Relating Differently more

Introduction Relating differently Jamie Heckert Anarchist Studies Network Sexualities 13(4) 403–411 ! The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1363460710370651 sex.sagepub.com The state is a relationship between human beings, a way by which people relate to one another; and one destroys it by entering into other relationships, by behaving differently to one another. Gustav Landauer (2005 [1910]: 165) Walking home after a yoga class the other night, a car pulled up in front of me – one of my classmates offering me a lift home. Having lived only a year in this neighbourhood where people seem to get through their days largely pretending that strangers don’t exist, I was moved by her warm generosity and hopped in. She stopped the car in front of my house and we carried on talking. Unsurprisingly, she asked that question – ‘what do you do?’ I do lots of things, of course. Don’t we all? I know that the question usually means what do you do for a job, for money – that other truth of the self. As in sexuality, I have no easy answer. Perhaps I am all too aware of how any answer implicates me in a capitalist ‘moral economy’ of person-hood (Skeggs, 2004). Unemployed, I’m awfully low. A scholar, I’m a bit higher up. An anarchist, I want to be equals. Of course, the question may simply come from a desire to connect, to understand another’s world. I pause, and reply, ‘I write about anarchism and sexuality.’ ‘Anarchism and sexuality!’ she exclaimed. ‘What do they have to do with each other?’ A common response. I thought carefully, very aware of a variety of diverse and divergent approaches being taken to this intersection, not the least in the articles for this special issue. I decided to go with what seemed to me to be the most obvious connection: relationships. Inspired by second-wave feminist critiques of a supposed clear border separating the personal from the political, Jeffrey Weeks’ subsequent challenge to a separation of the sexual from the social, and recent writings linking anarchism and post-structuralism (as well as a number of lived experiences), I found myself replying to her question with a (somewhat rhetorical) question. ‘How is it that we are meant to spend much of our day being told what to do, or perhaps telling others what to do, and then go home and be capable of listening with care to the desires of another, to our own desires, and to negotiate sex as 404 Sexualities 13(4) equals?’ (Leaving aside, for the moment, other mechanisms of governmentality, other than domestic sexual practices and the irreducibility of sexuality to sex.) She understood immediately, perhaps because our yoga class is very much about relating differently to ourselves and to each other. Drawing on the language of our teacher, himself very much inspired by the radically anti-authoritarian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, she put it in terms of meeting another – listening bodily, with empathy, to what is currently alive in them, as opposed to responding to one’s own thoughts of who another is, one’s image of another. For Krishnamurti, ‘relationship is direct, not through an image’ (2005: 23). Relationship, in this sense, sidesteps and undermines a moral economy of person-hood and the ‘the subtle ruse of power’ (Butler, 1990: vii) on which it depends, for there is neither truth of the self nor judgement. It is this approach which inspires one activist-scholar’s anarchic strategy for shifting from a culture of domination to a culture of connection (Rosenberg, 2003), with which we are invited to hear within the language of judgement expressions of pleasure for needs met or the pain of life-sustaining desires unfulfilled (e.g. food and water, equality and autonomy, love and learning). Likewise, this experience of direct relationship shares a clear affinity with ` Ranciere’s anarchistic understanding of the democratic in contrast to the hierarchical order, which he calls the police. ‘Politics,’ he argues, ‘only occurs when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition which is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone’ (cited in May, 2009: 15). Relating as equals serves as a gentle form of direct action – engaging directly with others to address oppressions rather than through representation, elected or imagined. Anarchism, here, acting as an ethics of relationships might also take us back to Gustav Landauer, subject of the first article in this issue. The state, capitalism, empire, patriarchy, heteronormativity, the university – these are not simply institutions; they are patterns of relationships. The question of how to transform, or even to destroy, the institution, may at the same time be the question of how to relate differently. This is not a question that can be answered only in theory. It must be lived. I say must, for I feel a deep-seated sense of urgency witnessing painfully unsustainable patterns of relationships with ourselves, each other and the ‘more than human world’ (Abram, 1997). I say it too, for I have experienced much in anarchist experiments and in other practices of freedom for which I am deeply grateful and which cannot be directly translated into words; the mediation of language cannot be the same as the immediatism of experience. Still, language and theory can be guides. In a talk entitled The Operating Instructions, the queerly erotic and profoundly anarchic storyteller Ursula Le Guin laments how reading has become instrumental, ‘so you can read the operating instructions’. No longer interested in the creativity which has been claimed by the market, she honours instead