As women fought against barriers to women’s full sexual pleasure, particularlyclaims that women ‘outgrew’ clitoral orgasm or that women’s desire was irrelevantor nonexistent, little attention was paid to those arguing that sex could never achieveliberatory goals because of its fundamental rootedness in power and inequality.1

Rather, many argued that clitoral orgasm, improved relationships, and more sexualexpression would bring about women’s social and political equality. For example,Erica Jong’s (1973) Fear of Flying advocated women embracing the ‘zipless fuck’,that is, frequent sex without emotional consequences as liberatory.

Not all second wave radical feminists disagreed with these claims. For someradical feminists, clitoral supremacy joined with radical self-determination. Ti-Grace Atkinson (1974) argued that men exercised patriarchal control by insistingthat heterosexual intercourse (and vaginal orgasm, if it occurred) should trump allother forms of sexual pleasure. Atkinson argued, ‘The construct of vaginal orgasmis most in vogue whenever and wherever the institution of sexual intercourse isthreatened. As women become freer, more independent, more self-sufficient, theirinterest in (i.e. their need for) men decreases’ (Atkinson, 1974: 13–14). She alsofamously said, ‘Why should women learn to vaginal orgasm? Because that’s whatmen want. How about a facial tic? What’s the difference?’ (Atkinson, 1974: 7). Anumber of other feminists, including Kate Millet (1970), Mary Jane Sherfey (1970),and Anne Koedt (1973), supported these views, citing pressures toward heterosex-ual intercourse and vaginal orgasm as a coded mechanism to encourage heterosex-uality. They furiously argued that these cultural scripts denigrated the clitoris anddemanded a penis as the mature and appropriate avenue to pleasure. Koedtdeclared, ‘The recognition of the clitoral orgasm as fact would threaten the het-erosexual institution’ (Buhle, 1998: 217).

While showcasing the clitoris played a central role for feminist activism of thetime – particularly as it championed lesbian identification, lesbian sexuality(Johnston, 1973; Singer and Singer, 1972), polyamory and non-traditional genderroles – other feminists faulted these claims of sexual liberation and rejected thiscelebration of newfound sexual ‘freedoms’. Some radical feminists argued againstvaginal and clitoral orgasm, directing suspicion toward sex as a mechanism forliberation. For example, Cell 16, a radical feminist group based in Boston in the1970s, figured centrally in the radical fight for gender justice by advocating absten-tion from sex, radical unity among women (including women protecting otherwomen from gender-based violence), and separatism. Cell 16 argued that patriar-chy placed women amidst an ‘orgasm frenzy’ (Densmore, 1968: 110), obsessed withpleasurable sex without attending to the larger social critique. Sheila Jeffreys (1990)argued that the sexual revolution essentially replaced one form of oppression with



another, and that new forms of sexual expression (e.g. pornography, The Joy ofSex books, televised discussions of sex) did not actually facilitate women’s free-dom. Another Cell 16 member, Roxanne Dunbar (1969), who later cited anarchismas a key influence on her politics, argued that sexual liberation became equatedwith ‘the ‘‘freedom’’ to ‘‘make it’’ with anyone anytime’ (Dunbar, 1969: 49), andthat this ignored women’s experiences of sex as ‘brutalization, rape, submission[and] someone having power over them’ (Dunbar, 1969: 56). Other radical voicesalso said that the sexual freedom campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s merely allowedmen sexual access to greater numbers of women and therefore worked in directopposition to women having more control over their personal and sexual freedom.

These dilemmas about integrating sexuality and social justice have raged on inmodern sexual politics as well, as feminists use sexuality as a benchmark for otherpersonal and social freedoms. Of course, feminists have made excellent progresswith sexuality, including the aforementioned efforts to value clitoral orgasm ascentral to women’s sexual pleasure, mobilizations for more awareness aboutsexual violence, battery, and domestic violence, and global acknowledgment ofsexual repression (e.g. Female Genital Surgeries, criminalizing marital rape, expan-sion of abortion rights and so forth). Sex education reforms continue, even as moredirect and harsh attacks against comprehensive sex education persist. Increasingnumbers of sex researchers and gender/race scholars promote feminist and anti-racist ideologies, and more and more college students take sexuality courses. Thatsaid, feminist politics too often prioritize sexuality as a central and inextricable partof women’s liberation, such that those who challenge its primacy remain silencedand forgotten. These suppressed voices ask: Why bother with sex at all? What ifwomen removed sex from their lives entirely? How might this change our under-standing of liberation and freedom?

Clearly, sex and the state intertwine in numerous ways that warrant consider-ation of what it would mean – discursively, politically, socially, sexually, and evenspiritually – if women stopped having sex entirely, not just as a temporary absten-tion (celibacy), but as a permanent sexual identity (asexuality). The state policesgender via regulation of sexual behavior and expression, revealing the complicatedstatus of sex as simultaneously a set of practices that can (theoretically) liberate andexpand consciousness while also replicating and further entrenching women into avicious politics of conservatism and repression. Sexuality represents the precisecollision between the body and a host of other political realms: social, economic,reproductive, educational, and familial. For example, until Lawrence v. Texas(2003), so-called ‘sodomy laws’ upheld the illegality of oral and anal sex (andsometimes all non-reproductive forms of sex) in many US states (Tribe, 2004).The state regulates prostitutes’ behavior and maintains their lack of access toresources like health care (West, 2000). Similarly, many US states often regulatethe circulation, selling, and distribution of sex toys, citing their indecency and thestate’s role to promote sexual reproduction (Glover, 2010). In fact, more states inthe USA currently have such laws under consideration than in previous years,indicating that this trend is not diminishing. Further, state regulation of

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pornography’s circulation, combined with lack of state intervention in requiringporn actors to use condoms, reveal the state’s interest in promoting conservative,pro-reproduction politics (Grudzen and Kerndt, 2007).

In addition to legal loopholes, more explicit links between sex and the state keepentire groups of women subject to increasingly oppressive forms of sexual control.Imposing severe birth control methods onto women seeking welfare (or refusing tosupport children born into the welfare system), along with sexual control overimmigrant women, represent the state’s particular control over poor women andwomen of color (Roberts, 1998; Schoen, 2005). Women often suffer from the fem-inization of poverty, particularly when seeking child support payments or main-taining steady incomes following divorce (Albelda and Tilly, 1999). Lack ofresources for undocumented women to report domestic violence and spousalrape also showcase the state’s tendencies to ignore violence against women byinstead normalizing men’s sexual access to women’s bodies (Andrews et al.,2002; Van Hightower et al., 2000). Further, uneven regulation and criminalizationof prostitution (e.g. harsher jail sentencing, mandated STD testing and so on), andrelative denial that white western men drive sex trafficking markets also representthe fundamental unevenness of sex and gender by celebrating men’s sexuality anddemonizing women’s sexuality, a trend long ago identified by radical feministvoices (Brents and Hausbeck, 2005; Taylor and Jamieson, 1999).

These facets of modern sexual life – where state interests and priorities dictatewomen’s sexual behavior – question whether such state regulation benefits womenat all. This is not a new claim. Past generations of anarchists, particularly EmmaGoldman, have argued that sex and love represent suspicious cultural practices thattoo often require state intervention and regulation. Goldman located marriage asthe key culprit in sexual oppression, calling for an end to marriage when it nolonger satisfies women (Goldman, 1896). Though she personally rejected monog-amy, her concerns about the underlying institutionalization of sex remained con-sistent with radical feminist views, as she argued,

Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is

therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for right to exist, to keep a position in

whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells

herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. (Goldman, 1911: 187)

Like Goldman, many later feminists recognized the problems of associatingrevolution with conventional sexuality, yet these dissenting voices often wentunrecognized or silenced. An anarchist politics of sexuality could, on the onehand, advocate polyamory as ‘anti-marriage’, or, as some radicals have argued,anarchist politics of sex could advocate women blocking sexual access and decon-structing sex and love as institutions. In other words, contrary to anarchy based onmultiple lovers and encounters, another interpretation poses that women becomeempowered when refusing sex entirely, thus threatening sex as an institution ofgovernmental and patriarchal control. If sex remains tangled with the state’s



influence, beholden to patriarchy and racism, and subject to anti-progressiveforces, anarchist sexuality might advocate full removal from sexual exchanges. Inshort, asexuality may help to dismantle the entire institution of sex.

Part II: Remembering radical histories

Though many radical feminists connected sexual expression with women’s socialand political freedom, many lesser-known radical feminists instead argued thatasexuality would fuel women’s empowerment. For example, Valerie Solanas,most known for writing the polemical and highly controversial SCUMManifesto2 before she shot Andy Warhol, controversially promoted asexuality asa logical outcome of having sex with men. Solanas (1996, originally published1968), who allegedly worked as a prostitute for many years, espoused the suprem-acy of asexuality, saying,

Sex is not part of a relationship; on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-

creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily – far more easily than she may

think – condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free

to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities . . . When the female transcends her

body, rises above animalism, the male, whose ego consists of his cock, will disappear.

(Solanas, 1996 [1968]: 26–27).

Solanas championed asexuality by claiming that enlightened women, aware oftheir disempowerment, will eventually reject sex altogether, while women compli-ant with patriarchy will doggedly pursue sex. To highlight the absurdity of corre-lating sex with positive social change, she equated sex with extreme obedience andcompliance with male norms: ‘Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the moremindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male ‘‘culture’’, in short,the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our ‘‘society’’ areraving sex maniacs’ (Solanas, 1996 [1968]: 27). She particularly criticized justifica-tions of sex as a means to community love and solidarity:

But being just awfully, awfully nice they don’t, of course descend to fucking –

that’s uncouth – rather they make love, commune by means of their bodies and

establish sensual rapport; the literary ones are attuned to the throb of Eros and

attain a clutch upon the Universe; the religious have spiritual communion with the

Divine Sensualism; the mystics merge with the Erotic Principle and blend with the

Cosmos, and the acid heads contact their erotic cells. (Solanas, 1996 [1968]: 27)

Solanas satirically attacked constructions of sex as a form of consciousness raisingand spiritual growth, instead portraying it as powerfully flawed and most oftendisempowering.

Solanas believed that women could empower themselves once they stoppedhaving sex, drawing upon asexuality as an option for post-sexual-revolution

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empowerment. Solanas portrayed women who denounced sex as worldly, experi-enced, and justifiably unable to comply with men’s demands. Such women arrivedat asexuality after a lifetime of sex:

Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals’, the ‘respect’

of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around . . . they’ve seen the

whole show . . . the fucking scene, the sucking scene, the dyke scene – they’ve covered

the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier – the peter pier, the pussy

pier . . . you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get anti-sex, and SCUM’s been

through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from

under the dock, move, take off, sink out. (Solanas, 1996 [1968]: 28)

Asexuality became the outcome of sex rather than an identity that originated earlyin life. Women who recognized sex as limiting, Solanas argued, could prioritizemore important things, particularly personal gratification and, perhaps, social jus-tice for women:

[T]hose females least embedded in the male ‘Culture’, the least nice, those crass and

simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking; who are too childish for the grown-up

world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit; too selfish to raise kids and hus-

bands; too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone’s opinion of them; too arrogant to

respect Daddy, the ‘Greats’ or the deep wisdom of the Ancients; who trust only their

animal, gutter instincts; who equate Culture with chicks; whose sole diversion is

prowling for emotional thrills and excitement; who are given to disgusting, nasty,

upsetting ‘scenes’; hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate

them in the teeth . . . these females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asex-

uality. (Solanas, 1996 [1968]: 27–28)

Thus, while Solanas’ characterization of asexuality as a tool for female empower-ment had elements of satire, hyperbole, and perhaps even madness, she most essen-tially argued that women could only achieve personal freedom or self-gratification viarefusing sex. Asexuality freed women from authoritarian constraints of patriarchy,demands of men, and less worthy pursuits of pleasure and physical gratification.

While Solanas’ arguments for asexuality lean toward the theoretical (Solanasresisted any characterization of herself as ‘within movement’, preferring autonomyin advocating social justice for women), other radical feminist groups like Cell 16 –a group known for its militant program to separate from men sexually and polit-ically – argued for asexuality as central to collective feminist identity. In my per-sonal interview with noted Cell 16 leader, Roxanne Dunbar (later Dunbar-Ortiz) inDecember 2008, she outlined Cell 16’s strategies of championing celibacy and asex-uality as a mechanism to raise feminist consciousness:

A woman could either be cold or pure, virginal and monogamous, or the opposite of

that. We proposed that women could be totally sexual beings but still choose to be



completely autonomous and not always in a relationship to a man. It came out of a lot

of discussions, including Dana’s [Densmore] idea that women should have the choice

if they wish to be celibate. We were hearing a lot about guerillas and it was recom-

mended that women not get married because they’d be held hostage to their families

and everything. Why can’t women also be celibate? We got all these figures together

about all of these celibate people – monks and priests especially – but everyone

laughed at celibate nuns. It was like something was really screwy for women to

resist sex and become a nun . . .We all saw celibacy as a choice that women could

make, that it wasn’t something sick. We wanted to depathologize it.

Following the publication of Cell 16’s journal, No More Fun and Games,Dunbar-Ortiz said that the group received much attention for asserting asexualityand celibacy as viable options for women. Densmore’s ‘On Celibacy’ article stirredup controversy both within and outside of radical feminist circles, arguing

One hangup to liberation is a supposed ‘need’ for sex. It is something that must be

refuted, coped with, demythified [sic], or the cause of female liberation is doomed . . .

Sex is not essential to life, as eating is. Some people go through their whole lives

without engaging in it at all, including fine, warm, happy people. It is a myth that this

makes one bitter, shriveled up, twisted . . . The guerillas don’t screw. They eat, when

they can, but they don’t screw. They have important things to do, things that require

all their energy. (Densmore, 1968)

Densmore also pointedly argued that sex required men to exercise power overwomen, so if women avoided sex altogether, they could resist some of thesepower imbalances:

Sexual freedom is the first freedom a woman is awarded and she thinks it is important

because it’s all she has; compared to the dullness and restrictiveness of the rest of her

life it glows very brightly. But we must come to realize that sex is actually a minor

need, blown out of proportion, misunderstood (usually what passes for sexual need is

actually desire to be stroked, desire for recognition or love, desire to conquer, humil-

iate or wield power, or desire to communicate). We must come to realize that we don’t

need sex, that celibacy is not a dragon but even a state that could be desirable, in many

cases preferable to sex. (Densmore, 1968)

Importantly, Densmore situated women’s sexual energies as easily fulfilled by non-sexual relationships with others, absorbing work, and political activism. She parti-cularly warned against women relying upon men’s validation and sexual attention,citing men’s tendencies to use sex and attraction against women in a socially con-trolling way:

Erotic energy is just life energy and is quickly worked off if you are doing interesting,

absorbing things. Love and affection and recognition can easily be found in comrades,

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a more honest and open love that love you for yourself and not for how docile and

cute and sexy and ego-building you are, a love in which you are always subject, never

merely object, always active, never merely relative . . . If you don’t play the game, the

role, you are not a woman and they will NOT be attracted . . . You will be feared and

despised and viciously maligned, all by men you know perfectly well . . . How is that

possible? Obviously, because they were never worshipping you . . . We will cease to

love and admire such men. We will have contempt for men who show that they cannot

love us for ourselves, men whose egos demand and require falsehoods. (Densmore,

1968)

Dunbar-Ortiz and Densmore’s constructions of celibacy (temporary with-drawal) and asexuality (permanent, identity-based withdrawal) as viable optionsfor radical feminist politics links women’s political advancement to control andautonomy over sexuality. In essence, sex limited women’s liberation potentialbecause it enforced sexual access to men, disallowed women from refusing sex,and constructed ‘liberated sex’ as more sex rather than more personal agency. Ifwomen derived freedom from sex with more partners, this maintained and sup-ported the patriarchal status quo. Radical sexual refusals, in contrast, allowedwomen to resist patriarchy by setting their terms for sexual pleasure and sexualaccess. Though neither Dunbar-Ortiz nor Densmore described themselves asanarchists at the time – though Dunbar later (2002) identified herself as ananarcha-feminist – their statements about asexuality (particularly in decenteringsex and patriarchy) aligned them with anarchists like Emma Goldman (despiteGoldman’s endorsement of multiple sex partners). An anarchist politics of sexmight offer the permanence of asexuality as a preferred option for women,particularly in a culture that demands state control over women’s bodies andsexualities. Current battles over same-sex marriage, for example, stand greatly atodds with central tenants of anarchist sex radicals, who advocate dismantlingmarriage as an institution, citing its tendencies to legalize gender disparities andimpose the state’s will onto the private lives of individuals. An anarchist visionof sexuality might instead redefine relationships outside of power and fixedgender roles, thereby mimicking ideologies of 1960s’ and 1970s’ radicalfeminism.

To understand the silencing of these feminist voices, consider that the anarchistimplications of sexuality have facilitated the obscurity of Cell 16 and ValerieSolanas. The role of asexuality has largely been forgotten in writing, theorizing,and historicizing radical feminism, perhaps indicating the threat it poses to stateinterests. When women choose asexuality, rather than simply being asexual as con-sequence of their ‘fixed’ psychological makeup, it challenges ideas about identityand institutions. Indeed, separatism originated as an asexual action, or, in anarchistterms, as a form of negative liberty (‘freedom from’ before ‘freedom to’). Boston’sCell 16 advocated separatism long before other radical groups prioritized lesbianseparatism. Consequently, Cell 16 operated as a kind of ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ (i.e.



a worker’s strike against capitalism), challenging men’s sexual access by advocatinggeneral revolt. Consider Catharine MacKinnon’s astute comparison between cap-italism/wage workers and patriarchy/women: ‘Sexuality is to feminism what workis to Marxism . . . In Marxism to be deprived of one’s work, in feminism of one’ssexuality, defines each one’s conception of power per se’ (MacKinnon, 1982: 515–54). MacKinnon later described the exploitative qualities of a ‘good’ fuck, notingthat even a ‘good’ male partner exploits, just as, for Marxists (and, by extension,anarchists), even a ‘good’ day of paid labor also exploits workers (MacKinnon,1987).

Certainly, Cell 16’s ‘sex strike’ must be remembered as preceding lesbian sepa-ratism; before women asserted sexual freedom from men by having sex with otherwomen, they first needed a basis upon which to separate from men at all. HistorianAlice Echols (1990) credits Cell 16 with helping to establish the theoretical andpolitical foundations of lesbian separatism by first advocating asexual separatism.In No More Fun and Games, both Roxanne Dunbar and Lisa Leghorn advisedwomen to ‘separate from men who are not consciously working for female liber-ation’, and to resist lesbian relationships by instead championing periods of celi-bacy. They characterized lesbian relationships as ‘nothing more than a personalsolution’ (Echols, 1990: 165) that would not sufficiently address the necessary redi-rection of energy needed to achieve sexual and personal liberation.3

To reimagine separatism as an essentially asexual action – one based on women’srefusal from the entire institution – helps to reestablish its radical and anarchicroots. Separatism originally targeted women’s denial of men’s sexual access to theirbodies, thereby decentering assumptions about traditional marriages, nuclear fam-ilies, and the necessity of sexuality. When feminist histories present separatism as alesbian action, this implicitly further radicalizes true asexual separatism. Whenwomen stop having sex, this limits the social control aspects of sexuality, particu-larly because it picks off the pro-reproduction, pro-family, pro-pleasure discoursesin favor of women’s autonomy and sexual agency to withhold sex. Perhaps anasexual political agenda advances women’s liberation in the direction of nihilism,a claim Solanas supported in her SCUM Manifesto:

Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? . . . Why should

we care what happens when we’re dead? Why should we care that there is no younger

generation to succeed us? . . . Eventually, the natural course of events, in social evo-

lution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation

of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of

females. (Solanas, 1996 [1968]: 35)

Thus, while Solanas offered a non-communal anarchist vision of a world progress-ing toward nihilism, Cell 16 offered envisioned asexuality as having anarchistpotential to threaten cultural institutions by helping women reclaim control overtheir bodies and sexualities.

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Part III: Asexuality as a political identity and strategy ofreform

When examining asexuality and separatism, their political use differs greatly fromtheir implications for pathology, identity, and sexual classification. Most existingresearch on asexuality, for example, asks questions that have relatively little socialand political significance. For example, some studies address prevalence rates, withmost research reporting that between 1 and 6 per cent of the American populationdescribe themselves as asexual, with numbers rising consistently during the past fiveyears (Bogaert, 2006; CNN, 2004). Additionally, some research asks whether asex-uality represents a stable sexual identity, a diagnosable mental illness, or a newform of sexual community. Battles continue about how to define ‘true’ or ‘real’asexuality (Bogaert, 2006). Some conceptualize asexuality as a unique, stable, life-long orientation, even for those who maintain long-term relationships or marriages(as social desirability and economics drive asexuals into relationships despite lackof sexual attraction or arousal). Others envision asexuality as a transitory choicethat responds to one’s life circumstances and changes in sexual desire throughoutthe lifespan (Bogaert, 2004, 2006), citing that asexuals often still masturbate evendenying traditional sexual attraction (Prause and Graham, 2007). Because asexu-ality has risen in numbers recently, it may also constitute its own under-recognizedidentity category and therefore maps onto gay and lesbian rights struggles(Scherrer, 2008). Nevertheless, such conceptualizations largely ignore the politicalor anarchic implications of asexuality, with virtually no studies addressing itsgender, race, and class implications.

Most research situates asexuality within models of classification, diagnosis, andpathology by asking: Can asexuality represent good mental health? Should we adda fourth category to the gay, lesbian, and bisexual continuum? Should those whohave infrequent or nonexistent sexual activity be classified as asexual, mirroringlabels often assigned to disabled communities (Milligan and Neufeldt, 2001)? Suchframing ignores the choosing of asexuality as a political gesture that underminesgender hierarchies by denying access to women’s bodies (as with radical feminism),or, particularly for women, as a response to real and pervasive gendered inequal-ities. Perhaps we should more pointedly ask: How does asexuality differ betweenmen and women, between those with different political orientations, and betweenthose with power and those without power? When people of color, women, theworking class, and other disempowered groups choose asexuality, does it carrydifferent meaning than when hegemonically powerful groups (e.g. white people,men, high SES groups and so on) choose asexuality? If sexual identity fluctuatesthroughout the lifespan (Diamond, 2003), might people also choose asexuality toassert independence, autonomy, and changing sexual priorities? Further, mightasexuality represent a logical, even empowering, response to oppression?

Social science research on sexual satisfaction and pleasure readily presentswomen as less satisfied and orgasmic than men (Baumeister and Tice, 1998;Haavio-Mannila and Kontula, 1997; Laumann et al., 1994; Sprecher and Regan,



1996). Women fake orgasm in response to (male) partners’ demands to supportegos or to end sex (Roberts et al., 1995; Wiederman, 1997). Women also experienceinnumerable social inequalities in other aspects of their lives, including work, fam-ilies, economics, education, military, sports, and media. Given this, framingwomen’s choice of asexuality as a political decision based on sexual oppressionmakes sense. Asexuality represents a viable response to the gendered culture ofsex by allowing women to deconstruct oppressive institutions and assert bodilycontrol (something denied to women through institutions like government andfamily). In other words, even non-radical/non-anarchist women may adopt asexualidentities or periods of celibacy in response to real inequalities, and future researchshould address these choices in light of gender, power, and resistance.

