[Anarchafeminists] [Fwd: [faf] Anarcha-Feminists Take to the Streets ...Because We Don't Need Anyone's Permission.]

Wed May 5 14:56:06 UTC 2010

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [faf] Anarcha-Feminists Take to the Streets ...Because We Don't
Need Anyone's Permission.
From:    "Nimda" <nimda.wil at tiscali.co.uk>
Date:    Tue, May 4, 2010 6:52 am
To:      londonfeministnetwork at yahoogroups.co.uk
         "FAFList" <faf at lists.riseup.net>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

(just thought some might be interested in these articles by American
Anarcha-Feminists. Nimda"

Anarcha-Feminists Take to the Streets ...Because We Don't Need Anyone's
Permission.

by Anarcha Feminists
Sunday May 2nd, 2010 12:49 AM

This was the communique distributed before today's Reclaim the Streets.
A call for an Anarcha-Feminist Bloc had been made and many anarchist
women and queer people of all sorts took to the streets.

This is only a beginning. We come together today as anarcha-feminists
excited because of this new beginning. Anarcha-feminism has barely been
flushed out, put into action, or recognized as a politic by even
ourselves. And many of us have never known of each other's existence,
therefore never knowing what we are capable of. We find it fitting to
meet in the streets, where strong social bonds are created and great
turns in history unfold. Make friends and comrades this May Day and
expect great things to come.

There's a new anarchism on the tips of all of our tongues. But there is
also a legacy of radical and powerful movements that we may find
enlightening if we are aware enough to not get caught in the trappings
that brought them to an end. In order to determine what we wish to be we
must see where we began...

The New Left movements pushed us forward light years in their
declarations that struggle is to be found on many, many more fronts than
class alone. Movements that we are the most proud of in our left
histories -- Black Power, Queer Liberation, Women's Liberation, etc. --
were quite literally crafting a future reality that looked very
promising. As these movements crumbled or weakened we can see how
aspects of these struggles that lacked a critique of authoritarian (and
especially State) power fell into the arms of liberalism. Liberalism
assumes and maintains the delusion that a government or any kind of
higher power is necessary and responsible for looking after us, to
ensure that all is peaceful and equal. We are kept in a state of
perpetual childhood, where all of our daily actions and disputes are
subject to judgment by the guiding hand of authoritarian father figures
from God to government, governor, mayor, banker, husband, to daddy dearest.

And so identity politics entered the scene, stage Left. Post-colonial,
feminist, and especially queer politics that once fought for autonomous
power distinct from normative society became a sad shadow of its formal
self as they became a politic about recognition within society, which
made these movements dependent on the structures responsible for their
unique tribulations.

Some of our comrades have suggested we throw out identity politics all
together. And this feels like a tempting idea. We are tired of the trend
of tokenization. Every political event we attend someone is tokenizing
their self, their mom, or some abstract group of people. Sometimes this
happens even in the name of "not tokenizing!" We see this as a
depressing attempt to establish legitimacy as a victim (as if that is a
cool thing to be!)

Within this context the activist's job has become that of making
diagnosis after diagnosis of who is and is not oppressed. Each
individual carries with them all sorts of unique atrocities that have
been imposed on their bodies and psyches as well as horrors they've done
to others. It's dishonest to sum up our lived experiences as that of a
"woman," an "immigrant," a "gender queer," or even a combination of any
number of recognizable marginal identities.

But this isn't even the bigger problem. Identity politic-obsessed
activism looks to make us feel safe within systems that are not designed
to be safe or freeing and does not take action to dismantle the system
completely. The Left has built an army of Gandhis. Gandhi, mind you, so
loved and romanticized the oppressed of his country that he could not
bring himself to endorse a social order which might end the existence of
their oppression. Even though he was seen as very radical at the time,
he proved to be a liberal at heart. Ending caste discrimination is quite
different from abolishing a caste system completely. We must make the
decision whether it is more in our interests to demand equal rights or
to fight for a future (or maybe a present) where demanding anything from
anyone other than ourselves is senseless.