imagination. ‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people’ (2004: 208). Storytelling, and the listening of which the Heckert 405 telling is a part, Le Guin argues, can be the guides we need. ‘Literature’, she concludes, ‘is the operating instructions’ (2004: 210). Might this apply, too, to scholarly literature? The articles in this special issue have helped me to imagine my own life, to consider how I might relate differently. Perhaps they will do the same for you. *** This special issue arises in the context of a wider surge in anarchist academic writing. Anarchist studies is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the journal by that name is now in its 17th year, with sexuality being a topic of anarchist research from the inaugural issue (Cleminson, 1993). The rise of the alterglobalization movement has fuelled a renewal of anarchism, not only as social movement and topic of study, but also as a theoretical tradition in its own right (Gordon, 2007). Or perhaps I should say traditions. Of course, anarchism has never been singular – specific anarchisms have arisen in different contexts in order to address particular relations of domination. While in one sense, anarchism is a 19th-century European tradition of revolutionary thought and practice founded by Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin and finding its heyday in the anarchist movements of the Spanish Civil War and the uprisings of 1968, anarchisms are diverse. As Juliet Paredes of Mujeres Creando, a Bolivian anarcha-feminist group, once put it, ‘I’ve said it and I’ll say it again that we’re not anarchists by Bakunin or the CNT, but rather by our grandmothers, and that’s a beautiful school of anarchism’ (2002: 112). Contemporary anarchist studies, too, are diverse: intersecting, engaging and intertwining in different ways with a wide range of subjects including anarchist activism (Franks, 2006; Gordon, 2008; Graeber, 2009), literary theory (Cohn, 2006), religion (Christoyannopoulos, 2009), disability (Waltz, 2007), criminology (Williams and Arrigo, 2001), colonialism (Anderson, 2005; Schmidt and van der Walt, 2009), international relations (Prichard, 2007), environmentalism (Horton, 2006; Smith, 2007) feminism (Acklesberg, 2005; Ferguson, 2008; Lisa, 2008) and of course, sexuality. The seven contributions to this issue, and the three books reviewed, each engage in diverse ways with anarchism, sexuality and possibilities of relating differently. The first three articles offer theoretical and historical frameworks for engaging with questions of the forms of anarchist sexuality, focusing in turn on marriage, polyamory and asexuality. The next four articles engage with issues of sexuality within contemporary anarchist activism across a range of urban geopolitical contexts, demonstrating different examples of (and calling for more) cross-pollination between anarchist and queer. But before that, a return to some of the conceptual and historical roots of these potentially empowering relationships. In his exploration of the historical relationship between anarchism and psychoanalysis, Jesse Cohn’s piece addresses the question of the forms libertarian sexual culture might take. Noting that anarchists recognize the importance of cultural traditions for producing convivial social relations, he asks the controversial 406 Sexualities 13(4) question, is marriage necessarily to be opposed? For Gustav Landauer, marriage and the family represented both a potential source of social ‘spirit’ and one component of a non-statist order. In saying this, he was strongly opposed to the anarchist psychoanalyst (and possible predecessor of Reich) Otto Gross for whom marriage and family life were essentially structures of repression and therefore to be eliminated. Cohn offers an illuminating and complex account of these and other lives intertwined in the personal and political challenges of living out anarchist ideals in relationships with others. I’m particularly grateful to this article for its gentle reassurance that even famous anarchists didn’t live up to their ideals all of the time, but that they were still able to nurture radical social change,1 and for its remarkably queer suggestions for a Landauerian social psychology of sexuality. Deric Shannon and Abbey Willis’s contribution, like Cohn’s, raises questions about monogamy, this time, however, in relation to theory. Set in the context of a social anarchist group where raising queer theory triggered a strong reaction, including a rejection of postmodernism as incompatible with anarchism, Shannon and Willis ask effectively, how can they be in love with anarchism without being married to one particular interpretation of it (i.e. forsaking all others)? And so their essay, drawing on a rich history of queer and anarchist critique of marriage and monogamy, develops the metaphor of ‘theoretical polyamory’ as a method for queering anarchism. Unpacking a clear divide between loving and thinking, theoretical polyamory serves to avoid the economic reductionism sometimes found in anarchism, to emphasize the benefits of multiple loving and thinking relationships for meeting individual and collective needs, and to rectify anarchism’s critique of borders to include those around identities. In other words, when their primary partner, social anarchism, becomes too rigid, too identity bound, they have other loving-thinking relationships to turn to. The third in this opening triad of articles emphasizing theoretical and historical perspectives takes a radically different approach to the question of forms anarchist sexual culture might take. In an article inspired by intersections