Quotes from the titled essay in Queering Anarchism:
I have a memory. It was 1984: a presidential election year in the United States. We had a mock election in school. To learn about the process? To start practicing early? I was eight years old. Only one person in our class voted for Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan. When these results were read aloud, the girl in front of me turned around and pointedly asked, “It was you, wasn’t it?” It wasn’t.
After school (that day? another?) a boy from my class asked me if I was a Democrat or a Republican. When I said, “Neither,” he was perplexed. “You have to be one or the other,” he responded, with all the assurance of one stating an obvious and unquestionable truth. “Well, I’m not,” I insisted. I knew you didn’t have to be; my parents voted, but they didn’t identify themselves with either party. In my mind’s eye, this boy’s face screws up with outraged and frustrated disbelief. “You have to be one or the other!”
Democrat or Republican? Gay or straight? Man or woman? Capitalist or anticapitalist? Anarchist or archist?
Us or them?
Anarchist politics are usually defined by their opposition to state, capitalism, patriarchy, and other hierarchies. My aim in this essay is to queer that notion of anarchism in a number of ways. To queer is to make strange, unfamiliar, weird; it comes from an old German word meaning to cross. What new possibilities arise when we learn to cross, to blur, to undermine, or overflow the hierarchical and binary oppositions we have been taught to believe in?
In many ways, I think we've been stuck with a definition of anarchism that is very white, very cishet, very abled, very male, and very Eurocentric. We need to expand beyond that to understand aspects of anarchism in a different light.
Hierarchy relies on separation. Or rather, the belief in hierarchy relies on the belief in separation. Neither is fundamentally true. Human beings are extrusions of the ecosystem—we are not separate, independent beings. We are interdependent bodies, embedded in a natural world itself embedded in a vast universe. Likewise, all the various social patterns we create and come to believe in are imaginary (albeit with real effects on our bodyminds). Their existence depends entirely on our belief, our obedience, our behavior. These in turn are shaped by imagined divisions. To realize that the intertwined hierarchical oppositions of hetero/homo, man/woman, whiteness/color, mind/body, rational/emotional, civilized/savage, social/natural, and more are all imaginary is perhaps a crucial step in letting go of them. How might we learn to cross the divide that does not really exist except in our embodied minds?
Queering might allow recognition that life is never contained by the boxes and borders the mind invents. Taxonomies of species or sexualities, categories of race or citizenship, borders between nations or classes or types of politics—these are fictions. They are never necessary. To be sure, fictions have their uses. Perhaps in using them, we may learn to hold them lightly so that we, in turn, are not held by them.
Conventional lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics is based on opposites: we an oppressed minority and they the privileged majority. In this version, the problem is inequality and the answer is legal protection. Queer theory troubles this, suggesting instead, in my mind, that the problem comes from belief in the identities. The thing about opposites is that they depend on each other to exist: straight is not gay, gay is not straight and bisexuality still confuses people. This leads to all sorts of possibilities for control—we learn to ask ourselves and each other, is he really...? Is she really...? Am I really…? We’re encouraged to believe that our sense of gender and who we fancy tell us who we are and where we fit in a sexual hierarchy imagined to already exist. Whereas a state-oriented LGBT politics tries to challenge the hierarchies of hetero/homo, cis/trans, while keeping the identities, queer politics might ask how the identities themselves might already be state-like with their borders and policing.
I have similar questions about anarchist and other identities. How much energy that could go into creating other-than-state-like ways of living gets lost to efforts to appear anarchist enough? I know I’m not the only one who suffers from anarcho-perfectionism! Likewise, I’ve seen loads of energy go into arguments about whether so and so is really anarchist or not, or such and such is really anarchism.
I yearn for honesty, complexity, and compassion. I don’t want to be asked, or told, to choose from a list of options already defined, already decided, already judged. I want to have a discussion. Connection. Intercourse. A chance to listen and to be listened to: giving and receiving, receiving and giving. Let’s experience different possibilities for identities, for relationships, for politics. Let’s meet.
So, is cooperation better than competition? Is queer better than straight? Are those the right answers? Is that how I should live my life?
I feel like the first question is something that isn't... actually said? So it feels out of place, but the sentiment of the rest (choosing binaries) is still fine.
The way I see it, at the moment anyway, neither queer nor anarchy is about finding the right answers or working out the right way to live. Both are about the experience of connecting with others, with self. I almost always find it harder to connect with someone who is insisting that their story is the story, their truth the truth. Where’s the space left for my story, my truth? Your story, your truth? How can different people, different creatures, different stories and voices learn to fit together if any one story tries to take up all of the space? Like the Zapatistas, I want to live in “a world where many worlds fit.”
