Quotes from the named essay, found in Queering Anarchism:
Both anarchism and queer activism have long challenged anti-pleasure ideology. Through decades of social struggle, the two overlapping movements have come to share 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. Pleasure activism manifests itself in any number of these cross currents.
Harm reduction has long been recognized as a movement with roots in anarchist direct action.
I think this author needs to define what they understand as "harm reduction," since there are a lot of liberals (and leftists) throwing this phrase around telling us that "voting for Biden" was an example of harm reduction (when it ostensibly was not). And I remember those ideas being floated in the early 2010s, too.
So if it's about genuine harm reduction by providing space for people to be safe while doing something that has the potential to hurt them (e.g., providing needle exchanges for intravenous drug users), that needs to be made more clear.
Such gestures of freedom are a fundamental part of anarchist practice. “You may already be an anarchist,” Crimethinc suggests. “Whenever you act without waiting for instructions or official permission, you are an anarchist. Any time you bypass a ridiculous regulation when no one’s looking, you are an anarchist. If you don’t trust the government, the school system, Hollywood, or the management to know better than you when it comes to things that affect your life, that’s anarchism, too. And you are especially an anarchist when you come with your own ideas and solutions."
I like this, but it feels disjointed from the beginning (mostly because there wasn't an explanation of what was intended by 'harm reduction', so that threw me).
To make sense of Scalia’s dissent, it is useful to look back to thirteenth-century Christian theology, specifically St. Thomas Aquinas’s categorization of “luxuria,” signifying crimes against nature in which masturbation signaled the beginning of a slippery slope leading to sodomy, adultery, and bestiality. For Aquinas and the rest of the “every sperm is sacred” crowd, masturbation is a sort of gateway pleasure, like marijuana is to heroin. It is not very dangerous in and of itself. Yet left to the active imagination, it is capable of opening doors to a vast arena of possibilities.
Over the years, this prohibitive logic only gained steam. The nineteenth-century Temperance Movement sought moral reform and the prohibition of the consumption of alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified in January of 1919. The era set in motion a cavalcade of unintended consequences as markets for alcohol consumption moved from legal, regulated commerce into the providence of an unregulated black market, which involved illegal approaches catering to market demand. Violence and crime followed. What did not occur, however, was the reduction of the consumption of alcohol. By 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Throughout the period, a queer public commons took shape in places, such as San Francisco, where prohibition was not enforced.
Intriguing. The connection between Prohibition and queerness in the US would be fun to explore.
Faced with increased attacks on social movements under the new administration, a number of groups fought back. The Black Panthers organized a food program to support their community in Oakland. The Young Lords, a Bronx-based direct action group of the same vein, organized a number of forward-thinking, audacious acts of direct action aimed at cultivating a more responsive system of public health for social outsiders. In 1970, the group took over Lincoln Hospital. The group’s list of demands included calls for Spanish-language translation for services, acupuncture to aid detox services, and a consumer bill of rights. Most would later become common practices and policy.
One of the early members of the Young Lords was Sylvia “Ray” Rivera, a leader in the transgender movement. Rivera was also a veteran of Gay Activist Alliance and the Street Trans Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Much of the gay liberation impulse shared common cause with the anarchism of the era. Pleasure activist Charles Shively described “indiscriminate promiscuity as an act of revolution.” Through this organizing, gay liberationists challenged the social system, rather than embrace marriage, militarism, and law and order social policies. Instead, the movement fought homophobia, sexphobia, and anti-pleasure ideology. It borrowed from Wilhelm Reich’s argument that anti-sex politics support the docile bodies linked to fascism as well as anti-sex ideology;[163] such thinking only fuels abstinence-oriented policies, sexualized and racial fear, prohibitive politics and disconnection from the body.
Throughout the period, activists came to build a movement around the recognition that abstinence is unsafe, repression unhealthy. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick explained, “There is an ethical urgency about queer theory that is directed at the damage that sexual prohibitions and discriminations do to people.”