of radical feminism and anarchism, Breanne Fahs makes the controversial argument that for women, an anarchist politics of sexuality might be expressed as refusing sex altogether. Critical of the ways in which sexual liberation has come to mean conforming to new norms of sexual expression (e.g. emphasizing clitoral orgasms over vaginal ones), Fahs highlights a radical feminist tradition suspicious towards sex as a mechanism of women’s liberation. Arguing for a recognition of sexuality as institution intertwined with state power and its incumbent capitalist, patriarchal and racist patterns of domination, refusal to participate in it has correlations with other radical refusals (e.g. anarchists choosing not to vote.) Drawing on the works of Valerie Solanas and radical feminist group Cell 16, Fahs argues that a withdrawal of energies from efforts to conform not only to sexist standards of sexual desirability but also to profoundly normative notions of sexual desire as natural and necessary arguably frees women’s energies for other pursuits, not the least being participation in movements for social justice. Finally, Fahs calls for a recognition Heckert 407 of contemporary asexuality as political, both for its potential to undermine state-centred rights claims based on sexuality and as strategy for resisting normalization. Opening the section on activism, Sandra Jeppesen also writes about resistance to normativity, in this case a radical refusal to participate in homonormative consumerism. Her article engages with, and opens for questioning, the concept of queer counterpublics. She offers three exhibits of anti-consumerist vomiting providing both visceral rejections of counterpublics reliant on sex-oriented queer commercial spaces for their viability and a basis for engaging with questions of what hierarchical and exclusionary relationships of race, class, gender and ability may be (re)produced by consumer-citizen sexual politics. In the first exhibit, vomit is read as emblematic of the unsustainable contradictions inherent in capitalism, and of the body’s rebellion. It also queers a border of public and private; Jeppesen’s second exhibit comes from a zine she co-wrote with a friend in the 1990s, Projectile: stories about puking. Punk in style and content, the zine offers a counter discourses to those that construct the embodied reality of vomit as both private and shameful. The third exhibit is taken from a direct action of the Pink Panthers collective, a queer anti-capitalist activist group in Montreal, linking race, gender and environmental destruction. The article is further structured through a series of five sections, each opening up new questions about what constitutes a radical politics of sexuality. Concluding with ‘Queer autonomous zones and participatory publics’, Jeppesen emphasizes the queer/anarchist values of direct (rather than liberal) democracy, intersectional anti-oppression politics, ‘and open-ended processes of. . . becoming-liberated’. Next, Laura Portwood-Stacer turns to the queering of sexual identity and politics in the contemporary North American anarchist movement. Drawing on interviews and ethnography, her article examines particular constructions of anarchist identity and finds them to be queer indeed. Resistant to colluding with the hierarchies and exclusions created by compulsory heterosexuality, homonormativity and monogamy, the anarchists interviewed expressed their sexual identities in alternative ways, emphasizing openness, queerness and polyamory (at least, in theory). In doing so, Portwood-Stacer argues that these anarchists are enacting a queer performativity, making trouble for norms of gender and sexuality, which is at the same time consistent with anarchist practices of prefigurative politics, putting into practice in the present the desired values of a free society. The article goes on to demonstrate how the infrastructure of the anarchist movement (e.g. infoshops, bookfairs, summit protests, communal housing and skill-sharing events) prevents this trouble-making from being limited to individual deviance, instead allowing it to act as a collective force for social transformation. The anarchist politics described here may well help to answer that perennial question, how can identity troubling queer theory be practical? At the same time, Portwood-Stacer emphasizes how a subcultural valuing of authenticity leads to a potentially oppressive ‘anarchonormativity’. The provocative question she concludes with is: Might this queer anarchonormativity be wielded strategically? 408 Sexualities 13(4) Continuing south through the Americas, Gwendolyn Windpassinger’s article examines queer debates in the Argentinean anarchist movement. Argentina caught the attention of anarchists and other anti-capitalists around the world in 2001 when economic collapse was met with a popular uprising, recuperation of workplaces by the workers and directly democratic and egalitarian structures for decision-making in and across neighbourhoods, since popularized by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s documentary film, The Take. Since the recovery of the official economy, much of this radical infrastructure has dissolved. Still, the Argentinean anarchist movement has been energized by these events, and it is in this context that Windpassinger discovers the queer anarchism of Proyectil Fetal and its resonance with both a history of Argentinean anarcha-feminism and the recent queer/anarchist work done in Europe by Gavin Brown, Richard Cleminson and myself. Like Shannon and Willis, Windpassinger found that the deployment of queer theory by Proyectil