Les Guérillères – by Monique Wittig – MP3 – PDF – Torrent – Archive – YouTube
Monique Wittig published Les Guerilleres in 1969, at a time when the whole world seemed on the brink of revolutionary change. It is the story of a successful feminist war against patriarchy. It was one of the most widely read feminist texts of the twentieth century both dated and ahead of its time. We include our own introduction and explanation at the beginning of the recording, you can read it here.
Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers – By Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English – MP3 – Read – PDF – alt PDF – Archive – Torrent – YouTube
Women have always been healers, and medicine has always been an arena of struggle between female practitioners and male professionals. This audio zine explores two important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States. The authors conclude that despite efforts to exclude them, the resurgence of women as healers should be a long-range goal of the women’s movement.
Originally published in 1973, this text offers a good brief analysis of the history of patriarchy as it relates to the medical establishment. However, it has some blind spots around Eurocentrism and intersectionality.
Musical Interludes – Stevie Nicks – Gate and Garden
The Unquiet Dead: Anarchism, Fascism and Mythology: introduction. – Anonymous – MP3 – Read – Print – Torrent – Archive – YouTube
This is the first installment of a book-length piece, The Unquiet Dead. The full text is available at unquietdead.tumblr.com; we will be posting recordings of other chapters in the future. The introduction includes an explanation of the project and reflections on history, myth, and essentialism.
“…We organized against white supremacy, which exists in non-fascist formations but is closely linked to fascism… and we knew that the U.S. police continue to be an armed, powerful, racist organization with links to explicitly fascist groups. Still, in many ways, we slept.
Alas, there is no haven to flee to; we cannot escape our doom, whether it comes from without or within, without facing it down. At present, this country is threatened by ISIS, a religious-fascist state force; rightwing populists use ISIS to justify their fascist rhetoric; the police continue to murder black people with little consequence; and elements of fascist mythology sometimes even manifest within radical communities.”
Musical Interludes – Over and Over by The Syndicate
Undoing Sex: against sexual optimism – by c.e. – MP3 – Read – Print – Archive – Torrent – YouTube
*This zine contains discussion of sexual assault*
“Undoing Sex” is a critique of sex-positivity that both draws upon and completely transcends second-wave feminist critiques. The essay explores the metaphysical quandaries faced by the “not-man” in their engagement with and survival of sex. Centering sex negativity in a transgender, queer experience of how the image of sexual pleasure and health is produced, marketed, and consumed by people of all genders, the text brings Marx, Foucault, Afropessimism, and other currently useful theories to bear upon the sexual impasse many (all?) of us face. It offers no prescriptive conclusions, but rather to speaks an array of inadequate coping strategies. We recommend it for all those who choose to have sex, for all those who choose to not have sex, and for those who feel that “choice” is not an adequate word.
Musical interludes – La Roux – In For The Kill
We must avoid falling into this trap, and so must always keep in mind that the celibate body is no purer, no more feminist, no less exploited. Just as a refusal to eat meat makes no change to the material basis of industrial agriculture, our refusals to fuck, much as our desires to fuck in different ways, don’t crack the material base of patriarchy. They may engender a better quality of life or more agency for individuals or communities, but these liberal models of “resistance” offer nothing in the way of a total break. This is the impasse faced by radical feminism: gestures proliferate but they only ever point towards the abolition of gender, glancing so close but never reaching the moment of Truth.
1:37:14 – A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980’s – by Donna Haraway – MP3 – PDF – Text – Torrent – Archive – YouTube
“It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
This prescient essay, while not written from a specifically anarchist perspective, remains unparalleled in its creative exploration of resistance predicated on a rejection of purity and “the natural.” Haraway’s cyborg transcends notions of intersectionality to trouble essentialism at its root. Her challenge to us–to imaginatively take up power in the course of its rejection–has been answered by many, but adequately refuted by none.
While we find this an intentionally anti-essentialist essay, and are aware of Haraway’s history of solidarity with trans women, we must note with regret her use of the term “Phallogocentrism.”
Resonance: An Anarchist Audio Distro 