#Queer Anarchism

[nihildes]

you didn't see shit. 🤫🏴🖤

[ohholydyke]

See the thing about fundamentalists and trads and Christian nationalists and MAGA evangelicals and ethnocratic bigots is that they render the faith so boring.

I take no issue with the fact that they would look at me and say that I’m not a member of the faithful because their faith is radically, inherently, ontologically distinct from mine. My God is too big and too loving and too esoteric to fit neatly into the gendered understanding of an authoritarian white father disciplining his children for not perfectly falling into lockstep. My Savior is the man who told the religious leaders “Caesar can have his idolatrous blood money, but give God your heart and your faith,” challenging the notion of an earthly ruler. My apostles wrote of the throne of man being empty—there are no masters or kings or governments, there is only Jesus Christ, Basileus Basileōn, king of kings. I believe in radical oneness with God through Christ—one flesh and one body, biblical marriage with the bridegroom whose flesh and blood make up the holy Eucharist. My faith is Queer, ancestral, esoteric, anarchist, insurrectionary, anticolonial, antiracist, unorthodox, disruptive, free. When I encounter the divine, or pray to the saints, or sit in the chapel to pray, I am experiencing communion with the sublime, in every sense of the word, the same presence that made the apostles fall to their faces before the transfiguration, that shaped the world from void, that animates the deep care and rage which boil into every aspect of my being.

When conservatives tell me I am not a Christian it is only because they cannot conceive of a Christ and a faith so big, so all encompassing, so beyond anything our human minds can comprehend, and they cannot conceive being in tune with this divinity and being left senseless by the knowledge that the divine above all else is us and loves us more than we could ever comprehend, such that experiencing this love is enough to leave one fundamentally, ontologically changed down to the fiber of their being. I feel sorrow for them. I pray that Christ may reach into their hearts and open their eyes, that they may see not only the horrors that they commit but also the deep love and freedom that awaits them through abandoning their fundamentalism and their bigotry.

Or, in other words, me every time I see another conservative Christian whining about how people aren’t doing Christianity right because they don’t adhere to a super narrow and watered down version of the faith:

[scottishcommune]

Anti-trans campaigners who threatened to bankrupt Dundee Women’s Festival with lawfare tactics were drowned out at their own event yesterday afternoon by a much larger crowd of queer people and allies, who danced, sang and chanted slogans in the City Square until the rather sad-looking gathering dissipated...

This is a really good reportback of the counter-demonstration against transphobic hate group "Women Won't Wheesht" that took place in Dundee yesterday

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Left to right. First row.

1. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell.

In a joyous and perverse intermingling of fable, myth, heterotopian vision, and pocket wisdom, The Faggots & Their Friends tell us stories of the 70s gay countercultures and offer us strategies and wisdom for our own time living Between Revolutions. These pages sketch a different shape to time and offer instructions for living within it. This story, like our own, plays out in liminal time. Not the time of revolution, and not after-the-revolution, the story occurs between revolutions. Being between revolutions: being enmeshed in slow entropy, in abandoned spaces, in lives forged without recourse to “winning” or “after.” The faggots feel this disintegration, and live best when empires are falling.

2. Be Gay, Do Crime by The Mary Nardini Gang.

Among the discordant chorus of anons who penned the defining texts of the queer anarchist network Bash Back!, none was more fervent in its glorification of criminal desire, decadent hedonism, and social undoing than the Milwaulkee-based Mary Nardini Gang. Their fiery “Towards the Queerest Insurrection” still circulates as an integral manifesto of riotous queerness, while the “Criminal Intimacy” and “Whore Theory” have made their more subterranean way into innumerable conversations and correspondences.

Ten years later, the secretive group supplements these collected writings with a subtle retrospective. Carefully unlocking the hidden layers of their theses on insurrection, they face up to what they got wrong, concede that the world ended somewhere between the Greek insurrection of 2008 and now, and insist upon the vital task of ushering new worlds into being as we live amid the decomposition and cataclysmic death throes of the old one. To their theses on insurrection, they prepend a new arcana tooled for opening onto the queerest of outsides.