There is nothing powerful in being valorized, recognized, and
romanticized as victims. Who cares if men know that some huge statistic
of us is raped by them? Does that stop rape? Who cares if everyone
remembers to get your preferred pronoun right? Does that help you when
you're in custody and the cops are discussing what's between your legs
so they can determine which cell block you "belong" in? And who cares if
your neighbor is so outraged by your boyfriend's violent outbursts that
she calls the police? You do, because you are the one with a police gun
in your face and you are the one later bailing out your boyfriend
despite the fact that the 1st of the month is quickly approaching. That
which establishes our horrible positions in society will never abolish
those positions. And we want out. We no longer want to be victims, but
we know that we can not count on the State, men, white people, straight
people, the cops -- whoever it is for you -- to do this for us.

Ironically, despite our critiques -- and sometimes hatred -- of identity
politics, we find ourselves coming together around a (somewhat loose)
identity: We are some people who no longer want to be victims of gender
tyranny and misogyny. Within this grouping we are hoping to circumvent,
to a certain extent, our gender and what that means for us when we are
living our lives in this Man's World so we might gain some insight as to
what it might look like to not have gender dynamics influence every
interaction. We come together to fight for a reality where identities
such as "man," "woman," and "trans" are logical impossibilities. We know
that together we can tend to our misgivings that these desires are
irrational and get down to business.

We will not, in fact, be throwing out identity politics all together. If
nothing else because we refuse to let liberals and non-profits have our
radical politics. But also because we do find it useful to identify and
analyze our miserable conditions in order to have a point of a
departure, in order to know very clearly what we do not want to be.

We do not want a feminism that looks like a social worker behind a desk
with concerned eyebrows. We want a feminism that stays up late at the
kitchen table convincing us that we deserve better. We do not want a
feminism that will put us up in a run down state shelter for a short
while until we're "back on our feet." We want a feminism that will break
back into our house we were just kicked out of and tell the land lord
he'll have hell to pay from a mob of angry bitches if he attempts
eviction again.

And when one of us is raped and murdered for our gender we definitely do
not want more empty calls for "justice" and quiet candle-lit vigils. We
want a feminism that acts from a much wider range of emotion and
expectation. We want a visible expression of exasperation, anger, and
frustration that makes obvious that we are finished with these routines:
the routines of violence against women and queer people, the routines of
quietly shaking our heads at these tragedies, the routines of asking for
change. We want a feminism that is not afraid to try new things, that is
dynamic enough to know that at times healing comes in the form of
vengeance and change comes in the form of destroying what destroys you.

This MayDay anarcha-feminism may just look like a riotous street party
with a contingent that is strikingly dudeless, but that rumbling you
hear is what lies right beneath the surface. Great ruptures and new
worlds are in store, but we can not be passive spectators in creating
our new selves. Kill the liberal in your head. There are no excuses now
for not exchanging numbers, saying hello on the street and building
relationships where we plan, scheme, and push each other out of
victim-hood by being the toughest comrades possible in our common
struggles and, perhaps more importantly, in our uncommon struggles.

We're in this together.

Some words, ideas, and inspirations were taken from the following:
Sex, Race, and Class by Selma James; the editorial in Upping the Anti
#9; Gramsci is Dead, Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements,
by Richard Day; We'll Show You Crazy Bitches, communiqué from Take Back
the Night Brooklyn Style; and countless difficult conversations.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/05/02/18646439.php

Although in recent years Take Back the Night has been co-opted by
liberal feminists, it has its roots in the widespread unrest of Italy in
the late seventies. In 1976, a seventeen-year-old was gang-raped in
Rome. A year later, when her case went to trial, she was gang-raped
again by the same men: and this time, her whole body was slashed with
razors in an attempt to keep her silent. Within hours, fifteen thousand
women mobilized, uniformly dressed like the sex workers common to the
district; "NO MORE MOTHERS, WIVES AND DAUGHTERS: LET'S DESTROY THE
FAMILIES!" was the cry heard in the street. They came just short of
burning the neighborhood to the ground.
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/11127
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/anarchafeminists/attachments/20100505/7fe6ee4e/attachment.htm>