Fetal led to more conflict than communication with fellow anarchists who prioritize the class struggle. At the same time, she sees great potential for queer anarchist analyses of sexuality, identity and power to contribute to the wider anarchist movement in Argentina and elsewhere. And finally, returning north to New York City, Benjamin Shepard expresses a shared concern that queer theory has become all too often abstracted from its roots in social justice movements. Here, he calls for a renewal of queer theory inspired by contemporary anarchist(ic) queer activist practices and the histories and theories with which they are entwined. Tracing connections from Victorian sex radicals through gay liberation movements to today’s queer direct action groups, Shepard highlights long-standing and significant affinities between anarchists and queers when it comes to sexual politics. Noting a number of examples where queer activists have expressed profound frustration from experiences of wanting, and not getting, some respect and understanding from queer theorists who write and talk about them, Shepard suggests that academic norms result in a distancing from antiauthoritarian activism resulting in a divide between theory and practice, and a subsequent loss of praxis – theoretically informed action. Not only might activists benefit from an overtly politically engaged queer theory, but queer theorists might find renewed inspiration in the overlapping values of anarchism and queer theory: ‘a rejection of the paternalistic state’, ‘DIY approaches to community building’, a ‘critical view of capitalism’, ‘a politics of freedom’, ‘a critique of the normative’ and a ‘respect for pleasure’. Like Jeppesen, Shepard looks at three case studies of queer activists challenging state and corporate control of public space and deploying diverse methods to create autonomous queer counterpublics. Drawing on autoethnography and interviews with activists, he offers three colourful tales of sex in the city. First, the Church Ladies, born out of Women’s Health Action Mobilization (WHAM) and ACT UP, sing outside abortion clinics attempting to diffuse ‘prolife’ protests drawing on a long tradition of the political use of camp humour and playfulness; second, at the 2009 Parade without a Permit, Shepard describes queers taking to the streets reminding everyone that ‘Stonewall was a riot!’ and third, direct action coalitions form to defend public sexual culture, including both male Heckert 409 cruising and sex workers of all genders, in response to ongoing efforts by authorities to promote gentrification. In conclusion, Shepard, alongside the other contributors to this issue, calls for greater engagement between anarchist and queer politics in order to develop mutually supportive relationships and to nurture multiple movements for social change. To conclude, I would like to return to the question of relating differently. Rather than simply expressing resentment that state, capitalist and heteronormative patterns of relationships (intersecting, as always, raciality, age, ability and ecology) make egalitarian and libertarian sex/uality difficult, the articles in this volume draw attention to rich and long-standing anarchist traditions of relating differently. However, as Shannon and Willis note, no tradition has all the ‘answers to the complex questions surrounding the political project of undoing all forms of structured and institutionalized domination, coercion, and control’ and as Cohn, Portwood-Stacer and Windpassinger’s articles amply demonstrate, anarchists, too, find challenges in their relationships with each other. While both anarchist and queer traditions emphasize a critique of normalization and an appreciation of difference, communicating around areas of disagreement can trigger strong emotions with a consequent decrease in empathy and understanding (Rosenberg, 2003). Perhaps, then, becoming-liberated might involve relationship skills of listening with empathy. Otherwise, solidarity becomes an abstract ideal rather than a lived experience. What might happen if the queer and class-struggle varieties of anarchists in Buenos Aires come to hear each other’s passions and concerns? Or the anarchaqueers and the LGBT folk who may be Othered in this identity construction? What additional coalitions might be possible? But before rushing to invoke the radical possibilities for a better future, that heritage of phallacized whiteness (Winnubst, 2006), I want to emphasize that clearly, this listening is already under way. It is what enables the diverse activist groups described in this issue to engage in meaningful solidarity, to organize non-hierarchically, and to find ways of expressing themselves that others can hear and understand. What then is it about these spaces, these queer anarchist counterpublics that enables listening (when they do)? And can this be practised in other contexts? Can these spaces be created anywhere? In universities? In my neighbourhood? What might becoming-liberated mean in my life? In yours? After reading Shepard’s account of activists’ feelings following the abstraction and theorizing of their experiences, I am deeply aware of both how much I appreciate being listened to and how much I love being able to listen to others. I hope that this emphasis on listening with care will be a central element of all my relationships, whether labelled personal, professional, political or ecological. Similarly, his article along with Jeppesen’s and Shannon and Willis’s, in particular, have inspired me in my efforts of ‘writing differently,’ passionately, in academic contexts (Game and Metcalfe, 1996; Grey