Dedicated to their friends among the dead, this pocket edition is a necromantic mirror, an encrypted message to old loves, and an invitation to those finding these words for the first time.

3. The Criminal Child by Jean Genet.

“As for me, I have chosen: I will be on the side of crime. And I will help the children, not to win back access to your houses, your factories, your schools, your laws, and sacraments, but to destroy them.”

So reads this new clandestine translation of a previously censored and unavailable text by Jean Genet. “The Criminal Child” is a critical engagement with the French youth prisons, a reflection on Genet’s formative years within them, a document of hostility towards society and its benevolent reformers, and – as argued by the anonymous afterword – an initiatory magical system.

5. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture by Arthur Evans.

This radical faerie classic, first published in 1978 by Fag Rag Press, uncovers the hidden mythic link between homosexuality and paganism in an elegy for the world of sex and magic vanquished by Christian civilization. From Joan of Arc to the Cathars and the underground worshippers of Diana, the author shows how every upwelling of gender transgression and sexual freedom was targeted by the authorities for total and often violent repression or appropriation. The concluding manifesto calls for pagan reconnection with the living world, the creation of armed anarchist cells, and the destruction of industrial civilization.

Left to right. Row 2.

1. What is Gender Nihilism? A Reader.

A collection gathering readings for discussions on an end to gender: not the proliferation or liberation of gender, but its catastrophic cancellation. The reader brings together writings as old as 1883 and as recent as 2015, juxtaposing nihilist, radical feminist, queer, trans, anticolonial, communizing and insurrectionary approaches with other unclassifiable textual/existential disruptions. Many of the readings are out of print or have only appeared online or in zine form, and include: Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, A.R. Stone, Paul B. Preciado, the entities known as Radicalesbians, Gender Mutiny, Baedan, Ehn Nothing, Laboria Cuboniks and, as always, Anonymous. Also includes “My Preferred Gender Pronoun is Negation,” “Gender Nihilism” by Aidan Rowe, and the gender nihilism anti-manifesto that inspired the collection.

2. Baedan 1 – journal of queer nihilism.

3. Baedan 2 – a queer journal of heresy.

If the first issue of Baedan was a knife thrust wildly in the dark, the second is an effort to examine our enemies in a new light; enemies who bear scars yet endure. In a sense, this issue follows through our initial attack and pushes beyond our own horrors at the consequences of words. We write at a time when everything which seemed slightly possible two years ago has borne its rotten fruit; when queer recuperation has become more powerful and accepted than ever, while the fetish for technology has reached an unprecedented frenzy; when so many efforts at subversion languish under the tyranny of cybernetic identity and aesthetics (even our own etymologies have become identities!); when friends turn away out of fear of the unknown, turn toward all the comforts and certainties of the past (identity politics, traditionalism, religious morality, activism, et al). The old enemies rear their heads and the terrain is as bleak as ever. And yet we take seriously that adage: “There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

4. Baedan 3 – journal of queer time travel.

Bædan: journal of queer time travel marks a further attempt to pose and to flesh out a queer critique of civilization. Queer not only in the sense of coming from those outside and disruptive of the Family, but also in the sense of a critique weirder than its more orthodox cousins. We imagine the Bædan project as an effort to pose the critique of civilization otherwise, to begin from another place. In this issue (and beyond…) we have conjured a strange bestiary of thinking, trying to unearth and trace the tradition of anti-civilization thought in the literature of queerness and in queerness as immanent critique.

*I couldn't find this one online*

[contaminatedvessel]

people think I'm kidding when I say that I believe shoplifting from corporations is okay. you need/want that thing? take that shit and try not to get caught (some security guards can be really fucking violent so be careful).

[anarcho-catboyism]

"The path of resistance is one of pure negation"

Blessed is the Flame Audiobook

Desert Audiobook

Life Without Law Audiobook

[cookthepenguin]

IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, I WILL OFFER FOOD.

IF YOU ARE THIRSTY, I WILL OFFER WATER.

IF YOU ARE COLD, I WILL OFFER WARMTH.

IF YOU ARE IN NEED, ASK AND I WILL GIVE.

IF YOU ARE IN TROUBLE, ASK AND I WILL HELP.

