from green anarchy magazine
http://www.greenanarchy.org/
Only a Tsunami Will Do
For a Post-Feminist Anarchy
by Rita Katrina-Andrews
Anarchists who cling to
Leftist ideology as if it's a life raft are not worth the energy of a
tirade. But, when another self-described post-left anarchist used an
essentialist feminist scheme to explain away a much more complex situation,
one of my peri-menopausal rants became inevitable. If it leaves you cold and
uninspired good; I'll have reflected the subject matter well. If you are
already preparing your defense, gwan-get to a 'safe space' to vilify me as 'maleidentified',
'manarchist' or ... But look, I'm not dissing you, 'sister' or 'brother';
always do what pleases you most. It's just that the endless 60's reruns of
"Men: Oppressors Original Problem" and "Women: Nurturers Only Solution"
are tiresome. Depressing. Frustrating. And the latest newsflashes, "Man
Deviates From Essential Nature, Becomes More Feminine; Crochets Scarf" or
"Woman Takes Male Privilege; Abuses Iraqi Prisoners" are just spinning
attempts to aerate a stagnant pool liberally polluted with the flotsam and
jetsam of feminism's (p)receding two Waves.
When feminists proclaimed
"the personal is the political" they conveniently ignored the fact that
politics require de-personalization; de-uniquing and de-individualizing,
massified roles with near verbatim scripts. I insist, the personal can only
be the anti-political ungoverned and ungovernable unique humans whose
liberation can have no interceptors, interpreters, or redirectors. For those
who need to identify the roles and scripts of my life to better position me
on their revoltving stage here's some personal for you.
I'm a woman/female/girl.
Mostly 'caucasian'. Omni-sexual. Enslaved by mother starting age five
(ironing boards don't fold that low for the young maids?). Army brat raped
by military intelligence father for six-plus years starting at age ten until
I swore the 'masculine' vow to kill him if he touched me again. Battered for
years, never fully broken. And no matter how hard They squeezed, an
intractable rebel girl. I was also (and still am when it suits me) a damned
good actress (or is it actor), which saved my ass more than once. I left
'home' as soon as I found a way out and oh, what a way! Mother, military
wife age 17. Prostitute in training, age 19. Single mother of two by 24.
Sexy bartender, thieving comptroller by 29. Kick-ass electronics tech, ace
network engineer 33. With one final agonizing push from below, disgusted
corporate executive age 35. Throughout it all, scores of lovers, but damn
few close and trusting relationships male or female.
Who do you trust in a
world filled with used/users and ideologues who can rarely be
'real'? All
this Progress and Success in the 'man's world' brought death too close by
40. I ignored the warnings for two more years while I searched for a gradual
escape. Once I realized that route didn't exist, I simply bailed. For 7
years I embraced life as a stinking desert rat and outlaw. My only
aspiration then, as now, is to be a 'wild thing'. By doing what I wanted,
when I wanted and mostly alone I gained a level of health I'd not had at
any age. Now I'm 50 and the long-forbidden tears of pain merge with those of
rage when I hear anarchists spouting the same shit, thousands of different
days later; "conform to appropriate behavior or else". My health is waning
again and I have real playing to get caught up with/in, but I can't escape
this reeling stage no matter how remotely I go!
Everywhere life suffers and
dies before its time, if my experience is any reflection and it's us human
'brothers' and 'sisters' doing the murder while indignantly pointing the
finger (some preferring the middle digit) at each other. Sibling rivalry has
gone global and our quarrels, deadly.
"Separation is the alpha and
omega of the spectacle." ibid
Look in the goddamn mirror
look all around you! No one is like you and no one can really know you
maybe not even yourself. But you think you've got everyone else figured out.
Look for sacred, fleshy mounds. A dick? Man, don't trust him; patriarch,
violent, oppressive, privileged, testosterone-poisoned, rapist-in-waiting,
in need of punishment. Breasts? Woman, nurturing, kind, earth-loving,
safe, survivor, in-need-of-sisterly-support. Damn it! So many generals armed
to the teeth with generalizations! Our allies can't be
distinguished/extinguished by appearance OR homogenized experience; neither
can most of our enemies. Believe it or Not Ripley.