Asexuality as a social and political choice also destabilizes other aspects ofmodern life. It undercuts assumptions and attributions about classifying andexplaining sociosexual behavior. For example, the heated debates about gay mar-riage assume that coupling matters, people have ‘natural’ inclinations toward sex,and rights discourses should inclusively expand to help others who seek publicvalidation of their ‘natural’ sexual attraction. Asexuality throws this paradigmoff kilter by questioning why the conferral of rights hinges upon sexuality. Couldwe instead dispense rights like health care and family visitation based on otherkinds of non-sexual statuses? Consider that nearly 33 per cent of asexual-identifiedpeople marry or cohabitate as a consequence of economic and social necessity (e.g.getting health care benefits and tax breaks) rather than sexual desire per se(Bogaert, 2006). In short, asexuality as a sociopolitical choice reveals the absurdityof basing civil rights on an institution like marriage. Sexuality is not an appropriateunderlying basis for rights and privileges; the state must re-evaluate its prioritiesand categories in a holistic way. Let us ask: Why should sexuality matter this much?Or, taking it one step further, anarchists pose that, because the state cannot divorceitself from institutions like marriage, coupling, and sexuality, we must strip thestate of its power altogether.

Similarly, if asexuality becomes a viable sexual identity, this distorts debatesabout whether gays and lesbians are ‘born’ or ‘choose’ their identity. Asexualsdeconstruct and dismantle many underlying ideas in such a debate: first, that allpeople have sexual inclinations of some sort; second, that these inclinations persistthroughout the lifespan; third, that identity is stable; and last, that sexual practicescan form identities. Asexual identity asks: Is sexual identity related to partnerchoice, internal sexual arousal, or self-identity based on gender and social mean-ings? Can one choose asexuality politically or socially but still identify as hetero-sexual, bisexual, or homosexual? Likewise, can one choose heterosexuality,bisexuality, or homosexuality while identifying as asexual? What might this meanfor state interventions into sexual life, particularly if the state encourages repro-duction and ‘pro-family’ ideologies? How might women’s abstinence from sexthreaten the foundations of social institutions like patriarchy, family, work, andthe media? Can asexuality subvert heterosexism more than other queer identitiesdo? Such questions suggest that asexuality has much to offer contemporary sexual

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politics, despite the woeful lack of attention paid to its political significance. Theseexamples collectively reveal the significance of conceptualizing asexuality as a polit-ical choice rather than merely a sexual identity based on pathology and normality.

That said, framing asexuality as an idealistic political solution presents someserious problems. Most importantly, asexuality often mirrors conservative tenden-cies to strip women’s sexual agency and relegate them to prudish figures that easilytolerate lack of sexual pleasure. Further, asexuality dangerously parallels the goalsof abstinence-only education and anti-choice agendas, in that suppressing sexualexpression is often promoted to unmarried, young, and otherwise disenfranchisedpeople. Additionally, asexuality often aligns itself with spiritual elements of deny-ing the body in order to heighten one’s rational selfhood, hearkening back to themind/body split imposed upon women to explain their ‘natural’ irrationality andmen’s ‘natural’ mental merits. Also, in a more concrete sense, denying sexualattraction and sexual relationships might limit the subversive, social justice impli-cations of our erotic lives (Lorde, 1993).

Ultimately, despite these various limitations, I advocate a reading of asexualityas socially and politically compelling, particularly as we recover the lost orobscured histories of radical feminism. In certain contexts, asexuality aligns itselfwith women’s conscious efforts to regain control over their bodies, assert sexualagency and autonomy, and redefine institutions that disempower women. Indoing so, asexuality has potential as an anarchic force, deconstructing keysocial institutions while simultaneously rejecting the pro-reproductive,pro-family, pro-patriarchy state priorities. The conscious choice to refuse sex,whether temporary or more stable in length, reveals underlying assumptionsbehind modern debates about sexual life (e.g. gay marriage, gay identity and soon). Asexuality asks whether sex should matter for social justice, and if so, itdemands a closer and more careful examination of our assumptions about thenaturalness of sex and the way it maintains the status quo, even in its more liberalmanifestations like sexual revolution or ‘free love’. Framing asexuality as a viableand politically significant choice transforms it into a compelling and depatholo-gized option, particularly as it elegantly mirrors our cultural anxieties, politicalpriorities, and deeply troubled constructions of gender, power, and sexual life.

Notes

1. Such positions found support two decades later by sex radicals like CatharineMacKinnon, who argued, ‘Women’s sexuality is, socially, a thing to be stolen, sold,

bought, bartered, or exchanged by others. But women never own or possess it . . . Themoment women ‘‘have’’ it – ‘‘have sex’’ in the dual gender/sexuality sense – it is lost astheirs’ (MacKinnon, 1989: 172).

2. Note that, while the SCUMManifesto is popularly known as ‘The Society for Cutting UpMen’, Solanas herself never defined the text that way, calling editor Vivian Gornick a‘flea’ for referring to it as such.

3. Notably, while Cell 16 never specifically defined separatism as removing women from allinteractions with men, they did promote women mobilizing with other women while



limiting contact with (non-feminist) men. One wonders, then, about the implications of

radical feminism advocating a total removal from all interactions with men; going farbeyond the sexual realm, such extremity might indeed inspire new modes of anarchistthinking (e.g. Can ‘freedom from’ extend to freedom from coexisting with men

altogether?).

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Singer J and Singer I (1972) Types of female orgasm. The Journal of Sex Research 8:

255–267.Solanas V (1996) The SCUM Manifesto. San Francisco: AK Press.Sprecher S and Regan PC (1996) College virgins: How men and women perceive their sexual

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Breanne Fahs is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona StateUniversity. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies and Clinical Psychology from theUniversity of Michigan (2006) and currently holds a faculty appointment atArizona State University while also working as a private practice clinical psychol-ogist in Avondale, Arizona. She has published articles on the politicizing effects ofdivorce, radical feminist histories, and women’s sexuality. She has a forthcomingbook with SUNY Press that examines the unintended consequences of the women’sliberation movement as it relates to aspects of women’s sexuality like fakingorgasms, performing bisexuality, and the development of female Viagra.Address: Arizona State University, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Glendale, AZ85306 USA.

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DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370652

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Queer anarchistautonomous zones andpublics: Direct actionvomiting againsthomonormativeconsumerism

Sandra JeppesenConcordia University, Canada

Abstract

Global anarchist movements and queer politics are integrating in mutually informing

ways. The characteristics of this synthesis include liberatory theories and practices of

embodied genders and sexualities in private and public, direct actions to visibilize and

extend queer publics, and queer intersections with capitalism, the environment, race,

disability, public space, private property and citizenship, among others. This article

will critically analyze three cases of anti-consumerist vomiting, including an erotic

performance, a punk zine, and a Pink Panthers direct action, to investigate the politics of

queer anarchist autonomous publics that extend the anti-homophobic and anti-

heteronormative politics of queer counterpublics toward challenging homonormativity

through intersectional anti-oppression and liberatory value-practices.

Keywords

counterpublics, homonormative, intersectionality, Pink Panthers, queer

From anti-homophobia to anti-heteronormativity

In the 1990s North American queer activism and queer theory shifted from an anti-homophobic position that resisted the heterosexual imperative, with an emphasison AIDS activism, growing gay villages, and same-sex marriage (particularly inCanada), toward more complex challenges to the heteronormativity of institutions,


Sandra Jeppesen, Communication Studies Department, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West,

CJ 3.230, 3rd Floor, Montreal, Canada H4B 1R6



laws and cultural practices. The term homophobia has fallen out of use by activists,as it contains within it the suggestion that there are legitimate psychologicalgrounds for individuals to fear or have a phobia of homosexuality. Instead weuse ‘heterosexism’ which points to the systemic nature of oppression againstqueers through cultural, political and economic structures favouring heterosexual-ity and heterosexuals. Heterosexism is the form of oppression resulting from theideology of heteronormativity. In A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, NikkiSullivan argues that

heteronormativity does not exist as a discrete and easily identifiable body of thought,

of rules and regulations, but rather, informs – albeit ambiguously, in complex ways,

and to varying degrees – all kinds of practices, institutions, conceptual systems, and

social structures. (2003: 132)

Similarly, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner suggest that ‘Heteronormativity ismore than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is pro-duced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life’ reprodu-cing itself systemically in ‘nationality, the state, and the law; commerce; medicine;and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance,and other protected spaces of culture’ (2000: 318–19). This affects life practices suchas parenting, joint bank accounts, hospital or prison visiting rights, travelling,immigrating, movie watching and inheritance. Heteronormativity frames hetero-sexuality as a universal norm making it publicly invisible, whereas homosexuality ismeant to be private and thus becomes visible in public (Duncan, 1996: 137).Furthermore, heteronormativity requires the stabilization of bodies into two cis-gendered categories (male, female), whereas queer bodies may be transgender,transsexual, intersex or otherwise challenge this stabilization.

Two anti-heteronormative strategies that engage publics have been used byactivists. Groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation challenged cultural normsby making interventions in heteronormative spaces such as shopping malls andbars. Activists ‘reterritorialize various public spaces through an assortment of strat-egies like the policing of neighbourhoods by Pink Panthers dressed in ‘Bash Back’T-shirts or Queer Nights Out and Kiss-Ins where groups of gay couples invadestraight bars or other public spaces and scandalously make out’ (Hennessy, 1994–95: 51). Interventions announce the presence of queers, interrupting the heteronor-mative public by challenging the assumption that queer sexuality belongs inprivate. As Hennessy argues, ‘The queer critique of heteronormativity is intenselyand aggressively concerned with issues of [queer] visibility’ (1994–95: 36) in hetero-normative publics. The second strategy is the creation of queer counterpublicsengaged in spaces like gay bars and villages that facilitate queer activism, dis-courses, cruising, and socializing. Berlant and Warner have found that sex-orientedqueer commercial spaces such as S/M bars, cafes, porn shops and bookstores areimportant sites for queer counterpublics: ‘there are very few places in the worldthat have assembled much of a queer population without a base in sex commerce’



(2000: 327). In these spaces, the public is predominantly queer, as the spaces create‘nonheteronormative worlds’ (2000: 329).

Exhibit A: ‘A garden-variety leather bar’ that ‘hosts a sex performance event’

‘A boy, twentyish, very skateboard, comes on the low stage at one end of the bar,

wearing lycra shorts and a dog collar. He sits loosely in a restraining chair. His partner

comes out and tilts the bottom’s head up to the ceiling, stretching out his throat.

Behind them is an array of foods. The top begins pouring milk down the boy’s throat,

then food, then more milk. It spills over, down his chest and onto the floor. A dynamic

is established between them in which they carefully keep at the threshold of gagging.

The bottom struggles to keep taking in more than he really can. The top is careful to

give him just enough to stretch his capacities. From time to time a baby bottle is

offered as a respite, but soon the rhythm intensifies. The boy’s stomach is beginning to

rise and pulse, almost convulsively. . . the top inserts two, then three fingers in the

bottom’s throat, insistently offering his own stomach for the repeated climaxes.

(Berlant and Warner, 2000: 328–9)

This example of erotic vomiting engages non-heteronormative erotic play therebycreating a queer counterpublic of the audience. ‘Counterpublics are, by definition,formed by their conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment’(Warner, 2002: 63). A queer counterpublic then engages queer sexualities and pro-duces opportunities for the circulation of discourses about them that are in ‘conflictwith’ or resistant to heteronormativity.

Important to this resistance is the liberation of the body from some of its privateand public constraints. Theories of privates and publics tend to assign sexualities(homo/hetero), genders (male/female)1 and races (white/non-white) to private orpublic domains in ways that re-enact binaries and stereotypes. Specific sexual acts,behaviours, objects, bodies, or spaces, however, are not inherently only eitherpublic or private. Warner suggests that the terms public and private ‘seem to bepreconceptual, almost instinctual, rooted in the orientations of the body andcommon speech’ (2002: 23), whereas it seems that notions of appropriate publicand private behaviour are highly socially constructed. The example he gives is notabout publics but ‘privates’: ‘A child’s earliest education in shame, deportment,and cleaning is an initiation into the prevailing meaning of public and private, aswhen he or she locates his or her ‘‘privates’’’ (2002: 23). However, there is nothingintrinsically ‘private’ about one’s genitals, rather this is something children learnwhen they are told to cover up. Spaces where people may experience the pleasure ofprivates in public include nudity clubs, clothing-optional beaches, naked sportsteams, saunas, naked yoga classes, and sex parties. In these spaces the body doesnot ‘naturally’ orient itself toward the privacy of sexuality or sex organs. Humansexual parts are not hidden away like our internal organs are (livers, kidneys,spleens), rather they are on the surface of the body. They are the surfaces of ourbodies: almost every part of the body’s surface is potentially sexual in some way.

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Thus what Warner calls the ‘orientations of the body’ are not toward privacy as heclaims, but rather toward a proliferation of public sensualities and sexualities.Bodies liberated through unlearning can be both private and public at once, orneither, as we choose. The liberation of bodies calls into question not just notionsof privates and publics but the entire set of social norms that this binary frames.

Part of this includes the liminal spaces of bodies, including clothing and affect,as specific instances in which the public/private distinction is thrown into crisis.Warner suggests that ‘Clothing is a language of publicity, folding the body in whatis felt as the body’s own privacy’ (2002: 23). Humans emphasize the privacy of our‘privates’ by covering them up. Similarly, feelings are meant to be experienced andexpressed in private. ‘Some bodily sensations – of pleasure and pain, shame anddisplay, appetite and purgation – come to be felt, in the same way, as privacy’(2002: 23). Sensations emanating from the body and gazes fixed upon the body arethwarted in their attempts to cross the threshold from private to public by oursocialized conceptions of propriety: we must cry, vomit, fall in love or have sexbehind closed doors. However, if the body’s own privacy is intrinsic to it, why dowe need clothes to fold the body into privacy? Is it not more liberating for sensa-tions and emotions to be shared rather than to be entirely private? Warner’s claimfor what is naturally public or private with respect to the body risks the reinscrip-tion of norms emanating from heteronormativity.

Queer citizenship has provided another framework for rethinking heteronorma-tivity. Robert Corber and Stephen Valocchi argue that ‘sexual and gender norms. . .serve as prerequisites for membership in the nation’ (2003: 15). The nation, throughthe legal system and its heteronormative capitalist discourses, establishes rules forentry, belonging and success, from which queers are systematically excluded.2

Belonging in a queer nation can be achieved by transgressions of sexual andgender norms. ‘Even as the nation-state establishes and enforces these norms ofbelonging, spaces open up in which individuals can exercise sexual agency, partly inresistance to these dominant understandings of sexual citizenship’ (Corber andValocchi, 2003: 15). Warner situates agency for the sexual citizen within thequeer counterpublic. He argues:

A public, or counterpublic, can do more than represent the interests of gendered or

sexualized persons in a public sphere. It can mediate the most private and intimate

meanings of gender and sexuality . . . It can therefore make possible new forms of

gendered or sexual citizenship. (2002: 57)

Non-oppressive queer social relations can be developed through counterpublicscreating spaces for queer sexual citizenship yielding the agency to participate in a‘process of world making’ (Warner, 2002: 57).

However with increasingly militarized borders, citizenship is a fraught category.A system of sexual citizens and non-citizens, with inferior rights accorded to thelatter, entails a hierarchization of sexualities whereby some would have ‘sexualcitizenship’ and others would not. Who would adjudicate such citizenship?



How would national citizenship intersect with sexual citizenship? Are non-citizensof the nation-state able to access sexual citizenship? Bobby Noble has shown that inToronto same-sex bath-houses, presumably sites of ‘queer citizenship’, the currententrance policy is ‘show your dick at the door’, a trans-phobic white-centric polic-ing of bodies (Noble, 2009). The concept of sexual citizen holds within it a policedborder that refuses some people (i.e. non-white, trans or intersex, immigrant,people who do not conform to western beauty standards, people in poverty,people with disabilities and so on) admission into queer counterpublics. Queeractivists thus challenge theorists to consider the nation, capitalism and other inter-sectional forms of oppression in their challenges to heteronormativity.

From anti-heteronormativity to anti-capitalism

The vomit performance described earlier can be interpreted as capitalist consump-tion. The ‘top’, or the dominant capitalist ideology, force-feeds products tothe receptive consumer or ‘bottom’. As ‘the bottom struggles to keep takingin more than he really can’, as in middle-class debt-driven consumerism, and‘the top is careful to give him just enough to stretch his capacities’, the sameway capitalism stretches our capacities, ‘a dynamic is established betweenthem in which they carefully keep at the threshold of gagging’ against consumingtoo much. Berlant and Warner figure this as erotic and the vomiting that follows asa sexualized ‘climax’, as the top offers his stomach for the stream of ejaculate/vomit.

Susan Bordo considers vomiting emblematic of the contradictions betweencapitalist production and consumption:

In advanced consumer capitalism . . . an unstable, agonistic construction of personality

is produced by the contradictory structure of economic life. On the one hand, as

‘producer-selves’, we must be capable of sublimating, delaying, repressing desires

for immediate gratification; we must cultivate the work ethic. On the other hand, as

‘consumer-selves’ we serve the system through a boundless capacity to capitulate to

desire and indulge in impulse; we must become creatures who hunger for constant and

immediate satisfaction. (1990: 96)

Consumerism cultivates the construction of the desire for consumerism itself,which extends beyond the desire for products to encompass the desire for a situ-ation of consumption in which there is a secure assumption that you can haveeverything you could possibly desire. The body cannot sustain these contradictions,however, even as every queer subject cannot participate in a counterpublic thatcalls for marginalized quasi-privatized gay-village spaces of consumerism predi-cated on public displays of perfect (white male) bodies indulging in capitalistexcess. Vomiting is a bodily expression of the unsustainability of capitalism. Thistakes on a gendered dynamic as well, as Bordo has found. Women are supposed tomake ourselves so ‘slender’ that we almost disappear, a disappearance that leads to

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multiple marginalizations in queer commercial spaces that demand entrance fees(class), are dominated by cis men (sex), are spaces that either reject or exoticizeracialized groups (race), and demand specific body images (able-bodiness). Bordoargues that this ‘embodies the unstable ‘double-bind’ of consumer capitalism’(1990: 99), as well as suggesting the untenability of women’s bodies within mascu-linist, heteronormative, racist, ableist, capitalist systems.

Queer commerce thus cannot empower all subjects. ‘Visibility in commodityculture is in this sense a limited victory for gays who are welcome to be visibleas consumer subjects but not as social subjects’ (Hennessy, 1994–95: 32). It isprecisely this social subjectivity that is at stake in anti-capitalist queer socialmovements.

Exhibit B: Projectile zine

In the 1990s my friend Leah and I produced a zine called Projectile: Stories about

Puking, containing sections called, ‘Where to puke in Toronto’, ‘The Montreal Puke’

and ‘The Red Puke’ partner puke reviews, and ‘Colour-code yer puke’, with a cen-

terfold depicting one of our friends bent forward projectiling a stream of puke from

his mouth. Other punk issues covered included band reviews, condom reviews for

sluts, the punk Beer Olympics in New York City, squatting, and police brutality.

(Jeppesen and Visser, 1996)

We were always puking so we made a zine about it. For us puking was the fullestexpression of an authentic excessiveness in a life lived with the kind of intensitydisallowed by polite society. Puking at 7:00am after drinking all night at punk clubsand after-hours bars in a subway train full of commuters was the ultimate cathar-sis. Your head heated up, your face started sweating, your body trembled, youvibrated from toe to head, and that surge produced something of you, a kind ofself-production, a collectively approved explosion against everything. The com-muters, staring in disgust, reproduced your disgust at society, as you passed theaffect of disaffectation back to them.

These moments created and accelerated our passion and self-rebuilding. Wewere not caught up in surfaces of life, the body, cleanliness, linear time. Insteadwe lived in urban grit, by crumbling graffitied walls under train bridges, displayingthe broken glass edges of our skin, enjoying the feeling of the piercing needle goingin welling up our eyes, the tattoo gun drilling down through our skin. Scarification,cutting, branding, vomiting and fucking intensified our lives. Puking was the cul-mination of a night of fully engaged participation in the most intense gruellingenjoyable expressive living. Fucking was the culmination of an intense connectionto another person, a letting go of bodily control, a full-on head-on encounter withanother being. Both explosive and expulsive, they gave a sense of finality to theproceedings: Now I’m done. I have lived tonight to the fullest extent of my capac-ity, exceeding norms on so many fronts. ‘Where to puke in Toronto’ lists thegrittiest corners of the city, back alleys with the stench of French fry vats and



dead pigeons, ‘behind Sneaky Dee’s just outside the kitchen (or just inside)’, darkgraffitied streets, abandoned houses, gravelly urban parks like the ‘junkie park atDundas and Bathurst’ or ‘Kensington park in the sex bushes’ (Jeppesen and Visser,1996). These were places we loved, we marked our territory with sex and vomit.Puking and fucking in public spaces and naming those spaces our own created aliberatory underground culture. This piece detournes the tourist guide ‘Where todine out in Toronto’ turning consumption/dining in public by the privileged classesinto production/vomiting in public by the underclasses. Puking was explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist and anti-spectacle. The two partner puke reviews tellrelationship stories through vomit rated by ‘colour’, ‘texture’, ‘sound’, and ‘loca-tion’. What did it reveal about the relationship? ‘I always think of [them] fondlyand somewhat pathetically when I’m hungover’ (Jeppesen and Visser, 1996), con-cludes one review. Puking and fucking drew us closer, creating zones of unmediatedshared intensities. Vomiting is a sex-like manifestation of the non-normative, theejaculate/projectile stream is a ‘fuck you’ on the pedestrian sidewalk of society. Itexpresses only its own intensities. It is the Deleuze and Guattarian body withoutorgans (1983), literally ejecting its own organs, intensely embracing other bodieswithout organs. Love and intimacy are created in these moments which would beshameful in consumer culture where intimacy is produced in circumscribed placesthrough consumerism – fancy restaurants, expensive gifts and so on. The excessesof affect and intimacy produced by vomiting and sex in public challenge hetero-normativity and its direct ties to capitalism.

Moreover, the boundary between public and private is thrown into crisis, per-haps even evacuated by the eroticized vomit performance and Projectile’s ‘storiesabout puking’, whereby both create non-shaming spaces as the body’s innards areput on display. Not just the sexualization of the act of vomiting, but the collapse ofbourgeois decorum in the act of ‘puking’ are transgressions of boundaries linked tothe public/private divide, including non-normative sexuality, public performance ofbodily functions, the reinscription of positive affect onto normatively negative acts,an overshare of expressive personal proclivities, an outward display of punk pov-erty through the lack of private space in which to vomit and so on. Furthermore,the zine, as a form of autonomous media, creates its own fluid anti-capitalistautonomous public. Queer radicals have thus become anti-capitalist, recognizing‘that heteronormative forms, so central to the accumulation and reproduction ofcapital, also depend on heavy interventions in the regulation of capital’ (Berlantand Warner, 2000: 327). But gay capitalism has been quick to establish norms ofhomosexuality consistent with consumerism.

From anti-capitalism to anti-homonormativity

As we have seen, an important part of queer politics is the reclaiming of hetero-normative public space for queer public sex and safety. Berlant and Warner’saccount of queer counterpublics takes recourse to a spatial taxonomy related to cap-italist private property rights and commercial development. ‘In late 20th-century

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‘‘post-industrial’’ societies like the United States, the (in)visibility of class divisionscontinues to be spatially regulated by urban planning’ (Hennessy, 1994–95: 67).Ownership and control of space is at stake in queer liberation. ‘By letting thelanguage of real-estate development serve queer public intimacy, Berlant andWarner provide a powerful and necessary critique of heteronormative privacyand put forth a compelling defense of the social networks and queer culture createdthrough public sex’ (Castiglia, 2000: 156). Spaces mapped out for queer pleasurevia communal intimacies are crucial to queer counterpublics. For Warner, ‘Acounterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon ofopinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have acritical relation to power’ (Warner, 2002: 56–7). Anti-capitalist queer organizingassumes a critical relation to the new power hierarchies that have been establishedwithin queer culture, to unlink queer culture from consumerism, offering critiquesof gay villages steeped in commerce, the ‘pink dollar’, the gay niche market, andcorporate sponsorship of Pride marches.

