Against All Odds: Abolishing Gender, Abolishing Poetry

Text from the zine:

“Because of our misplaced desire to find ourselves within societies society, poets become absurdly competitive. Invoking abstract concepts of authenticity to either validate or invalidate writing. There is no valid or authentic poetics because the individual levies themselves against the poem every time a new poem is written or read. Everything is relational…stemming from the individual as the original point of relation. It is through individuality that poetry must be practiced, not through institution. But we also must recognize that our understanding of ourselves is produced within the context of a complicated network of power relations. To properly read we should reject self and poetry as simply “too relational.” My queerness does not make queer poems or queer readers. My identity does not create poems. I create poems. Quite plainly put, the attempt to compartmentalize the author into a palatable and packable product which the institutions of poetry can sell, does a disservice to the understanding of self and of poetry. Self in relation to poetry. Self about poetry.”

Against All Odds pdf

Against Gender Against Society

Text from the zine:

“We must turn against society itself. Gender is a war against all of us, and for those who desire freedom, nothing short of the total eradication of gender will suffice. To those of us who wish to remove all the walls between each other instead of being alienated from each other (and ourselves) because of groupings we never chose, to those of us that wish to access all our potential doings, our potential to become anything instead of pacing within the limits of genders we know to be inadequate, we say: let’s destroy society, let’s destroy gender.”

Against Gender Against Society pdf

An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender: Considerations on Resonance, Memory, and Attack

Text from back cover:

“There are certain practices that exist in the ways in which self-proclaimed “radical trans” people and “anarcha-feminists” of certain activist subcultures have set into motion in response to the question of gender. These include consent zines/workshops, “trans 101”s, and call-outs of “fucked up” behavior internal to their subculture, in addition to dance parties and orgies. There is certainly nothing inherently *wrong* with any of these things, but if we take seriously the notion that we must destroy gender and all social relations of this society, there is clearly something lacking in the practice which only challenges gender at a level of language use and subcultural dynamics. If we abandon the leftist- activist model and accept the charge that “revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination, but by resonance” and writing that has further elaborated this thesis of an insurrectional music, we come to an understanding that there are at the very least a number of problems with thinking that these isolated methods alone could build a force to destroy gender.”

An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender pdf

Arming Negativity: Towards the Queerest Attack

From back cover:

“My queerness is an experimentation that never ends. It is the totality of a life lived against the law, insubordinate and wild. It is not a communist politics but a nihilist negation to all systems that attempt to subordinate individuality. It is not the leftist politics of demanding and “building a better world” but an anarchist insurgency of reclaiming life day to day, and setting fire to its captors. Since gender is embedded in every fabric of this industrial, civilized society, I find no hope in salvaging any part of it­ only joy in every second of its calculated demise.”

Arming Negativity_Towards the Queerest Attack pdf

Baedan: Queers Gone Wild (An excerpt from Baedan: A Journal of Queer Nihilism issue 1)

Text from back cover:

““ If we can determine anything from our project of queer negativity, it is that capitalism has an unlimited capacity to tolerate and recuperate any alternative politics or artistic expression we could imagine. It is not a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule of civilization.”

Baedan_Queers Gone Wild pdf

Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism

From back cover:

“Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart. Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
—Hannah Senesh, Jewish partisan fighter.

(Zine cover art and booklet format by Little Mouse Fun, http://www.littlemouse.fun/zines.html)

Blessed is the Flame pdf

Criminal Intimacy

Text from back cover:

“We do not offer ‘criminal’ or ‘queer’ as identities, nor as categories. Criminality. Queerness. These are tools for revolt against identity and category. These are our lines of flight out of all restraint. We are in conflict with all that restricts every and each desire. We are becoming whatever. Our sole commonality is our hatred for everything that exists. Held in common, such a revolt of desire can never be assimilated into the state­-form.”

Criminal Intimacy pdf

 

Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-defense, & Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender

Text from back cover:

“We are not asking for a right to the streets, we are taking them; we are not asking for advertisements that do not objectify women, we’re destroying the commercial mechanisms
that objectify women; we are not appealing to male power for an end to rape, but threatening: “If you touch me, I will fucking kill you.” For once, the mechanisms that create and maintain identities of womanhood were refused, and our desires were our own, our bodies were our own, and our violence was our own.” – We’ll Show You Crazy Bitches

Dangerous Spaces pdf

Degenerations: Between Pride and Gender Victimhood by Anna Beniamino

From back cover:

“I am anarchist, I am not feminist because I see feminism as a sectorial and victimist withdrawal, I have never made any gender discrimination although I don’t use gender­friendly linguistic conventions, on the contrary I often use dirty politically incorrect language. I think that the annulment of gender privilege and similar oppression is already contained in the search for anarchy, that is to say in the practice of anti­-authoritarian relations, and should be cultivated there. Ah, I forgot, I loathe consciousness-­raising in public meetings and I also consider assemblies to be blunt instruments. I understand and also have the will to meet. But I see how all too often the assembly degenerates into sterile self­-representation.”

