Fuck Around and Find Out: An Obituary for Victimhood

  • 2023/12/07 04:07

“Here, I reflect on a specific memory that involves physical abuse and sexual assault…

…after years of accumulated anger and despair, something changed. The line between life and death blurred as I stood up holding a chair over my head and screamed incoherently at a man who, for years, used my body for both sexual assault and various forms of corporal punishment. This man, who was supposed to be my father figure, my role model, my trusted best friend, slowly backed away. Today was the day he lost all power and control over me. For the first time there was fear in HIS eyes instead of mine, and years of childhood mental and physical abuse would cease forever.

It wasn’t until I became aware of my own violent potential that I experienced freedom. Despite being much smaller and weaker, I was no longer afraid. A new confidence had consumed me – one that could never be inspired by the protection of my Family, Community, or the State. Even the threat of imprisonment couldn’t subdue this deranged exhilaration. I waited. I waited for him to try again. I watched him poison himself with the usual gin, brandy, and beer combination, waiting for his drunken wrath to return. But it never did. My abandonment of victimhood hadn’t gone unnoticed. Almost as if he could smell his own pool of blood from an impending ambush attack in the night. The future was written. He was lucky to still be alive – and seemingly had no intentions on taking that gamble.”

Fuck Around and Find Out_An Obituary for Victimhood pdf

 

Against The Gendered Nightmare

  • 2020/07/08 07:41

From back cover:

“In the past several years, the question of gender has been taken up again and again by the anarchist milieu. And still few attempts amount to much more than a rehashing of old ideas. Most positions on gender remain within the constraints of one or more of the ideologies that have failed us already, mainly Marxist feminism, a watered down eco-feminism, or some sort of liberal “queer anarchism.” Present in all of these are the same problems we’ve howled against already: identity politics, representation, gender essentialism, reformism, and reproductive futurism. While we have no interest in offering another ideology in this discourse, we imagine that an escape route could be charted by asking the question that few will ask; by setting a course straight to the secret center of gendered life which all the ideological answers take for granted. We are speaking, of course, about Civilization itself.”

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

Against The Gendered Nightmare pdf 

Against All Odds: Abolishing Gender, Abolishing Poetry

  • 2017/09/20 04:44

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

  • 2017/09/14 20:40

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

  • 2017/09/14 20:35

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

  • 2017/09/14 20:34

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)

  • 2017/09/14 20:33

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

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

  • 2017/09/14 20:07

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

Destroy Gender

  • 2017/09/14 19:58

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

  • 2017/09/14 19:43

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

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

  • 2017/09/14 18:27

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

  • 2017/09/14 18:18

“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

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

  • 2017/09/14 07:13

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

BITING BACK: A Radical Response to Non-Vegan Anarchists

  • 2017/09/11 17:21

Text from back cover:

“Veganism is not merely a dietary choice, but a challenge to the dominant anthropocentric narrative. It is not about purchasing different products but cultivating new relationships with non-human animals which are not based on hierarchies and oppression. While there are still anarchists who feel waiting for the collapse of capitalism and supporting the ALF is a sufficient enough approach to anti-speciesism, many of us recognize the social and dietary framework which enables speciesism and the need for its total destruction.”

BITING BACK A Radical Response to Non-Vegan Anarchists pdf

Accomplices Not Allies: Abolish The Ally Industrial Complex

  • 2017/09/08 04:20


This zine presents a strong critique of the political identity of “ally” and the activists who have built an “ally industrial complex” based on their anti-oppression credentials. Written from the context of indigenous struggles, this zine criticizes and explains several different types of “allies”: those who wish to “save” oppressed people, those who wish to use oppressed people to advance their own interests, academics, self-proclaiming allies, and more. Rather than “allies,” the zine argues instead for “accomplices” who attack colonial structures and ideals and who are realized through mutual consent and trust.

Accomplices Not Allies pdf

Against Identity Politics: Spectres, Joylessness & The Contours of Ressentiment

  • 2017/09/08 04:09

Texts from back cover:

“What is being criticized here is a particular political style, rather than a theoretical orientation – a style which labels as oppressive any deviation from a particular political line, which resorts almost immediately to public denunciation and exclusion, and which entails analytical and categorical rigidity […]”

“Structural oppressions are sociologically real, but their roots can be traced deeper, to the structures of statism and representation. If we must theorize a primary contradiction, then let it be the contradiction between ourselves – as unique ones, forces of becoming, irreducible and unrepresentable beings – and the entire regime of spectres and alienation.”

Against Identity Politics pdf

Ain’t No PC Gonna Fix It Baby: A Critique of Ally Politics

  • 2017/09/08 03:28

Text from back cover:

“Anti-authoritarian white allies often express that they are working with authoritarian or nonpartisan community groups, sometimes on projects they don’t believe in, because the most important thing is for them to follow the leadership of people of color. The unspoken implication is that there are no anti-authoritarian people of color—or none who are worth working with. Choosing to follow authoritarian people of color in this way invisibilizes anarchist and anti-authoritarian people of color; it also functions to marginalize and suppress efforts from less powerful or influential members of these communities. In this way, white allies diminish the agency and leverage of people of color who disagree with the established, institutionalized groups, reinforcing hierarchies of legitimacy and policing the boundaries of political approach by throwing the weight of their privileges behind those who already have more power.”