Exhibit C: The Pink Panthers, Montreal, 14 February 2004

Operation ‘Pepto-Bismol Please!’, designed by the Pink Panthers collective to

denounce the commercialization of Valentines Day, took place as planned late this

afternoon in Montreal’s Gay Village. After puking on the doorsteps of the Village’s

most prosperous shops and bars catering to gay businessmen, members of this radical

queer group flooded the neighborhood with counterfeit coupons, symbolizing the

reign of the pink dollar and the capitalist compliance of today’s average gays and

lesbians (Les Pantheres Roses, 2004).

According to Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman: ‘The Pink Panthers, initially con-ceived of at a Queer Nation meeting (they are now a separate organization), pro-vided a searing response to the increased violence that has accompanied the generalincrease of gay visibility in America’ (1992: 161). Les Pantheres Roses, The PinkPanthers, was ‘a group of radical queers based in Montreal, who use[d] direct andcreative action to confront the established order’. Formed in 2002, Les PantheresRoses held their first anti-capitalist action at Montreal Gay Pride in 2003,‘[d]istribut[ing] hundreds of Anti-Ad Kits on Rene-Levesque Street’ (LesPantheres Roses, 2004). In 2004 they organized an anti-homonormativeValentine’s Day vomiting direct action:

A member of the Pink Panthers, before vomiting on the steps of the store Megavideo,

revealed that the most infuriating thing for him was the capitalist appropriation of

emotions like love and liberty, which have always belonged to everybody and should

never have become dependant [sic] on consumption. He feels that multinationals and

others who profit off of Valentine’s Day are doing something that by its very nature

(competition, salary reduction, waste of natural resources) has nothing to do with the

love of another person. (Les Pantheres Roses, 2004)



The Pink Panthers used their vomit action to denounce capitalist exploitation ofgay consumer dollars and ‘natural resources’ or the environment, linking thesetwo issues. They also noted that, ‘businessmen make themselves out to be themost enthusiastic proponents of gay liberation, while at the same time using theirphallocentric power to exclude everyone who is not a white man’ (Les PantheresRoses, 2004). They add masculinity and race to the environment and capitalismas axes of oppression that intersect with and in queer subjectivities and liberation.The Pink Panthers’ anti-homonormative action includes a greater diversity ofqueers who might live in poverty, and/or be women, and/or be bisexual, and/or be trans, and/or be people of colour, and/or be sex workers, and/or be dis-abled, and/or not conform to the dominant beauty image, and/or otherwise devi-ate from gay stereotypes. They challenge barriers to participation for doubly ormultiply marginalized queers in counterpublic spaces inside urban clubs or shops,where some modes of oppression might be reinforced (e.g. by racism, the ‘dick atthe door’ policy, beauty standards, social class belonging, ageism, ableism and soon). Furthermore, the Panthers’ message was created in the streets, accessible toall passers-by, claiming public spaces and moments as queer autonomous zonesfree of oppression.

Direct action vomiting critiques the homonormativity of the queer counter-public that includes gay villages, corporatized Pride marches and the like. ThePink Panthers’ vomit actions make Berlant and Warner’s erotic vomit storyseem somewhat limited, as does the academic public created by representationin an article such as this one. Sitting in a bar vicariously experiencing some-one’s intense eroticism positively revalues and simultaneously degrades it, as theperformance risks becoming commodified. The Pink Panthers’ statementcritiques queer counterpublics for commodifying affect through ‘the capitalistappropriation of emotions like love and liberty’. While the erotic vomiting sceneBerlant and Warner witnessed is hardly a Valentine’s Day card, it does partic-ipate in the queer consumerism of gay bars that reifies homo-norms, for exam-ple that queers all go to leather bars, or that being queer is a hip young urbanlifestyle choice. These stereotypes become homo-norms in urban queercounterpublics.

While queer visibility in heteronormative culture is important, Mall Zaps andKiss-Ins also tend to reinforce queer stereotypes through mainstream practicessuch as shopping and public kissing. Richard Dyer has found that ‘Gay people,whether activists or not, have resented and attacked the images of homosexual-ity . . . The principle line of attack has been on stereotyping’ (Dyer, 2006: 353). Gaystereotypes tend to emphasize white middle-class cisgender gay male consumerism.‘Particularly damaging is the fact that many gay people believe [stereotypes], lead-ing on the one hand to the self-oppression so characteristic of gay people’s lives,and on the other to behaviour in conformity with the stereotypes which of courseonly serves to confirm their truth’ (2006: 353). Kiss-Ins and Mall Zaps perform the‘truth’ of certain stereotypes revealing both internal (within queer groups) andinternalized (within the self) oppressions.

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Ironically, this tends to both deconstruct and simultaneously reinforce bothheteronormativity and homonormativity. ‘One of the modes of [maintaining het-erosexual hegemony] for gays is casting gay relationships and characters in terms ofheterosexual roles’ (Dyer, 2006: 356), including kissing in malls or public squaresposing as a heteronormative couple. Kevin Michael DeLuca describes a famousgay kiss-in poster by Gran Fury thus: ‘One sailor has his arms around his partner’swaist. The other sailor’s arms are around his partner’s neck. In other words, it is aclassic kiss’ (1999: 18). This image inserts queer subjectivities into the public sphere,demanding access to power. At the same time, it risks becoming a homonormativeimage, as the men are both beautiful, white, thin, and middle class with matchingshort haircuts and outfits. Certainly there is also a level of irony in the perfor-mance. Nonetheless acts and images like ‘these simply bolster heterosexual hege-mony, [whereas] the task is to develop our own alternative and challengingdefinitions of ourselves’ (Dyer, 2006: 357). Self-definitions must move past whiteprivilege and other dominant homo-norms. A Kiss-In emphasizes public kissing,not a norm in all ethno-cultural groups. Shopping imagines all queers as middle-class consumers who escalate environmental devastation. ‘These stereotypes ofwealthy free-spending gay consumers play well with advertisers and are useful tocorporations because they make the gay market seem potentially lucrative’(Hennessy, 1994–95: 66). Queer activism, in earnest attempts to challenge hetero-normativity, has inadvertently reinscribed a homonormative subject complicit withcapitalism, racism, environmental destruction, ableism, patriarchy, beauty mythsand so on. Radical queer activists attempt to move beyond this deadlock withoutabandoning the notion of queer culture altogether.

The Pink Panthers’ action of vomiting in public takes it out of a commodifiedspace. The vomit, however, was made of oatmeal not actual vomit, producing asimulated vomiting against the hyper-simulations of capitalism. The action goesinto a space it rejects, and replicates that which it rejects. This simulation andrejection is analogous to the disgust shared with commuters, a kind of hyper-affect produced by vomiting in streets or back-alleys or commuter trains. Onlythese non-regulated, open-ended public spaces can be liberatory; as the bodyitself becomes the message, the vomit becomes a kind of street-corner text acces-sible to all. According to DeLuca, the body itself has become an event-image, a textthat can shift the discursive mainstream framing of queer politics, as some ‘activistgroups practice an alternative image politics, performing image events designed formass media dissemination. Often, image events revolve around images of bodies –vulnerable bodies, dangerous bodies, taboo bodies, ludicrous bodies, transfiguredbodies’ (DeLuca, 1999: 10). The vomiting body is a ‘dangerous body’ bringingforth new ideas. ‘Their bodies, then, become not merely flags to attract attentionfor the argument but the site and substance of the argument itself’ (1999: 10). Usingtheir bodies, the Pink Panthers’ puking action articulated a message against con-sumerism and other exclusions, the substance of which was the vomit itself. Their‘bodies simultaneously are constructed in discourses and exceed those discourses’



(1999: 20) – or in this case, the discourse/vomit exceeded the body – moving beyond‘a class-specific ‘bourgeois (homosexual/queer) imaginary’ [that] structures ourknowledge of sexual identity, pleasure, and emancipation’ (Hennessy, 1994–95:70). Certainly not bourgeois, vomiting on the steps of queer consumerism makesthe point that pleasure and emancipation should be available to all subjects, thosewho go to gay bars, as well as those who are excluded. The public created is a freeand fluid autonomous public.

This kind of direct action demonstrates that ‘movements around gender andsexuality do not always conform to the bourgeois model of ‘rational-critical debate’(Warner, 2002: 51), nor do they remain legal. Groups such as ‘Earth First!, ACTUP and Queer Nation have challenged and changed the meanings of the world notthrough good reasons but through vulnerable bodies, not through rational argu-ments but through bodies at risk’ (DeLuca, 1999: 11). Engaging in direct action inopen public spaces the Pink Panthers risk criminalization. After the action inMontreal, The Mirror ran the headline, ‘Puking Queers Make Splash!’ and featuredan interview with a ‘self-described anarchist’, who used the name ‘‘Olivier’’, – apseudonym, as he acknowledges his acts are illegal’. The use of pseudonyms isalmost ironic as vomiting is not a transgression of the law, but rather signifies atransgression against the digestive system. The context of the action, however – inpublic, against corporations – renders it ‘illegal’ and the pseudonym necessary.Often regular behaviour (vomiting, having sex) is criminalized when engaged byqueers. Furthermore, there is a link between shame (i.e. the private) and criminal-ization (i.e. privatization of ownership, space and so on). Warner observes that‘critically relevant styles of publicness in gay male’ and, I would add, other queer‘sexual culture[s] are seldom recognized as such but are typically denounced assleaze and as crime’ (2002: 52). Puking punks and queers are sleazy, shamefulcriminals who are bad for business.

And yet sleaze, perversion, deviance, eccentricity, weirdness, kinkiness, BDSMand smut, although perhaps not openly homo-norms among the new assimilation-ists advocating same-sex marriage, are central to sex-positive queer anarchist lives.‘Queer and other insurgents have long striven, often dangerously or scandalously,to cultivate what good folks used to call criminal intimacies’ (Berlant and Warner,2000: 322), figured as exciting sites of resistance. ‘Nonstandard intimacies wouldseem less criminal and less fleeting if, as used to be the case, normal intimaciesincluded everything from consorts to courtiers, friends, amours, associates, and co-conspirators’ (2000: 323). Here we come up against another binary, however:normal vs. nonstandard. According to Jamie Heckert, ‘LGBT politics maintainsthese categories: it intends to invert their meaning, redefining sexual deviance assexual identity of which one should be proud and sexual normality as boring/oppressive’ (2004: 106). The desire for certain behaviours to be recategorized as‘normal’ is denounced in a queer anarchist world-making project that considers allconsensual, non-coerced intimacies and sexualities legitimate, challenging homo-normativity via anti-oppression politics.

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From anti-homonormativity to anti-oppression politics andalternative value-practices

Abandoning hierarchized binary categories is one strategy of intersectional anti-oppression politics. As Heckert argues, ‘Sexuality is constructed into hierarchiesand is interconnected with other forms of social divisions including gender, sexualorientation, class and ethnicity’ (2004: 102). The Pink Panthers reveal and critiquethese hierarchies in their media interviews. The Gazette, on 23 February 2004, ranthe wordy headline, ‘Pink Panthers use fake vomit, phony money to preach in thegay village: non-violent but often bizarre actions aim to encourage activism in gaycommunity’. ‘Nathalie’ suggests ‘The gay (political) strategy is very narrow-minded. They never consider other causes, like women’s rights, the environment,globalization’. Similarly, in The Hour of 29 July 2004, ‘Jubejube Molotov’ asks‘What about drag queens, trannies, gays of colour?. . . What about everyone whodoesn’t want to be married and have kids?’ Also on 29 July 2004, The Mirror’sarticle, ‘Radical pink: Queer anarchists take on what they perceive to be the racism,sexism and materialism of the gay establishment’, takes up the Panthers’ critique ofthe ‘gay-geoisie’. The article suggests that ‘some Montreal homosexuals feel at oddswith the mainstreaming of gay and are rebelling against the pigeon-holing of theiridentity based solely on their sexuality and their supposed disposable income’.Revealing the intersectionality of exclusions has the power to expand queer politicsand publics. This media coverage further expands the queer autonomous public toinclude mainstream (The Gazette) and left weekly (The Hour, The Mirror)audiences.

An intersectional analysis is considered crucial within queer anarchist culture.Intersectionality, as LeslieMcCall argues, is based on the realization that ‘[s]ocial lifeis considered too irreducibly complex – overflowing with multiple and fluid deter-minations of both subjects and structures – to make fixed categories anything butsimplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing dif-ferences’ (2005: 1773). Nikki Sullivan has found that if oppressions are divided intocategories and addressed one at a time, enacting other oppressions becomes a risk:

One of the problems with disassociating race, gender, and sexuality and focusing

primarily on one of the terms is that such an approach can lead to the production

of accounts of race that are (at least implicitly) sexist and/or homophobic, theories of

gender that are (at least implicitly) racist and/or homophobic, and analyses of sexu-

ality that are (at least implicitly) racist and/or sexist. (2003: 66)

Accordingly, Hennessy opens out her queer anti-capitalist analysis: ‘the racializedand gendered division of labor suggests that there are more lesbians than gay menliving in poverty and proportionately more of them are people of color’ (1994–95:69). An anti-categorical intersectional analysis considers oppression on intersectingaxes rather than the ‘silo model’ of unrelated categories. Furthermore, the range ofdifferences within categories of oppression renders categories themselves nearly



meaningless (McCall, 2005) whereby a general failure to acknowledge this hasentrenched systemic oppressions. ‘Any system’, as Heckert observes, addressinginternal oppression, ‘that limits or stigmatises our imaginings of the possible (beit anarchism or same-sex desires). . . is oppressive to us all’ (Heckert, 2004: 113). Ananti-categorical approach moves beyond labels to value individual experiences, andopens up the possible imaginings Heckert advocates.

In fact, both Heckert (2004) and Dyer (2006) argue for the development of a setof alternative values self-defined among our communities. These values are notoppositional to mainstream values, rather they come from a liberatory set of com-mitments driven by a very different conception of life’s possibilities and priorities.This points to the problem with the concept of counterpublics. Once the hegemonicdiscourse has been established, a counter-discourse may challenge it but any chal-lenges on this terrain, regardless of how indefinite their extent or diffuse theirnetworks, will have difficulty disrupting the power relations that mapped the ter-rain in the first place. By Warner’s own admission, a counterpublic ‘maintains atsome level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status’ (2002: 56),making lived equal relations among heterosexual publics and queer counterpublicsimpossible. As Heckert articulates, ‘Oppositional politics is based upon the sameterms as that which it opposes. Thus, it serves to maintain the definition of thesituation imposed by its opposition’ (2004: 105). A strategy of counterpublics runsthe risk of reinforcing exactly the hegemony it is attempting to crack. ‘A successfulradical politics. . . must not rely upon transgression and opposition if its goal is toreconstruct society around a different set of norms (e.g. co-operative, non-hierarch-ical, comfortable with sexuality, consensual and so on)’ (2004: 108). With alterna-tive values, instead we create and build our own autonomous zones and becomeour own publics making spaces for participatory engagement. ‘The political valueof queer and public sex cultures is not in their transgressive nature, but in theirdevelopment of alternative sexual values that attempt to move beyond sexualshame’ (Heckert, 2004: 113). Activists are therefore moving beyond shame andare simultaneously developing a politics of shame (see also Moore, 2004).

Douglas Crimp takes up this deconstructive project, arguing that shame ‘isequally and simultaneously identity-defining and identity-erasing’ (2002: 64–5).Shame erases queer identities by disallowing them, and simultaneously definesqueer identities through emotional relations as it ‘appears to construct the singu-larity and isolation of one’s identity through an affective connection to the shamingof another’ (2002: 65). Shame produces a moment of intense emotion that creates abond between two people as their identities are negotiated. ‘Just as shame is bothproductive and corrosive of queer identity. . . so too is it simultaneously productiveand corrosive of queer revaluations of dignity and worth’ (2002: 65). Shame can betransformed into dignity in transcendent moments of emotional experience, atransformation that is critical to sex-positive, radically ethical queer sexual prac-tices such as sex play, public nudity, public sex and polyamory.

As Heckert argues, ‘sexual ethics are also of central importance. [Warner] crit-icises sexual identity politics for focusing on identity to the exclusion of sex. For

Jeppesen 475


him, sexual shame is the key issue to be addressed in a politics of sexuality’ (2004:113). In raw moments of sexual pleasure, intimacy and disclosure we can make ourmost intense connections to others, but only if shame is productively transformedinto dignity, joy and pleasure. Crimp advocates ‘a new slogan of queer politics: ForShame!’ (2002: 68), for the shame produced in moments of irresistibly sexy mutualvulnerability. Crimp’s conception of shame has the potential to transcend not justshame but also heteronormativity and homonormativity. Moments of sexual andother forms of bodily vulnerability draw us to people, facilitating intimacy througha more honest set of negotiated practices and consensual desires based on andproductive of trust, dignity, laughter, and respect for varieties of non-normativepractices including vomiting and/or sex in public. Non-authoritarian social rela-tions and value-practices are required for these moments, critical to transcendingthe painful experiences of normative anti-queer social shaming.

Queer autonomous zones and participatory publics

Bobby Noble points to ‘the simultaneity of the relations between gendered embodi-ment, sex play, and racialization inside homonormative communities, neighbour-hoods and venues for cultural production’ (Noble, 2009). Similar critiques of thequeer community have been taken up by Gay Shame anarchist activists organizingin the late 1990s. In That’s Revolting! Matt/Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore docu-ments their personal experience in Gay Shame collectives in San Francisco andNew York City. ‘Gay Shame emerged to create a radical alternative to the confor-mity of gay neighbourhoods, bars, and institutions – most clearly symbolized byGay Pride’ (Sycamore, 2004: 238). Gay Shame is ‘mostly anarchist leaning’ (2004:239), and organizes gatherings, events and direct action protests against capitalismand intersecting oppressions. A San Francisco flyer asks, ‘Are you choking on thevomit of consumerist ‘gay pride’?’ (2004: 239). Another poster entitled ‘Gay pride,my ass: It’s all about gay shame’ (2004: 240) announces an ‘autonomous space’(2004: 240) outdoors on Tire Beach with performances, art-making, bands, instal-lations, DJs, food, kidspace, and ‘politics and play’ (2004: 240). The event hosted‘speakers on issues including San Francisco gentrification and the US colonizationof the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, as well as prison, youth, and trans activism’(2004: 241). The range of issues and events in the ‘autonomous space’ point to avery different kind of sprawling, engaged public than Berlant and Warner’s indoor,circumscribed, queer counterpublic. ‘We encouraged people to participate in cre-ating their own radical queer space, and people argued about political issues,painted, poured concrete and made a mosaic, dyed hair, and mudwrestlednaked’ (Sycamore, 2004: 241). Participation is a key element in the formation ofa ‘Queer autonomous space’ (2004: 237) or zone, as are multiplicities of politicalfocus (Puerto Rico, kids, youth, prisons, trans people, art production, gentrifica-tion and so on) and an over-arching anti-capitalist practice that includes freeentrance, barter and trade, dressing to ‘ragged excess’ (2004: 240), and the provi-sion of ‘free food, T-shirts and various other gifts’ (2004: 241).



Queer autonomous zones thus are open-ended spaces in which participation ofall comers is encouraged through a direct (rather than liberal) democracy model.They are facilitated via engagement with a multiplicity of intersectional anti-oppression politics. Interactions in queer autonomous spaces develop sustainablesocial relations and value-practices, based on mutual respect, consent, sexual lib-eration, and non-normativity, in which people engage in open-ended processes ofdeveloping alternative ways of being, feeling, thinking, engaging, acting andbecoming-liberated. The question is – what’s next? How do we continue toexpand our movements and theorizing to extend the becoming-liberated of queer?

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments, Jamie Heckert for encour-agement and patience with my process, and Sydney Neuman for engaged proofreading.

Notes

1. Following Vade’s important article (2005) advocating the ‘Gender Galaxy’ which revealsthe falsity of the gender/sex divide and the negative legal impact of this distinction ontrans people, I am using the term ‘gender’ to be comprehensive.

2. In the USA this is particularly true. In Canada same-sex marriage and human rights areprotected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and immigration processes are begin-ning to include same-sex partners in sponsorship claims, as well as considering persecution

for sexuality as a basis for refugee claims. These processes however remain heteronorma-tive. I’d like to thank Melissa White for sharing her insights and research on this issue.

References

Berlant L and Freeman E (1992) Queer nationality. Boundary 2 19(1): 149–180.Berlant L and Warner M (2000) Sex in public. In: Berlant L (ed.) Intimacy. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 311–330.Bordo S (1990) Reading the slender body. In: Jacobus M, Fox Keller E, Shuttleworth S (eds)

Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science. New York: Routledge, 83–112.

Castiglia C (2000) Sex panics, sex publics, sex memories. Boundary 2 27(2): 149–175.Corber RJ, Valocchi S (eds) (2003) Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Malden, MA:

Blackwell.

Crimp D (2002) Mario montez, for shame. In: Barber SM, Clark DL (eds) RegardingSedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory. New York: Routledge, 57–70.

Deleuze G and Guattari F (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1. 1972.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

DeLuca KM (1999) Unruly arguments: The body rhetoric of EarthFirst!, act up, and queernation. Argumentation and Advocacy 36(Summer): 9–21.

Duncan N (1996) Renegotiating gender and sexuality in public and private spaces.

In: Duncan N (ed.) Body Space: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality.New York: Routledge, 125–143.

Dyer R (2006) Stereotyping. In: Durham MG, Kellner DM (eds) Media and Cultural Studies

KeyWorks. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 353–365.Heckert J (2004) Sexuality/identity/politics. In: Purkis J, Bowen J (eds) Changing Anarchism.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 101–116.

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Hennessy R (1994–95) Queer visibility in commodity culture. Cultural Critique 29(Winter):

31–76.Jeppesen S and Visser L (Leahfish) (1996) Projectile: Stories about Puking. Toronto: self-

published.

Les Pantheres Roses (2004) Operation ‘‘Pepto-bismol SVP!’’ URL (accessed 12 July 2008):http:/lespantheresroses.org.

McCall L (2005) The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety 30(3): 1771–1800.

Noble B (2009) Trans-Culture in the (White) City: Taking a Pass on a QueerNeighbourhood. URL (accessed 8 May 2009): http:/nomorepotlucks.org/article/ego/trans-culture-white-city-taking-pass-queer-neighbourhood.

Sullivan N (2003) A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York UniversityPress.

Sycamore M, Berstein M (eds) (2004) That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting

Assimilation. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull.Vade D (2005) Expanding gender and expanding the law: Toward a social and legal con-

ceptualization of gender that is more inclusive of transgender people. Michigan Journal ofGender and Law 11: 253–316.

Warner M (2002) Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.

Sandra Jeppesen is an activist, writer, and Assistant Professor in CommunicationStudies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Her research is in guerrillatexts and autonomous media, including analysis of discourses produced throughanti-poverty activism, anti-colonial no-border activism, radical feminist and queercollectives, anti-racist pedagogies, and other social movement texts. Address:Communication Studies Department, Concordia University, 7141 SherbrookeStreet West, CJ 3.230, 3rd Floor, Montreal, Canada H4B 1R6.



Sexualities

13(4) 479–493




DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370653

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Constructing anarchistsexuality: Queer identity,culture, and politics in theanarchist movement

Laura Portwood-StacerUniversity of Southern California, USA

Abstract

This article explores the articulation of queer sexuality with anarchist identity. Drawing

on interviews and participant observation in the contemporary North American anar-

chist movement, I show that queer critique is typical among self-identified anarchists.

