anarcha library

I noticed the article titled How to induce a miscarriage herbally (and safely) is currently the...

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:22:00 -0400

I noticed the article titled How to induce a miscarriage herbally (and safely) is currently the highest in hits from searches from all across the U.S., Canada, and other countries (including Pakistan and Dubai yesterday). The following is what I recently posted as a note before the text of the article:

…I’m not sure what the credentials of the author are. I would like to direct you to a variety of other resources to check out in addition to this one. I apologize that some are in a pdf form that can’t be put through a translator (although please be very careful if you’re using google translator for any of this, and putting it into action).

This is the best document online as far as I can tell: Herbal Abortion a Woman’s DIY Guide zine

Committing a crime does not remove…

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:21:26 -0400

Committing a crime does not remove…:

rgr-pop:

suzy-x:

Committing a crime does not remove…

mcgoats:

lavender-labia:

thegreenwolf:

Committing a crime does not remove someone’s humanity. I would rather live in a society where rapists and murderers are still treated as human beings, even in a prison, because preserving their right to be human is as important as protecting my right to be…

Wow ok I’m not gonna treat or think of rapists with compassion literally ever thx xoxo

sorry not sorry

Okay so this thread has really started to irk me.

Everyone crying “BUT WHERE WILL ALL THE RAPISTS GO?!?!?!” at those for prison abolition really miss several points here. And one of them is that actually, the vast majority of rapists actually DO NOT end up in prison.

If only 56% or estimated rapes are reported and only 3% of those charged with rape ever see a jail cell, who’s to say that most prisoners are rapists? In fact it seems a minority of prisoners actually are violent offenders. Meanwhile, a rising number of people in prison are actually “drug offenders” (AKA young people of color who sell or use drugs) who’ve been racially profiled. According to wikipedia:

As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes. As of 2008, 90.7% of federal prisoners, or 165,457 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.^[22] Drug offenses account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population since 1985; approximately half a million people are in prison for a drug offense today compared to 40,000 in 1981—an increase of 1,100 percent.^[23]

The reason we demonstrated in front of a women’s prison on Mother’s Day is because incarcerated women, especially women of color, are disproportionately survivors of violence and trauma. Many of them are incarcerated as a result of their abuse; many fight back, many get duped by their abusers, and many consequently have to leave their families behind. Also, with regards to transwomen, many are profiled by police under the suspicion of being sex workers, and have had to fight off hate crimes. Eve Ensler, who I usually feel iffy about, has made an excellent documentary and play called Any One of Us, and Victoria Law has written a book called Resistance Behind Bars, which articulates women’s struggles in prisons and outside of them. Angela Davis has also written extensively on the subject as a black feminist and former political prisoner. These works show that these prisoners don’t need to be confined; they need serious help.

If the current criminal justice system was any good, the assholes on Wall Street would be done for, and so would roughly 94% of rapists. If it was any good, my own father wouldn’t have been thrown in prison under the racist pretense that he was undocumented, when he actually showed up to court to pay a debt. But instead, prisons uphold white supremacy and slavery, and continue cycles of abuse for marginalized people. So you all need to do yourselves a favor and read up before you start attacking prison abolitionists, instead of individualizing a structural problem by saying things like “But I need prisons!” When you obviously have no idea what happens in them or how most people get there. No sympathy for rapists, but no excuses for a fucked up prison system.

Yeah Suzy!

I should also add, too, that this kind of argument completely erases the fact that prison subjects bodies to rape in hugely escalated ways. IE, people go to jail for, say, drug possession and then are raped or (less rampantly) become rapists. There aren’t really stats on this, but the idea that most prison rape is committed by other prisoners bothers me and is probably not true at all. Prison makes bodies particularly vulnerable to rape by cops, guards, doctors, janitors, fucking everyone. A prison industrial complex, a prison system at all, is always going to be what we call a “rape culture” because it is a culture which removes economic and legal value from bodies, which completely separates bodies from their autonomy, which by definition erases the right/power/capability that any body has to exercise anything that looks like “consent,” and which makes a rape of these bodies unpunishable by any means.

And (if you watch SVU you know this all too well) a support of prisons is a complicity in using rape as punishment for (almost always) lesser wrongs, most of which are not actually bodily infractions but are capitalist ones—drugs, property theft. Rape becomes something that it is okay to do to certain bodies, and rape becomes something it is especially okay to do to bodies that fuck with capitalism. In prisons, rape props up capitalism. (And let’s not forget that this is literal: guess how many things in your home and neighborhood were made by prison labor? Guess how many things on your boobs were made using prison labor?)