Degenerations_Between Pride and Gender Victimhood pdf

Destroy Gender

Text from the zine:

“My personal experiences with gendered violence are only taken seriously in light of revealing myself as a trans woman. Our theories should start from the ways we have experienced gender violence in our daily lives, not identity. Our relationships to each other should be based upon our affinities and similarities with each other, rather than based upon the categories of lowest-common-denominator politics. Daily life is far too complicated to be reduced into two categories…Gender is a hierarchy, an apparatus of governance, a form of social control. Gender is violence…”

Destroy Gender pdf

Dysphoria Means Total Destroy

Text from back cover:

“There is no revolutionary identity here, only an irreconcilable conflict against and through identity. This despair and this hatred is the result. Subsequently, identity-based attacks upon gender will not be able to collapse gender. My taking hormones or getting surgery or whatever is simply my performing the conflict by the lines of power that run through me. It does not follow that these things constitute an attack upon gender itself, although it may stimulate it to evolve in order to maintain its existence…Dysphoria is situated in the space where the existent and the nonexistent overlap – that is, in the world – and is typified by antagonism and fundamental negation. On the one hand, it is a negation of the existent (not-this) and desirous of the nonexistent (not- that) in the modes of which it is capable. Where dysphoria can be softened by interacting with gender and attempting to bring the existent closer to the nonexistent, this will not affect power or the reproduction of the world. Where dysphoria becomes feral and lusts for dissolution becomes the exit from this world to a place that does not yet exist. To destroy gender, we must be willing to destroy the world it exists within. After all, there’s no hope any way… why not?”

Dysphoria Means Total Destroy pdf

Espacios Peligrosos: Resistencia violenta, Autodefensa y Lucha insureccionalista en contra del género

““No estamos pidiendo derechos por las calles, estamos hablando de ellos; no estamos pidiendo anuncios que no nos conviertan en mujeres-objeto, estamos destruyendo los mecanismos comerciales que nos deshumanizan como mujeres; no estamos apelando al poder masculino para que termine con las violaciones, sino que le amenazamos: “Si me tocas, te aniquilaré”.

Por una vez, los mecanismos que crean y mantienen las identidades de la feminidad fueron rechazados, y nuestros deseos fueron los nuestros propios, nuestros cuerpos fueron los nuestros propios, y nuestra violencia fue la nuestra propia.”

espacios-peligrosos pdf

Gender Anarky: Selected Writings

“Gender Anarky is (was?) a collective of radical trans women resisting in the California prison system.”

Gender Anarky pdf

Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto

“We are radicals who have had enough with attempts to salvage gender. We do not believe we can make it work for us. We look at the transmisogyny we have faced in our own lives, the gendered violence that our comrades, both trans and cis have faced, and we realize that the apparatus itself makes such violence inevitable. We have had enough. We are not looking to create a better system, for we are not interested in positive politics at all. All we demand in the present is a relentless attack on gender and the modes of social meaning and intelligibility it creates.”

Gender Nihilism An Anti-Manifesto pdf

Infinite Relationships: Relationships without bounds or boundaries, love without limits, without ends

Text from back cover:

“The alternative, which this fear of solitude prevents us from seeing, seems more preferable: a world without borders, in which each of us would be part of a broader family of lovers and friends, with no distinction made between the two—and no set format for any relationship, so experimentation would be a constant feature of every one, and no relationship could ever get dull or overwhelming. To get to such a world, we just have to get used to not limiting each other, to not thinking of love as a limited commodity.”

infinite-relationships-relationships-without-borders-or-boundaries-love-without-limits-without-ends pdf

Let’s Talk Consent

An excellent guide to putting consent into practice.

lets talk consent pdf

Marriage & Love by Emma Goldman

“In our present pygmy state love is indeed a stranger to most people. Misunderstood and shunned, it rarely takes root; or if it does, it soon withers and dies. Its delicate fiber can not endure the stress and strain of the daily grind. Its soul is too complex to adjust itself to the slimy woof of our social fabric. It weeps and moans and suffers with those who have need of it, yet lack the capcity to rise to love’s summit.”