Anarchist movement culture serves as a medium for the circulation of discourses

around sexuality and anarchist identity, as well as supports individuals in their own

queer practices of resistance against dominant sexual norms. However, subcultural

investments in notions of authenticity may serve to detract from the political potential

to be found within anarchist culture. This article ultimately concludes that the strong

movement culture and its investment in authentic identity can prove useful for anarchist

political projects, but that ‘anarchonormativity’ must be wielded strategically, taking into

account its many potential effects.

Keyword

anarchists, identity, politics, queer, sexuality

I’ve seen the anarchists in our community become more queer in their outlooks, their

self-presentation, and even their own sexualities.

Neal Ritchie (2008: 273)

I don’t like to identify as straight. I find it oppressive.

Tina, a self-identified anarchist1

In this article, I explore how queer sexuality is enlisted in the construction ofpolitical identity by members of the contemporary anarchist movement2 in NorthAmerica. The anarchist movement has developed its own culture, in which there are


Laura Portwood-Stacer, University of Southern California, USA



clear, though contestable, ways that people cultivate their identities as anarchists.Certain expressions of queerness have become associated with anarchist identity,and I am interested in the effects, both social and political, that this articulation has.Investments in ‘authentic’ expressions of political identity can prove to be divisivewithin a movement, and can also displace attention away from the material politicalprojects of themovement and ontomore superficial, individualized concerns. Yet theintegration of resistant practices and identities into the culture of a movement canserve to collectivize what may seem like superficial and individualized concerns, suchthat they end up carrying real symbolic and material power to effect change. Here, Ipresent some of these effects as they play out in individuals’ personal experience asparticipants in the anarchist movement.

‘Anarchist’ is a political identity assumed by individuals, and, like any othersocial identity, it is constructed and communicated through the adoption of life-style practices and visible bodily performances. Sexuality is one way (among many)that individuals represent, and thus constitute, themselves as anarchists. Identitiesare historical, meaning that they are made possible by particular discourses, whicharise at particular moments, in particular contexts, and amidst particular powerrelations (Hall, 1996). Thus the content and meanings of an identity, such as anar-chist, are always contingent, varying in ways based on spatial and historical loca-tion, and discursive struggles over its definition. Each person who identifies as ananarchist experiences and enacts the identity in their own unique way, but there isenough coherence around the term for it to be a meaningful object of analysis.Despite variation between individuals, the anarchist is a specific type of individual,who represents the incorporation of various practices into a coherent, nameableidentity (Foucault, 1990a; Heckert, 2004). Here, I show that queer sexuality is animportant component of anarchist identity: particular sexual practices and ways ofsexually self-identifying are incorporated into the constitution of the anarchistsubject.

The definition of queer I work from is rooted in an activist and theoreticaltradition that celebrates sexual autonomy and the proliferation of sexual difference,in opposition to the repressive conformity of heteronormativity. Queer is a refusalto accept the legitimacy of socially dominant sexualities on the basis that they arenatural or intrinsically valuable. This refusal is resonant with anarchism’s funda-mental philosophy, which is a commitment to autonomy, accompanied by anopposition to hierarchy, that is, unequal power relations that allow some people’sautonomy to be violated by others. Dominant sexual mores and institutions createhierarchies in which people are coerced into having and expressing a limited rangeof sexual desires and interpersonal arrangements (Rubin, 1984). Thus it is ideolog-ically consistent for anarchists to take up queers’ resistance of the establishedhierarchical valuation of sexual identities and practices. In this article, I describeways that self-identified anarchists attempt to resist dominant norms of sexuality.The modes of resistance I discuss here do not exhaust those deployed within theanarchist movement; however my selections are reflective of what came up mostoften and most strikingly in the course of my research.



Methodology

This article draws on my research on the culture of the contemporary NorthAmerican anarchist movement. I conducted interviews with 37 individuals whoself-identified as anarchists, or had a strong affinity to anarchist politics. Themajority of the interviews were done face to face, though some were conductedover email or internet chat. The format of the interviews was semi-structured, inthat I introduced general themes to the conversation via open-ended questionsabout the interviewees’ identification with anarchism, participation in politicalorganizing, membership in anarchist communities, and personal lifestyle practices.In addition to conducting interviews, I attended anarchist bookfairs, conferences,organizing meetings, and social events as both participant and observer. I also readtexts, both printed and electronic, written by and for anarchists.

Recruiting interviewees for a study on anarchists can be a complicated matter.Radical activists and their organizations are regularly subject to infiltration andsurveillance by law enforcement personnel, which may make them particularlywary of people claiming to be doing ‘research’ on their activities. For thisreason, I relied on something of a snowball technique, recruiting people I waspersonally acquainted with and then through them, making contact with otherpotential interviewees. I chose not to restrict the study to a particular organizationor physical location, because of the anarchist movement’s nature as a cosmopol-itan, electronically connected network in which organizational affiliations arehighly fluid and geographical mobility is common. As I will discuss later, individ-uals’ experiences of sexuality and anarchist identity are affected by their situationwithin local communities, so it turned out to be instructive to talk to people whowere situated in a variety of locations. At the same time, the construction of anar-chist identity is not wholly determined by local context, given the circulation ofanarchist discourses and bodies within national and global networks, so theaccount of anarchist sexuality I offer here is, I think, representative (though not,of course, exhaustive). That said, I would hesitate to generalize any of the specificexperiences or discourses I discuss here to the anarchist movement as it existsbeyond North America. The cultural, economic, and political contexts withinwhich other branches of the global anarchist movement are situated are perhapstoo divergent for me to be able to make any claims for the universality of myfindings. I would hope however that the analytical tools I use and the theoreticaland practical implications of my work would prove broadly useful across borders,and indeed, for other political movements besides anarchism.

I did not purposely recruit interviewees based on any aspect of their identitiesother than orientation toward anarchism. This openness was intentional, based onthe fact that when I set out I did not presume to know precisely how other identitycategories would intersect with people’s identities as anarchists. It was also for thisreason that I did not ask people to explicitly identify their gender, race, ethnicbackground, or class status. More often than not this information emerged asrelevant to people’s personal experiences and political orientations, but I was

Portwood-Stacer 481


careful to let people share these aspects of their identity where and how they foundthem to be germane to the discussion, rather than demanding that they categorizethemselves in particular ways, which might be reductive or presumptuous. Becausethis article is focused specifically on sexuality, I do not address other aspects of theinterviewees’ identity for the most part. An intersectional analysis that brings eth-nicity, class, age, disability, or other categories to bear on anarchists’ experiences ofsexuality would certainly be interesting and productive, but it is unfortunatelybeyond the scope of this article.

I do not self-identify as an anarchist, and I was candid on this point if inter-viewees inquired about it, which many of them did in the course of our conversa-tions. I did not announce myself as a non-anarchist when attending events orasking for interviews, so it is possible that I was assumed to be one; it is certainlypossible that this assumption affected people’s willingness to participate in thestudy or the answers they gave. I do see my own political identification as aqueer feminist as placing me in solidarity with many of the beliefs and projectsto which anarchists are committed, and because my research is actively directed byand toward my political goals, it is my hope that the people I studied feel servedrather than exploited by this work, despite the power differentials inherent tothe researcher–researched relationship. Though I am critical of some aspects ofanarchist movement culture, as are many anarchists themselves, this critique is,I hope, well founded, and comes from a position of overall support rather thanopposition.

What does anarchist sexuality look like?

In many of my interviews, I asked people to talk about their sexual identities andpractices, usually in the form of an open question like ‘can you talk about yoursexual identity, if it’s not too personal?’ or ‘how would you describe your datingpractices?’ Interviewees demonstrated a tendency to problematize – or subject toethical scrutiny and self-discipline (Foucault, 1990b) – their personal relationshipsto heterosexuality and monogamy. By this I mean that people discussed theirsexual identifications and practices in terms of how they contributed to and wereinfluenced by their ideological commitment to anarchist politics. Alyssa was expli-cit about the fact that her queerness is a political orientation in addition to being asexual identification, ‘[it] is definitely political – not just about desire and who Ihave sex with but also about an orientation against capitalist heteropatriarchy’.Alyssa also commented that her queerness does not necessarily ‘track with’her desire for other women. For anarchists and other sex radicals, to adopt thelabel of queer is not to foreclose heterosexual practices, but rather to disavow thesocial coercion involved in enforcing what Rich (1980) calls ‘compulsoryheterosexuality’.

Indeed, the majority of interviewees indicated that they had been primarilyinvolved in heterosexual romantic relationships. What is interesting however is



that those who are mostly or exclusively heterosexual in practice show a reluctanceto completely identify themselves as heterosexual people. When asked to talk abouther sexual identity, Tina responded, ‘I identify as no preference. Um, I think I leantowards, like, um, heterosexual, like, relationships because that’s what I’vebeen primarily involved with, but I don’t like to identify as straight. I findit oppressive.’ And in describing his relationship with his female partner,Miles noted that,

what was best about our relationship was just how non-gendered it was. Not that we

shared each others clothes and called each other ‘ze/hir’ or anything, but just that it

wasn’t caught up in what seemed to be the same patterns and habits of the world at

large in our practices of heterosexuality.

What is at issue for Miles and others is less an objection to heterosexual desire andmore an objection to the idea that heterosexuality is normal, natural, and morallysuperior to other sexual arrangements.

A similar concern is involved in anarchist resistance to homonormativity, a termused by radical queers to critique homosexual identities and relationships thatconform to heterosexual ideas of normalcy, for example, gender dichotomous,monogamous, legally sanctioned, and so on. In Samantha’s experience, forinstance, the homonormative taboo around ‘butchfag’ relationships has meantthat her preference for dominant, masculine-presenting females (which she herselfidentifies as) has been largely unsatisfied in the reality of her dating life, and she hasusually ended up dating more submissive, feminine-presenting females. ForSamantha, her identity as queer means that she is ‘open to having romantic andsexual relationships with people of many genders and sexes’, rather than wishing toconform to a butch–fem norm. The responses of Miles, Samantha, and others alignwith Doty’s succinct summation of queerness as ‘something that is ultimatelybeyond gender – it is an attitude, a way of responding, that begins in a place notconcerned with, or limited by, notions of a binary opposition of male and female orthe homo versus hetero paradigm usually articulated as an extension of this genderbinarism’ (Doty, 1993: xv).

The practice of monogamy is particularly ideologically suspect to anarchistsbecause of its ties to capitalism, patriarchy, and the state. Legendary anarchistEmma Goldman opposed monogamy because she felt it mirrored the relation ofprivate property within capitalism (Goldman, 1977). The system of monogamytreats the individual’s body, love, and sexual intimacy as if they are exclusive eco-nomic goods, whose values are degraded when they are accessible to multiplepartners. The cultural injunction to monogamy is a side-effect of the capitalistdivision of gendered labor, in which men and women are trained for differenttypes of work and are thus dependent on each other and encouraged to formpaired bonds (Rubin, 1997). Furthermore, the capitalist state sanctions monoga-mous heterosexual pairings through the institution of marriage. Josef stated thecase emphatically: ‘being married and all that is, like, that’s just a whole ‘nother

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prescribed . . . subscription to patriarchy and it’s bullshit, it’s like property manage-ment, and I don’t, I don’t believe in that, you know?’ Grant articulated the con-nections he sees between his practice of polyamory and his commitment to ananarchist society:

I think polyamory for me has to do with anarchism being more than just a non-state

solution to state capitalism, but a complete assessment of all forms of hierarchy . . . it

has personally helped me address aspects of my patriarchal socialization. It’s a tan-

gible way to express that I really don’t feel ownership over my partners, and it con-

tributes to a level of openness and honesty you often don’t find in monogamous

relationships. Additionally it helps me avoid codependent relationships which I

think contributes to one of the great successes of capitalism, namely dividing

people from each other. More often than not it doesn’t matter how we’ve been divided

along lines of race, gender, age, and so on because the ultimate individual goal in a

capitalist society is to find a husband or wife and sequester yourselves off from the rest

of society in a toxic family unit.

Anarchists like Grant are quite aware of their own position in relation to hege-monic power structures and explicitly recognize sexuality as a medium throughwhich to struggle against oppressive forces.

‘Polyamory’ is the most common term used by contemporary anarchists todescribe their non-monogamous relationship structures. Polyamory is practiceddifferently by different people, but it generally amounts to a mutual understandingof sexual non-exclusivity between partners. In theory, anarchists’ opposition toinstitutionalized monogamy is less about advocating for particular sexual desires(for multiple partners, say) than it is about a radical commitment to people’sfreedom to determine the nature of their own sexual practice, without coercionby the market or the state. Even those who are currently monogamous voicedsupport for the idea of polyamory or said they had been polyamorous in thepast. Just as people critically distanced themselves from heteronormativity whilestill engaging in heterosexual practices, people who practiced monogamy were alsocritical of it:

Rilla: I always end up being monogamous . . . But, like, I think if I think about it

critically, I could see why people advocate it, you know? It sounds good but I just,

I tend to always end up in monogamous relationships with men.

Leo: I wish I was polyamorous. I wish I could psychologically cope with polyamory

[laughs] but, um, I probably couldn’t, so instead I’m a very reluctant monogamist.

Although Leo identified himself as a monogamist, albeit a reluctant one, otherinterviewees disidentified with monogamy, even if they practiced it. The idea is that,as Joel put it, identifying oneself as open is ‘a good thing to do’, whether or not oneactually pursues sex with multiple partners.



Anarchist movement culture and queer politics

An explicitly political oppositionality distinguishes anarchist sexual practices frommore apolitical alternative sexuality movements. For example, there is an apoliticaldiscourse on polyamory that does not engage with a critique of power (Haritawornet al., 2006; Noel, 2006). The literature that circulates within the popular polyam-ory movement promotes polyamory as a sort of self-help, a change in lifestyle thatanyone might make. It fails to take into account the systems of domination thatenforce hegemonic norms, particularly where those systems exert unequal pressureon different kinds of bodies. In this context, polyamory is simply discussed as analternative arrangement that individuals might choose as a way to improve thequality of their own lives and relationships. In contrast, anarchists see polyamoryas individual practice and social critique.

Not everyone believes that individual practices are effective vehicles for socialcritique, though. ‘Lifestylist’ is used as an epithet to describe self-identified anar-chists who are supposedly more concerned with their own expressions of anarchismthan with radical social transformation. Those who object to lifestyle anarchismoften do so on the grounds that it plays into a neoliberal ideology that uncriticallycelebrates the agency of the individual, and thereby minimizes the real oppressionsperpetrated by capitalism and other power hierarchies (see especially Bookchin,1995). The pernicious effects of neoliberal rhetoric should not be underestimated(see Duggan, 2003), however there are ways to understand individual practice assomething other than a preoccupation with the self that counteracts the potential ofcollective action. As Foucault (1988) argues, attention to the self does not neces-sarily signify the privatization of life or the valuing of the self over others; on thecontrary it can be a way of orienting one’s conduct toward others and toward thegeneration of a desired social order.

Queer theory, particularly as advanced by Judith Butler, attempts to explicatethe mechanisms by which such individual practices might effect a transformation insocial relations of power. Anarchists who treat their sexual identities and practicesas sites of resistance are invested in the political value of queer performance. Theybelieve that representations of the self have the potential to effect changes in powerrelations, so they use their own bodies as models of resistance. These anarchistsattempt to ‘make trouble’ (Butler, 1990) for the discourse of normative sexuality,and the relations of power it supports, by proliferating instances in which thenormal categories of identity and desire do not seem to apply. Ho takes a posi-tion inflected by queer theory when she argues that people’s practices of non-monogamy ‘will almost inevitably become known to other people, and thereforeserve as a demonstration of alternative practices and options. This demonstra-tion will incline or facilitate other people to make similar transgressions’(Ho, 2006: 562).

This kind of embodied political performance might be likened to the anarchisttradition of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which is the use of highly visible actionthat simultaneously produces a material result and inspires mass revolt.

Portwood-Stacer 485


Historically, propaganda by the deed referred to spectacularly violent acts such asassassination or rioting, but today we can understand it more broadly as any kindof embodied performance that promotes the visibility of anarchist politics andperhaps persuades others of their value. Closely related to the idea of propagandaby the deed is that of ‘prefigurative politics’, which is the attempt to enact desiredchanges in society through everyday practice within the activist community(Breines, 1982). The idea that by living and performing one’s politics one cancommunicate to others and hopefully effect changes in society is an attractiveone. However, theorists of queer performativity (e.g. Butler, 1993) point out thatindividual acts, on their own, do not have the power to disrupt social norms. Infact, if they are read as mere deviations or personal preferences, transgressions mayserve to reinforce the norms they attempt to subvert. Acts of resistance must bearticulated to a collectively understood political discourse in order for them toregister as such. I would argue that, in fact, anarchist movement culture is amedium in which such an articulation can be achieved.

The contemporary discursive articulation of anarchist politics and queer sexu-ality is owed in large part to the work of explicitly anarchist queer activist groups,notably Gay Shame in the USA. Gay Shame advances a radical alternative to theliberal discourse of gay rights and gay pride, suggesting that queer sexuality is bestnurtured not by assimilation to mainstream culture or the winning of privilegesthrough consumerism and statist campaigns, but by direct actions that aim at moreautonomy and a better quality of life for queer people (Sycamore, 2008). Since theinception of Gay Shame in 1998, other anarchaqueer actions, organizations, andpublications have emerged with similar missions and tactics. For example BashBack! formed in 2007 in preparation for protests at the mainstream political partyconventions in the USA, and has spawned the formation of active local chaptersacross the country as well as a recurring Radical Queer Conference (BAMF!Productionz, 2009).

The shared values of subcultural scenes are commonly established through thecirculation of written documents (Duncombe, 2008). This is certainly true of theanarchist scene, where texts are shared in the form of zines, newsletters, blog posts,links on social networking sites, and a few major websites that serve as electronichubs for the distribution of anarchist information. Anarchaqueer zines are readilyavailable at infoshops and bookfairs, and are easily accessible on the web (see, forexample, the internet-based Queer Zine Archive Project). It is also useful to con-sider the publications of the CrimethInc. collective, because they are easily acces-sible to the uninitiated (they can be found in mainstream bookstores or ordered onthe web, plus the texts do not assume that the reader has extensive experience in theanarchist movement). CrimethInc.’s 2000 publication Days of War, Nights of Loveis subtitled ‘Crimethink for beginners’ and serves as a sort of introductory text toanarchist ideologies, tactics, and culture. Similarly, CrimethInc.’s Recipes forDisaster is a deliberate attempt to collect and pass on knowledge from people’sexperience with anarchist organizing and lifestyle practices, so that individuals newto the scene can learn from the successes and failures of others. In relation to



anarchist sexuality, Recipes has chapters titled ‘Nonmonogamous Relationships’and ‘Sex’ which offer advice on how to successfully carry off politically informedpractices of polyamory and romantic physical encounters. The existence of textslike this shows that these issues are of concern to anarchists and that there is anactive attempt to establish what anarchist sexuality ought to look like. As theauthors of Recipes put it, ‘since most of us didn’t grow up with many good exam-ples of non-monogamous relationships to learn from, the more we discuss andcompare our experiences the better-equipped we’ll be to chart this unknown terri-tory together’ (CrimethInc., 2005: 397).

The circulation of anarchist and anarchaqueer publications is made possible bythe infrastructure of meetings and spaces that has been established within theanarchist scene. Infoshops are spaces (often storefronts) where books and zinesare centrally stored and made available to the local community. Many anarchistcommunities also organize annual bookfairs, which draw people from the localarea and surrounding regions, and sometimes even from across the continent.Infoshops and bookfairs not only expose people to anarchist texts but alsobring people into physical contact with each other, where they can performand discuss their practices of non-hegemonic sexuality. Furthermore, in the lastdecade especially, anarchists have had a regular presence at global and nationalpolitico-economic summits. These protest convergences serve as occasions for glob-ally dispersed individuals to meet each other in localized physical spaces. The flowsof bodies and discourses between spaces of convergence – what Juris (2009)describes as the networked logic of the anarchist movement – helps to bringqueer identities and practices to various communities and the individualswithin them.

Explicitly queer-themed discussions, events, and spaces can usually be foundamidst the offerings at these nodes within the general anarchist network. Manyprotest convergences have featured queer spaces (see Brown, 2007), for example theQueer Barrio where one interviewee stayed when he traveled to the 2006 G8 protestin Germany. Not coincidentally, the Queer Barrio was located in close proximity toother explicitly anarchist campsites. A group called Anarkink held a party to coin-cide with the 2009 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, so travelers to the fair couldexperience the sex-positive queer anarchist scene in San Francisco. The BerkeleyAnarchist Students of Theory and Research & Development’s annual conferenceregularly features at least one discussion panel on queer issues; a recent topic was‘Anarchy & BDSM’.3 These are just a few examples of ways that the infrastructureof the broader movement fosters the exploration of the intersections between anar-chism and queer sexuality.

Anarchist networks are also key to establishing a culture in which queer sexu-ality is felt to be supported at a collective level by the whole community.Individuals acting on their own may not have the wherewithal to effectivelyresist the pressures of heteronormativity. Although Miles was initially optimisticabout his ability to have a marriage that preserved the radical nature of his rela-tionship with his partner (see the quotation earlier in this article), ultimately his

Portwood-Stacer 487


hopes were not realized:

Even though I ‘never believed’ in marriage, I thought it was such a trivial thing that I

could participate in the institution without it having any effect on me or our relation-

ship. I have learned the power of these structures in how they shape your world and

how others deal with you (and you with them), and don’t like it. This so-called inti-

mate relationship has become an interest of others (and, of course, the state). I guess I

used to think that you could turn these things against themselves from the inside and it

didn’t make any difference if you had the right attitude. I don’t believe that now . . . So

the ‘marriage experiment’ is a failure, from my point of view.

Despite his best intentions, Miles found himself unable to resist the coercivepower of hegemonic institutions to affect even his most personal experience. Withina cultural context where most people define marriage differently than he, his abilityto shape his own experience of an intimate relationship is severely hampered. Milesexpressed to me that he does not really feel himself to be a part of an activeanarchist community. Perhaps if he and his wife were surrounded by others whore-imagined intimate relationships in the same way, they would be able to sustain amore radical marital partnership.

Gabby’s experience also speaks to the importance of community in supportingalternative sexual practices. Gabby, who identifies as polyamorous, has been a partof anarchist scenes in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, but she felt it was easierto practice polyamory in Washington rather than in Los Angeles, because it wasaccepted as the norm within the scene there. Her preference was not challenged bythose she dated because it was assumed that most people in that scene were poly-amorous, and in fact, preferences for monogamous partnerships had to bedefended. By contrast, anarchists in Los Angeles are aware of, and nominally insupport of, polyamory, yet Gabby does not have the same sense that it will beautomatically acceptable to her potential partners. Joel corroborated Gabby’sobservation that polyamory became a community standard in Washington. Hementioned a well-known and well-liked couple in the anarchist community therewho had an open relationship, which he felt paved the way for others to try out thepractice. This couple’s visible performance of polyamory allowed the practice toenter people’s ‘sexual vocabulary’, as Joel put it.

The prevalence of communal housing among the anarchists in Washington alsocontributes to the formation of community support for queer sexualities. Withinthese spaces, residents and visitors have opportunities to witness their peers’ privatelifestyle practices. Intimate expressions of sexuality are on display for others toobserve and emulate – everyone can see (and hear) how many people someone isbringing home on a regular basis, and who disappears with whom into whosebedroom. In a society where sexuality – especially queerness – is often encouragedto remain hidden, semi-public alternative spaces create the feeling that it is perfectlyacceptable – even normal – to be openly queer. In such settings, CrimethInc.’spromise, ‘Look around and you’ll see that there are alternatives . . . to the



traditional ways of making love and being sexual that mainstream culture offersus’, (2000: 203) actually rings true.