If you fuck with capitalism you go to jail. If you go to jail you get raped. If you get raped you don’t go to jail. If you rape a prisoner you get a high five from Eliott Stabler.

I don’t want to overlook the important fact, though: dude socialists will always always use the PIC as a way to derail and redirect any conversation about accountability for rapists. Even though, as you said, most rapists are not in prison, nor will they ever be in prison.

a: I want my rapist to go to jail
dude socialist: you are propping up capitalism, and also I am probably going to rape you because that’s what dudes like me do

*anarchists too, and really any dude, or maybe anybody, but I’ve met mostly the socialist ones

Smashing The Prison Industrial Complex In Three Easy Steps, According To White Dudes In Their Twenties:

FREE ALL RAPISTS! ANY WOMAN OR QUEER PERSON WHO WANTS TO INVOLVE THE STATE IN THEIR TRAUMA IS AN ENEMY OF THE CAUSE AND SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM ALL ORGANIZING SPACES. ALSO PROBABLY RAPED.

ANY PERSON WHO DOES NOT PROTEST MY WEED POSSESSION CHARGES* IS AN ENEMY OF LIBERATION

IF WE SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS, ALL THE POOR BLACK PEOPLE WILL BE SAVED

*wherein I will never face jail time if I am white but am really mad about having to do community service

THIS IS IMPORTANT.
ONE CAN BE AGAINST BOTH RAPE/RAPISTS AND PRISONS,
and also
BOTH RAPE AND PRISONS SHOULD BE OPPOSED.

i agree. important conversation.

Spring Additions

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:23:40 -0400

i had intended on updating more often, but below are some things i added to the site since march. i was particularly excited to see a pdf version of Caliban and the Witch available on libcom.org. i highly recommend that book.

i also enjoyed the gender pamphlet by Jamie Heckert that the Institute for Anarchist Studies put out.

i thought the “who is oakland” article has some very interesting things to say about identity politics and other issues facing anarchists and “activists” lately.

some of the links are to older zines that i have liked that i was happy to find digital versions of to share with you.

Gender (IAS Lexicon Series pamphlet) (2012)

Oppression within oppression: a response to “A Question of Privilege” (2011)

Postrevolutionary pioneer: Anarchist María Luisa Marín and the Veracruz renters’ movement

Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation (2012)

Complex Everyday Realities: Women and Class (2011)

Caliban and the Witch (2004) pdf

What Is There in Anarchy for Woman? (1897)

Safer spaces, false allegations, and the NYC Anarchist Bookfair (2012)

How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with bell hooks (2009)

Féminisme et Anarchie (1970)

Women’s Self-Defense zine #1-2

¿Qué significa anarcofeminismo?

Thinking Through Perpetrator Accountability (2009)

Transgender liberation, class politics & anarchism (2012)

La historia de la lucha de mujeres anarquistas 1884-1968

Sample chronology of anarchist women’s activity in Latin America 1884-1968

Herbal Abortion: The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (1994)

Women in the Spanish revolution - Solidarity (1975)

Wive’s Tales zine

Free Women of Spain (2005) pdf

Free to Choose: A Guide to Reproductive Freedom (2006)

Viva Voce: Some thoughts on women’s health and sexuality

"Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:33:04 -0400

“

Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with solidarity, minimizing and misrepresenting the severity of structural racial inequality, and reinforcing stereotypes about the homogeneity and helplessness of “communities of color.” The category of “communities of color” is itself a recently invented identity category which obscures the central role that antiblack racism plays in maintaining an American racial order and conceals emerging forms of nonwhite interracial conflict. What living in a “post-racial era” really means is that race is increasingly “represented” in government, media, and education as “culture” while the nation as a whole has returned to levels of racial inequality, residential and educational segregation, and violence unseen since the last “post-racial” moment in American history – the mid-60s legal repeal of the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial privilege, and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural identities as the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the dominant and largely unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in the US today. According to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one more “culture,” and white supremacy one more ideology, instead of a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy.

Demographic categories are not coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures” which can be represented by individuals, no matter how well-intentioned. Identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial identity categories have typically been described through an additive concept, intersectionality, which continues to assume that political agreement is automatically generated through the proliferation of existing demographic categories.

For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the problem, and state, corporate, or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic “cultural diversity” within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be the solution. It is a well-worn activist formula to point out that “representatives” of different identity categories must be placed “front and center” in struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But this is meaningless without also specifying the content of the politics of these “representatives.” The US Army is simultaneously one of the most racially integrated and oppressive institutions in American society. “Diversity” alone is a meaningless political ideal which reifies culture, defines agency as inclusion within oppressive systems, and equates identity categories with political beliefs.

