Anarchism & Sexuality

Ethics, Relationships and Power

Jamie Heckert, Richard Cleminson, Jamie Heckert, Richard Cleminson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136808364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Gender & The Law
• Index: Law

Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

Chapter 1

Ethics, relationships and power

An introduction

Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson

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.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind

Like masturbation, anarchism is something we have been brought up to fear, irrationally and unquestioningly, because not to fear it might lead us to probe it, learn it and like it.

—Cathy Levine, The Tyranny of Tyranny

Introduction

With this book, we bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experiences of sexuality. We’ve attempted to craft a queer book, both in style and in content: a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political, between desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual, between activism and scholarship, between poetry and prose, and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. In doing so, we attempt to enact what Judy Greenway has called a ‘methodological anarchism that relinquishes control, challenges boundaries and hierarchies, and provides a space for new ideas to emerge’ (Greenway 2008: 324). Bringing this book into the world, we have a number of intentions: first, to make fresh anarchist perspectives available to contemporary debates around sexuality; second, to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent waves of anarchist scholarship; and, third, to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. But before that, before this book has even been published, we have already been transformed through the process of engaging with each other and each of the contributors and their contributions. Lest we slip into a fetishisation of the future, of ends disconnected from means, of products separated from production, we note that the long slow birth of this book is already making interventions and contributions. The book is not unusual in that respect; all processes, all relationships, have multiple effects. What is unusual, in the goal-oriented ‘phallicised whiteness’ of capitalism (Winnubst 2006: 6), is to appreciate processes and relationships for themselves. This appreciation is one of many inheritances from anarchist, feminist and indigenous traditions for which we are deeply grateful.

The book’s methodology, running through each piece in this collection, concentrates on raising historical, present and practical questions concerning sex and sexuality, love, desire and intimacy, with a specific focus on a triad of interconnected fields: ethics, relationships and power. By means of its consciously interdisciplinary approach, this book attempts to bring contemporary and historical anarchist interpretations into the pressing spheres of current social, political, ethical and legal debate. In doing so, Anarchism & Sexuality bridges a supposed gap between theory and activism, between ideas and ‘real life struggle’. By drawing inspiration from the rise of the global movement of movements, and the corresponding waves of anarchist activism and scholarship, this book provides much-needed sources of inspiration for putting anarchistic ethics into practice, focusing on issues such as race, class and gender equality, sexual liberation and sexual violence, the experience of one’s own body and the interface between these matters and social mores, psychological patterns, laws and other aspects of ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze 1992).

Before articulating these messages and their relevance to living our lives, first of all we want to say a few words about how anarchism may be understood. For some, anarchism is very easily defined: either it is a symbol and incarnation of chaos or it is an outmoded revolutionary political ideology originating in social movements of nineteenth-century Europe. Despite its evident trajectory, anarchism is dismissed as an ideology that failed historically to create and sustain a revolutionary society, an ideology and practice that is locked into an essentialist concept of human nature as primarily generous and good, and that is bound by prioritising class struggle and workplace issues over and above transforming other social relationships. Thus, anarchism is all too often viewed as having little to offer contemporary questions and strategies for undermining seemingly entrenched hierarchies and violent exploitative social relationships. In this second reading, anarchism is more or less confined to the writings of ‘anarchist luminaries’ such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Piotr Kropotkin, experiencing an upsurge in the late nineteenth century and petering out, save in some isolated spots in the periphery of Europe and Latin America, by the end of World War Two. For others, however, anarchism did not die with the Spanish Civil War. Anarchism has since developed through ongoing practical experiments in non-hierarchical organisation and has broadened and deepened its theoretical foundations to offer a striking relevance nowadays. However, while anarchism remains opposed to capitalism and to the state (whether the state-centred politics of liberal democracy or the centralised vertical structures of authoritarian socialism), its relevance to sexuality is perhaps not all that apparent. This definition of anarchism certainly doesn’t sound sexy (except, perhaps, to those of us with a fetish for revolutionary theory).

Rather than seeing anarchism as an ideology, anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker suggests that it should be understood as a ‘definite trend in the historic development of mankind [sic]’ to strive for freedom (cited in Chomsky 2005: 118). Commenting on this, Noam Chomsky argues that there is no need to pin down anarchism as a singular object because

there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man [sic] or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that ‘human nature’ or ‘the demands of efficiency’ or ‘the complexity of modern life’ requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

(Chomsky 2005: 119)

As a trend striving for freedom, for liberation, the significance of anarchism for an examination and living out of sexuality might become more obvious. However, many have understandably become critical of notions of sexual liberation after poststructuralist critiques of ‘liberation’ and in a time where freedom has individualistic connotations. What might sexual anarchy mean, if not the total lack of order and morality that some might imagine? What characterises this anarchist trend besides dismantling authority?