The pitfalls of anarchist identity politics4

That the anarchist movement fosters a collective culture of resistant sexuality iswhat gives real political potential to anarchists’ performative critiques of hege-monic sexuality – critiques that might otherwise be unintelligible and ineffectiveacts of isolated individuals. Yet, although the anarchist proliferation and normal-ization of queerness is, in itself, a positive corrective to the marginalization of queersexuality in mainstream society, it is not wholly unproblematic. One of the bypro-ducts of cohesive movement cultures is an investment in authenticity – the idea thatyou have to adhere to certain cultural practices in order to be a ‘real’ anarchist.Indeed, accusations of inauthenticity are rampant within anarchist scenes.Authenticity is established by the individual’s ability to bring their practices inline with an accepted narrative of identity (Giddens, 1991). When a personclaims (or rejects) a particular sexual identity, or engages (or refuses to engage)in a particular sexual act, or enters into (or resists) a particular interpersonalarrangement, it always makes a statement about that individual. Although queerpractices may or may not be experienced as the manifestation of an individual’snatural desires, they are always performative in the sense that they function torepresent the self and constitute one’s social identity (Butler, 1990). Because of thearticulation of queerness and anarchist identity, an individual’s self-representationas queer is at the same time a reconsolidation of anarchist identity, and thus ofone’s belonging in the anarchist scene. By the same token, to perform sexuality insuch a way as to contradict the socially constructed narrative of anarchist identityis to call into question one’s claim to that identity. Because ‘authentic’ anarchistsexuality is constructed as queer, individuals whose sexuality does not read as queermay not be seen as legitimate anarchists.

Joel observed that individuals who attempted to practice polyamory wereashamed when they found themselves experiencing feelings of possessiveness orjealousy, as if these emotional reactions jeopardized their identities as ‘good’ anar-chists. Orlando said that he had seen his friends get ‘stressed out’ about their owndesires, putting pressure on themselves to be in open relationships, even thoughthey did not find the arrangement pleasurable. Leo made a similar observation:

I was really trying to force the ideology on my reality . . . you can tell, everybody, some

people, want to be polyamorous but they just can’t cope with it, like [on] their own

psychological level. But you can tell they suffer at it and they’re making everybody else

suffer, and everybody else, like, some people don’t want it, but yet they’re taking that

position.

Because anarchist communities are so effective at promoting counter-hegemonicpractices, people feel insecure when their own preferences fail to measure up to

Portwood-Stacer 489


anarchist norms, and they feel unduly pressured to participate in practices they arenot personally comfortable with, in order to maintain their integrity as anarchists.To privilege certain practices in the name of queerness is not only a contradictionto the anarchist opposition to hierarchy, but it is furthermore a misunderstandingof the queer project. Queer is about dismantling those power relations that wouldmake any form of sexuality compulsory, not about the reproduction of coercion innew directions.

An extension of the problem of authenticity policing is the foreclosure of pro-ductive relations of solidarity across borders of sexual identity. Anarchists riskalienating people who have real contributions to offer to the movement if theyare too concerned with whether people are ‘queer enough’ to participate. This isnot to say that anarchists should mainstream their sexualities in order to appeal toa broader public, but rather that there ought to be room in the movement forpeople with varying sexual identities and practices. Several interviewees demon-strated an awareness of these issues and described their own struggles with them,pointing out the importance of ‘meeting people where they’re at’ when doing polit-ical advocacy. They recognized that contextual factors would affect people’s open-ness to radical political expressions like queer sexuality, and that it is important notto talk down to people or make them feel defensive about their cultural back-grounds. For example, Mark reflected that he often encounters homophobiaamong the working-class laborers he tries to do organizing work with. This high-lighted for him the importance of cultivating strong personal relationships basedon points of political solidarity, so that he could feel comfortable challengingcomments and attitudes he finds offensive. For Mark, it was important not toalienate people, but it was also important to him that he did not ‘let shit fly’when he felt it was inappropriate.

A particular danger that arises when identity categories become a mark ofauthenticity is that people may fetishize the image or label of queerness while infact doing nothing to further the empowerment of queer people. Several inter-viewees expressed concern about people hiding behind radical political identitiesin order not to do what one interviewee called the ‘sticky work’ of confronting theirinternalized homophobia, misogyny, and racism. A few used the term ‘manarchist’to describe self-identified anarchists who claim to be critical of hegemonic genderrelations, but who consistently (if unconsciously) invoke and benefit from theirheterosexual male privilege. This is one of the perennial paradoxes of sexual ‘lib-eration’: critiques of sexual moralism can be taken as license to flout communitystandards of mutual respect and to objectify the bodies of others, with the ultimateresult of reproducing hegemonic sexism (Rossinow, 1988; Bailey, 2002). If peoplesee the adoption of counter-hegemonic identity labels as sufficient to actually coun-ter hegemony, they may end up reproducing oppressive power dynamics.

So we can see that the establishment of a normative anarchist identity – what wemight call ‘anarchonormativity’ – may have unintended and pernicious effects. Forsome, the solution is to do away with norms altogether: ‘Everything, every desireand need, has to be respected, or else this is no revolution after all, just the



establishing of a different norm’ (CrimethInc., 2005: 398). Yet this position risksreproducing the neoliberal model of free choice that treats individual acts as pureexpressions of personal agency, ignoring the systemic power relations that arealways at work in structuring those acts. This would be to dismiss the real obstaclesthat work against the adoption of queer identifications and practices and to excusepeople when their choices happen to replicate traditional oppressive relationships.The problem with traditional oppressive relationships is not that they are tradi-tional, but that they are oppressive. If we rethink norms, not as repressive homog-enizers, but as shared ethical commitments, we can perhaps rethink normativity asa basis upon which individual identifications and practices can acquire the collec-tive force of the movement culture from which they emerge. Anarchonormativityhas its political value then, insofar as it serves to proliferate and make legible formsof sexuality that are informed by anarchist ethics.

Conclusion: The strategic use of queer anarchonormativity

There is power in identity. Individuals may become ‘collective agents of socialtransformation’, when they mobilize their shared political identities toward radicalpolitical projects (Castells, 2003: 70). Where the disciplinary power of anarchonor-mativity is used to promote a queer critique of hegemonic sexuality, and thusmakes life more livable for those whose desires are repressed by dominant institu-tions and discourses, it has positive political potential. Where such power is used togenerate new forms of repression or to foreclose relationships of solidarity orto distract from efforts to combat material oppressions, it is less strategicallysound.

Anarchists might usefully retain the discourse of authenticity, as long as itsdisciplinary power is wielded strategically for positive material outcomes. Thepower of anarchist identity lies in its potential to use collective values – sometimesin the form of cultural norms – to mobilize people against oppression where theyfind it. So for example, Joel remarked that ‘guys who are players under the auspicesof anarchism get called out really quickly’, by other anarchists who want to pre-serve the political integrity of polyamorous practice. Similarly, the critique of‘manarchism’ can function to push people to bring their material practice in linewith their symbolic identifications. The fact that people get ‘called out’ for theirfailure to adhere to anarchist political ideals helps to check oppressive sexual prac-tices that occur in mainstream society and within the scenes themselves. In suchcases, social discipline can work to produce desirable subjectivities and practices.Yet the power of these disciplinary tactics must be wielded strategically, so as toavoid reactionary tendencies toward name calling and boundary policing. To wieldthe power of anarchist identity strategically would be to evaluate critically itseffects (as I have tried to do in this article), and then to deploy that power insuch a way as to maximize those effects that contribute to emancipatory politicalprojects, and minimize those that do not.

Portwood-Stacer 491


Notes

1. All interviewee names are pseudonyms.

2. The contemporary emergence of anarchism in North America can be designated by anumber of terms: movement, subculture, scene, community, network, and so forth. Inthis article, these terms can be seen as roughly interchangeable, though my use of one

instead of another in any given instance is intentional, based on its connotations in thesociological literature. See Gelder (2007) for a review of this literature.

3. BDSM is shorthand for a whole set of erotic practices based on consensual role-plays ofpower dynamics. The letters are variously taken to stand for bondage, discipline, dom-

ination, submission, slave, sadism, master, and masochism, respectively.4. Traditionally, ‘identity politics’ refers to the idea that those individuals who identify with

a particular social group are best positioned to undertake political activism on behalf of

that group. It has also come to refer to the policing of identity that goes on within activistscenes. See Heckert (2004) for an extensive consideration of the relationship betweensexuality and identity politics, and the implications for anarchist movements. My argu-

ment here is somewhat distinct from Heckert’s (whose fieldwork was done in the UK), inthat the anarchist movement as I observed it recognizes sexuality as a legitimate site ofradical political activism. In my analysis, the idea of authentic anarchism is used not somuch to exclude sexuality from anarchist politics as it is to police the content of an

authentically anarchist sexuality.

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Laura Portwood-Stacer is an instructor in the Annenberg School forCommunication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, whereshe teaches courses on culture, media, consumption, and identity. She has previ-ously published on gender and popular culture in Feminist Theory. Her currentresearch project is titled The Practice of Everyday Politics: Lifestyle and Identity asRadical Activism. Address: Annenberg School for Communication, University ofSouthern California, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0281, USA.

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Sexualities

13(4) 495–509




DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370657

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Queering anarchism inpost-2001 BuenosAires

Gwendolyn WindpassingerLoughborough University, UK

Abstract

This article deals with the emerging field of queer anarchism, with a particular focus on

the characteristics of this emerging paradigm in Buenos Aires. It draws on recent the-

oretical connections between queer theory and anarchism in the work of Gavin Brown,

Richard Cleminson and Jamie Heckert, as well as in the work of a queer anarchist group

in Buenos Aires called Proyectil Fetal. Set in the context of its historical precedents in

anarcha-feminism, Proyectil Fetal’s paradigm is illustrated with a variety of examples from

their online publications, whilst also considering some of the critical reactions to their

articles.

Keywords

anarchism, Argentina, feminism, queer, sexuality

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncrit-

ically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.

(Butler, 1990: 13)

Introduction: Argentinean anarchism since 2001

The purpose of this article is to outline practical and theoretical intersectionsbetween queer theory and anarchism and to relate these to anarchist culture inBuenos Aires since the economic crisis in 2001, paying particular attention tofrictions that occur between queer and non-queer anarchists in the city. This intro-duction to the article teases out some of the effects the Argentinean economic crashin 2001 had on anarchism in the country. The main part of the article examinesrecent theoretical connections between queer theory and anarchism (Heckert,Cleminson, Brown) and the role of anarcha-feminism in the genealogy of whatI term ‘queer anarchism’, leading on to a discussion of a particular queer anarchist


Gwendolyn Windpassinger, Loughborough University, UK



group in Buenos Aires called Proyectil Fetal (Fetal Projectile), and the criticaldebate surrounding the group’s work.

When Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, the news spread across the world,showing images of masses of people storming banks and supermarkets, buildingroadblocks and bringing four consecutive governments to their knees within onlytwo weeks. The crisis triggered a number of societal transformations, which,I suggest, in turn marked the nature of anarchism in the country. Argentineanswere furious at the government for what they saw as criminally corrupt misman-agement of the country’s economy, and as their savings were frozen in the banks,they feared losing them through ravaging inflation. Simultaneously, large sectors ofsociety lost their jobs. It was in this context that Argentineans began to buildalternatives to traditional forms of economic production, decision-making andpolicy implementation. Two alternative structures that stand out due to their last-ing influence on the economic and political situation were anarchist activitiesaround workers’ and community self-management. I will look at these in turn.Thousands of businesses went bankrupt as a consequence of the economic crisis,leaving warehouses and other premises empty, some of which were subsequentlysquatted and used as housing. Other workplaces were recuperated and continued tobe run cooperatively by former employees, albeit under continuous threat of force-ful eviction, because of their defiance of the laws protecting private property.Popular neighbourhood assemblies were also set up, often in these same premises.Masses of people began to congregate in these assemblies, where they decided andcarried out matters of local concern themselves, rather than relying on party pol-iticians (Adamovsky, 2003; Sitrin, 2006). These transformations have now beenlargely reversed. As the economy recovered, people began losing interest in partic-ipating in the assemblies, and were quite happy to delegate decision-making to thegovernment; other assemblies were shut down by force by the State apparatusbecause they infringed on private property, and now there are virtually none left.Nonetheless, as I suggest, even though these structures that were so widespread insociety, particularly in the city of Buenos Aires, have been dismantled in the after-math of 2001, they have had a lasting impact on Argentinean anarchism. Often,before the assemblies were dissolved, among the last participants left were anar-chists;1 anarchists also continue to collaborate with those few cooperatively runbusinesses that are still in place. Why are anarchists enthusiastic about these struc-tures? It is because both popular neighbourhood assemblies and cooperatively runbusinesses are usually marked by ‘horizontalism’ (in Spanish, horizontalidad, seeSitrin, 2006), a consensus-based approach to decision-making, which anarchists seeas prefigurative2 for building a non-hierarchical, anarchist society. This can explainwhy some anarchists are trying to reinvigorate these structures that were so wide-spread in the immediate aftermath of 2001. Two examples are the Sociedad deFomento and the Casa de Convivencia Anarquista of Banfield, a suburb ofBuenos Aires. Anarchists also currently support the squatting of land in theBuenos Aires suburb Ingeniero Budge by thousands of families. There is also anotable rise in community garden projects, driven by anarchists and



alterglobalisationists.3 Examples are the Huerta Orgazmica (Orgazmic [sic!]Garden’, with links to the commune La Sala), the garden of the anarcho-punk4

social centre Tucuy Paj (from Quechua, ‘For All’), and the community garden ofBanfield. It seems fair to say, as Daniel Barrett has argued in his monumental mapof Latin American anarchism, that the impulse Argentinean anarchism received in2001 is the strongest impulse since the heyday of Argentinean anarchism in theearly 20th century (Barrett, 2007). It has also become apparent that the anarchistmovement of Buenos Aires is not made up of one unified group, but it is made upof a diverse set of groups and activities, some of whose interests and perspectivescoincide, and others differ. The crisis has provided an impulse for the creation ofsquats and squatted community centres, often influenced by anarcho-punks, whichhas permanently marked the nature of anarchism in Argentina. Within anarchistcircles, there is also, to this date, an increased readiness to form workers’ and con-sumers’ cooperatives. La Sala (selling cleaning products), Tucuy Paj (a consumers’cooperative) and La Gomera (a printing cooperative) are examples of anarchistcooperatives that have been working for years, although not uninterrupted byinternal disputes. All in all, 2001 has been a catalyst for an increased and diversifiedanarchist movement in Argentina.

During my last research trip to Buenos Aires in 2007–2008, I met LeonorSilvestri, a member of Proyectil Fetal, a group founded in 2007 that calls itselfanarchist feminist queer. Browsing through the group’s articles in an anarchistnewspaper and online, particularly on their blog (Proyectil Fetal, 2009b) and onthe website of Indymedia Argentina, quickly made it clear that with ‘queer’, theywere explicitly referring to Butlerian queer theory. On Silvestris various blogs (foran overview, see her blogger profile: Silvestri, 2009), her particular synthesisbetween punk, anarchism, feminism and queer theory becomes apparent.5 I wasintrigued by the possibility of specifically combining queer theory and anarchism,and began looking for other work on the intersections between the two. It is arather young field of enquiry, with first sustained theories provided over the lastfew years by Jamie Heckert (2005), Gavin Brown (2007, 2009) and RichardCleminson (2008), as will be laid out later. There have been ongoing tensionssurrounding sexuality in anarchist politics in Argentina, just as they have existedin anarchism in other countries, dating back to anarcha-feminist interventions sincethe late 19th century. Emma Goldman is a figure who stands at the heart of thishistorical conflict. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us first look at whatanarchism is, before dealing with the disputed field of sexuality from an anarchistperspective.

Anarchism

Although scholars, notably Robert Graham, have identified a host of texts going asfar back as 300 CE as containing anarchist ideas, anarchism as a systematic polit-ical philosophy is generally regarded to be a much more recent phenomenon(Graham, 2005: xi). The story of philosophical anarchism is sometimes considered

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to begin in 1793 with the publication of William Godwin’s Enquiry concerningPolitical Justice and its influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Pessin andPucciarelli, 1997: 5). Since Godwin, a vast body of theoretical writing has beenpublished, for example by Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Pierre-JosephProudhon, who is considered to be the first person to describe himself as an anar-chist in 1840 (Graham, 2005: xii). Anarchist communism, the most widespreadform of anarchism throughout its history, was ‘embraced not only by Kropotkinand [Carlo] Cafiero, but by numerous other anarchists, such as Elisee Reclus,Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Luigi Galleani, Shifu, Jean Grave, ErricoMalatesta, Sebastien Faure, Hatta Shuzo and the ‘‘pure anarchists’’ of Japan, andmany anarcho-syndicalists’ (Graham, 3 May, 2008).

But of course, anarchism has never only been a philosophy, but also an ethics ofaction, often inspired by the thought and propaganda of anarchist agitators, result-ing in vast workers’ and popular movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,be it in Spain, Italy, Argentina, or the Ukraine. This is the period often referred to asclassical anarchism. Anarchist revolutions took place in the Ukraine (1918–21) andSpain (1936–9) (Graham, 2005: 304, 477, 482). Anarchism’s global historical signif-icance has been stressed by the Anarchist Studies Network:

over the last two decades, academics have slowly begun to rediscover the historical

significance of anarchism, which, as Benedict Anderson recently had to remind his

fellow historians, was for a time the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial

capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism. Scholars have started to study the

influence of anarchism on early Korean and Filipino national liberation struggles,

movements for birth control from Barcelona to Boston, Latin American labor history,

Jewish immigrant life, the development of modern sociology and geography, the

French Resistance, debates over eugenics and Social Darwinism, modern art and

Modern Schools, avant-garde film and popular music, revolutions from Mexico to

China to Russia itself. (Anarchist Studies Network, 2008)

But what characterizes the anarchist philosophy? The term ‘anarchism’ is derivedfrom the Greek for ‘no ruler’ (Graham, 2005: xi). Many definitions have been madeof anarchism. The essence of this philosophy is a deep questioning of hierarchiesand a critique of exploitation and domination, with a strong dedication to equalityand strategy for change. If a feminist critique centres on the concept of patriarchy,the lynchpin of an anarchist critique is the more general concept of hierarchy.If combined, feminism plus anarchism become anarchist feminism, or anarcha-feminism, a strand of thought that plays an essential part in the genealogy ofqueer anarchism.

A ‘Queer Anarchism’?

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) was written as a contribution to feministtheory, and only later was attributed the status of one of the founding texts of



queer theory. Queer theory constitutes a major intervention in contemporary fem-inist debate, and thus it does not come as a surprise that contemporary anarcha-feminism would also draw on queer theory. I understand queer theory broadly asthe study of heteronormativity and other normative discourses related to sexualityand gender. Marxist queer theorists subject these concerns to a broader critique ofcapitalism (Hennessy, 1996, 2000; Morton, 2001). The critique of capitalism from aqueer perspective has led to the invention of concepts such as ‘homonormativity’, aterm coined by Lisa Duggan to support her criticism of a particular current withincontemporary gay politics which she considers to be highly complicit with neolib-eralism (Duggan, 2002). ‘Queer anarchism’, then, critically assesses hegemonic dis-courses related not only to gender and sexuality, but to any form of domination,including but not reduced to a critique of the mechanics of exploitation and dom-ination that exist within capitalism.6 This field has not actually been termed assuch, although a recent call for papers speaks of queering anarchism (Shannon andRogue, 2008) and Heckert has employed the term queer anarchy (Heckert, 2005:54). However, although Heckert does not rule out that there may be scope in a‘(more) explicitly anarchist queer theory’ (2005: 248), he himself prefers not toapply the label ‘queer anarchism’ for the purposes of his own research (Heckert,2005: 81). His reasons for doing so are due to common associations with the term‘queer’ in anglophone countries: ‘the word queer brings with it associations of(gendered and sexualized) transgression and, more specifically, homosexuality.Thus, at the same time as it provides a radical critique of identity politics, queeranarchism may maintain some of identity politics’ limitations’ (2005: 248). In orderto avoid these pitfalls, Heckert theorizes anarchism as an ethics of relationshipsinstead, an approach which, as he argues, effectively queers anarchism:

[e]mphasising an ethics of relationships as the core of anarchist criticisms and ideals

encourages a more explicit turn to queer and feminist politics and to issues of the

‘private’ sphere, including ‘personal’ relationships, sexuality and emotions. A rela-

tional understanding of anarchism, then, must break down the divisions of public/

private, individual/collective, autonomous/relational, hetero/homo, justice/care and

other binaries that sustain the State apparatus and state-forms. (Heckert, 2005: 249)

This turn to issues of the ‘private’ sphere, resonating with both the Second Wavefeminist conviction that the personal is political, and poststructuralism’s challengeto binary oppositions, is advocated by Proyectil Fetal, the Buenos Aires queeranarchist feminist group that I will consider in more detail later. The group main-tains that ‘the sexual binary is an ideological apparatus of the State, which, as asocial construct, produces a fiction whose objective is to falsify economic, politicaland ideological differences as facts of nature, and thereby perpetuates them’7

(Proyectil Fetal, 2008c). Proyectil Fetal consider along poststructuralist lines thatwe have internalized state-forms; in other words, that domination is contained inthe very way we feel and think, and must be targeted there, in order to ‘explode thevery basis of the domination that resides within our hearts. . . All that are oppressed

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need to be free, of others and of themselves’ (2008c). Following this logic, ProyectilFetal have reached the conclusion that ‘without a profound self-emancipation fromall the economic interests that are naturalized in our bodies, products of the societyof control, even if the State were abolished, oppression and practices of dominationwill persist’ (2008c).

Combining a reading of Heckert with a Marxist theory of alienation based onHolloway’s Zapatismo (2002), Brown redefines ‘queer’ as an ideology that isopposed to the capitalist ‘separating of people from their own doing’ (Brown,2007: 197). Brown purports that the queer activists he investigates ‘oppose andcontest the complacent politics of mainstream gay politicians who actively work towin gay people’s compliance to a depoliticised culture based on domesticity andprivatised consumption’ (Brown, 2007).