Aint_No_PC_Gonna_Fit_It_Baby_A Critique of Ally Politics pdf

An Obituary for Identity Politics

  • 2017/09/07 21:08

From back cover:

“Rather than taking aim at identity itself and the apparatus maintaining this paradigm, energy is spent tearing one another down, ignoring the complexity of individual uniqueness, and playing the State’s role of defining each other based on membership to identity categories. Embracing a particular identity only reaffirms that identity’s existence as a ‘universal truth’ – and therefore, by the colonial intentions of assigned identity, the servitude and enslavement of some to others as a universal truth as well…

…I refuse to participate in upholding enslavement as a condition of my existence, and therefore these ‘truths’ are nothing more than political works of fiction…

…These ‘truths’ are the social constructs of control, keeping the life of rebellion shackled in a cold well of reform.”

An Obituary for Identity Politics pdf

Complices No Aliades

  • 2017/09/07 19:21

“Esta provocación está planteada para intervenir en parte de las tensiones actuales alrededor de la solidaridad/trabajo de apoyo al ser las trayectorias actuales, desde mi perspectiva, contra-liberadoras. Agradecimientos especiales a DS En Phoenix por las conversaciones que han conducido a este zine, y a todes aquelles que aportaron comentarios/preguntas/discrepancias. No interpretéis esto como para “aliades blanques jóvenes de clase media”, sólo para activistas pagades, activistas sin ánimo de lucro, o como une amigue dijo, “anarquistas o estudiantes que han empobrecido”. Hay muches supuestes “aliades” en la lucha por los derechos de les migrantes que apoyan una “amplia reforma de la inmigración” la cual impulsa la militarización de las tierras indígenas.”

complices no aliades pdf

Dangerous Foundations: An Argument Against the “Identity” in Identity Politics

  • 2017/09/07 19:16

A well-written, thorough critique of identity and a proposal for its total abandonment.

Dangerous Foundations Anti-Identity pdf

Desire Armed: Anarchy and the Creative Impulse

  • 2017/09/07 19:09

Text from back cover:

“My freedom is not a promise for the future, but a way to continuously confront the world where I exist now, taking possession of my life with all my might, in conflict with everything that stands in my way. This ongoing conflict (which will not end simply because we somehow manage to eradicate the entire institutional framework of authority) is what makes the essential destructive, negating aspects of anarchist practice one with the creative aspects. Consciously creating our lives as our own means destroying every chain that holds as back, smashing through every barrier that gets in our way. Thus, there is no use in waiting for some condition to hand us our freedom. We need to act now for our own sakes and on our own terms, not for any cause nor on terms set by those who want to maintain the ruling order.”

Desire Armed Anarchy and the Creative Impulse pdf

Essentialism and The Problem of Identity Politics

  • 2017/09/07 18:26

Text from the zine:

“Essentialism is the idea that there exists some detectible and objective core quality of particular groups of people that is inherent, eternal, and unalterable; groupings can be categorized according to these qualities of essence, which are based on such problematic criteria as gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, and class. These external qualities are almost always marked by visual cues, making the categories more obvious and/or easier to notice. These qualities contain social and — more importantly from an antiauthoritarian perspective — hierarchical signi cance to those marking the cues and those marked by the cues: sexism, in the case of gender; racism in the case of skin tone; the unwanted attention of authorities in the case of any and all different looking/acting people. Racism, sexism, classism, and most other forms of historical oppression are ideologies and policies maintained and justified by essentialism.”

Essentialism and the Problem of Identity Politics pdf

From Politics to Life: Ridding Anarchy of the Leftist Millstone

  • 2017/09/07 18:07

Text from the zine:

“From the time anarchism was first defined as a distinct radical movement it has been associated with the left, but the association has always been uneasy. Leftists who were in a position of authority (including those who called themselves anarchists, like the leaders of the CNT and the FAI in Spain in 1936–37) found the anarchist aim of the total transformation of life and the consequent principle that the ends should already exist in the means of struggle to be a hindrance to their political programs. Real insurgence always burst far beyond any political program, and the most coherent anarchists saw the realization of their dreams precisely in this unknown place beyond. Yet, time after time, when the fi res of insurrection cooled (and even occasionally, as in Spain in 1936–37, while they still burnt brightly), leading anarchists would take their place again as “the conscience of the left”. But if the expansiveness of anarchist dreams and the principles that it implies have been a hindrance to the political schemes of the left, these schemes have been a far greater millstone around the neck of the anarchist movement, weighing it down with the “realism” that cannot dream.”

From Politics to Life pdf

Identity, Politics, Anti-Politics: A Critical Perspective

  • 2017/09/07 17:44

A critique of identity politics from a queer, anarchist perspective, arguing that identity politics runs the risk of forming cross-class affinities between queers, women, and people of colour, and assimilating radical struggles into establishment politics. Originally published in Pink and Black Attack #4, 2010, and reproduced in Queer Ultraviolence – A Bash Back! Anthology available from Ardent Press.