Marriage and love pdf

Only A Tsunami Will Do: For A Post-Feminist Anarchy

Text from back cover:

“Men, women, …fighting for the elusive Happily­Ever­ After­Plus­$’More. This powerful enemy includes a mindset requiring controlled, predictable (despite acknowledging its impossibility), identifiable order according to a Mass­ter plan. But it is perhaps, first and foremost, the loss of the unique individual, alienated from self and others, masked in a divisive pseudo ­libertarian ­unity. We are unified only in our misery, guilt, and blame — wasting away in our too often self­ selected, segregated, readily ­identified roles — in reality, easily monitored cells. Male, female, black, white, straight, gay….And no kinder and gentler feminine warden will release us; if we want out we need to break out and burn the prison down. And our opportunities are rapidly disappearing. There’s no Womanhood to exalt, no Manhood to destroy. If anyone treats you in a way you don’t want —deal with them as individuals. Don’t tag them as proof of a misbehaving aggregation; anarchists neither accept nor impose representation. Missteps amongst comrades — even with strangers — are opportunities to explore our roles and (usually unspoken) expectations. If a John is abusive, a Kat dangerous, take them out [of that position] in whatever way you see fit. When we directly and consistently refuse and resist every imposition of another’s will/leadership/order/coercion and remain open to insurrectionary inspiration in any form, we embrace a means never­ending.”

Only A Tsunami Will Do_For A Post-Feminist Anarchy pdf

Pieces of Self: Anarchy, Gender and Other Thoughts

“My intention in putting this zine together is to make available essays that clarify the connections between the origins of patriarchy and civilization, that analyze the function of gender in this society and the effects that gender constructions have on our lives, and that challenge individuals to come to our own conclusions. Part of my reasoning for doing this is that I feel that gender is not adequately addressed. I feel like most people have only a vague idea of what gender means to their lives, and even less do they know what they want it to mean. It seems that most dialogue on gender rarely gets past identity politics, reactionary rants, and desperate attempts to place blame.”

Pieces of Self Anarchy, Gender and Other Thoughts pdf

Poly Amor: An exploration and expression of polyamorous relationships

This zine explores polyamory, its origins and its practical manifestations.

PolyAmor pdf

QUEER FIRE: The George Jackson Brigade, Men Against Sexism, and Gay Struggle Against Prison

A collection of histories, speeches, and interviews with members of The George Jackson Brigade and Men Against Sexism. These stories give inspiration for the multiform queer struggle against prison, capitalism, and the state.

queer-fire pdf

Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability

Text from back cover:

“People in relation to each other create healthy or unhealthy exchanges. There is no absolute for “fucked up,” “healed,” or “safe” ­ it changes with time, life circumstance, and each new love affair. It is with feelings of unease that I have observed the slippery slope of “emotional” abuse become a common reason to initiate an accountability process…Here is the problem with using this model for emotional abuse: it’s an unhealthy dynamic between two people. So who gets to call it? Who gets to wield that power in the community? (And let’s all be honest that there is power in calling someone to an accountability process.) People in unhealthy relationships need a way to get out of them without it getting turned into a community judgement against whoever was unlucky enough to not realize a bad dynamic or call it abuse first…These processes frequently exacerbate mutually unhealthy power plays between hurt parties. People are encouraged to pick sides and yet no direct conflict brings these kinds of entanglements to any kind of resolve.”

safety is an Illusion_Reflections on Accountability pdf

Setting Fire to The Church of Social Justice: 3 Critiques of Identity Politics, Call-Out Culture & Other Forms of Statist Thinking

A multi-perspective, thorough and in-depth look at identity politics, call-out culture and the accountability process and their relationship to church and state.

Published by Dandelion Distro ( www.facebook.com/dandeliondistro )

Setting Fire to the Church of Social Justice pdf

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

Text from the zine:

“It seems obvious that the study of history is a necessary element of continued war against the present world. There are tools lying in every failed insurrection, every temporarily-established zone of free play, every campaign of sabotage that ended in a jail cell or shootout. To ignore these lessons is to forfeit valuable weaponry and strategic insight. History is a weapon.”

STAR Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries pdf

To Destroy Sexuality

Text from the zine:

“Of course, we realize how many obstacles we have to overcome to make our aspirations into something more than the dreams of a small and marginal minority. We are keenly aware that liberating the body for sensual, sexual, affective, and ecstatic relationships is inseparably linked to liberating women and destroying male dominance and role models – especially sexual role models. It is likewise linked to destroying all forms of oppression and “normality.”