In a less explicitly queer anarchist vein, Cleminson (2008) has provided a pains-taking argument for subjecting the history of anarchist attitudes to sexuality to apoststructuralist reading. Unlike Heckert and Brown, Cleminson develops a read-ing of anarchism and sexuality directly on the basis of his readings of MichelFoucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as poststructuralistanarchist theorists Saul Newman, Lewis Call and Todd May, without any referenceto self-identified queer theorists. He argues for an anti-essentialist anarchism:

for the sake of a more effective social movement and anarchist historiography, we

need to reject an ontological anarchism which is based on fixed structures and human

essences in order to ‘anarchize’ the way we think, equipping ourselves with other

strategies outside of these structures and essences. (Cleminson, 2008: 18)

This makes it clear that within anarchism, one can find a variety of paradigms, andthat some of these paradigms are incompatible with the anti-essentialism character-istic of feminist, queer and poststructuralist theory. The tensions in these variousapproaches to anarchism will become particularly pertinent in relation to the con-temporary Argentinean anarchisms investigated in my case study. Not all queertheorists are anarchists, of course, and not all anarchists are queer theorists,although some maintain that both traditions share historical linkages (Heckert,2005: 49) and form a multifaceted contemporary alliance which has the power todefy the laws of neoliberalism and homonormativity (Brown, 2009). As Heckertstates, ‘while anarchism must necessarily challenge hierarchies of gender and sexu-ality in order to be consistent with a critique of all forms of domination, ‘‘queer’’need not necessarily be anarchist’ (Heckert, 2005: 49). The scope of my article doesnot allow for an in-depth discussion of Heckert’s argument. However, it can be saidthat integrating queer theory and anarchism helps him address what he sees as thefourmain criticisms generally made of queer theory: its neglect of issues of gender; itshomocentricity; its promotion of ‘individualistic sexual transgression which is con-sistent with capitalism’; and, finally, its over-emphasis on ‘textual deconstructionand a cultural politics of knowledge’, with a converse lack of ‘institutional. . . andmaterial engagement’ (Heckert, 2005: 49). Broadly, the reason why anarchism is a



useful framework within which to place queer theory, is because it provides a morecomprehensive ethical framework which explicitly opposes all forms of oppression.Much like Marxist approaches to queer theory, queer anarchism can prevent sexu-ality from taking an isolated, primordial role neglecting capitalist and genderoppression, with which it is entwined. AsHeckert puts it, ‘[i]n order for queer politicsto successfully disrupt the hetero/homo division, it must also disrupt all the hierar-chical binaries with which it is intertwined. These hierarchies must be challenged inall relationships, not only sexual ones’ (emphasis in original, Heckert, 2005: 58).

Such attempts to link seemingly disparate concerns become pertinent early on inthe Argentinean context when considering the history of anarchist feminism in thecountry. As Helene Finet argues, in turn-of-the-century Argentina, ‘anarchist fem-inist propaganda. . . is inseparable from a growing awareness of the mechanisms ofeconomic and social exploitation of Argentinean women with immigrant origins. Itmaterializes these working women’s expectations within a vast project for a liber-tarian society’8 (Finet, 2006: 138).

In a nutshell, the project of queer anarchism critically assesses hetero-norma-tivity and other hegemonic discourses related not only to sexuality, but to any formof domination, for example economic domination, by placing queer theory withinthe wider political framework of anarchism. It constitutes an anarchism that isenriched by insights from queer theory. Whether anarchism really needs queertheory, is a disputed question, which resonates with the century-old debate whetheranarchism needs feminism. As Maxine Molyneux wrote:

[b]y the 1880s there had emerged within the European Anarchist movement a distinc-

tive feminist current, represented by writers such as ‘Soledad Gustavo’ (Teresa Mane)

and Teresa Claramunt, just as within the movement in North America these ideas

were developed by Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and others. Some of these

writers were already being published in Argentina in the 1880s, and in the Anarchist

press critiques of the family appeared together with editorials supporting ‘feminism’,

by then a term in current usage. The main impulse for anarchist feminism came from

Spanish activists, but Italian exiles like Malatesta and Pietro Gori gave support to

feminist ideas in their journals and articles. (Molyneux, 1986: 123)

Emma Goldman fought hard to convince her comrades of the need to incorporatefeminist ideas into anarchism. When she came to Paris to do propaganda work in1900, some French anarchist groups decided to exclude the material she hadbrought on sex from their conferences (Goldman, 1988 [1931]: 271). She recountsa conversation with Kropotkin, who provoked her with the following commentregarding the anarchist paper Free Society: ‘The paper is doing splendid work. . .but it would do more if it would not waste so much space discussing sex’(Goldman, 1988 [1931]: 253). Goldman retorts:

[a]ll right, dear comrade, when I have reached your age, the sex question may no

longer be of importance to me. But it is now, and it is a tremendous factor for

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thousands, millions even, of young people. Peter [Kropoktin] stopped short, an

amused smile lighting up his kindly face. ‘Fancy, I didn’t think of that’, he replied.

‘Perhaps you are right, after all’. (Goldman, 1988 [1931], emphasis in original)

On the whole, however, Goldman affirms that, in her own ranks, she was verymuch alone with her feminist concerns (1988 [1931]: 225).

Queering anarchism in contemporary Buenos Aires

Today, despite considerable resistance from within the anarchist movement, theBuenos Aires-based group Proyectil Fetal is promoting a ‘queer anarchist feminismwhich unsettles the normativity of the hegemonic forms of sexual identity, in orderto create new definitions of the subject’ (Proyectil Fetal, 2008b),9 which leads thegroup to proclaim that ‘[o]ur gender expressions are multiple, irreducible to a singlelogic or category’ (Proyectil Fetal, 2008c). Proyectil Fetal is a group made up oftwo core members, Leonor Silvestri and Laura Contrera, who have both attendeduniversity in Buenos Aires and are in their early 30s. Proyectil Fetal had its firstexperience as a group at the 22nd Latin American Women’s Congress in the prov-ince of Cordoba, Argentina on 13–15 October 2007, where they felt the necessity toarticulate an anarcha-feminism in opposition to the Catholic anti-abortion lobbyand Left party feminisms dominating this conference (Proyectil Fetal, 2009a).Using colourful language, Proyectil Fetal reject the latter as ‘authoritarian partyorganisations which, like sanitary towels, precisely to prevent overflow and tocollect followers, foster their ‘‘feminine wings’’, always assigning them considerablyless importance than ‘‘the great struggle’’’ (Proyectil Fetal, 2008b). By contrast,Proyectil Fetal’s conviction is that ‘the so-called ‘‘gender question’’ is not justanother point on the agenda, but the condition sine qua non for a radical changeof everything’ (Proyectil Fetal, 2007a). Their queer anarchism is not only based oninsights from second-wave feminism and queer theory, but also on a reading ofGoldman and her anarcha-feminist contemporaries in Argentina, such as JuanaRouco Buela and the editorial group of La Voz de la Mujer (Woman’s Voice), oneof the first periodicals written for and by women (Finet, 2009: 15). Proyectil Fetalargue that

the germ of some of the ideas nourishing us (poststructuralist, anti-specieist, individ-

ualist) could already be found in the most potent voices of early anarchism, even

though it was not the type of anarchism that would consolidate itself in our country:

for example, Emma Goldman, Bakunin, Severino di Giovanni, [Emile] Armand.

(Proyectil Fetal, 2009a)

They redeploy signature phrases used by the editorial collective of La Voz de laMujer in 1896. ‘No God, No Boss, No Husband’ (Finet, 2009: 17) becomes‘Without God, without a Husband, without a Boss, without a Political Party’(Proyectil Fetal and Centro Social Tucuy Paj, 2008), and the phrase ‘we demand



our bit of pleasure in the banquet of life’ is used verbatim (Finet, 2009: 16; ProyectilFetal, 2008c). However, while the ‘we’ in the latter referred to ‘women’ in theoriginal demand, Proyectil Fetal argue against the binary construction of genderand extend the revolutionary subject to all counter-hegemonic identities relating tosex, gender, sexual practices and ethnicity: ‘our anarchism is queer, dirty LatinAmerican, perverse, and inconvenient. Our clocks are not a century slow withregard to what is happening today in the streets of the oppressed and the coun-ter-hegemonic abnormal’ (Proyectil Fetal, 2008c). Importantly, Proyectil Fetal’sdefinition of women is not bound to biology, but people are free to self-identifyas women ‘without a medical examination’ (Proyectil Fetal and Centro SocialTucuy Paj, 2008). Proyectil Fetal recognize women’s specific oppression, whilstalso calling for the inclusion of ‘any radical and alternative, non-heteronormativegender expression’ in the feminist agenda (Proyectil Fetal, 2007a), arguing thatthere are ‘problems, many of which exclusively affect women, and others areonly shared by non-hegemonic gender expressions (transvestites, transgender andintersex people)’ (Proyectil Fetal, 2007b).

Similarly to La Voz de la Mujer over a century earlier, Proyectil Fetal’s work iscausing an outcry among anarchists in today’s Buenos Aires. In some respects, thereasons for this outcry are similar to the criticism wielded a century ago: in bothinstances, critics see women’s emancipation as secondary on the revolutionaryagenda. If in 1896, it appears that the work of the women editing La Voz de laMujer was greeted with the words ‘[l]et our emancipation come first, and then,when we men are emancipated and free, we shall see about yours’ (Molyneux, 1986:128), Proyectil Fetal’s concerns are brushed aside because they focus on sexualidentity and gender oppression, rather than the oppression of the working class.One such critic wonders,

are [Proyectil Fetal] unaware of current affairs? One comrade of MST10 Neuquen

assassinated, two workers killed in Acindar, one in Astillero Rio Santiago . . . the

police is torturing and imprisoning comrades from the Casino, etc etc. . . .What of

[Proyectil Fetal’s proposal] can be of interest to anarchist comrades involved in the

struggle/what of this can be of interest to those exploited by Capital and State, in

order to support their struggle for freedom as a class and as a society? . . . Truth

be told, I am not at all interested in this postmodern proposal. (Anonimo,

26 February, 2008)

Proyectil Fetal’s texts receive a mixed response on Argentina’s Indymedia website.While some applaud their interventions, others attack their texts for being toodifficult, for being ‘postmodern’, too theoretical, ‘ludic’ exploits of ‘bored, rich,snobby women’, as well as for the group’s anti-Marxist prejudice (Proyectil Fetal,2008b, 2008d). Various readers reject their work outright as not anarchist: ‘THEYARE NOT ANARCHISTS! THEY ARE NOT OUR COMRADES!’ (Vando,2008), ‘(g)o back to bourgeois Belgrano,11 which is where you belong. You haveno business with anarchists’ (Algunx, 2008). Such violent reactions could be

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explained by the fact that Proyectil Fetal’s articles are polemic. They also contain acertain amount of jargon taken from queer theory and poststructuralism, whichalienates both those readers who are unfamiliar with academic jargon, as well asthose academically trained readers that reject poststructuralism. Moreover,Proyectil Fetal sometimes take this jargon for granted and leave basic poststruc-turalist assumptions unjustified. As one critic writes, their text ‘El Sexo de tusRevoluciones’ ‘starts off declaring as the truth what instead it should demonstrate’(P. M., 2008). Finally, the text’s anti-Marxism is based on a simplistic conceptionof Marxism, which does not account for the variety of currents within this politicalphilosophy:

[i]f there is one thing we have learned from the death of the hegemony of positivism

(i.e. the Marxist conception – historically proven wrong – that ‘revolution’ is brought

about scientifically, in the same way at all times), it is that the barricades are multiple,

because the forms of subjugation and domination are multiple . . . What Marxism has

called the ‘principal enemy or issue’ does not exist, a view which, sadly, is held by a

number of self-proclaimed anarchists. Strategic priorities and immediate emergencies

are not the same independently of time, nor are they something that can be com-

pressed to ‘the primordial’. (Proyectil Fetal, 2008b)

This is a polemic attack on both Marxism and those anarchists who believe that thefirst and foremost thing that needs to be done away with, and that can be done awaywith in isolation, is class. Because they prioritize class struggle, ‘class-struggle anar-chists’ sometimes disregard the other instances of oppression with which ‘class’ isintertwined that Heckert, among others, has drawn our attention to. By calling them‘self-proclaimed’, Proyectil Fetal are questioning whether such class-struggle anar-chists really are anarchists. Unsurprisingly, some class struggle anarchists would feelprovoked by such an allegation, and throw the accusation back at Proyectil Fetal onthe grounds that they are too middle-class. In contrast to certain class-struggle anar-chists, queer anarchists feel the need to stress the complex nature of oppression, and,conversely, the multiple fights that need to be fought, on ‘multiple barricades’, asProyectil Fetal call it in the foregoing excerpt. They insist that ‘power circulates, it isnot that simply embodied in one single place, where it could be dethroned’ (ProyectilFetal, 2008b). This poststructuralist conception of power is not shared by all of thecontemporary anarchist community in Buenos Aires, as the critical reactions toProyectil Fetal’s articles show. Some of the class-struggle anarchists criticizingProyectil Fetal’s work also show a clear rejection of theory, poststructuralist orotherwise, which leads one commentator to criticize those readers who,

when a critical assessment of the predominant forms of activity is not presented in

conjunction with an immediately applicable, ‘concrete’ proposal, do not care if the

criticism is justified or not, but instead come out to lecture from the culture of work:

you are not doing anything, ‘you are just talking, we are at least doing something,

even though we are doing it badly’. (Ricardo, 2008)



By referring to those who ‘lecture from a culture of work’, this critic is addressingthose class-struggle oriented readers whom he believes criticize Proyectil Fetal’slack of engagement with the working class and contrast it with their own, albeitflawed, engagement with the working class.

All in all, it is ironic that Proyectil Fetal betray their ostensibly anti-binaryattitude by basing their criticism of class-struggle anarchism and Marxism onsuch a reductionist construction of Marxist thought. However, they emphasizethat their arguments are subject to ‘constant revision’ (Proyectil Fetal, 12 March2009a), and their more recent work shows that they are indeed revising some oftheir attitudes and strategic priorities. On the other hand, their philosophy isspread out over a variety of articles, which means that an attentive reader canfind that questions raised in one article are answered in another. One of thethings that caused an outcry on Indymedia Argentina was certainly the simplisticrepresentation of Marxism in ‘El Sexo de tus Revoluciones’, and, all in all, over-simplified views of Marxism, poststructuralism and queer theory provide a lot ofground for insults and arguments between Proyectil Fetal and anarchists who aremore oriented towards class struggle. The two have the same goal: an anarchistsociety. However, their worldviews and strategies are profoundly different.

Conclusion

In this article I have sought to outline recent intersections between queer theoryand anarchism as they have begun to be theorized by Brown and Cleminson, andparticularly by Heckert. Queer anarchism, whether in its explicit or more frequentimplicit form, is a young field of enquiry. Therefore, as can be expected, many areasof research are waiting to be explored from a queer anarchist perspective. LeonorSilvestri and Laura Contrera of Proyectil Fetal have started blogs dealing withBDSM, sodomy, sexual fantasies, polyamory and such controversial topics aspaedophilia and pornography, from an overtly queer anarchist perspective.Based on my understanding of the queer anarchist paradigm, I have sketchedsome of the frictions that occur between class-struggle anarchists and queer anar-chists in present-day Buenos Aires, and traced their conflict to flawed paradigmaticassumptions on either side – the oversimplified view of Marxism that ProyectilFetal use in a polemic article on the one hand, and the outright rejection of post-structuralist thought, in particular by class struggle anarchists, on the other.

The queer anarchism propagated by Proyectil Fetal provides a framework for adeep analysis of power that allows anarchists to analyse their everyday practicesand ways of thinking, in order to develop practices that are in accord with theiranarchist ideal of non-exploitative, non-hierarchical relationships. Therefore thereis undoubtedly scope in civil discussion between class-struggle anarchists and queeranarchists. Butler’s warning that ‘[t]he effort to identify the enemy as singular inform is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressorinstead of offering a different set of terms’ (Butler, 1990: 13), however, should notbe taken lightly either by Proyectil Fetal itself, or by its critics. The heated

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discussions on Indymedia Argentina show that queering anarchism is not an easyprocess; it creates animosity because it represents a radical, poststructuralist breakwith the Marxist paradigm. The theory wars of the 1990s are far from over, mostcertainly so in Buenos Aires.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1st International conference ‘queering

paradigms’ at Canterbury Christ Church University, 27 February–1 March 2009. This articleis based on research carried out for an AHRC-fundedMaster of Research at the University ofStirling, supervised by SabineDedenbach-Salazar Saenz andAndrewGinger (2007–2008) andsubsequent departmentally funded doctoral research at LoughboroughUniversity, supervised

by David Berry (from 2008 to the present). I wish to thank these supervisors and sponsors. Ialso thank Helene Finet, Leonor Silvestri, Jamie Heckert, Richard Cleminson and an anon-ymous reviewer for their detailed and helpful comments.

Notes

1. I have undertaken three field trips to Buenos Aires between 2006 and 2008 participatingin and observing the anarchist community there. The following account of the influence

of the economic crisis on the anarchist movement is based on my participant observationin Buenos Aires in the Federacion Libertaria Argentina (Argentinean AnarchistFederation), the anarcho-punk squat Tucuy Paj and the Casa de Convivencia

Anarquista, unless otherwise indicated. My predominant participant observation inthese particular anarchist groups invariably shaped my field of vision. As far as themany other anarchist groups and individuals in the city are concerned, I rely on

Daniel Barrett’s map of Argentinean anarchism (see Barrett, 2007), as well as my archiveof some of these groups’ paper and online publications.

2. On prefiguration as a key element of anarchist politics, see Franks, 2006; Gordon, 2007;

Graeber, 2006; Graeber and Grubacic, 2004 and, specifically in relation to anarchism andsexuality, see Greenway, 2009 (1997). For prefiguration in relation to queer autonomousspaces and anarcha-queer practices, see Brown, 2009.

3. To distinguish anarchists from alterglobalizationists, the latter may or may not identify

with any particular ideology or even belong to a leftist party, while anarchists areopposed to party politics, and, in calling themselves anarchists, clearly identify themselveswith the anarchist ideology. This often implicit distinction however, does not impede

collaboration between anarchists and alterglobalizationists.4. Anarcho-punk is, to put it crudely, a synthesis between anarchist and punk philosophy,

which results in a particular counter-cultural, do-it-yourself lifestyle. For a recent study

of anarcho-punk, see Nicholas, 2005, 2007.5. Lucy Nicholas has investigated the synthesis between queer, punk, feminism and anar-

chism in relation to the Australian anarcho-punk scene (Nicholas, 2005, 2007).

6. There are of course many different paradigmatic approaches to the conjoinedstudy of anarchism and sexuality, even to this date, despite the current poststructuralistorthodoxy. David Berry’s work (2004) is an example of a recent, non-poststructuralistinvestigation of anarchism and sexuality. An extensive reading list on anarchism and

sexuality can be found on the Anarchist Studies website, see Anarchist StudiesNetwork (2009).



7. Proyectil Fetal’s texts as well as reactions to their texts are originally in Spanish. All

translations are mine.8. My translation of ‘[l]a propagande feministe anarchiste . . . est indissociable du processus

de prise de conscience des mecanismes de l’exploitation economique et sociale des

femmes argentines issues de l’immigration. Elle materialise les attentes de ces ouvrieresdans un vaste projet de societe libertaire’.

9. This article was first published in print (Proyectil Fetal, 2008a).10. Movimiento Socialista por los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers’ Movement).

11. Belgrano is a rich neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.

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Gwendolyn Windpassinger is a PhD student at the department of Politics, Historyand International Relations, Loughborough University. Address: Department ofPolitics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University,Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK.

Windpassinger 509


Sexualities

13(4) 511–527




DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370656

sex.sagepub.com

Article

Bridging the dividebetween queer theoryand anarchism

Benjamin ShepardNew York College of Technology/City University of

New York, USA

Abstract

Much of the struggle for a queer public commons involves tactics and philosophical

understandings embraced by anarchists and queers alike. A few of these overlapping

positions include: an embrace of the insurrectionary possibilities of pleasure; a rejection

of social controls and formal hierarchies in favor of mutual aid networks and DIY

community building; the use of direct action; and a culture of resistance. The intercon-

nections between these movements are often under-theorized and under-valued. Yet,

rather than build on these linkages, much of today’s queer theory finds itself facing a

divide separating theory from practice. This article explores this divide in relation to

historically-informed examples of current queer activist practices in which queers and

anarchists share common cause. The examples highlight the links between anarchism

and efforts aimed at reproductive health and sexual self-determination, public assembly,

and battles against social prohibitions and vice squads. The article concludes with a call

for a mutual engagement between queer activism and anarchism.

Keywords

autonomy, Church Ladies for Choice, Emma Goldman, praxis, queer theory

The other night, I took a stroll into St Mark’s Bookstore in the East Village of NewYork City. First, I perused the queer studies section. Unlike a decade ago, therewere very few new titles, with the exception of works on gay marriage. NextI walked over to the section on anarchism and it seemed to have quadrupledsince my last visit to the store. While the dearth of books on queer theory comparedto works on anarchism could be explained away with any number of excuses aboutacademic press distribution, it seemed to reflect a growing concern about the


Benjamin Shepard, New York College of Technology/City University of New York, USA



relevance of queer theory to movements for social change (Kirsch, 2000). Whileanarchism has increasingly supported and informed social movements (Graeber,2004a, 2004b), queer theory has suffered from a seeming inability to speak beyondthe confines of the academy or itself (Hall, 2003; Mattilda, 2004; McLemee, 2009).There was, after all, a time when queer activism and theory informed each otherand the movements they supported (Crimp, 2002; Warner, 1993, 1999). Yet, just asanarchism has become further rooted in global movements, queer theory has cometo feel distant from the politics that once fueled it. Some have come to argue thatqueer theory needs to reinfuse itself within authentic social struggles (Kirsch, 2000;McLemee, 2009). This article proposes queer theory embrace its philosophicalinterconnections with anti-authoritarian organizing. It explores a few of the his-toric links as well as conflicts between anarchism and queer politics, considering thedivide between these two traditions of activism, as well as their interconnections viadistinct case examples of anti-authoritarian organizing involving rejection of socialcontrols, vice squads, and criminalization of protest and dissent. Queer and anar-chist politics overlap in any number of ways. The article explores how.

Throughout the last decade I have participated in the cross-pollination betweenqueer/AIDS activism and anarchist-inspired global justice movements in NewYork, with all their fits and starts, and occasional successes. To make sense ofthese experiences, I have employed an autoethnographic approach to consider thelinks and conflicts between queer and anarchist organizing traditions. Here myparticipant observations are compared with historical evidence, theory, and inter-views with key actors (Butters, 1983; Juris, 2007). My aim is to come to a closerunderstanding of the interconnections and conflicts between these movements.While the interviews featured are all with men; I hope the project highlights theways such activists contribute to a multi-issue, multi-gender, anarchist queer orga-nizing ethos that Emma Goldman helped articulate as she romped around the citya century ago.

Queer and anarchist politics

Queers and anarchists have long shared a similar disposition toward sexual politics.Sharing a kindred spirit with the early Victorian sex radicals in the UK (Sears,1977), anarchists were particularly influenced by the campaigns to end the BritishContagious Diseases Act of 1864. Faced with a law which authorized police to‘investigate and inspect’, quarantine, and criminalize suspected prostitutes, activistsembraced an anti-statist approach (O’Kelly, 1993a, 1993b). Influential, anarchistqueer writer Daniel Guerin (1970: 13) suggests that at its core, anarchism is a‘visceral revolt’ against such models of state control (also see Berry, 2004). Inthe years to follow, homosexual desire and sexual freedom became primarytopics for anarchists, who developed common cause with sexual outsiders(Kissack, 2008).

Conversely, early gay liberationists organized in a fashion that echoed anarchistsentiments toward freedom of the mind, body, and spirit. Yet, this could only take



place when the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) rejected a Mattachine politics ofrespectability in favor of an anarchist impulse toward radical egalitarianism(McLemee, 2009). The anarchist-queer chant, ‘2-4-6-8, smash the church, smashthe state!’ was a constant at early gay liberation rallies and actions (Teal, 1995[1971]). A report on GLF’s 30th anniversary was titled ‘Anarchy Inc’ after thenickname of one of the members for the group (Blotcher, 1999).

Author J.P. Harpignies (2009), who lived in New York at the time of the riots,recalls this feeling in streets of June 1969. Harpignies was organizing with a groupat New York University called Transcendental Students (TS). Self-described anar-chists, the group transformed an old restaurant, Harouts, on Waverly Place into acommunity space.