Identity_Politics and Anti-Politics pdf

Leftism 101

  • 2017/09/07 17:27

This zine collects two excellent essays by Lawrence Jarach: “Leftism 101” from Back to Basics: The Problem of the Left put out by the Green Anarchy collective and “Anarchists, Don’t let the Left(overs) Ruin your Appetite” from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #48.

The first essay looks at the origins of Leftist thought and anarchism’s relationship to it. The second essay provides a brief overview of anarchists’ historical relationship with “the Left,” concluding that there is no point in engaging with it.

Leftism 101 pdf

Let’s Become Dangerous: For the Diffusion of the Black International by Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

  • 2017/09/07 17:23

Text from the zine:

“No, our burned banks are not a way of protest or a token of friendship and solidarity with the “poor person” who does nothing and sits on his couch. It is a way to express our “I”. An “I”, that wants to stand out from the herd of slaves, an “I” that does not bow the head down, an “I” not waiting for the crowd to revolt, an “I”, which claims his own name, his own “acronym” and does not hide behind anonymity. The meeting time of the revolted ‘Egos’ takes up the name that we give to it. Its name is FAI and it is our “we”. A collective “we”, armed with razors against our enemies.”

Lets Become Dangerous pdf

Negate Politics, Affirm Cuteness

  • 2017/09/07 09:49

A zine against “growing up”, politics and workerism.

Negate Politics pdf

Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind

  • 2017/09/07 09:16

Text from back cover:

“Post­-left anarchists reject all ideologies in favor of the individual and communal construction of self­-theory. Individual self­-theory is theory in which the integral individual in context (in all her or his relationships, with all her or his history, desires, and projects, etc.) is always the subjective center of perception, understanding and action. Communal self- theory is similarly based on the group as subject, but always with an underlying awareness of the individuals (and their own self­-theories) which make up the group or organization. Non-­ideological, anarchist organizations (or informal groups) are always explicitly based upon the autonomy of the individuals who construct them, quite unlike leftist organizations which require the surrender of personal autonomy as a prerequisite for membership.”

Post-Left Anarchy_Leaving the Left Behind pdf

Really Though, Not All “Black” People Give A Fuck About “White” Dreads

  • 2017/09/07 08:16

Text from back cover:

“Just ‘cus people share the same institutionalized form(s) of oppression don’t automatically mean they share the same visions and objectives on how to destroy it. These are important differences that shouldn’t be flattened. While these groups continue their mind-numbing attempts to create a new system of race essentialism within the shell of the old, some of us are having fun destroying all the systems. My anarchy is an existential expansion of individuality beyond the limitations of racial (and gendered) social constructs.”

Really though, not all black people give a fuck about white dreads pdf

Revolutionary Solidarity: A Critical Reader for Accomplices

  • 2017/09/07 08:08

A collection of essays that thoroughly critique identity politics, ally politics and other forms of liberalism found in anarchist circles.

Revolutionary Solidarity pdf

Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability

  • 2017/09/07 08:03

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

Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism

  • 2017/09/07 07:54

This zine lays out the basic principles of insurrectionary anarchism: attack, autonomous self-organization, rejection of management, illegality, informality, the synthesis of individualism and communism, and immediacy.

Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism pdf

Total Destroy #3 A Milwaukee Anarchist Periodical

  • 2017/09/07 07:48

Text from back cover:

“In a police report describing a black bloc at the Republican National Convention, one ever-so eloquent officer claimed that he observed a group of over one hundred anarchists “doing being totally out of control”. While we certainly are flattered by the sentiment, what the clever officer witnessed was neither doing nor being. It was not the performance of an act or even a state or quality of having existence. He bore witness not to us in a certain state of existing, nor embodying any stable identity. Dumbfounded, his inability to identify any particular mode is, in fact, illustrative of what he stumbled upon. He witnessed an opening of a space in the policed grid of desire and action – an invention of new trajectories, possible bodies and unheard of futures. He observed us mapping a new virtual landscape of otherworldly affects – a zone of indeterminacy, an autonomous zone, as it were. It was the actualization of our potential; a widening of the virtual-actual circuit tracing the flows between who we are and what we can be. He witnessed, but failed to really see, our bodies in a perpetual and intensifying dance of annihilation and genesis of our selves. He’d be wrong to say we were either doing or being. What he desperately termed our doing-being was in actuality a becoming – our becoming totally out of control.”

Total Destroy #3 Milwaukee Anarchist Periodical pdf

Terror Incognita

  • 2017/09/07 07:33

Terror Incognita challenges conventional notions about consent, violence, sexuality, desire, and freedom, in hopes of pushing the discourse about these subjects far out of familiar territory.

Terror_Incognita pdf

The Limits of Contemporary Anti-oppression Theory and Practice (A critique of Privilege Theory and Cultural Essentialism)

  • 2017/09/07 01:58

Text from back cover:

“Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and queer political program which white liberals can somehow become “allies” of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim that they are in possession of such a program. This particular brand of white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and field of action offered by privilege theory.”

The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Practice pdf