Time and again politicians of color have betrayed the very groups they claim to represent while being held up as proof that America is indeed a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. Wealthy queers support initiatives which lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then offload reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers who are predominantly women of color.

But more pertinent for our argument is the phenomenon of anti-oppression activists – who do advance a structural analysis of oppression – who consistently align themselves with a praxis that reduces the history of violent and radically unsafe antislavery, anticolonial, antipatriarchal, antihomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom struggles to struggles over individual privilege and state recognition of cultural difference. Even when these activists invoke a history of militant resistance and sacrifice, they consistently fall back upon strategies of petitioning the powerful to renounce their privilege, alter their terminology, or “allow” marginalized populations to lead resistance struggles.

For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege and cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political framework has become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address racism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when people of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked as white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and perpetuates the dominant praxis.

”

- Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation

(via ahystericalvoid)

"Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:31:58 -0400

“

Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and queer political program which white liberals can somehow become “allies” of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim that they are in possession of such a program. Such assumptions of “allyship” are deeply bound to a self-defeating politics of white benevolence and minority victimhood, rather than to the agency, heterogeneity, and self-organization of marginalized demographics.

This particular brand of white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and field of action offered by privilege theory.

”

- Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation

(via ahystericalvoid)

VIDEO: Selma James on Her Six Decades of Activism

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:52:00 -0400

VIDEO: Selma James on Her Six Decades of Activism:

Although I don’t agree with her on everything, I find Selma James and what she has been and is involved with pretty fascinating.

Happy May Day!

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:59:12 -0400

Happy May Day!

Pussy Riot and free speech: How Russian capitalism and religion are attacking dissent

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:21:50 -0400

Pussy Riot and free speech: How Russian capitalism and religion are attacking dissent

Quiet Rumors new edition available later this year from AK Press

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 15:38:12 -0400

A new edition of one of our all-time favorite AK Press titles!

This is a fascinating window into the development of the women’s movement in the words of those who moved it. Compiled and introduced by the UK-based anarchist collective Dark Star, Quiet Rumours features articles and essays from four generations of anarchist-inspired feminists, including Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Jo Freeman, Peggy Kornegger, Cathy Levine, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Mujeres Creando, Rote Zora, and beyond. All the pieces from the first two editions are included here, as well as new material bringing third and so-called fourth-wave feminism into conversation with twenty-first century politics. An ideal overview for budding feminists and an exciting reconsideration for seasoned radicals.

Joel Olson 1967-2012

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 01:39:00 -0400

We are deeply saddened by the loss of esteemed activist, writer, scholar, and NCV Contributor Joel Olson, who passed away while on sabbatical in Europe.

Joel was Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he specialized in political theory. A noted expert on racial politics and extremist ideologies, he was the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) as well as numerous articles and reviews. Joel was working on a second book, entitled American Zealot: Fanaticism and Democracy in the United States, at the time of his death.

During the 1990s Joel was involved with Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation and later went on to form Bring the Ruckus! He was a well-known figure in the anti-racist and pro-immigrant movements in Arizona, working with grassroots groups including Copwatch and the Repeal Coalition.

Joel was a powerful voice in radical politics, a dedicated father, and someone who worked tirelessly through his words and deeds to raise critical consciousness and promote justice in the world. He will be missed by all of us here at NCV, and we ask that you keep him and his family in your thoughts.

Joel has definitely influenced my politics, all the way back from 2000. My ideas about gender and race are influenced by the race traitor politics he discussed in talks and in his book, Abolition of White Democracy. He passed way too soon.

Check out one of his latest pieces: “White Supremacy”: An IAS Lexicon series pamphlet - Infoshop News

The Myth of Overpopulation

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:40:00 -0400

I happened upon this little gem from 1998, a pamphlet called The Myth of Overpopulation: A collection of articles about attempts to control the bodies and fertility of third world women (1998) which I wish I had known about when I was writing Invasion by Birth Canal? The fourteenth amendment and its opponents’ motivations (2010).

The concept of overpopulation remains a controversial and heated topic even among anarchists and feminists. Here in Arizona, I still become surprised to hear activists referring to overpopulation as a legitimate issue (especially without qualifying it as far as consumption vs. reproduction) despite the anti-immigration rhetoric they’ve become familiar with. Sure, population could still be a problem even if bad people make an agenda out of it, but I feel there are plenty of other issues to address that are more important, such as capitalism, colonization, globalization, and level of consumption. This becomes especially important as capitalists try to raise the level of consumption in poverty-stricken countries, with the idea that it will decrease the number of children people have. (Clearly I’m not opposed to getting people out of poverty, but capitalists are clearly trying to create needs for TV sets and Coca Cola across the world.) I could go on and on, but my view points are expressed in “Invasion…”.