Not that long into TS’s managing of the Harout’s space, members of GLFdropped by after a run-in with the police. There, ‘what seemed like a few hundredof NYC’s wildest drag queens and militant gay activists at the height of their earlyexcitement about their emergence as a potent social force, poured in and began todance wildly and to party ferociously’, recalls Harpignies. ‘Their energy and theirvariety of appearance and dress and plumage was truly extraordinary’. Harpigniesstared ‘mouth-agape. . . It seemed like a typhoon that was so powerful the idea oftrying to rein it in never even came up. I’ve never seen that wild a scene again in mylife’. Few in TS had witnessed such an ethos of sexual freedom, combined with anti-authoritarian politics. ‘We had never seen people as totally rebellious and seem-ingly fearless as these folks, so we felt a sort of awe and respect for them’.

In years to come, Gay Liberation would expand into a global movement (Teal,1995 [1971]). Its aim was not just liberation for queers, but liberation of sexualityfor everyone (Altman, 1972). The movement borrowed from a range of influencesincluding anarchism, to help articulate the meanings of its aspirations. ‘Thanks toEmma Goldman for the title’, Gayle Rubin (1975) wrote in her essay ‘The Trafficof Women’, acknowledging the influence of anarchism on her thinking. With thisessay, Rubin incorporated anarchism into sexual politics and an interplay betweenMarxism and psychoanalysis in a way that anticipated and influenced queer theory.

None of this is to suggest the interconnections between anarchist thinking andqueer activism have been smooth. Liberal-minded gays actually departed fromGLF to form their own group, the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) shortly afterGLF was formed (Teal, 1995 [1971]). In the years to come the split betweenassimilationist-minded gays and queers who hoped to link gay liberation withbroad-based movements for social and sexual freedom would only grow (Crimp,2002; Sedgwick, 1990). Liberals and radicals battled each other throughout theACT UP years, echoing the previous generation’s conflicts (Crimp, 2002;Shepard, 2009). Assimilationist-minded gays would disavow their movement’s link-ages with broad-based social movements for social and sexual freedom,instead favoring the rights of gays to fit in, shop, marry, and join the army(Goldstein, 2002; Warner, 1999). Queer activists challenged this line of thinking,railing against the cultural erasure of assimilation (Brown, 2007; Mattilda, 2004).People are different is the first axiom of Eve Sedgwick’s (1990) queer theory.

Shepard 513


Yet, this thinking had become increasingly isolated, its influence felt separatedfrom much of mainstream political debate.

Between theory and praxis

Certainly intellectuals and academics helped infuse a critical theory into the workof ACT UP and SexPanic! and vice versa (Crimp, 2002; Hall, 2003; Halperin,1995). Yet the field and the activism supporting it seemed to hit a creative brickwall when facing the politics of neoliberalism, urban space, and quality of lifepolitics in the late 1990s (Crimp, 2002; Duggan, 2004). And some suggested thefield retreated when it was unable to influence such developments (Shepard, 2009).It is easier, after all, to theorize about a problem than to solve it (Kirsh, 2000).Others argued that much of queer theoretical writing had disengaged from activ-ism, become obtuse, and only accessible to academics (McLemee, 2009; Rogue andShannon, 2008).

A few examples help illustrate the point. ‘So many people are so constipated’,explained Jay Blotcher (2007), a long-time activist and observer of the queer scenein New York. ‘They think that they have a handle on sex but they are lobbinggrenades from the ivory tower’. And the embodied aspects of queer world-makingare obscured. ‘They apply a lot of polysyllabic words to the experience. And that’sa distancing factor’.

‘Let me give you a salient moment where academia fell short of the reality of it’,Blotcher continued. In the early 2000s, NYU sponsored a symposium titled, ‘QueerNation, What Happened?’ It included not just academics but also activist AlanKlein, one of the founders of Queer Nation. ‘Alan got to speak first. Alan is as farfrom an academic as you can get. But he knows his stuff’, Blotcher explained. ‘Alansaid Queer Nation began because ACT UP was becoming crowded with agendas.Therefore the occasional queer issues that found their way into ACT UP. . . werelooked upon with much more selectivity’, Blotcher elaborated. ‘Alan got togetherwith his lover, Karl Soehnlein [and some others], and said ‘‘let’s create anothergroup that can address this’’’. Klein related this story and passed the mike. ‘Well, itis as if he hadn’t talked’, Blotcher moaned. ‘The following speaker ruminated, ‘‘thereason Queer Nation began was because of the Zeitgeist, the dialectic this’’, blah,blah. . . And Alan looked like he’d been slapped across his face’, Blotcher recalled.‘Sometimes reality is less glamorous than you want it. Queer Nation sprung fromqueer pragmatism. The rest came from that’. The academics on the panel ignoredKlein’s lived experience with the group. ‘It reinvigorated my distrust and some-times disgust with intellect, academia specifically, when it comes to on the ground,in the trenches activism’, Blotcher concluded.

The details of this story are less important than the sentiment. The story Blotcherrelates is anything but uncommon. In recent years, any number of observers havehad similar experiences (see e.g. Mattilda, 2004; McLemee, 2009; Nyong’o, 2008).Part of the problem is that much of academia seeks to distance itself from the politicsor culture of anti-authoritarian activism, which has so profoundly influenced queer



organizing and vice versa (Brown, 2007; Graeber, 2004a, 2004b; Nyong’o, 2008;Ritchie, 2008). While queer theory has relegated activism to its periphery, anarchismhas increasingly linked its critique within activist practices. ‘[I]t is primarily con-cerned with forms of practice’, writes David Graeber (2004b). Yet, if the examplesgiven earlier suggest anything, it is that in many circles queer theory has come toignore the practices Graeber describes.While there are any number of queer activistsinvolved in direct action and anarchist(ic) movements, many theorists seem to havewalked away from the practices, writings, or questions involved with the activismwhich long once fueled queer theory.

There are any number of ways to interpret this. Yet, one could argue that queertheory faces a divide between theory and practice, resulting in a diminished praxis.The term praxis is generally used to describe a ‘kind of self creating action’, writesMartin Jay (1973: 4). ‘one of the earmarks of praxis as opposed to mere action wasits being informed by theoretical considerations’ (Jay, 1973). Social change activismis thought to involve ‘the unifying of theory and praxis’ (1973). This ethos is whatseems to be missing from today’s queer theory.

Anarchist queer

Jamie Heckert (2006: 14) writes: ‘Were queer theory to draw upon the rich heritageof anarchism and acknowledge the anarchistic elements of its own heritage’, it justmight find its way out of its current impasse. ‘What might ‘‘street’’ queer theorylook like?’ Rogue and Shannon (2008) wonder. It might reflect some of the queerand anarchist organizing practices taking place in the squats, gardens, small townsand social movements taking shape across the globe. While queer theory and anar-chism are often viewed as mutually exclusive terms, they need not be. They share agreat deal of common ground, built of an active cross-over between anarchist andqueer issues and actions. The following highlights a few overlapping themes.

Rejection of the paternalistic state – queers and anarchists alike view the state with abasic skepticism.When the state proclaims civil liberties must be sacrificed in order toprotect citizens from social outsiders, both camps share a similar critical disposition.Both favor self-organization in the pursuit of alternative spaces for social connection(Graeber, 2004a, 2004b; Warner, 1999). Within their support of DIY approaches tocommunity building, use over exchange, pleasure over procreation, they both share asimilar critical view of capitalism (Brown, 2007; Duggan, 2004; Mattilda, 2004). Thisis not to suggest such a disposition is monolithic; it is not. There are LGBT and evenqueer activists as well as anarchists who preclude an anti-capitalism from their anal-ysis (Goldstein, 2002; Guerin, 1970), yet for the most part, both camps share anemphasis on the use of space for alternate means to accumulation; they approachbuilding space with an emphasis on pleasure and direct democracy rather than profit-making (Amster et al., 2009; Brown, 2007; Holtzman et al., 2004).

Both anarchism and queer theory borrow from a range of influences to supporta politics of freedom. Here, freedom supports collective self-determination,mutual aid, a rejection of patriarchy, and space to make choices about one’s life

Shepard 515


(Brown, 2007; Goldman, 1969; Highleyman (1995 [1988]; O’Kelly, 1993a). ‘Bothprojects argue for a need to move beyond hierarchical and naturalized arrangementsof socially constructed identities’, note Rogue and Shannon (2008). This is a politicsorganized around the realization of respect for people’s needs. Rather than individ-ualism, it is about the seeking of freedomvia awide range of expressions.Whilemuchof life under capitalism involves disciplining of the body, this politics puts a premiumon explosive experiences, dynamism and experimentation. Herbert Marcusedescribed such a politics in terms of ‘polymorphous perverse’ sexuality, whichextended from bodily experiences into an abundant approach toward socialchange. The Red Butterfly Collective, a splinter group fromGLF, is a good example.‘Human liberation’, it argued ‘in all its forms, including Gay Liberation, requireseffective self-determination, i.e. democracy, in all spheres of social life affecting thelives of people as a whole’. The collective’s motto lifted directly from Marcuse:‘Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros is the political fight’, (quoted inEscoffier, n.d.).

Anarchism and queer politics support a critique of the normative assumptionsabout the world (Goldman, 2001 [1923]; Kissack, 2008; Warner, 1993). Bothemphasize practices, rather than fixed social or cultural identities (Amster et al.,2009; Hall, 2003; Sedgwick, 1990). Both support free will and choice, favoring theconsent of those involved, not the approval of government or religious institutions(Highleyman, 1995 [1988]). This sentiment echoes Emma Goldman’s (1969) argu-ment that matrimony was another form of wage slavery and exploitation. Ratherthan marriage, anarchist queers support alternative social groupings, sexual self-determination and safer promiscuity (Brown, 2007; Highleyman 1995 [1988];Ritchie, 2008; Mattilda, 2004).

Concurrently, anarchism and queer politics share a mutual respect for pleasure(Ritchie, 2008). Mikhail Bakunin laid the ground work for an anarchist rejection offruitless forms of social and sexual prohibition, later taken up by anarchists such asJoy of Sex author Alexander Comfort. ‘Liberty alone can bring moral improve-ment’, writes Daniel Guerin, paraphrasing Bakunin’s work (1970: 32). ‘Far fromchecking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepenedit’, Guerin (1970: 32) elaborates. Contemporary queer theory echoes the anti-authoritarian rejection of social and sexual prohibitions Guerin describes. ‘Thereis an ethical urgency about queer theory that is directed at the damage that sexualprohibitions and discriminations do to people’, Eve Sedgwick explains (cited inSmith, 1998: B9).

As opposed to sexual shame, both fields argue that fantastic possibilities takeshape when people share social eros. Such eros can be thought of as a social con-nection and attraction among minds, spirits, and bodies of people (Escoffier, n.d.).Not necessarily sex, social eros speaks to the possibilities that take shape amongpeople free to build alternative social relations around care, adventure, pleasure,and responsibility for each other and the communities in which they thrive.‘Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free groupings of individualsfor the purpose of producing real social wealth’, argues Emma Goldman (1969: 62),



‘an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and fullenjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires’.

In order to achieve the levels of ‘full enjoyment’ Goldman refers to, anarchistqueers have fashioned a politics based on autonomy from state social controls, aswell as coercive social mores. The implications of such thinking are many. ‘To beautonomous is not to be alone or to act in any way one chooses – a law untooneself – but to act with regards for others, to feel responsibility for others’, writethe editors of Notes from Nowhere (2003). ‘This is the crux of autonomy, an ethicof responsibility and reciprocity that comes through recognition that others bothdesire and are capable of autonomy too’ (2003: 110). People are different; they havedifferent needs and desires as Bakunin argues (quoted in Anarcho, 2001). What oneperson finds repulsive, others find delicious, tantalizing and risky.

‘Sooner or later, happily or unhappily, almost everyone fails to control his orher sex life’ writes Michael Warner (1999: 1). Yet, it is typically those on themargins – the sex workers, sexually-generous queers, and women who have hadchildren out of wedlock – who must contend with the ramifications and condem-nations. ‘Shouldn’t it be possible to allow everyone sexual autonomy, in a wayconsistent with everyone’s sexual autonomy?’ Warner muses (1999). One wouldhope. Yet, as Kissack (2008) and Sears (1977) point out, queer anarchists have longstruggled for sexual self-determination, often out of necessity. Sexual autonomy,after all, requires more than rejecting social restrictions, controls, or unjust laws,Warner notes: ‘It requires access to pleasures and possibilities, since people com-monly do not know their desires until they find them’ (1999: 7).

The result of such explorations is an abundant approach to sexual self-determination and community building, in which sexual self-determination is avery part of movement organizing. ‘Women should be building our movement theway wemake love – gradually with sustained involvement, limitless endurance – and,of course, multiple orgasms’, as anarchist feminist Jo Freeman put it in 1972. Morethan physical experience, Freeman refers to an ethos of desire, expression and thepossibility that people can do things on their own terms. Such a politics connectsnotions of pleasure and direct democracy, experienced in multiple forms.

The theatrics of the Stonewall-era queer performance group the Cockettesembodies such an ethos. ‘From the very beginning everything was fun, nice wayto be together, be ourselves and do our bit for sexual freakdom’, Scrumbly, one ofthe Cockettes, reflected. ‘Anarchy ideally is a wonderful system. If it feels good, goalong with the game’ (Tent, 2004: 18). ‘It was total sexual anarchy’, John Watersrecalls (Gamson, 2005: 55). Rejecting pre-Stonewall repression, the Cockettes tiltedthe scales toward creativity. In doing so, The Cockettes offered a theatre of trans-gression, their shows were performances in sexual liberation, via a topsy-turvycarnival-like interplay as audience and performers shared a space for social con-nection, pleasure, and democratic exchange. Theirs was an embodiment of a lib-eration era ethos of communal living, mutual care, disdain for capitalism, andrespect for pleasure (Gamson, 2005; Tent, 2004). More than sexuality, theCockettes reveled in a distinct and absurd politics of play.

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Crafted and created by such activists, play offers solutions to myriad challenges.It connects activism with camp, irony, humor, and a respect for pleasure and groupsolidarity. This approach perfunctorily rejects a macho brand of activist heroics(Crimp, 2002). Play is not a rejection of activism, but rather a unique amplificationof it. Linked with aesthetic and organizing projects, play becomes an arena inwhich to explore alternative social and cultural possibilities (Shepard, 2009).

While queers have long recognized pleasure as a resource, they share this dis-position with anarchists (Brown, 2007; Ritchie, 2008). Fifth Estate, an anti-authoritarian magazine, recently ran a special issue dedicated to play. ‘Party likeits 1929’ the lead editorial declared. ‘To discuss the radical persistence of pleasuremight seem rather decadent’, the editors wrote. But, ‘we want to remind our read-ers and ourselves that one facet that has always distinguished anarchists and anar-chy from other flavors of resistance and visions of society is our insistence of therevolutionary nature of joy’ (Fifth Estate, 2008: 3).

Over the years, queer anarchists have built on this ethos to support a culture ofresistance. While anarchists refer to the DIY spaces they create as forms of dualpower, in which autonomous publics coexist within the structures of state power(Graeber, 2004a, 2004b), queers have come to recognize these public commons ascounter publics (Mattilda, 2004; Warner, 1999). Such networks are buttressedwithin an emphasis on mutual aid and families of choice, which support closeties between the collective and the individual (Brown, 2007). Whether supportinga public sexual culture, a street party, a zine, or other forms of direct action, thesesymbols of freedom contribute to cultures of resistance (Ritchie, 2008).

Much of this cultural project takes shape via a DIY approach, which emphasizesvarious forms of creative direct action (Highleyman, 1995 [1988]; Holtzman et al.,2004). The efficacy of such practices involves the space for people to find agency,engage, and speak out (Goldman, 2001 [1923]). Such approaches involve not onlychallenging unjust laws, but organizing alternative solutions. A few examples helpdemonstrate the point. The final section of this article highlights campaigns inwhich queers and anarchists shared common cause while building on an anti-authoritarian organizing agenda organized around rejection of social controls,vice squads, and criminalization of protest and dissent.

Case 1. Sexual self-determination, reproductive autonomy:from Emma Goldman to the Church Ladies for Choice

On 31 May 2009, Dr George Tiller, a US doctor who provided reproductive healthservices at a clinic in Wichita, Kansas, the home of Operation Rescue, was shot byan opponent of the procedure (Hegeman, 2009). After he heard, New York anar-chist James Nova (2009) responded:

also tragic is that only when someone gets killed does anti-abortion terrorism get any

press. When they burn clinics or smash windows, spit on, punch, and tackle defenders,

employees, and patients it warrants no coverage. I’ve had hunting knives pulled on



me, been tripped, shoved and witnessed others being assaulted many times over the

years. These psychos have the total support of nearly every local police department

across the country. I have seen cops kneel and pray with the attackers. But they aren’t

classified as terrorists because they are CHRISTIAN!

The first case study considers the efforts of queer and anarchist activists to defendsuch clinics. The coalition has deep roots. Emma Goldman (1916), after all, wasarrested after speaking about abortion in violation of the Comstock Law in NewYork.

Over the years, queers and anarchists would continue to battle the prohibitivepolitics of Comstock’s ilk. Between Goldman’s arrest in 1916 and OperationRescue’s Summer of Mercy protests in 1991, when the group sent thousands ofactivists to block access to abortion clinics, debate over the practice has continued(Hegeman, 2009). ‘When I was at Berkeley, my political involvement was basicallywith women’s reproductive rights’, explained queer activist Brian Griffin, who wenton to join ACT UP. ‘To me homophobia and misogyny are the same thing. It’s allabout hating the female and boys acting like girls’.

A primary tactic of abortion opponents is to organize a vigil at an abortionclinic. The Students for Life of America, or SFLA (2007) lists steps to organizing aclinic vigil:

1. ‘Choose a clinic’2. ‘Announce the vigil’3. ‘Know the laws’4. ‘Gather materials for your vigil . . .with pictures of both living and aborted

babies’, and5. ‘Be a witness for life at the clinic’. (SFLA, 2007)

What SFLA does not mention are the efforts of abortion opponents to harass orintimidate clinic clients, often screaming, ‘You’re murdering your baby’ (Bader,2005). In response, queers have organized a practice known as clinic defense.

Over the last few years, I have attended clinic defense at the Ambulatory Centerin South Brooklyn. In November 2007, I went with the Church Ladies for Choice,an ACT UP spin-off group, members of the Radical Homosexual Agenda, the NewYork Metro Alliance of Anarchists, and the Brooklyn Pro-Choice Network. TheRude Mechanical Orchestra performed that overcast Saturday morning. TheChurch Ladies and company stood on one side of a barricade at the entrance tothe clinic. On the other side, a group of pro-life activists held rosaries and a replicaof a dead bloody fetus; they offered diapers to those willing to be turned away. TheChurch Ladies juxtapose that energy with a display of silly humor, underminingthe atmosphere through irreverent songs. Most of their songs are culture jams ofclassic melodies rewritten as pro-choice anthems. One crowd pleaser is ‘Christian-fascio-Nazi-nutso-psycho-right-wing-buuull-shit’, written to the tune of MaryPoppins’ ‘Super-cali-fragilistic-expealidocious’. (Church Ladies, 2005).

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‘My church lady name is Harmonie Moore’, explained Brian Griffin in an inter-view in 2006. ‘Back in the early days of ACT UP, a chant was invented, ‘‘how manymore have to die?’’ And after chanting it repeatedly, hours on end at demonstra-tions, it became ‘‘Harmonie Moore has to die?’’ And people used to say, ‘‘Who isthis poor woman Harmonie Moore and why does she have to die?’’’ So, as theChurch Ladies were coming together, Griffin, adopted the chant as his own mon-iker and became Harmonie Moore. Each of the Church Ladies’ performanceshighlight the implicit links between women’s health, reproductive autonomy,choice, and HIV prevention. Yet, they do it with a politics which links the lessonsof queer activism and feminism translated through jokes and songs.

The Church Ladies are part of a long lineage of DIY queer performance groups,dating back to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and even the Cockettes. ‘I wasalways fascinated with the Cockettes’, Griffin explained. ‘I think the Church Ladiesgo over much better in New York than say the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. . . Ithink we fit well here in New York. . . we’re far more given toward irony’.

‘When I moved to New York one of the things, in terms of getting involved withthis city, I noticed everywhere I was going there were these boys with ‘‘Silence ¼Death’’ and ACT UP t-shirts, Griffin explains. ‘I thought I should go to a meetingbecause these are the people that are looking where I’m looking and I’ll probablymake friends there’, Griffin continued. Most of Griffin’s friends volunteered withNew York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a highly formalized organization. ‘Andthat’s not me’, Griffin explained. ACT UP’s culture of play was far more appealing.‘So combined with the fact that I was seeing all these attractive men, that I wantedto meet, I started going to ACT UP meetings’. Once there, he was absorbed into theactivist culture, especially after he met future co-conspirator reproductive rightsactivist Elizabeth Meixell. ‘When Elizabeth came up to me to say she wanted tohave the Church Ladies for Choice, I swear it was like a light bulb’, Griffin recalled.‘I know exactly what I want to do with this. I know it’s the next step through theCockettes, through the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’.

So Griffin and Meixell founded the Church Ladies with a group of activists fromWomen’s Health Action Mobilization (WHAM) and ACT UP. The first demon-stration was at an event WHAM had planned outside St Patrick’s Cathedral.Karen Finley showed up as the Mother of God. ‘And there were four of us’,Griffin explained. ‘I had a red dress and a sign. We had this moving picket andwe would laugh and giggle with Elizabeth feeding us chants’.

Someone walked up to Griffin and asked him, ‘‘‘Aren’t you making fun ofreligion?’’ I said, ‘‘Well yes’’. She had no comment. ‘‘Yea, what’s the problem?’’’While only a few of the Church Ladies are anarchists, the group cohered within ananti-authoritarian stance. ‘When in doubt, make fun of the Religious Right’became their creed.

Much of the potency of the Church Lady repertoire involves its camp embraceof bad taste, the subversive possibilities of humor, and play. Another popular songat Clinic Defense is ‘Chop It Off’, a homage to Lorena Bobbitt, a US housewifewho cut off the penis of her abusive husband. The song takes on the misogyny of a



culture of rape, using humor to delight in the lessons of a woman who fought back.Staring straight at the ‘antis’ during clinic defense the Church Ladies sing to thetune of Jingle Bells:

Listen up you boys

We don’t want to confuse

There’s something that you have

That you don’t want to lose . . .

So you should always ask!

And be polite, you see,

Or clap won’t be the only thing

That hurts you when you pee!! Oh!

Chorus

Chop it off! Chop it off!

Use a kitchen knife

Teach him he can’t rape you just because you are his wife

OW!!!. . .

If he tries to rape you . . .well, he has to sleep sometime!

(Church Ladies, 2005)

Harmonie Moore’s favorite moments as a Church Lady are when he’s actually ableto make the antis laugh. Here, humor takes on any number of meanings. After all,those who laugh tend to participate in a shared meaning. Such humor underminesideas, morals, and authority (Woodside, 2001). It helps regular people breakthrough feelings of inhibition to act and play, liberating us from the confines ofrationality and reason (Holt, 2008). And it gives us a means to engage. At least itfeels like this when the Church Ladies perform.

Throughout the years, different Church Ladies have moved through the group;yet, the group has maintained an abiding faith in sexual self-determination, theimportance of humor and culture as tools of resistance, and a belief in the freedomto speak out. Over time, even the struggle for public assembly would becomeembattled.

Case 2. Public assembly

Throughout the 1990s, many traditional meeting spaces for queers came underattack. In recent years, this process has only become increasingly pronounced.Driving the frenzy was a conservative urban regime that successfully justified itspower grab as a morality campaign. Queer meeting places for social and sexualcongress were shut down (Crimp, 2002). In response, queers would work withanarchists to defend, create, and preserve such spaces. Some were sexclubs, squats, cruising areas, and community gardens; others took shape asforms of public assembly, including street demonstrations, parties, and CriticalMass bike rides.