Redefining the root of
oppression as the patriarchy is not a well-thought out critique, it's a
well-marketed clichι designed for a captured audience (and another
buck-oh-five bumper sticker). Of course, the obvious rulers on the world
stage are mostly men whose power and glory comes primarily through the
Institutionalized hierarchy of violence. And yes, many homes are the domain
of god-thefather with woman and child beaten into supporting roles.
But to
reconstruct the entire world on a patriarchal foundation, radfems had to
ignore women's roles in the design and enforcement stage. Women also rule
(there are few who who don't dominate someone/thing; hierarchy is ubiquitous
because of its success/ access/-ibility to everyone).
If women's power has
come primarily from the institutionalized hierarchy of manipulation,
matriarchy is supposed to be desirable? Fuck that! My liberation cannot be
measured in the incremental subtleties of physical pain relieved. And no
amount of revisionism can disguise the shifty-shifting roles we all play in
this CO-creation: heroes and heroines, saviors and damselsin- distress,
villains and innocents and...
Alert! Alert! Most every
frightened fear-monger was raised by a mother. Do you think she might have
some role in creating the monsters their offspring become? Or are the
domineering, child-beating, Abu Graib, star-quality commandeers of the
global-stage-sanscock simply patriarchs with pussies?
What do you call women
who urge if not order their men to war to return as heroes protecting
the oh-so-sweet and suddenly available booty? From ancient Helen of Troy to
the re-released Lysistrata, the cunt is no stranger to the imperial
battlefield. Tell me, is it gender, class, or race privilege that keeps the
blood off the hands of the Albrights, Elizabeths, Thatchers, Rices...? Is it
sexism that keeps women 'behind the lines' stuck with the 'inferior' roles
of director, coordinator, or yellow-ribbonier of the men who slaughter for
'freedom'?
"It is easy to see why
bourgeois thought, strung up as it is on a rope of radicalism of its own
manufacture, clings with the energy of desperation to every reformist
solution, to anything that can prolong its life, even though its own weight
must inevitably drag it down to its doom." Raoul Vaneigem
Women's Studies
(Institutionalized Herstory) produce new leaders who mimic the strategies of
their historic predecessors, who succeeded in defining nationalism as a
unifying birth identity. But, feminists are way behind in marketing their
massified set of values: a common (politically correct) language,
generalized shared experience as victim/survivor, loyalty to The Cause, and
an "incredible commonality of vision".
And as do patriots, these feminists
often treat me as a traitor because I refuse to join their "Liberation"
Party.
Stars of the new-age feminist
stage hawk their wares in honor to the goddesses deities worshiped by the
earliest domesticaters of field and home. Some point to these matrilineal
and matriarchal societies of old as models for a postpatriarchy future. I
can't help but wonder; if early civilized women's rule was so fucking
excellent, why was it ended? Is it possible their subjects objected to being
controlled; consequently genderizing their oppressive experience? Roles
couldn't have been exchanged after a masculinist revolution, correct?
But let's get real. We don't
know shit about the distant past with ANY certainty so lets stick with
today. Teachers are mostly female, and along with the mommy dearests and
aides de camp Mattel, Disney, and countless other spectacular brands seared
onto our overly large brains have primary responsibility for
schooling/punishing the wildness (as in the spontaneous self-exploration of
the curious delights and even pains of life) right the fuck on out of us.
"Be good girls and boys the Machine needs you to behave in order to use
(then kill) you efficiently later." Or am I still blaming the big-V,
glossing over an innate female naivetι, ignoring a forced ignore-ance of
woman's subjugation and oppression?
Bullshit! Women are
intelligent, aware, and more than innocent bystanders or collateral damage
in the brutal war on life; far more than empty vessels to be filled by Man's
cock and ideals. Women are as capable of greedy, destructive, bitchin'
behavior of our own accord as we are of submissive (eventually
selfdestructive) acceptance of another's brutality. And here has always been
resistant women fighting often alongside men against the imposition of
another's order. All humans have a wide range of traits and tendencies that
can't be reliably tied to her 'blood' or his 'nature'. Some men are brutes
and some women are, too. Some women nurture, others don't but that doesn't
make them brutes (or masculine). Some men nurture which doesn't make them wusses (or more feminine!). And when does violent self-defense become
offensive aggression; compassionate nurturing force compliant pacification
both tools of the Masters? Do we want to demolish gender roles or redefine
them?