“We want to be rid of all roles and identities based on the phallus. We want to be rid of sexual segregation. We want to be rid of the categories of man and woman, gay and straight, possessor and possessed, greater and lesser, master and slave. We want instead to be transsexual, autonomous, mobile, and multiple human beings with varying differences who can interchange desires, gratifications, ecstasies, and tender emotions without referring back to tables of surplus value or power structures that aren’t already in the rules of the game.”

to-destroy-sexuality pdf

Toward the Queerest Insurrection

Text from the zine:

“Some will read “queer” as synonymous with “gay and lesbian” or “LGBT.” This reading falls short. While those who would fit within the constructions of “L”, “G”, “B”, or “T” could fall within the discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability—an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defined against the dominant narrative of white-hetero monogamous-patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized, and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal.”

Toward the Queerest Insurrection pdf

This is Not a Love Story: Armed Struggle Against the Institutions of Patriarchy

Text from the zine:

“Many feminist theorists and activists categorically condemn “violence”– be it offensive or defensive, physical or verbal– on the grounds that “violence” (an extremely ambiguous term in itself) has its roots in patriarchal culture and the patriarchal mindset, and is somehow the “invention” of men– as if violence doesn’t appear everywhere in the natural world in myriad forms, usually contributing in significant ways to the balance of local ecosystems. While certain feminist thinkers put forth an analysis of violence and hierarchical power relationships that is well worth considering, a wholesale condemnation of revolutionary violence aimed at the destruction of that which oppresses us is a gross oversimplification of an extremely complex situation: that is, the web of patriarchal tyranny that all of us, wimmin and men alike, find ourselves born into, where violence is used by our oppressors to enforce our political and social submission, and where we are all desperately looking for effective ways to reclaim our lives.”

this is not a love story armed struggle against patriarchy pdf

Queer Ultraviolence (Spanish version)

La collección que sigue comprende varios ensayos y comunicados de la monstruosidad conocida como Bash Back! Estas selecciones sirven como un destello a lo que será una antologia más completa que pronto será publicada por QI (Queer Internacional).

QI es un proyecto que se dedica a la publicación de textos queer-insurrecionales de todo el mundo. Esta sociedad nos llena de ira, y para nosotrxs no hay ninguna otra opción menos su aniquilamiento.

Queer Ultraviolence Spanish pdf

War on Patriarchy , War on the Death Technology

The collected statements ,essays , and communiqués of direct action and the Wimmin ’ s Fire Brigade.

War on Patriarchy War on The Death Technology pdf

3 Positions Against Prison

Text from back cover:

“One and a half centuries ago, slavery was abolished by the United States government. This followed an enormous social struggle over abolition–wars were fought between pro-slavery elements and abolitionist elements. There were slave revolts and armed uprisings. The government intervened. And the Thirteenth Amendment ever-so-neatly includes a loophole allowing for the enslavement of prisoners (“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”). Moreover, the economic system of chattel slavery was replaced with indentured servitude and industrial wage labor–which the Northern capitalists were struggling to proliferate. So today, we have slavery, although slavery has been abolished. The structures of society that required slaves have remained intact. And in one hundred years, prisons may be abolished, but we will still have prisons as long as capitalism remains intact.”

3 Positions Against Prison pdf

Against Prisons, Politics, Society

Text from the zine:

“There appears to be a trend in radical circles of distinguishing prisoners based on their so-called ‘crimes’, with the intent (conscious or not) to identify ‘political prisoners’ who, by virtue of their actions, are more deserving of support and solidarity. Prisoners who have been targeted by the state due to their political beliefs and/or actions are given special attention amongst radicals, while the rest of the prison population spending their days in a cage are often only an afterthought, used as a means to lend credibility to political ideology, or completely forgotten.

“This privileged and moralistic practice has invaded radical circles and creates a distinction between ‘political’ and ‘ordinary’ prisoner. Political prisoners are said to have been imprisoned unjustly, unlike the rest of the prison population. This can manifest either as an insistence of their innocence (as in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal), or, in cases in which the prisoner has obviously broken the law, they are viewed as acting only in response to unjust laws or conditions (as in the case of Walter Bond). In both cases, their innocence is maintained.”

