Names mentioned:
Venus Selenite, Dane Figueroa Edidi, b.binaohan, or Luna Merbruja
Quotes from this article:
But they're still a business, and as such its priority is sustaining itself and not the marginalized people that it claims, who may not claim it back. Which is how I feel after getting to know the radical bookstore.
What I want is to take note of the failure of the radical bookstore to meet oppressed people where they are, and to suggest that abolition calls for a deeper transformation that would turn places like Bluestockings from mouthpieces for institutional publishing into the accomplices that oppressed people require for the creation of revolutionary culture.
Who gives a shit if these zines aren't what their readers are contacting them about and looking for when they show up to the bookstore? No one knows that they want and need our work because it has hardly had a chance to exist -- but if it's put in front of them, they will value our work if they truly believe in any of the same things we do.
The Brooklyn Book Festival that's sponsoring this event with Bluestockings, by the way, is a massive recipient of funding from the Amazon Literary Partnership: that's hundreds of thousands of dollars across years of patronage. So that's Bluestockings putting itself in tension with Amazon workers for what? A bloodless corporate-sponsored trans literature?
It's also that the involvement of the former group in publishing will make them into collaborators with institutional violence. There's an interview where Torrey Peters talks about what a cool guy her editor boss Chris Jackson is over at One World, the publisher of Detransition, Baby -- he also happens to be the editor of a memoir by Eric Holder, the former Attorney General aka the architect for the legal justification of Obama's use of torture and drone strikes.
What does it mean for her editor to be a propagandist for the American imperial machine? And for a book that this very propagandist (or should we just call him a war criminal like Holder?) signed off on to be sitting on the shelves of a radical bookstore?
Let us step back and consider that this pattern where propagandists, rich monsters, and other friends of war criminals at corporate publishing houses are the same people who are now beginning to give book deals to (mostly white, mostly hyper educated) trans writers. In fact, those editors are the same people who usher forth many of the books that become the must-reads stocked by bookstores, radical or not. The same publishing infrastructure that creates legitimacy for war criminals also extracts profits from the marginalized writers (and their culture) it targets periodically as a trend.
It feels like every year I've been trying to figure out, "What is the relationship of the bookstore to the poor person?" Every year the answer comes back in a different form, dragging along different evidence, but the same result: it's an antagonistic relationship. With the radical bookstore, it's no different. It's still property and its allies against the propertyless.