For those of us interested in reproductive freedom, it is important to know the history and current activities and rhetoric around population, birth control, eugenics, etc. If you don’t know about Norplant, look it up (or see my writing and references in “Invasion…”). If you don’t know the history of sterilization among Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Black Americans, immigrants, etc. (specifically people with uteruses), look it up. If you don’t know the influence of anti-immigrant people and other racists in the environmental and birth control movements, check it out. If you don’t know how birth control devices are tested on poor people in the global south, or that ones that are banned in the US are still being used elsewhere by US NGOs, read up! A lot of this will be in the pieces I linked above and am linking below, although some of this, especially the pamphlet I just found, are a bit out-of-date.

I have a few other pieces of writing on the anarcha library blog: Putting the Control Back in Birth Control: Racism, Class and Reproductive Rights (2005)

Strong Hearts and Poisoned Waters: The Exclusion of Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement in the U.S. (2004)

White Pro-Lifers on Undocumented Mothers: Hypocrisy and Racism (2009) (some of this is repeated in “Invasion…” as it came prior to it)

Controlling Gendered Immigrants and Racialized Populations: overpopulation, immigration and environmental sustainability

Beyond Welfare Queens: Developing a Race, Class and Gender Analysis of Welfare and Welfare Reform.

All these and more at http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com

Feminism as CIA plot

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:56:42 -0500

New Statesman - So, it turns out feminism is a CIA plot to undermine the left

Check out this article. In the video within, the comments about the CIA come up about 3:30 in. I find it absolutely ridiculous that he would use this to excuse the non-diverse panels that the commenter in the beginning of the video brings up (although he denies that’s what’s happening). I find it interesting that the article paints this discussion as having to do with feminism itself being a CIA plot, but check out the comment I pasted below for some more context on this. I have heard of radical feminists exposing Gloria Steinem’s relationship to the CIA and her liberalizing impact before and tried to research it further (and by the way, if you have any articles about this, let me know how to find them, because I’ve looked for them before without any success), because I feel that it may be somewhat significant as far as the liberalization and identity-politics aspects of the feminism that became mainstream.

I’ve written about foundations/non-profits and the ways they undermine more radical foundations of movements before, and it’s complicated to frame it as some sort of conspiracy. I don’t necessarily believe that it was a conspiracy per se, but of course the projects that get funded are the ones that people with money find useful. Take that how you will.

Keep in mind that many radical feminists were opposed to participation in domination. They didn’t want equality within the system. They wanted to destroy the system.

Notice also that even today, feminist radical people, especially people of color, such as those in INCITE!, have been calling out mainstream feminism for their relationships to the prison industrial complex and the non-profit industrial complex. The (Ford Foundation-funded) non-profits tend to offer solutions to problems that are not real solutions- that further criminalize and/or marginalize POC.

bobf
29 February 2012 at 21:48

Regarding the U.S. power elite and the CIA’s apparent promotion of certain anti-patriarchal left middle-class feminist groups, in 1975 members of the non-foundation-subsidized radical feminist Redstockings held a press conference to disclose to other U.S. feminists Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem’s previous involvement with the CIA. Redstockings noted at this time that “It has been widely recognized that one major CIA strategy is to create or support parallel organizations which provide alternatives to radicalism and yet appear progressive enough to appease dissatisfied elements of the society.”

And there is some evidence that a Random House book on the feminist revolution which was to have contained a chapter on Steinem’s past CIA links also had “restricted” material pulled at Steinem’s request. As Current Biography Yearbook 1988 noted, “a Village Voice columnist, writing in the May 21, 1979 issue, darkly hinted that she [Steinem] might have prevailed upon Random House to delete a chapter entitled `Gloria Steinem and the CIA’ from The Feminist Revolution, a collection of essays by writers affiliated with the Redstockings.” And as Nancy Borman observed in the July 1979 issue of the Lower East Side-based Overthrow Magazine:

“Publication of Feminist Revolution was delayed nearly three years…and when the book was finally released…the chapter on Gloria Steinem and the CIA had been deleted in its entirety…Six weeks after Feminist Revolution was finally published five members of the Redstockings held a press conference to argue that their book would be better described as `censored.’…The near-total blackout on the Steinem/Random House censorship story is reminiscent of the level of enthusiasm Redstockings encountered when they first tried to get coverage for the story of Steinem and the CIA.”