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One of the leading groups to queer the right to public assembly is New York’sRadical Homosexual Agenda (RHA), an affiliate of the New York Metro Allianceof Anarchists. Since 2007, the RHA (2008) has used direct action to championnotions of liberty. To do so, the group announced the 2007 Parade without aPermit after the city council speaker, lesbian Chris Quinn, cut a deal with thepolice department to curtail freedom of assembly for groups of 20 or more.‘[J]ust as the police have the power to grant permits, they also have the power todeny them’, the RHA would note (RHA, 2008). ‘Why do the police decide who canassemble and who cannot?’ Over the next two years, the group held parades,zapped politicians, disrupted city council hearings, and participated in unpermitteddrag marches as well as many other forms of direct action.

For the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, the RHA organized anotherParade without a Permit. ‘Join us in the streets as we assert our freedom to assem-ble and celebrate our liberation’, the call for the parade declared, highlightingthe point that Gay Liberation began when queers fought back against abuses bythe NYPD and inspired a riot (Teal, 1995 [1971]). ‘Today, the infamous NYPDvice squad which raided the Stonewall bar in 1969 is still out in force entrappingand arresting queers’. It noted, ‘Though [Mayor] Bloomberg and Quinn haveworked hard to ensure that the NYPD repress the freedoms of straight andqueer New Yorkers, our lives and our rage won’t fit in their heavily policedparade routes’ echoing the anarchist motto ‘Our Dreams Won’t Fit In YourBallot Boxes!’

On 19 June 2009, the night of the action, I walked around Washington SquarePark passing out flyers, announcing our parade, stopping to chat. ‘You know thedeal’, I noted when I stumbled into a group of friends from Queer Fist andReclaim the Streets. ‘You guys are coming, right?’ ‘Of course’, they assuredme. Carrying a sign declaring, ‘The Stonewall Veterans Never asked for aPermit’, we walked us around Washington Square toward the exit. I was thinkingwe would take the streets once we got to 7th Ave, but looking behind me, mygroup of friends had cheerfully succeeded in taking it as we walked out of thepark. ‘Liberation, not assimilation, fuck that assimilation!!!’ the group chanted.The joyous, campy declaration, ‘We’re here! We’re queer! We’re fabulous! Don’tfuck with us!’ followed. This spirit resonated throughout the night air. ‘We willnot be quiet! Stonewall was a riot!’ we screamed as we approached the StonewallInn. The rally moved down Christopher Street, where a nightly street party takesplace off the piers most every night. Many joined the parade. ‘One onlookerstepped to the front of the banner and unleashed his inner baton twirler as theRHA drum corps pounded out a rhythm and led us in the chant, ‘‘This street isfor faggots. F-A-G-G-O-T-S!’’’ (WeWANT You, 2009). Members of the NYPDtrailed behind most of the night. Fortunately no arrests accompanied this cele-bration of a culture of resistance. The RHA were not the only group fighting thepolice in New York in 2009. The final case study highlights efforts to push backthe new vice squad.



Case 3. Fighting the vice squad

‘When the handcuffs clicked on my wrists on October 10, 2008, an energy wasreleased within me that connected me directly to the spirit of the Stonewall rebel-lion in late June of 1969’, declared Robert Pinter, a victim of a false prostitutionarrest. In the weeks and months afterward, members of ACT UP, the RHA, andthe Queer Justice League, joined in a coalition to fight the ongoing ravages of theNew York vice squad. Yet, the arrests continued. Throughout 2008 the NYPD vicesquad entrapped at least 30 men for prostitution after exiting Manhattan adultvideo stores with undercover officers who initially approached them for consensualsex. The city then used these false arrests as the main evidence in pursuing nuisanceabatement suits against the stores to close them down. The arrests were part of aquality of life campaign, lasting nearly two decades, sanitizing signs of publicsexual culture from the city streets (Crimp, 2002; Shepard, 2009). In response,Robert Pinter founded the Campaign to Stop the False Arrests in December of2008. The group held rallies from February through June of 2009 and his case drewthe notice of local and national media (Humm, 2009; Osborne, 2009). The grouphighlighted a crackdown on cruisers, loitering, and visible signs of public sexualculture.

Andy Velez, a long time member of the ACT UP, helped organize a few of therallies around the false arrests. ‘One thing one has to give up with such activism is asense of good taste’, Velez noted, describing an ethos which runs through queeractivism. Of course, this requires letting go of shame, learning to speak up, and tocope with embarrassment. Yet, he suggests it is worth it. As an example, Velezdescribed a brainstorming session during the meetings over the false arrests. ‘It’sboth scary and fun planning these things. You never know when you would comeup with something’, ruminated Velez. ‘Like just recently. . . I was at a meeting andthey were talking about an upcoming rally and whether they should get a permitfor a rally in Sheridan Square’ – before answering himself with a ‘No’ one shouldnot get a permit, just as RHA did not in their Parades without a Permit, which heattended. The action in question was scheduled in three weeks. ‘And I’m like,‘‘What are you waiting for? Too-much-time. . . You know what? Valentines iscoming up. I think we need to give the Mayor a Valentine. We should go to hishouse on 79th Street’’.’

So the following week, a relatively modest number of people, including myself,attended the rally in the freezing cold. ‘But it happened to be a day in which themedia was hungry for something’, Velez continued. There were as many journalistsas activists. ‘We got huge coverage and a meeting the following week with ChristQuinn and. . . the Mayor’s office. It was mostly damage control’. While the NYPDhas been harassing queers for cruising and cracking down on visible signs of publicsexual culture for years, suddenly they were apologizing. ‘We embarrassed theMayor who wants to be god and be re-elected’, Velez explained. ‘The signI made said, ‘DUMP the MAYOR’. So, it’s his nightmare coming to life.

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That’s not stuff he wants to hear, even from crazies. That’s why that meeting cameabout. And [NY Police Commissioner] Kelly has backed off.’ The charges weredropped against Pinter.

The actions gained vitality as the Coalition to Fight the False Arrests expandedto include a number of groups, including SWOP-NYC (Sex Workers OutreachProject – NYC) and SWANK (Sex Workers Action New York), as well as activistsfrom around the city. Here, the actions built on historic theoretically-informedcritiques used to build solidarity among sexual outsiders. The work of SWANKwithin this coalition continues a long tradition of anarchist queer sexual civil lib-erties activism (Kissack, 2008; Sears, 1977). Here, current activists build on EmmaGoldman’s (1969) anarchist theory of prostitution and sexual freedom, whichframes sex work in terms of worker rights and autonomy, as well as sexual-civil-liberties. Such activism links campaigns against the vice squad within a frameworkfor challenging unequal and repressive relations between the sexes, races, and clas-ses, as well as rejecting oppressive social norms. Finally, it builds on an anarchistqueer tradition of rejecting ‘all forms of exploitation’ (O’Kelly, 1993b).

In conclusion

This essay has explored the interplay of ideas and approaches to theoreticallyinformed direct action. In the first case example, the Church Ladies highlightedthe interplay between a culture of resistance, creative direct action, and the insur-rectionary possibilities of humor; the second, RHA’s Parades without a Permithighlighted the link between queer traditions of defiant and playful street perfor-mance and efforts to elude social controls; and the third explored the politics ofrejecting prohibitive politics in favor of engagement with new forms of sexual selfdemocracy. These are small cases. And certainly further research on this topic isneeded. What the examples suggest is that queer activism and anarchism are mutu-ally reinforcing, with issues and ideas overlapping and interconnecting. Queersbenefit from the anarchist connection with global movements; conversely, anar-chism gains strength by borrowing from queer approaches to direct action, com-munity organization, rejection of patriarchy, and the pragmatic organizingstrategies Jay Blotcher, Brian Griffin, and Andy Velez describe. The discipline ofqueer activism, buttressed with research, flexibility, and pragmatism helps supportmovement action in any number of ways. While not all anarchists agree with suchapproaches, anarchism and queer organizing often meet on the ground within aflexible approach to actually creating and sustaining alternative public commons.Both share a propensity toward taking power via direct action. This approachinjects a vitality into multiple movements. Yet, for queer theory to value thisinterplay of ideas and practices, it could benefit by stepping off the sidewalk andback into the streets. The challenge for queer and anarchist politics is to supportmutually an ongoing commitment to a rejection of a prohibitive politics in favor ofthe political possibilities of pleasure ebbing through multiple movements for socialchange.



Acknowledgements

Special thanks for Jamie Heckert and Kelly Moore for their ideas and suggestions for thisarticle, and to Spencer Sunshine for his the multiple conversations, which helped inspire this

work and for helping me establish contact with J.P. Harpignies.

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Benjamin Shepard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Human Services at New YorkCollege of Technology/City University of New York He is the author/editor of sixbooks including White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the SanFrancisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997), From ACT UP to the WTO: UrbanProtest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (Verso, 2002) andQueer Political Performance and Protest and Play: Creativity, and the NewCommunity Organizing (Routledge, 2009). His forthcoming works includeCommunity Projects as Social Activism (SAGE), and The Beach beneath theStreets: Exclusion, Control, and Play in Public Space, with Greg Smithsimon(SUNY). Address: New York College of Technology/City University of NewYork, 300 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

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£24.99 / CAN$44 (hbk), US$24.95 / £12.99 / CAN$31 (pbk).

Well known as a committed social historian, Professor Sheila Rowbotham hasproduced a biography, which is both an exhaustive piece of scholarship and alabour of love. She tells us she first came across Carpenter in 1959, when shewas just 16, in a biography of Havelock Ellis. Carpenter’s sex radicalism, his anar-chist socialism and his feminism resonated deeply with her as she embarked on herown trajectory as a socialist feminist scholar in the 1970s.

This is not the first time Rowbotham has written about Carpenter. Sheco-authored a book with Jeffrey Weeks called Socialism and the New Life:the Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis in 1977,which we can now view as part of that activist scholarship of the second wave offeminism and gay liberation which sought to remember and reinscribe its first-wavehistory. For the new biography, she has exhaustively perused the Carpenter papersin the Sheffield Archives. Previous elaborations of Carpenter have certainly beenwritten, several by his contemporaries, such as Three Modern Seers: James Hinton,Nietzsche, Edward Carpenter (1910) by Havelock Ellis’ wife Edith Mary OldhamLees Ellis, who referred to him as one of those ‘who dream the impossible dream’.Edward Lewis, a friend and disciple, wrote a hagiography, Edward Carpenter: AnExposition and an Appreciation (1915), which called him ‘. . . a holy man, a naturalsaint’ and ventured ‘I do not think I am mistaken in saying that he himself is one ofthe children of Uranus’. Rowbotham’s book, nevertheless, is by far the most com-prehensive biography to date, and whether you approach it as a newcomer toCarpenter, or as someone already familiar with his life and works, it makesengrossing reading; it is engaging, meticulous and stylistically accessible.

Rowbotham elegantly digests the complexities of Carpenter in context, fromhis bourgeois Brighton upbringing surrounded by sisters constrainedwithin Victorian middle-class malaise, to his fascination with Shelley, the lonelinessof his Cambridge days rowing with attractive young men he was too shy to touch,followed by his painful break with the Church and flight to workers’ educationin the North, to Indian mysticism, sandals, comradeship and love with working-class men.

Those who know about Carpenter are often inclined to marvel at ‘how he gotaway with it’, ‘it’ being the advocacy and relatively open practice of homosexuality


in the same period as the Oscar Wilde trials. Rowbotham’s research shows us thathe nearly didn’t. She tells of his persecution at the home, in Millthorpe nearSheffield, which he shared with his long term lover George Merrill, by a right-wing neighbour, a member of the Liberty and Property Defence League, whocanvassed the parish with leaflets proclaiming ‘Socialism and Infamy: theHomogenic or Comrade Love Exposed’. The pamphlets accused Carpenter andhis companions of ‘morbid appetites, naked dancing, corruption of youth, pagan-ism and socialism’. Carpenter overcame the scandal, Rowbotham tells us, byimporting married friends to promenade with him, lending respectability, and byhis already wisely established good relations with the local vicar as well as hisreputation for close to home philanthropy.

In addition to such touches of observant realism, the biography traces someinteresting connections. Rowbotham unearths the information that a youngAmerican, Gavin Arthur, who was something of a godfather to the Beat poets,visited Carpenter in his latter days in Guilford and wrote an account of polyam-orous tantric sex with the nature-loving guru, which he donated to Allen Ginsberg.In the same account Arthur also claimed Carpenter had confided that, on his ownpilgrimage to the USA to meet the poet Walt Whitman, he had likewise slept withhis hero. This certainly provides pleasurable grist to a mill of speculation that theseforerunners of the gay liberationist movement may have been connected not simplyby poetry and inspiration. In Ginsberg’s famous poem ‘Howl’, the echo ofCarpenter’s mystic ‘Towards Democracy’ (1883–1891) is unmistakable, therepeated sentiment and phrase ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’ appearing to describe lovebetween men in both.

Rowbotham’s biography cannot be a substitute for reading Carpenter’s works,but it is a superb study, and for those unfamiliar with the historical setting, anexcellent guide. She takes care to present a rounded picture of the man, encom-passing his many interests from workers’ education to nudism. However, it is clearthat she warms to the radical anarcho-socialist and the sexual libertarian pioneermore than to the ex-minister of the Church of England turned pagan mystic.Rowbotham has decidedly more time for the feminism of Loves Coming of Age(1896) than for the ‘world consciousness’ of Pagan and Christian Creeds (1920).

In My Days and Dreams (1916: 254), his autobiography, Carpenter wrote of1881 ‘It was a fascinating and enthusiastic period. . . The Socialist and Anarchistpropaganda, the Feminist and Suffragist upheaval, the huge Trade-union growth,the Theosophic movement. . . one felt that something massive must surely emergefrom it all’. Rowbotham, sharing Carpenter’s background as a politically commit-ted adult education teacher, who also lived through interesting political times in the1970s, has gifted to the future, in this biography, a wonderful portrait of one of the19th-century pioneers of radical left and green politics, of feminism advocated bymen, and of homosexual liberation theology.

Jenny Alexander



Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917.

Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2008. 220 pp. ISBN 10: 190 4859119; ISBN 13: 978

1904859116 (pbk).

There was a time when amongst both activists and scholars of anarchism anymention of the reception of the question of homosexuality in the movementbrought up the rather stock responses whereby the views of Emma Goldmanand Alexander Berkman were cited as ‘proof’ of the engagement of anarchists inthe defence of a persecuted ‘sexual minority’. With an extensive sea of silencebetween these two figures, masking both unsung attempts to further the gaycause by individual anarchists and attempts to hide movement ‘homophobia’, itseemed that there was little more to say on the question. Fortunately, however, asmall number of detailed research undertakings such as the one offered by TerenceKissack have rectified both of these equivocal stances. That is to say, while exam-ples of opposition to same-sex desire amongst anarchists have been laid bare forwhat they were (although not simply explained by recourse to an immutable formof ‘homophobia’), courageous examples whereby anarchists, in concert with theirbeliefs of freedom in all facets of human existence, have slowly come to light.

The coming out, so to speak, of not only anarchist sexual politics in general butalso anarchist writings and practices around same-sex sexuality has proceededapace. There is still much to do, however, most notably in respect of historicalstudies. Examples of discussions on sexuality in the British anarchist movementand, for example, in the publication Freedom have yet to claim their historian,despite a number of important texts on the subject appearing in its pages, notleast from renowned anarchists such as Marie Louise Berneri. The French anar-chist movement has received some attention in this light given the emphasis placedon sexuality by individualist anarchists such as E. Armand. In this sense, Kissack’sbook is a landmark study and it will serve as a major contribution to the historyand to the present of sexual politics in the anarchist movement.

One of the main merits of this book is its transnational perspective. Too manyaccounts of the reception of particular questions in the anarchist movement,whether these be ideas on syndicalism, nudism or sexuality, focus almost uniquelyon the national level and rarely engage extensively in the international debates thatbrought about or encouraged anarchists’ concerns. This volume shows that in theUSA, despite some earlier reception of ideas on free love, birth control andwomen’s rights, it was the Oscar Wilde affair that provided some anarchists withthe impetus to press for legislative as well as social change with respect to con-sensual homosexual relations. As Kissack suggests, however, this may have beendue, at least in part, to efforts to champion individual liberty rather than the actualendorsement or approval of homosexuality per se, the stance of Benjamin Tuckeressentially corresponding to this philosophical justification.

Kissack also shows how ‘first-wave’ anarchism in the 1870s did not view homo-sexuality as favourably as the second wave of the very late 19th century and early1900s. In informative sections, the author shows how this shift was largely due tothe reception of international and local work on sexology and sexual psychiatry.

Book Reviews 531


The interface that Kissack traces between anarchism and these new sexual sciencesis carefully plotted and is suggestive for future studies on the relations between thetwo. Also important were the writings of anarchists, such as Edward Carpenter,and poets, such as Walt Whitman, in effecting a qualitative change in anarchistthought. This kind of appreciation should militate against any simplistic explana-tion whereby anarchists’ support for the sexual rights of homosexuals merely camefrom anarchists’ overall philosophy or political goals.

Some questions remain, however. Throughout the book, the positive engage-ment by anarchism with the question of homosexuality is perhaps viewed toobenignly in two senses. Firstly, by the end of the book, I wonder how extensivewas this engagement. Although Kissack suggests that it was basically a fringe ofsupporters who viewed homosexuality as acceptable or, at least, not punishable bylaw, excepting the more well-known activists such as Goldman, we do not hearmuch about the possibly many more who viewed homosexuality – and its suppor-ters – as beyond the pale for civilized society and for anarchism. Secondly, scienceis presented as generally positive in Kissack’s account. The work in the USA byauthors such as Jennifer Terry and many others would question the straightfor-ward liberatory mission of the sexual sciences. These queries may be tempered byfurther research on the relationship between homosexuality and anarchism, a fieldthat is now ripe for international analysis across anarchist movements of differentcontinents.

Richard CleminsonUniversity of Leeds, UK

Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. Champaign: University of

Illinois Press, 2003. 280 pp. ISBN 10: 025 202804X; ISBN 13: 978 0252028045 (hbk).

Time is an enormous long river

And I’m standing in it

Just as you’re standing in it

My elders were the tributaries

And everything they thought and every struggle they went through

And everything they gave their lives to and every song they created

And every poem that they laid down

Flows down to me . . .

I can reach down into that river and take what I need

To get through this world.

(Bridges Utah Phillips)

With this study of sex radicals in the USA (1853–1910), Joanne Passet has reachedinto the river and woven together an inspiring and engaging story of an anarchistand feminist history of my elders that I never imagined could have existed.



Whereas the feminist histories of this era I was taught as an undergraduate focusedon the suffragettes, this book documents a subjugated discourse inspired by alter-native spiritual traditions intertwined with the American strain of individualistanarchism and the revolution against chattel slavery to develop critiques of bothwage slavery (the coercive nature of labour in capitalism) and sex slavery (theabusive effects of institutionalized male dominance in marriage). The three typesof slavery were seen by the ‘sex radicals’ of the era as mutually supportive, eachresting ‘on an assumption of a hierarchical order rather than egalitarian relation-ship’ (p. 66), though at times emphasizing women’s slavery in marriage as thefundamental institution which ‘encouraged men’s tendency to dominate others’(p. 13). The sex radical movement held together and grew despite the social, eco-nomic and intellectual isolation of its members (particularly the rural women andmen who made up the majority readership) through the publication of a number ofindependent periodicals, the publishers of which risked, and sometimes suffered,imprisonment under laws that criminalized the circulation of ‘obscene’ materialincluding pornography and open discussion of birth control. For the editors andreaders of the sex radical press, space to communicate about the pleasures anddangers of female sexuality was a far greater priority than suffrage. Passet quotesone Missouri correspondent to the long running anarchist periodical Lucifer, theLight-Bearer, ‘To me, political rights are secondary as compared to the right ofwoman to her own body’ (p. 62). Sex radicals emphasized instead empowermentthrough knowledge and transformation of social relations, in which ‘each womanmust participate in her own emancipation’ (p. 70). Viewing the state as an institu-tion of domination ‘led [vocal sex radical] Lillie D. White to dismiss suffragists andchurch women who demanded the ballot as hypocritical and criticise them for‘‘asking for their rights’’ while the same time ‘‘sustaining the oppressor whodenies them’’’ (p. 150).

I was particularly fascinated by the way in which discourses of spirituality andliberty were intertwined; spirituality served both to inspire and justify diverse radi-cal perspectives. For example, Spiritualism, the practice of channelling voices of thedead, enabled women to ‘acceptably utter radical pronouncements about theirrights, including the right to sexual autonomy’ (p. 43). In response to fears thather critique of patriarchal marriage was tantamount to an assault on Christianity,Mary Gove Nichols, subject of the first chapter of this book, ‘argued that a wifecould not obey divine laws until she was free from ‘the lustful despotism of oneman’ and ‘selfish or unwinds legislation of many’ (p. 35). In variation on thistheme, Thomas Cook, an Indiana Spiritualist sex radical, advocated the ‘loveprinciple’ rather than free love, believing ‘that women and men – as falliblebeings – required extensive experimentation in order to find their divinely intendedmates’ (p. 35), with monogamy as the ultimate goal. The overlap of spirituality andliberty can also be found in the millenarian notion of the good society destined tocome, the arrival of heaven on earth. The conviction that ‘the woman, as birthgiver, should have the right to determine when and with whom she had children’(p. 10) stemmed not only from a principle of feminist autonomy, but also from the

Book Reviews 533


belief that free love would be much more likely to produce children capable of‘regenerating society and inaugurating the millennium’ (p. 10). In the later years ofthe study and following the rise of eugenics, the latter element became moreimportant to some sex radical men, including the influential editor of Lucifer,Moses Harman, creating one example of a gender divide in a mixed movement.

While the sex radicals intended to practice egalitarian heterosexuality, prevailingsocio-economic conditions denied women equal pay for equal labour creatingeconomic dependence on men. While some men prefigured the contemporaryWages for Housework campaign by nearly 150 years, these acts ‘subtly reinforcedtheir superior status: they were in a position to give, and women to receive’ (p. 83).Further divisions stemmed from the forms ‘free love’ might take. ‘The question ofsexual variety – the right to love more than one person either simultaneously orsequentially, chastely or sexually – divided sex radicals for over five decades’(p. 163). And, lest my enthusiasm for anarchism paint a simplistic picture ofother less nuanced historical work, let me note that questions of childcare werefragmented along political lines with anarchists promoting individual responsibil-ity, utopians collective households and others arguing that the distinction betweenlegitimate and illegitimate children could be overcome by the state taking respon-sibility for all. Clearly, not all of the sex radicals in Passet’s study wanted to abolishthe state; some wished to renegotiate the terms of their relationship with it.

Consistent with the largely antiauthoritarian themes of the book, Passet’s meth-odology is also thoughtfully egalitarian. Rather than relying entirely on the voicesof well-known public speakers and writers, this book is the product of a carefulreview of 3439 letters sampled decade-by-decade from nearly 20 sex radical period-icals. She shares the words of ordinary women and men – many of whom, I wasdelighted to note, lived in small midwestern towns like the one where I grew up.Filtered through memories of painful experiences, my tendency is to imagine theseplaces as quintessentially conservative. This book has been a welcome awakeningto a radical history, which helps me feel a greater connection to my own past. Myonly aching curiosity, unaddressed in the book, is the sex radicals’ relationship withother than heterosexual possibilities. Perhaps this will be the topic for anotherbook.

Jamie HeckertAnarchist Studies Network



Anarchism and Sexuality

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Transcript of Anarchism and Sexuality