To hold tightly—to shame, resentment, or any emotion or any story of how the world really is—is to be held tightly. This is not freedom. To hold gently is to be held gently. This, to me, is freedom. No opposition, no tension, between intimacy and spaciousness. Instead, there is a gentle dance that comes from a deep stillness.
To become anarchist, to become queer, is not easy. To learn to cross lines, to see that the lines are not even real, is a radical transformation for those of us who were raised to believe in them. But it need not be a struggle. Struggling against the world as it is, struggling against my experience, gets in my way. Sure, the world is not the world of my dreams. Why should it be? To stop my pain, or yours? Running from pain is a noisy affair. It distracts.
Here’s a queer proposal: the state is always a state of mind. It’s putting life in boxes and then judging it in terms of those boxes, those borders, as if they were what really mattered. It’s trying to get other people to do what you want them to do without so much regard for their needs, their desires. It’s self-consciousness, self-policing, self-promotion, self-obsession. It’s anxiety and depression. It’s hyperactivity stemming from the fantasy that being seen to be doing something is better than doing nothing, even if what you’re doing might cause more harm than good. It’s resentment at self and others for not doing it right, for not being good enough. It’s the belief that security comes from control. And it’s a source of tremendous suffering in the world.
I don't know if I buy this proposal because... so much of the state is tangible in my life. As an immigrant who has (overt) conditional ability to exist within a State, these borders and boxes really do matter. Having to be constantly aware of them is harmful, and knowing that they often stop me from doing things I would otherwise want to because there is a lot of fear. I think the State is less a 'state of mind' but that it infiltrates our states of mind all the time, even we we're least expecting it.
I find the use of anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity odd and misplaced here. Perhaps less so anxiety or depression because there is a lot of anxiety and depression built up within the walls of the State that acts as triggers for many people, but I don't think that hyperactivity really fits in the conversation being had.
Perhaps this whole area could've been redirected to make the point, which is salient; this feels really conflicted in its organisation.
It’s also something I do. When I look inward, when I meditate, I can see how much the mind is attached to individualistic stories of myself: as important, as weak, as wonderful, as useless, as victim, hero, or villain. The stories fluctuate and change form. And when I believe them, they affect all of my relationships. I, too, can perform the state.
Again, I feel like this is clumsily making a point that would otherwise be really interesting. We do often want to control people into "doing right," and it is a way of "performing the State," but... Hm. Something still feels off, as if individualistic choices (to meditate) are going to be the answer to individualistic behaviours.
They can help, no doubt. But we need combinations of actions and behaviours. It kind of misses what accountability beyond the self would look like and how that could function. (Not in any kind of self-flagellating way, either. We do this all the time when we discuss things with our friends, but we need more social tools to be able to ask questions to help people get to the root of things when they need to.)
And when I again get caught up in my own thoughts, my own desires, my own stories about who I am, and who you are, what should have happened, how the world should be…then I see so little outside the dramas of my own mind. Everything I see, everyone I meet, I reinterpret through the lens of those fictions. I take myself and my beliefs very, very seriously. Just like the State.
I'm very 'yes and no' about this part. Because I understand how I can view some people through the lenses that are hard to take off, to not give them the necessary space to just be, and that has been something I have worked hard to unlearn throughout my life (especially once I started getting into teaching and youth liberation).
But I also feel that it's not "just like the State" because you rarely have power in that space; it definitely can be "in service of the State," which is something teachers have to fight back against all the time. What, I think, we need to watch for is the potential that this harms people within our organisations and groups, how often it happens to people without it being recognised.
But also, it needs to be understood that this viewpoint is something that is very easy for abusers to manipulate. And they have. There's a delicate scenario that needs to be understood, and we need to do more collective work in making that happen.
Is it radical to hate myself for that? Is it radical to hate “cops,” “capitalists,” “politicians,” “racists,” or “homophobes” for that? In my own experience, the two are intimately intertwined. Inseparable.
This is a strange way to end this, and I'm not fully on-board with this idea. Unless your experiences are genuinely inseparable, in which case you may want to explore that.
It isn't radical for us to hate ourselves for working through the lessons our world and lives have taught us. However, I think it is unfair to liken that to hating cops, capitalists, politicians, racists, or homophobes. Honestly, it's nonsense.
Is it that you have control over someone else? Do you perpetuate those systems through your own actions and behaviours? If someone is working against cops and doesn't hate them, that doesn't bother me; however, people have very real reasons for hating them, and telling that "it's not radical" does nothing to deal with either the existence of the police or why they have that hatred in the first place. The same is true for all the other groups of people.