Other politically radical women anti-war activists have attempted in the past to alert a new generation of feminists to the Ms. magazine founder’s past CIA links. Australian anti-war writer-activist Joan Coxsedge’s 1982 book, Rooted In Secrecy: The Clandestine Element In Australian Politics, for instance, contained a section titled “Sisterhood and the CIA,” in which she made the following observation:

“It goes without saying that because of the growing participation and influence of women in the political arena, certain radical sections of the women’s movement are under scrutiny by secret agencies, including the CIA…The CIA attacks in a variety of ways. One method is to defuse the movement by infiltration and diverting its aim into safe reformist channels. Another method is to set up rival conservative organizations…The CIA involved itself in the international women’s movement as early as 1962. At that time, it contributed thousands of dollars a year to the Committee of Correspondence, a New York-based group consisting of 18 American women and 12 associates…The Committee was in contact with at least 5,500 women in 120 countries…The Committee made a big point in its literature that it was `non-government and independent.’ It held conferences in conjunction with the United Nations and was in a prime position to locate and collect information on women leaders around the world…An example of the watering-down of radical demands was provided by the 1975 disclosure of Gloria Steinem’s role in the Women’s Liberation Movement…Feminists have accused Ms. of substituting itself for the genuine movement, blocking knowledge of authentic activists and ideas.”

And in her 1983 book, The Future Of Women, former University of Chicago Professor of Sociology Marlene Dixon wrote:

“Bourgeois feminism…fights only to gain…equality with men under the rule of capital…Bourgeois women can become controllers of bank and finance capital, petty bourgeois women can become their vice presidential lieutenants. For 10 years this has been the obsession of the bourgeois feminist movement, under the hegemony of such CIA types as Gloria Steinem…And yet during those same years…the conditions of life of all women have been under increasing attack.”

"I am an unapologetic marriage abolitionist, which means that I believe that the financial and..."

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:30:06 -0500

““I am an unapologetic marriage abolitionist, which means that I believe that the financial and legalized structural advantages currently attached to the institution of marriage in this country should not be linked to the practice of marriage as such, but should be available to all people who want to collaborate on home, family, support and love on their own terms.””

- Alexis Pauline Gumbs (via feministquotes)

fuckyeahanarchistbanners: theothertruths: we’re pro-choice and...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 02:32:03 -0500

fuckyeahanarchistbanners:

theothertruths:

we’re pro-choice and we riot

We’re Pro-Choice And We Riot && Anti-Racist Action

Pussy Riot’s Performance At One Of The World’s Most Hallowed...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:17:09 -0500

Pussy Riot’s Performance At One Of The World’s Most Hallowed Orthodox Churches

Posted by JacobSloan on February 28, 2012

Pussy Riot is a bright young Moscow musical act known for its anti-Putin message and raucous behavior. Their latest shenanigans were a blasphemous performance at Russia’s main cathedral. Russia Today explains:

Russian Cossacks are to stand guard over Moscow’s Orthodox churches after a feminist punk band broke into a Cathedral and sang blasphemous songs at the altar. Earlier this month, four members of the all-girl band Pussy Riot rushed the church dressed in mini-dresses and wearing masks. Without losing time, they sang a song entitled Holy Shit before being escorted out by security.

"I don’t believe feminism adequately revolts without opposing the gender binary and at the same time..."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:04:06 -0500

“I don’t believe feminism adequately revolts without opposing the gender binary and at the same time promotes liberation from all systems of domination. And of course I imply in the title that feminism is revolting (as in repulsive) when it is transphobic, and when it attempts or justifies participation in systems of domination.”

- When Feminism is Revolting: Initial Thoughts on Abolition of Gender (2012)

When Feminism is Revolting: Initial Thoughts on Abolition of Gender

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:30:05 -0500

by stacy, aka sallydarity

“People do not revolt against what is natural, therefore inevitable; what is not inevitable could be otherwise—it is arbitrary therefore social. The logical and necessary implication of women’s revolt, like all revolts, is that the situation can be changed. If not, why revolt? Belief in the possibility of change implies belief in the social origins of the situation.” Christine Delphy, Close to Home 211

“The implications of this are indeed radical. The political goal envisaged is not the raising of women’s status, nor equality between women and men, but the abolition of sex differences themselves. In a non-patriarchal society there would be no social distinctions between men and women, nor between heterosexuality and homosexuality.” Stevi Jackson, Christine Delphy 120

