- Anarchist WritersSociety & Culture Website
- Automatic WritingRecord Label
- Nicolas CadiouAuthor
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
"Woman is not simply what you get when you take away whatever gives men power, and Man is not the fully empowered humanity denied women. Both are ways of being divided against and alienated from oneself by the system within which we are trapped. Both are impoverished forms of human existence. One only benefits from either role in relative terms."
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
Trying to write long comprehensive pieces has been causing me too much anxiety, but this loose tumblr post has the basic outline of my thoughts on how gender nihilism has been taken up since I wrote about it.
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
Automatic Writing (blog) shared a link.
"Writing is difficult for me at the moment, but I feel the need to say something, publicly, about the “Marriage Equality” campaign and the referendum process, and to say it now, not afterwards. So I’ve decided to collect together the various things I’ve written for facebook posts, as a fragmented gesture towards a queer analysis of what we’ve just gone through.
Personally, I’ve found the referendum process very demanding. Demanding both in the sense of the strain it’s placed ...on my emotional resources, and in the sense that its produced a slew of moralising demands from marriage advocates which I’m expected to meet. I’m sick of it. At a time in my life where I’m trying to navigate the complexities and risks of openly living a trans life in a hostile society, I’m sick of being told that I’m being insufficiently attentive to the needs of people twice my age who just want to get married. I’m sick of demands for solidarity that are never going to be reciprocated. I’m sick of having to reaffirm that I think discrimination is bad every time I speak about anything other than why same-sex couples should be able to get married. I’m sick of people who want to talk about discrimination but couldn’t give a shit about the discrimination against forms of kinship and family outside the marriage norm that will persist after this referendum passes. I’m sick of marriage being allowed to stand for equality, and of “marriage equality” being treated as the sine qua non of progress for queer people.
My experience of the referendum has confirmed everything I already knew about same-sex marriage politics: Marriage Equality is a politics that must consume all others. It can only function by filling the entire space of queer representation; by monopolising concepts of progress and futurity; by homogenising and flattening queerness into a single issue, a single striving, a single (conservative) picture of the actualisation of queer freedom; by insisting that it and it alone has always been the liberation implicit in our politics. It demands our participation and we cannot refuse. All of us, whatever we wish, whether it benefits us or not, must suffer through a torrent of abuse and behave ourselves, lest our refusal to tolerate violent homophobic speech acts jeopardise a campaign that won’t even afford us the dignity of demanding rather than asking for the meagre concessions being offered to us. (And if you don’t Marriage Equality will call the cops.)
So vote Yes, please, so that we can be spared a rerun of this shit."
Anti-marriage politics is not anti married people. It's not advocating your relationship should be banned or forcibly broken up. It's opposing the idea that your relationship is superior to everyone else's, that it's deserving of greater support and protection than everyone else's, or that it, uniquely, deserves to be built in to the material and legal structure of society. It opposes the coercive application of norms built around an idealised heterosexuality because it wants an end to coercive norms governing relationships, sexuality, gender and identity, not because it wants to replace them with different ones. (So could you please stop the "radical queers imposing their views on us" nonsense? Thanks.)
Speaking at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair last weekend.
Aidan is voting Yes, but is not happy about it.
"Marriage equality” represents a victory for conservatives within the LGBT movement in narrowing and limiting th...e horizons of ur politics, and for conservative and homophobic social forces in diffusing and recuperating the potential for radical transformative change opened up by the gay liberation movement.
Despite attempts to re-write history by assimilationist LG(B(T)) organisations, inclusion within marriage is not all we have ever wanted. Queer politics has always put forward a vision that proposed a far more substantive concept of equality than just the end of formal legal discrimination: a concept of equality that cherishes difference and diversity, rather than precribing a single ideal based on heterosexual monogamy. Rather than seeking inclusion only for those who are willing and able to conform to the norm, we should seek the abolition of state marriage, the decoupling of rights from aherence to particular norms, and full social acceptance for the full diversity of forms of sexuality, kinship, affinity, alliance and affection. “Marriage equality” is a setback for that vision.
By attaching rights and social acceptance to compliance to a specific norm, we reaffirm that those outside that norm are undeserving of the same rights or social acceptance. We reinforce the idea that difference is to be punished and policed and excluded.
But, whether we like it or not, this is what's happening. The question for those of us who remain outside, and who hold a vision of a better world in our hearts, is how to advance that vision despite the setback this represents. This is a moment for queers to recognise ourselves as an autonomous political movement, which hopes and fights for a different future than the dismal politics of pro-marriage, and to recognise that we must build communities that can turn our dreams into concrete political action, because no one else is going to do that for us.
Aidan Rowe
A queer anarchist activist and writer who will criticise the goal of assimilation through inclusion within marriage and ask what the next steps are for those with a more radical vision of queer liberation. Aidan blogs at https://automaticwriting1.wordpress.com/
The video is a recording of the ‘Voting for Marriage Equality while being critical of Marriage’ sessions at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair
See https://youtu.be/gWpfJAZScMQ for the full video including the questions to the panel at the end
I spoke on this panel at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair last weekend, on the upcoming same-sex marriage referendum and its implications for queer politics in Ireland.