I DO NOT DO THESE THINGS WITH THE HOPE OF BEING REWARDED.

I DO NOT DO THESE THINGS OUT OF FEAR OF PUNISHMENT.

I DO THESE THINGS BECAUSE I KNOW THEM TO BE RIGHT.

I SET MY OWN STANDARDS AND I ALONE ENFORCE THEM.

I AM AN ANARCHIST.

[abyssal-debonair]

“Masculinity and patriarchy are one in the same” is one of the ideological pillars of patriarchy. It frames masculinity as something that can only be affirmed via a dominance relation and renders all forms of counter-hegemonic masculinity invisible. Ceding that territory to patriarchy only serves to erase the butches, trans mascs, trans men, nonbinary people, etc. who explore and live out subversive forms of masculinity. We would be far better served by understanding masculinity as something that patriarchy attempts to capture, rather than something it inherently owns, therefore shifting our understanding of masculinity away from seeing it as a component of the enemy and towards understanding it as continuously contested territory. Patriarchy attempts to enclose masculinity, rigidly define it, tie it to domination and control, and punishes all unsanctioned expressions of it. This capture is not inherent nor is it complete. Trans and gnc people have been undermining that project since it began! Many of the positions explored above take for granted that masculinity is a real and consistently definable phenomena: invented, made material, and defined by patriarchy alone. They assume that patriarchy’s word on masculinity has been the only real word, cis men’s understanding of it the only real understanding of it, its deployment in rigid gender roles its only possible manifestation. Cis men have been at the wheels of centralized power and thus have had more means to make their own voices drown out the rest of us, but subversive masculinities have always been here, have always been a threat to the patriarchal narrative. Many also assume that when queer and trans people refer to masculinity we are always referring to a masculinity that at least gains its meaning from patriarchy. It is time to inform you that your imagination up until this point has been disastrously stifled. Certainly, popular conceptualizations of hegemonic masculinity are inherently patriarchal and gain their meaning from that system. However, it is too far to assume that trans people are always referring to the same framework of masculinity that cis men do. We create our own meaning even as we expand masculinity to the point of meaninglessness. I take testosterone and am seeking top surgery to affirm my womanhood. Glitter, dramatic eyeliner, platform boots, and extremely slutty deep-V shirts validate my sense of my masculinity as much as work boots and button-ups do. Some of us are simply not referring to patriarchal masculinity when we are doing masculinity and what we’re doing is not new. Not only is masculinity not inherently patriarchal: masculinity is not inherently anything at all! Masculinity, femininity, and all gendered terms are vibes-based only and vibes are always changing with people and context! They are not real! Their utility is in play and self-exploration and any insistence of inherent reality beyond that will itself necessarily refer to patriarchy.

read the entire essay by Lee Shevek (@butchanarchy) — she does an excellent job breaking down the problem with conflating masculinity with patriarchy, especially how that leads to vilifying masculine people who are harmed by the patriarchy.

[lichen-punk]

pants update O.o

[shroobles]

[comradeallie]

[nihildes]

can't stop, won't stop.

[blackcat-brazil]

[barely-coherent-anarchist]

ngl i feel like a lot of the 'online left'™ is less focused on actually fighting for socialism, and more focused on adopting the radical aesthetic without engaging in any real world activities that would further leftist causes.

like, prices of everyday goods are at an all time high, we are on the brink of ecological collapse, fascism is on the rise across the globe, and marginalised people are being stripped of their rights every single day.

and yet, while a lot of people are actually getting out there and taking direct action, organising, etc., some of us are too busy just ranting about how the world's going to shit, or arguing amongst ourselves on twitter, or just reading theory without applying said theory to the real world.

don't get me wrong, social media is an important vehicle for the spread of leftist ideas, theory is absolutely vital for understanding how the current systems operate, and our anger is completely justified. but none of these things can change anything without mass movements across the globe taking direct, revolutionary action.

basically, theory is nothing without praxis, and vice versa.

anyways, unhinged rant over lmao.

gonna go grab some breakfast :)

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

A friend is tabling zinecon tomorrow and asked if I'd print some zines for her to give away along with her art zines. I asked her what topics and she said queer and palestine so I chose these.

[selfmedblves]