If the gender/sex binary was imposed on humankind as a way to naturalize male domination, this would mean that all of us would be much more liberated by gaining freedom from imposed gender boxes. We need a feminism (if the term is not to be abandoned) that liberates us all. A while back, I got into some arguments over transphobia with some feminists on an anarchist feminist listserv, during which I thought one particular woman I was debating with was being essentialist—believing that there’s something essential to women, specifically those assigned female at birth. I brought up the realities about intersex people, trans people, the lack of universality among those she defined as women (racial, class, etc), as a way to debunk this idea that there can be a line drawn between male and female and that we can define women as a stable category. I reread the argument more recently, however, and realized that I wasn’t dealing with this sort of essentialism, in that particular case. My rival was quoting the notoriously transphobic Sheila Jeffreys, whose ideas about gender are actually not that far off from some other feminists I’ve been reading to gain insight into this naturalization of a gender hierarchy (and notably, writings by some of these feminists, such as Monique Wittig have also been reproduced and distributed in anarchist spaces). I have found that a number of feminist and queer radicals have promoted ideas that could potentially undermine certain people’s autonomy and agency. We can draw from different authors or ideologies, but we must decisively aim towards that which empowers everyone.

I’ve determined that the disagreements between and among feminists and trans* (see footnote[1]) folks (not that they’re mutually exclusive) on the question of gender is that “gender” doesn’t have a commonly understood meaning. The thing is, the term gender is used to talk about the social aspects attached to what is commonly understood as sex (physical/anatomical/genetic/whatever)—sex is perceived as the container, and gender is the contents (we’ll discuss the problem with this distinction later). “Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was used solely to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.”[i] This isn’t to validate a psychologist’s understanding of transsexuality and gender, nor the binary, but to point out the context in which it was initially used to describe gender. What was being discussed when the term was popularized within feminism was how the roles and the social characteristics prescribed for women and men are not natural but imposed—that women wouldn’t be submissive if it weren’t for social forces, and if we could break down the coercion that enforces gender, we could each be ourselves. An understanding of gender as a mismatch or dysphoria does not necessarily have anything to do with a binary, whereas the feminist conception of gender specifically refers to the binary gender roles and requirements about dress and demeanor.

Everyone wants freedom from the coercive aspects of gender. But in some feminists’ minds gender is intimately tied with power: masculine/men equal domination, feminine/women equal subordination. “Gender” refers in this sense to who we’re supposed to be—to prescribed roles. Of course there’s going to be disagreement if the same word is used for how we define ourselves. Yet the fact that many do not agree to what extent the latter can be separated from the former explains this attitude shared by certain folks who identify as radical feminists and/or lesbian feminists that has led, at different points and to varying degrees, to hateful comments and/or actions, invalidation, and/or ostracism of people with butch, femme, masculine, or feminine identities, heterosexuals, bisexuals, sex workers, and/or trans folks, especially transsexuals who were assigned male at birth.

Perhaps language is just inadequate to describe all that which gets lumped into the term “gender.” Kate Bornstein offers a breakdown of different aspects of gender: gender assignment, gender attribution, gender roles, gender identity, etc. Gender assignment, attribution and roles are coercive, and are part of the gender binary system. Gender identity, though somewhat based on the ideas of gender in this patriarchal society, is more about how you identify in terms of gender, which doesn’t necessarily have to exist within the binary. Judith Butler has discussed gender as performativity, which I find intriguing, but is written in largely inaccessible language, and arguably does not adequately address the power dynamics involved, nor the ways in which people are inclined to one gender or another.

The coercive aspects of gender, especially gender roles, are more along the lines of what certain feminists refer to as gender. I will tentatively call this “gender stratum” for lack of a better word. “Gender stratum” also clearly refers to aspects of gender within a hierarchal order. Because I have concerns about the term “identity” as possibly reinforcing an idea of something fixed or static, I will use the term “gender inclination” to refer to one’s own sense of self in terms of gender, although I do not claim to be able to precisely define what this means. I agree that without gender stratum, gender inclination might look very different, but it is impossible to know what gender inclination would look like without power relationships. It is important to acknowledge the complexity of gender inclination additionally because there is a great diversity of gendered combinations of bodies, sexualities, styles of dress, emotional characteristics, and activities of interest that cannot be simply said to be a mixing and matching within a binary.

It is interesting that the potential of certain feminist ideas which challenge the idea of gender coercion could come into such conflict with concepts of gender inclination which also challenge this idea. These feminist ideas have some value in their understanding about gender stratum, but need to be challenged for their ciscentrism or cissexism[ii] when it comes to their treatment of gender inclination.