A dominant and dominating
force fixing us in our proper place is the elevation of a mass
identifiable, controllable, and homo-non-genius above all. Well... not
above our overlords and ladies of course. Class IS one of the deep and suck-ulent
roots maintaining the divided and conquerer and we ALL give aid and comfort
to this enemy. But most feminists have to diminish the class and race
factor or risk exposing their own bourgeois white roots and concomitant goal
of wresting power from their male classmates. And they NEED our help to get
it/up.
Feminist
consciousness-raising focused a magnifying glass on men's oppression of
women. A useful beginning perhaps, but the scope was never expanded to
explore the greater duality we share as both possessor and dispossessed.
Women still don't talk about the shit we ought to be talking about if we are
going to spend so damn many words and trees on our liberation. Feminists
talk about taking back the night (I'll take a whole lot more day, thank
you!) while the fucking pigs guard their flanks. Does it matter if the swine
are women? Men are relegated to the back of the line if they're permitted at
all (as though the night is safe for men and as if these women have shit to
say about who is or is not allowed in the streets!). Hey mamas, guess what?
Your ass-end is one of the most vulnerable points in your rigid formation
you can't see what's coming! You send the 'brothers' to the back (sound
familiar), elevating the 'sisterhood' to it's proper place of leadership,
prominence, and self-protection. In reality, those men have got your back
while you still play the fool.
There's also a lot of
woman-talk about female objectification and male privilege, of the necessity
for a step-by-step consensual intimacy and of an ever-expanding definition
of rape. Objectified? Damned right! I am one of trillions of (barely) living
beings redefined as Capital's objects things of usefulness until we're
useless and then we're nothing. Was my raped-pussyobject damaged more than
my brother's smashed-face-object? Is the old Anglo man's labored dying
breath black-lunged from years as miner-object more privileged than the
African girlchild's starvingbelly- object of colonial-diamond/ gold
annihilation for all those pretty rings on the all those pretty fingers,
sold to the highest bidder for the legally-objective right for both actors
to get what they want when they want it? Fuck that shit! You want to measure
and rank our tangible pain along with abstracted privilege!? What
coldhearted measurement device do you have, feminist woman? And when will
you stop sacrificing and I mean sacred-fixing our (w)hole to be used
against us while we prop up the Masters' limp, yet somehow still-potent play
for the Accumulation of Everything?
And don't tell me that you
astute and clever woman don't know how to wield the weapon of your
'femininity'. You want Power? Control? Domination? Women wrote their own
book, it's just not in print. We rarely even talk with each other about the
ways we can and do manipulate; taunt and tease, offer and withdraw affection
(or sex), flatter and ridicule men (and women and children) into doing our
bidding. This is not the unfortunate yet righteous feminine response to the
masculine power trip. It is the interactive, tightly-scripted Play For More
Power and Control men and women act out together. We know how much men want
and need and love to get up all next to us; to feel us, to feel us feeling
them. Stroking bodies, nurturing love, licking wounds, and ... oh damn! You
know what? I love it too! I love her smooth breasts and soft pussy; his hard
cock and rough chest. A man's sweet whispers and a woman's ardent bites.
When we're uninhibited and unmediated by rigid con-sensuality; certain we're
lovers not abusers and rapists we're ALL there. If we fumble in our desire
and unfamiliar passions, why the surprise that anarchists are not perfect in
their every gesture and word? Our fluid, wild, and lusty dance has long been
reduced to lock-step marches: a puritan morality by the Right and gender,
sexual, and reproductive rights by the Left. As we tear down our habituated
facades, we may still be 'inappropriate' at times. Repressed (and who isn't
in some significant way) do we oppress? Shattered and afraid do we
attack those we're closest to? But our necessary attack is (un)bound to
explode somewhere! Can we help each other with our aim?