and Sinclair, 2006). Portwood-Stacer and Windpassinger’s articles bring my awareness to the significance of relating anarchically; I’m moved reading them and realizing how being able to contribute to anarchist movements and scholarship opens new possibilities in other people’s lives 410 Sexualities 13(4) (as well as my own). Finally, in laying out separate anarchist arguments for marriage and against marriage, for monogamy and for polyamory, and even for asexuality, the combined articles in this issue affirm the creative contradictions within anarchist traditions, emphasizing for me the importance of a diversity of tactics. Usually applied to questions about the ethics of fighting with police or breaking the windows of Starbucks, it seems to me equally valid to the question of forms of (anarchist) sexualities and intimacies. Rather than simply tolerating the emotional and political strategies of others that I find hard to understand, this inspires me to see them as guides that might help me to imagine my own life, my own relationships, differently. Acknowledgements A warm thank you to the Anarchist Studies Network both for financially supporting the conference organized by me and Richard Cleminson in Leeds in 2006 that, in a roundabout way, led to this special issue. Thank you, too, fellow ASN members for the ongoing intellectual and emotional support which have helped me both to carry on doing the research and writing that I love and to have the energy to support others in their own efforts. Thank you to all the peer reviewers for your help with this, to the contributors both for your articles and for your feedback on this editorial piece. How I love mutuality! Note 1. Landauer was, just to name one example, a major influence in the foundation of the Kibbutz movement (Horrox, 2009). References Abram D (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Acklesberg M (2005) Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press. Anderson B (2005) Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. London: Verso. Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Christoyannopoulos A (ed.) (2009) Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cleminson R (1993) First steps towards mass sex-economic therapy? Wilhelm reich and the spanish revolution. Anarchist Studies 1(1): 25–37. Cohn J (2006) Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Ferguson K (2008) Discourses of danger – locating Emma Goldman. Political Theory 36(5): 735–761. Franks B (2006) Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of British Anarchisms. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press. Game A and Andrew M (1996) Passionate Sociology. London: SAGE. Gordon U (2007) Anarchism reloaded. Journal of Political Ideologies 12(1): 29–48. Heckert 411 Gordon U (2008) Anarchy Alive! Antiauthoritarian Politics, from Practice to Theory. London: Pluto Press. Graeber D (2009) Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press. Grey C and Sinclair A (2006) Writing Differently. Organization 13(3): 443–453. Horrox J (2009) A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press. Horton D (2006) Environmentalism and the bicycle. Environmental Politics 15(1): 41–58. Krishnamurti J (2005) Facing a World in Crisis: What Life Teaches Us in Challenging Times. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Landauer, G (2005 [1910]) Weak Statesmen, Weaker People (trans. Robert Ludlow), Der Sozialist. Excerpted in Graham R (ed.) Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas – Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism 300 CE–1939, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 164–165. Le Guin UK (2004) The operating instructions. In: Le Guin UK (ed.) The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 206–210. Lisa (2008) Threads. Glasgow: self-published. ` May T (2009) Anarchism from foucault to ranciere. In: Amster R, Deleon A, Fernandez L, Nocella A, Shannon D (eds) Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy. London: Routledge, 11–17. Paredes J (2002) An interview with Mujeres Creando. In: Star D (ed.) Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press/Dark Star, 111–113. Prichard A (2007) Justice, order and anarchy: The international political theory of PierreJoseph Proudhon, 1809–1865. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35(3): 623–645. Rosenberg M (2003) Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press. Schmidt M and van der Walt L (2009) Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press. Skeggs B (2004) Class, Self, Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Smith M (2007) Wild-life: Anarchy, ecology, and ethics. Environmental Politics 16(3): 470–487. Waltz M (2007) Making room for difference: An anarchist response to disability. Fifth Estate 41(374): 11–12, 40. Williams C and Arrigo B (2001) Anarchaos and order: On the emergence of social justice. Theoretical Criminology 5(2): 223–252. Winnubst S (2006) Queering Freedom. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jamie Heckert is an independent scholar living in Poole on the south coast of England. He is co-editor, alongside Richard Cleminson, of Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power (forthcoming, Routledge) and contributor to various activist and scholarly publications on themes including non-monogamy, queer research methodologies, anarchist ethics, identity politics and sex education. His key interest, both in research and other forms of practice, is the development of sustainable relationships with ourselves, each other and the land of which we are a part. [email:jamie.heckert@gmail.com]