Newest anarcha library additions

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:43:46 -0500

the latest on http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com:

ANTHOLOGY CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS (Survivors of Sexual Assault….) (2012)

N’Dréa: One Woman’s Fight to Die Her Own Way (2005)

Not Your Mom’s Trans 101 (2010)

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got (2011)

Anarcho-Transhuman #1: Feminism + Queering All The Things (2012)

It’s Down to This: stories, critiques and ideas on community and collective response to sexual violence and accountability (2012)

Letter to a Gender Rebel (2012)

Transcending Anatomy #1: A Guide to Bodies and Sexuality for Partners of Trans People (2011)

When Feminism is Revolting: Initial Thoughts on Abolition of Gender (2012)

"White Supremacy": An IAS Lexicon series pamphlet

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:17:15 -0500

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to come up with an adequate definition of it. Yet the social and political effects of race are very real. Race is like a dollar bill—a human creation rather than a fact of nature that has value only because people say it does. And like money, people give race “value” because it serves a function in society. That function in the United States is to suppress class conflict.

In the United States, the system of race (what we now call “white supremacy”) emerged in the late 1600s to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. Through a series of laws, they granted the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to be excluded from enslavement, move about freely without a pass, acquire property, bear arms, enjoy free speech and assembly, change jobs, and vote. For their part, they respected the property of the rich, helped seize indigenous lands, and enforced slavery. In accepting this arrangement, the English poor (now called “whites”) went against their class interests to serve their “racial” ones, and thereby reinforced the power of the rich.

This cross-class alliance between the ruling class and a section of the working class is the genesis of white supremacy in the United States. It continues to this day. In this system, members of the cross-class alliance get defined as white, while those excluded from it are relegated to a “not-white” status. By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploits their labor, too, working-class members of the white group or “race” have historically tied their interests to those of the elite rather than the rest of the working class. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy ever since.

As this white alliance grew to include other ethnicities, the result was a curious form of democracy: the white democracy. In the white democracy, all whites were considered equal (even as the poor were subordinated to the rich and women were subordinated to men). At the same time, every single white person was considered superior to every single person of color. It was a system in which whites had an interest in and expectation of favored treatment, in a society that claimed to be democratic. It was democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone else.

In the white democracy, whites praised freedom, equality, democracy, hard work, and equal opportunity, while simultaneously insisting on higher wages, preferential access to the best jobs, informal unemployment insurance (first hired, last fired), full enjoyment of civil rights, and the right to send their kids to the best schools, live in the nicest neighborhoods, and receive decent treatment by the police. Even white women, who were otherwise denied full citizenship, enjoyed the benefits of white democracy, such as the right to legal representation, favored access to certain occupations (teaching, nursing, and clerical work), easier access to better housing (including indoor plumbing, heat, electricity, and time-saving household appliances), and/or the all-important guarantee that their children would never be enslaved.

In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du Bois ca called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation, genocide, reservation, and other forms of racial oppression. The result was that working-class whites and people of color were oppressed because the working class was divided. The tragic irony is that many poor whites often did not get to make use of these advantages, yet despite this, they defended them bitterly.

The white democracy continues to exist, even after the end of slavery and legal segregation. Take any social indicator—graduation rates, homeownership rates, median family wealth, prison incarceration rates, life expectancy rates, infant mortality rates, cancer rates, unemployment rates, or median family debt—and you’ll find the same thing: in each category, whites are significantly better off than any other racial group. As a group, whites enjoy more wealth, less debt, more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites have a better work ethic. But U.S. history tells us that the white democracy, born over four hundred years ago, lives on.

The white race, then, does not describe people from Europe. It is a social system that works to maintain capitalist rule and prevent full democracy through a system of (relatively minor) privileges for whites along with the subordination of those who are defined as not white. The cross-class alliance thus represents one of the most significant obstacles to creating a truly democratic society in the United States.

This is not to say that white supremacy is the “worst” form of oppression. All oppression is equally morally wrong. Nor is it to imply that if white supremacy disappears, then all other forms of oppression will magically melt away. It is simply to say that one of the most significant obstacles to organizing freedom movements throughout U.S. history has been the white democracy, and that it remains a major obstacle today.

In a global economy (and a global recession), corporate elites no longer want to pay white workers the privileges they have historically enjoyed. Instead, they want to pay everyone the same low wages and have them work under the same terrible conditions.