And, the eco-feminist's (and
is every feminist really an eco-feminist?) reified Earth is not my Mother!
My mother raped me as sure as my father, whether she turned away in silence
or handed him the lotion. The 'earth' is symbiotically-conflicted,
wildly-simple, amazingly-complex, violent-nurturing, male/ female/hermie/ungendered,
multi-colored, undefinable beings living alone, together. Humans included,
once for FREE! Why anthropomorphize, genderize, then parentalize always
spectacularizing it's uniquelyindividual- wholeness? If 'Earth' is
'Mother' we are ALL motherfuckers! Raping her with our death
machine-beauty aids-tofu-packages thrust into too-shallow graves
unlubricated with recycled-sustainable lies. Oh, but those clear-cut
mountains DO remind me of a shaved pussy I'll grant you that. Still lovely
living mounds, but scraped raw for what? And please don't distill your
reasoning to "for the Man's wood".
Distillation doesn't make for purity, it
merely relocates unwanted elements to where you can't see or smell or taste
them anymore. And it will not help your cause if it is indeed one of a
healing nature.
Anarcha-feminists, I thought
you might be accomplices in my genderless, raceless, classless, open-armed
eternal struggle for immeasurable freedom. The double female identifier
surely hinted at your narrowed perspective, little changed from before you
became an 'anarchist'. Your battle of the sexes continues while all around
you extinction gives a shit about identity gendered or other Otherness.
I'm a fucking anarchist opposed to ALL hierarchy, which presents itself in
ways both gross and subtle, Institutional and institutional Focusing on one
of its forms is useful at times, but why would any anarchist extract then
isolate even equating or elevating one type of domination over another?
Hierarchy does not equal patriarchy. Individual women who call themselves
feminists (WHY?) DO have relevant ideas, critiques, and experiences for
anarchists to consider. But feminism cannot be re-formed into an image of
anarchy and anarchy has no need of reformation in the image of Woman.
"When will you stop
identifying with what defines you?" ibid
None of my rant denies the
reality of female subjugation (or of the male's), of sexism (or racism or
classism...) or of a temporary usefulness of segregated safe-spaces.
Breaking free of our chains is difficult, possibly embarrassing. At times
even painful and dangerous. But how can self-imposed confinement ever be
liberatory? How will we create new worlds devoid of separatism when we use
it as The Strategy? This tirade IS a dismissal of the one-sided, non-selfreflecting,
and non-self-critical discourse and massified divisiveness that dominates
all political theory and practice, including feminism. The roots of our
subjugation are deep and tangled; each strand feeds and supports itself and
the structure it is inseparable from. Clipping one will not destroy the
whole; roots are both regenerative and cooperative. This is why some
anarchists and other radicals declare the whole-tangled-mess our enemy. It
is civilization (patriarchy does not equal civilization) rooted in an
all-encompassing domination over the land and over every entity sustaining
and sustained by it. It is life as war whose strategies include aggressive,
violent attacks AND subtle, destructive manipulations.
Men, women, ...fighting for
the elusive Happily- Ever-After-Plus-$'More. This powerful enemy includes a
mindset requiring controlled, predictable (despite acknowledging its
impossibility), identifiable order according to a Mass-ter 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 never-ending.
Find yourself,
man/woman/.../child let me find myself. If we've got a groove let's dance
it into the streets where we'll get it on. Watching each others' back as we
explore the unfamiliar night where strangers are unique, but really not so
strange. Can we learn to trust our intuition/instincts/senses, our comadres
Y compadres who live in their own skin, instead of on ideologies built on
the irrationally rationalized fears of others?
FUCK! We've got to destroy
this stage/platform before it gets kicked out from under nearly dangling
feet and noosed and hoodied heads. And I want to lay my naked and wounded
being on the newly exposed dirt alongside the sensual, raging, gentleness of
a tribe of free lovers of life while I still can. With my tears of pain and
rage unabated, I ask you most urgently why do you wave away potential
accomplices while playing The Droll Revolutionary instead of embracing us in
the infinite ecstasy of revolutionary play?