In order to answer these questions, we believe that it can be helpful to think of this ‘trend in history’ called anarchism as a kind of ethics of relationships, as advocating and practising very different relations of power than those involved in the state, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy (Heckert 2010a, 2010b). Three ‘guiding principles’ drive the endeavour in this book to bring anarchist ethics to (sexual) relationships. First, anarchism is not viewed as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to social problems, but rather as a commitment to diversity as an ethical stance in itself, in sharp contrast to the standardisation and regulation of state and bureaucratic rationales. The contributions in this volume reflect this diversity because situations are different, because life itself is diverse; there are, nevertheless, some commonly shared ethics: agreements to respect a diversity of tactics, support for cultural and ecological diversity in the face of neoliberal imperialism, and resistance to any orthodoxy. Second, anarchism has a radical commitment to equality; anarchy means no one gets to claim the unquestionable status of being on top (an = no; archy = top, from the Greek anarkhos).¹ Instead, relationships are always open to renegotiation. Unlike an individualistic notion of freedom, where one person is to be ‘free’ (that is, privileged) at the expense of others, anarchism’s idea of freedom is relational: one person’s freedom is inseparable from another’s freedom. Thus, anarchist organisation practises horizontality, or perhaps a fluidity of power where no one is in any position of leadership for an extended period and where leadership involves following rather than commanding. Likewise, a radical commitment to equality involves an ongoing process of empowerment so that everyone is better able to contribute to change. This ethic of freedom, in resistance to everyday forms of governmentality and normalisation, subtle or more overt, is addressed in different ways and draws on different analytical tools in each of the essays and short pieces contained in these pages. Third, anarchism, as a daily practice, engages in an ethic of care rather than an ethic of control (including control disguised as care). This book explores how love and solidarity can be articulated in the sphere of sexuality and beyond within societies that may seem ever more disconnected, atomised and authoritarian. Thus, rather than supporting charity, anarchism favours solidarity where all practices of freedom are recognised as interconnected.

Finally, anarchist ethics place emphasis on listening to others rather than speaking for them or on their behalf. In addressing the sensitive issues of intimacy, love and desire, the essays and poems in this book both argue for and demonstrate this ethic of listening as an alternative to statist patterns of representation and discipline. In the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign, this inspired approach is demonstrated through a focus on listening to the struggles of others and supporting their capacity for autonomy rather than electoral campaigns to become their representatives (Marcos and the Zapatistas 2006). In anarcha-feminism and radical psychologies, learning to listen to oneself, to acknowledge one’s own emotions and desires, is crucial to unlearning patriarchal hierarchies of the rational over the emotional, of mind over body. For, as Saul Newman put it, ‘if the problem of voluntary servitude – so often neglected in radical political theory – is to be countered, the revolution against power and authority must involve a micro-political revolution which takes place at the level of the subject’s desire’ (Newman 2010: 6). In listening to our own bodies, our own desires, as well as to others (human and non-human), perhaps we can all come to imagine our own lives.

Part of imagining our own lives – and practising them, too – for many of us is related to how we live our sexuality. For some, this is a fundamental part of their life experience; for others, it is one of a wide range of activities to which limited time is devoted. But today, as some commentators have noted (e.g. Weeks 1985), sexuality has accrued the status of being somehow special, different from other social relationships. Of course, what goes on in sexual relationships is in numerous ways different from what takes place in the relationship amongst workers in the workplace or the interactions between citizens and authorities. But many of the same hierarchies, obligations and behavioural patterns coincide in different relationships, whether we label them intimate, economic or political. The special status of sexuality stems, in part, from a patriarchal separation of the personal from the political, the private from the public. Supposedly natural constructions of masculinity and femininity, double standards across these divisions, whereby it is socially sanctioned that men have many partners and women should be ‘chaste’, are themselves naturalised. Sexuality has become the truth of the self in a way that other aspects of ‘private’ life have not; such an incitement to ‘be sexual’ and to consume the wares of sexuality fits with present exhortations to construct our own lifestyles and identities through avid and repetitive consumption. In other words, who you have sex with (or want to have sex with) is assumed to be a fixed characteristic, an answer to the question of what sort of person you are or an essential part of personhood by which you are valued or denied value; sexual performance also becomes an integral and necessary part of the self. Similar assumptions are rarely made about expressions of desire for golfing, swimming or walking on the beach. The result is that sexuality has become emphasised as a special location for liberation, the place where desires can be met.

Making sex special like this causes all sorts of problems, as some branches of feminism and later poststructuralism have argued. For starters, profit-oriented media sell this notion of individualistic sexual liberation, saying not only that people can have the great sex lives they want, but that they should have them. How is this supposed to happen? Most people spend all day at rigidly differentiated and hierarchised workplaces, are told to suppress their feelings in order to obey the rules, and find it difficult to come home and become capable of expressing their feelings and desires and listening to those of another. And if (or when) people fail to express their feelings and desires, they are told it is their own fault. However, those faults can be fixed, those problems can be solved by spending money on individual solutions: ‘beauty’ products and cosmetic surgery, self-help books and psychological magazines that disinter one’s ‘true’ desires and self.

As the realm of sex and relationships becomes ever more privatised, the subject of surveillance and the plaything of psychological expertise, the collective and race/gender/class-inflected elements of sexuality fall from view. Faced with the commodification of sexuality, its privat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Sexual anarchy, anarchophobia and dangerous desires
• 1. Ethics, relationships and power: an introduction
• Poetic interlude 1
• Poetic interlude 2
• Poetic interlude 3
• Poetic interlude 4
• Index