Generally speaking, whites have responded to this attempt to treat them like regular workers in two ways. One is through “multiculturalism.” This approach, popular in universities and large corporations, seeks to recognize the equality of all cultural identities. This would be fine, except multiculturalism regards white as one culture among others. In this way, it hides how it functions as an unjust form of power. Multiculturalism therefore fails to attack the white democracy. It leaves it standing.

The other response is color-blindness, or the belief that we should “get beyond” race. But this approach also perpetuates the white democracy, because by pretending that race doesn’t exist socially just because it doesn’t exist biologically, one ends up pretending that white advantage doesn’t exist either. Once again, this reproduces white democracy rather than abolishes it.

There are right- and left-wing versions of color-blindness. On the Right, many whites sincerely insist they aren’t racist but nonetheless support every measure they can to perpetuate their white advantages, including slashing welfare, strengthening the prison system, undermining indigenous sovereignty, defending the “war on drugs,” and opposing “illegal immigration.” On the Left, many whites assert that race is a “divisive” issue and that we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. This argument sounds inclusive, but it really maintains the white democracy because it lets whites decide which issues are everyone’s and which ones are “too narrow.” It is another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment.

Multiculturalism and color-blindness (on the Right or Left) are no solution to white supremacy. The only real option is for whites to reject the white democracy and side with the rest of humanity. Fighting prisons, redlining, anti-immigrant laws, police brutality, attacks on welfare (which are usually thinly disguised attacks on African Americans), and any other form of racial discrimination are valuable ways to undermine the cross-class alliance. So are struggles to defend indigenous sovereignty, affirmative action, embattled ethnic studies programs in high schools and colleges, and the right for people of color to caucus in organizations or movements. All of these struggles—which people of color engage in daily, but whites only occasionally do, if at all—seek to undermine whites’ interest in and expectation of favored treatment. They point out the way toward a new society.

We can see this in U.S. history, when fights to abolish the cross-class alliance have opened up radical possibilities for all people. Feminism in the 1840s and the movement for the eight-hour day in the 1860s came out of abolitionism. Radical Reconstruction (1868–76) very nearly built socialism in the South as it sought to give political and economic power to the freedmen and women. The civil rights struggle in the 1960s not only overthrew legal segregation, it also kicked off the women’s rights, free speech, student, queer, peace, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble, everything is possible. An attack on white supremacy raises the level of struggle against oppression in general.

Even today, the white democracy stands at the path to a free society like a troll at the bridge. The task is to chase the troll away, not to pretend it doesn’t exist or invite it to the multicultural table. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people currently defined as white would have no role or influence in such a society. It only means that they would participate as individuals equal to everyone else, not as a favored group.

Political movements in the United States must make the fight against any expression of white democracy an essential part of their strategies. The expansion of freedom for people of color has always expanded freedom for whites as well. Abolishing white interests is not “divisive,” “narrow,” or “reverse racism.” It’s the key to a free society.

Note: The following text is from the forthcoming “White Supremacy” pamphlet—one of a series of free pamphlets designed by Josh MacPhee (justseeds.org) in the forthcoming Lexicon Series, created by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (anarchiststudies.org) to offer definitional understandings of commonly used keywords among occupiers and others engaged in a politics from below. “White Supremacy” was written by Joel Olson, author of The Abolition of White Democracy, a founding member of Phoenix Copwatch, and currently involved with the Repeal Coalition in Phoenix. This pamphlet will be available in print form soon, along with four other words in the first batch of Lexicon pamphlets: “Colonialism,” “Anarchism,” “Gender,” and “Power.”

anarcha library

I noticed the article titled How to induce a miscarriage herbally (and safely) is currently the...

Top Posts on anarchalibrary

Popular Posts (30 days)

Popular Posts (All time)

Committing a crime does not remove…

Spring Additions

"Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer..."

Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation

"Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is..."

Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation

VIDEO: Selma James on Her Six Decades of Activism

Happy May Day!

Pussy Riot and free speech: How Russian capitalism and religion are attacking dissent

Quiet Rumors new edition available later this year from AK Press

Joel Olson 1967-2012

The Myth of Overpopulation

Feminism as CIA plot

"I am an unapologetic marriage abolitionist, which means that I believe that the financial and..."

fuckyeahanarchistbanners: theothertruths: we’re pro-choice and...

Pussy Riot’s Performance At One Of The World’s Most Hallowed...

Pussy Riot’s Performance At One Of The World’s Most Hallowed Orthodox Churches

"I don’t believe feminism adequately revolts without opposing the gender binary and at the same time..."

When Feminism is Revolting: Initial Thoughts on Abolition of Gender

Newest anarcha library additions

"White Supremacy": An IAS Lexicon series pamphlet