Against Prison Politics Society pdf

Attacking Prisons At Their Point of Production: A Brief Look at Militant Actions Against the Prison Industrial Complex

Attacking-Prisons-Point of Production pdf

Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex


“Since the early 1990s, increases in the prison population in England and Wales have sparked a boom in prison construction, leading commentators to comment on ‘the largest prison building program since the middle of the 19th century’ (Morgan, 1999: 110). While women make up a small proportion of those incarcerated, their rates of imprisonment have multiplied faster than men’s, causing feminist activists to call for drastic measures to counter ‘the crisis in women’s prisons’. 4 Between 1985 and 1998, for example, the number of women in prison more than doubled, from 1,532 to 3,260 (Prison Reform Trust, 2000). The prison service has responded by contracting with private corporations to built and operate new prisons, and by rerolling men’s prisons for women. Recent government initiatives designed to slow the increase in the use of incarceration, such as Home Detention Curfews, have had little impact on the number of women sentenced to prison which continued to grow during the year to 2001 by 9%, compared to 2% for men.”

celling black bodies pdf

Locked Up

Text from back cover:

“Prison is the most direct, brutal expression of power, and like power it must be destroyed, it cannot be abolished progressively. Anyone who thinks they can improve it now in order to destroy it in the future will forever be a captive of it. The revolutionary project of anarchists is to struggle along with the exploited and push them to rebel against all abuse and repression, so also against prison. What moves them is the desire for a better world, a better life with dignity and ethic, where economy and politics have been destroyed. There can be no place for prison in that world.”

locked up pdf

Survival in Solitary: A manual written by & for people living in control units

Text from back cover:

“The federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, went on permanent lock down in 1983. This created the first “control unit”. Now, in addition to the federal government, some forty states have built these “maxi-maxi” prisons — representations of the angry and cruel repression that grips our country today. Human beings are put alone in a small cell with double steel doors and no window for 23 hours a day. No program, no work, no education, meals alone, and maybe one hour by oneself in a bare dog-run outside. A religious task force calls such conditions psychological pain and agony tantamount to torture. It is torture. Here, now, in the following pages, people who are captives in these cells write about what goes on and how you can survive…”

Survival In Solitary pdf

Writing to Prisoners FAQ

An informational guide to writing and supporting prisoners.

writing_to_prisoners_FAQ pdf

I WILL NOT CRAWL: excerpts from Robert F. Williams on Black struggle and armed self-defense in Monroe, NC

Text from the zine:

“Somebody in the crowd fired a pistol and the people again started to scream hysterically, ‘Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers! Pour gasoline on the niggers!’ The mob started to throw stones on top of my car. So I opened the door of the car and I put one foot on the ground and stood up in the door holding an Italian carbine.

All this time three policeman had been standing about fifty feet away from us while we kept waiting in the car for them to come and rescue us. Then when they saw that we were armed and the mob couldn’t take us, two of the policemen started running. One ran straight to me, grabbed me on the shoulder, and said, ‘Surrender your weapon! Surrender your weapon!’ I struck him in the face and knocked him back away from the car and put my carbine in his face, and told him that we didn’t intend to be lynched. The other policeman who had run around the side of the car started to draw his revolver out of the holster. He was hoping to shoot me in the back. They didn’t know that we had more than one gun. One of the students (who was seventeen years old) put a .45 in the policeman’s face and told him that if he pulled out his pistol he would kill him. The policeman started putting his gun back into the holster and backing away from the car, and he fell into the ditch.

There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and he started screaming and crying like a baby, and he kept crying, and he said, ‘God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t even arrest them!’ He kept crying and somebody led him away through the crowd.”

I Will Not Crawl pdf

Guide To Racist Symbols

Guide-to-Racist-Symbols pdf

Autonomous Resistance to Slavery and Colonization; two essays by Russell Maroon Shoatz

Text from back cover:

“These early Maroons were able to overcome language barriers, mistrust, and the growing
influence of racial doctrines that eventually evolved into the white supremacist cultural construct outside of the swamp. That is not to say that they didn’t have any racial or ethnic  prejudices. It’s absolutely clear, however, that they overcame them enough to be able to live, support, protect, fight and die for each other for well over 100 years.”

Autonomous Resistance to Slavery and Colonization pdf

Anarquía y Alcohol: Realmente desperdiciadx Cómo lo demoníaco llegó a ser civilizado


“Anarquía y Alcohol logra hablarnos de la problemática del alcohol en el ámbito político sin caer en tópicos ni en el dogmatismo que caracteriza a este debate; nos guía en un viaje por la historia de la civilización ­según defiende­ cimentada en la fabricación de cerveza; nos retrata lo cotidiano y lo doloroso a la vez. Todo con un tono irónico, que no se olvida de la seriedad con la que debe tratarse el tema. Propone, además, recuperar palabras como “éxtasis” o ”embriaguez”, para dotarlas de un sentido más positivo y que refleje realmente ese estado de plenitud que tanto anhelamos. Y sobretodo, provocar la expansión del rechazo del alcohol ­y del resto de drogas, claro­ predicando con el ejemplo en una vida sana y en busqueda de la realización personal.”

anarquia-y-alcohol-formato-rechazo pdf