One of the primary activists involved with the early syringe exchange programs in New York was Greg Bordowitz, who worked with ACT UP’s syringe exchange committee. Bordowitz reveled in ACT UP’s ethos of pleasure. “Looking back on it now, it was a place you could have romance. Well, everybody was in love with everybody. There was this intense sense of comradeship and closeness. We were all brought together and felt close because of the meaningfulness of the work, and the fact that people were dying, and people in the group were getting sick. It created this feeling, a heightened intensity. Emotions were very powerful within the group, and they were on the surface of the group. Often people would cry in meetings, or people would get enraged in meetings. It was intense that way. And also, that fuels Eros. That fueled attraction that—people clung to each other, not necessarily in a desperate way, but people found comfort in each other. They enjoyed each other.” For members of ACT UP, pleasure was a resource.
Yet over the years, syringe exchange programs would increasingly become entwined with departments of health, funding, and the pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex. Today much of harm reduction is about evidence:
- Science
- Linear thinking
- Positivism
- Collaboration with health departments
- Service provision and struggles—against co-optation
- Funding
But where did the pleasure go? The plenary of the ninth Social Research Conference on HIV, Hepatitis C and Related Diseases, Australia, 2006, was titled: StigmaPleasurePractice. Here participants asked, “Why is it difficult to consider pleasure in drug policy and practice? What are the consequences for practice? How might a greater focus on the pleasures of drugs invigorate harm reduction?”
I genuinely feel like... all of this is what happens the moment the State, non-profits (sometimes acting on behalf of the State but also formed under the auspices of the State), and academia get involved. They drain the energy and relocate everything to somewhere else, meaning the core values and messages are distorted.
And there's just a lot of assimilation that takes place, too.
To start the process, it is useful to reconsider the ways direct action practices inform movements for social and sexual freedom, including anarchism, sexual civil liberties activism, and by extension harm reduction. “I joined Sex Panic! because there’s no group making the same connections between the renewed sexual repression of the past several decades,” explained Chris Farrell in 1998. “The failure of the left to identify pleasure as a political principle worth fighting for does a lot to explain the moribund state of progressive politics.” Here Farrell calls for the activists to “return sexual pleasure to the progressive agenda....Until the left learns the function of the orgasm, our fight against repression is doomed.”
Throughout the movement, leaders such as housing works co-founder Keith Cylar, helped keep the expression of pleasure as an integral component of harm reduction. Squatter Louis Jones started Stand Up Harlem within the same spirit of anarchism. “That to me felt so incredible. You talk about emotions. I just felt such pleasure. Everyone thinks about pleasure in terms of decadence, but there was more to it than that. I was moved…It brought fulfillment. I felt animated. We were living together, sleeping together, and working for change.” Yet, more to it, “[u]sing was dying with dignity—with dignity because it was my choice. No one was making it for me. I took a stand for those I knew who chose drugs when they were facing death.” Jones recognized that when facing death, there were those who “would want to cop in the midst of all that pain.” He explained: “For some it was just to get that old familiar, this old feeling, relationship, lover, what have you. This pain relief that the doctor might not give or it might not be enough. It was on your own terms. The liberty was what I was elated about—the choice without shame. That was what I was doing.”
Building on these lessons, one can come to see components of an agenda for pleasure, care, and just human relations. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud rejected Puritan mores by suggesting that everyone has some form of perversion in them. There is no shame in it. This is part of being human. Yet shame exists and causes harm. To do away with shame and the repression it fuels, pleasure activists push to transform the social order. Yet, to be effective, the process must include a respect for self-determination, choice, and pleasure. If we do not acknowledge the importance of pleasure, we risk mirroring the prohibitive politics we reject. Without justice, there can be no pleasure. After all, what we are protecting is a right to social imagination that rejects both paternalism and positivism, while opening spaces for alternative social relations and ways of embracing experience outside the realm of the rational experience. The failure of the political left to articulate a pro-pleasure argument is nothing short of a failure of the political imagination. It leaves a huge void to be occupied by moralists. There is another route—one built through practices in pleasure, justice, and freedom.
