Friday, March 14, 2014

Some questions about the state of manarchy and the gender of marxist critique

It's interesting how the meaning of "manarchist" has shifted, maybe narrowed, over the last few years.  When I first heard folks using the term about five years ago, it seemed to me that it was a way of marking the ways that even the most theoretically avant-garde variants of anarchist practice and scholarship were marked by their gendered assumptions, hypermasculinist norms, and most troublingly what a lot of people denounced as a profoundly apologetic attitude towards various forms of sexual violence.  In the intervening half-decade it's been popularized (thanks, Ryan Gosling,) but also, maybe, contained, so that to call someone a manarchist is no longer to put masculinity itself on the carpet, but instead to invoke a much more particular sort of naive antifeminism and hypermasculinism which maybe owes a lot more to the experience of the Occupy movement than to the occupations that preceded it.  Does that make any sense?  Is it a useful claim to make?  I'm guess I'm curious about the state of "manarchy" at present, particularly given the latest round of critiques of "call-out culture" and the latest attacks on people for outing anarchists with histories of sexual assault for dishonesty about transformative justice procedures etc.

I guess I'm thinking about this also in relation to the weird backlash against trigger warnings.  I think the politics of safety are pretty fraught, and folks need to read Christina Hanhardt's fantastic book about the politics of Safe Space and the race and class politics of gay neighborhoods and policing, which has a great deal to say on the subject.  But there's also a disturbingly gleeful antifeminism in some of the not-even-critiques that have circulated on social media in the wake of that New Republic piece.  In the fifteen-odd years that I have been involved in radical organizing and other projects, I don't know that I've ever seen such malice directed towards what are, in essence, survivor strategies.  I think TWs are open to critique.  I have lots of critiques.  (In short I think there are ways that TWs assume a universal equivalence of trauma in which the racialized particularities of particular forms of violence are flattened and/or disappeared.  No one is safe, but some are always already safer than others.)  But while assy critique can be liberating and fun to read as well as fun to perform, it can also easily slip into some rather reactionary forms of address.

The two paragraphs above seem a bit more disconnected now than they did when they were congealing in my brain, so I think I'll stop there and move on to something else.

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