Trauma

Invisible People – AudioZine

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Invisible People screenshot

Invisible People – by Margaret Killjoy – MP3 – Purchase Book– Torrent – Archive – YouTube
A squatter comes face to face with crippling anxiety in order to eke out a meager living by hacking rich people. This story was first published in the disability-themed sci-fi anthology Accessing the Future edited by Djibril Al-Ayad and Kathryn Allan. This story was Killjoy’s first professional short fiction sale. More by Margret Killjoy here.

“The last light of the sun came down through the broken windows, all pretty and shit, catching on that big jagged shard of glass and then pouring out into the room over my bed. Over Marcellus. He snored in that way he always did, endearing and soft.

I hurried to dress in the last of the daylight, but once I was done, I lingered. I paced, I ran my fingers through my beard, I watched the twilit horizon and counted the silhouette bones of the buildings Portland calls its skyline.

Anything but go to work.”

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Undoing Sex – AudioZine

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Undoing Sex cover

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.

Lines In Sand – AudioZine

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1:07:16 – Lines In Sand: three essays on identity, oppression, and social war – intro by Peter Gelderloos – MP3 – Read – Print – Archive – Torrent – YouTube

“…I think we all need to fiercely reject the Ally as a primary identity of
struggle. You cannot give solidarity if you are not struggling first
and foremost for your own reasons. To be only or primarily an ally is to
be a parasite on others’ struggles, with no hope greater than to be a
benign parasite; it is to refuse to acknowledge our interests and place
in the world out of a dogmatic insistence on identifying ourselves with
the system we are supposed to be fighting. Being aware of relative
oppression and privilege is vital, but emphasizing those differences
over the fact that all of us have common enemies and all of us have
reasons to destroy the entire system is deliberately missing
opportunities to make ourselves stronger in this fight.”

Lines in Sand is a collection by various unnamed authors with an intro by Peter Gelderloos that looks
critically at identity politics and anti-oppression politics. All of
them are very thought provoking and well worth reading. These aren’t
knee-jerk criticisms, but rather are thoughtful explorations of the
problematic aspects of identity and anti-oppression politics and
practice.

 

“…tokenization and paternalism are on any list of “fucked up” behaviors in
an anti-oppression practice, thus the practice protects itself from
open complicity with the very problems it creates. Human agency is a
fundamental component of freedom, perhaps the most important one;
therefore if someone is denied agency in their own struggle because the
most legit thing they can do is be an ally to someone else’s struggle,
it is inevitable that they will exercise their agency in the course of
supporting a struggle they view as someone else’s. To do so, they will
either look for any oppressed person who supports a form of struggle
they feel inclined towards, and use them as a legitimating façade, or
they will try to participate fully and affect the course of a broader
campaign or coalition in which they are pretending to be mere allies. In
other words, by presenting privilege as a good thing, anti-oppression
politics creates privileged people who have nothing to fight for and
inevitably tokenize or paternalize those whose struggles are deemed
(more) legitimate.”