Before I begin my rant/critique about a book release I just attended, I’d first like to remind my readers that the term “radical” means “root” like square root which is why it’s called a radical in math. This is something I just had an “ah-ha” moment about and is currently informing the way I analyze things.

When we talk about radicalism, we are talking about striking at the roots, rather than reforming them through liberalism. We mean that we recognize that the whole system is built upon and sustained through structures that we do not wish to transform, but that we wish to be rid of.

So.

I sat down on the arm of a couch with a few of my friends - one whom I came with, two whom I happened to see there - excited to learn about this book that was published about militant queer resistance to heteropatriarchal capitalism. I am utterly sick of reading about the violence/nonviolence debate and was eager to hear theories and methods that reflected more of how I have come to understand struggle and resistance.

Not two minutes into the first speaker’s introduction to the book, I look around the room, look back at the speaker. I lean down to the friend I came with, who is sitting at my feet, and ask her if she has a spare pen. Thankfully she does and lends it to me, and I take out my planner and start to scribble. (This friend helped me process all of this afterwards and I thank her profusely for all the emotional and intellectual work she has helped me put into this.)

This has never happened before. I have never felt the urge so strongly to write down my critique and frustration at an event. At most events I go to, I sit through the bullshit and laugh quietly in my head because what is being said is so far from the understanding I’ve come to (I know this sounds snobby but it happens). It’s amusing, it’s uncomfortable, but it has never been what I felt here. Here, I feel deep disappointment and bitter rage because this is the closest I’ve come to finding an activist space that shares my understanding of radicalism. The academy is too assimilationist and career driven. The streets are too liberal and heteropatriarchal. This book and this group of people seek to bash back at all of these expressions of power to create a critical praxis of radical queer resistance, and this is what I wanted.

And this is essentially what they gave. Maybe it’s a good building block. But using a very single-issue, shallow, privileged epistemology that actually does not strike at the roots.

The roots they identified are: capitalism and Christianity. I have no problem with these being identified as methods of oppressing queers. In fact, I recognize capitalism and hegemonic Christianity as tools in the shed of a larger power structure. I waited and waited for that larger structure to be addressed, all the while scribbling away my critique. I got nothing. The best thing I got was my friend at my feet tearing off a slip of paper, folding it, and passing it to me. It said: “KILL WHITEY." (NOTE that this is an inside joke of sorts whereby we really mean, "I hate white supremacy and how white people won’t talk about how privilege has constructed them as subjects and how whiteness is a lens through which they see the world.)

To my friend: THANK YOU. So let’s talk about the root of queer oppression. Which is, by the way, also a root of capitalism and Christian supremacy. And patriarchy (an issue that was skirted at this reading but at least partially addressed by engaging feminist praxis). It’s this little tiny thing called white supremacy, which manifests through franchise colonialism, settler colonialism, and racism. Without white supremacy, capitalism and Christianity would never have been effective tools against anyone, including queers (this is one of my problems with Foucault - he never addresses his whiteness and the invisibilized privilege informing his theory).

In the past, to queer, as a verb, can be defined as something done to sexually nonnormative people to secure heteronormative supremacy. It is inherently a colonialized and racialized process by which heteronormativity comes to be defined through whiteness and corresponding ideas such as normalcy, decency, health, fitness, etcetcetc. Andrea Smith, Anne Stoler, and Scott Morgensen have all theorized the emergence of the supreme white heterosexual man through the conquest of Othered peoples - Smith and Morgensen through settler colonialism and genocide, Stoler through franchise colonialism and economic violence (such as slavery). The programs employed to secure the supremacy of whiteness operated through a sexualized narrative whereby Native peoples were subjugated, enslaved, and exterminated methodologically, to distinguish the goodness of the white colonizers from the barbarism of the Native colonizeds.

OF COURSE, capitalism and Christian supremacy necessarily informed this process; in the name of G-d and profit, these Native peoples (and now people of color in diaspora) underwent and today undergo this legacy of subjugation. However, without an analysis of colonialism and racism, the "plant” of oppressive power is only stripped of some of its lateral roots, while the anchor remains intact. Capitalism, Christianity, and heteropatriarchy would not have become such powerful tools of oppression without the lateral root of white supremacy. And the whole epistemological anchor, which fuses all of these systems of power into one lifeline, regrows if we do not address the way that whiteness informs our understanding of resistance.

So I sat in my corner, shaking, scribbling down my anger and disappointment. I thought to myself, am I too radical for radicalism? Is this why some of my radical friends, queer people of color who disidentify with communism and socialism, refuse to come into these anarchist spaces with me? Because they create an unsafe patriarchal white supremacist environment that disavows masculine and white privileges in the name of critiquing identity?

The talk laid out two ways of theorizing identity: buying into identity politics, or rejecting identity outright. (There were lots of dichotomies posed in this space, even as the speakers verbally expressed the desire to break dichotomies. This way of thinking also emerges from that same epistemology that made possible capitalism, Christian supremacy, and heteropatriarchy, and must be challenged.) On the one hand, the speaker spoke to essentialism and critiqued it; I agreed. On the other, the speaker critiqued identity-blindness; I agreed. But then he went on to fall into the very identity-blindness he critiqued instead of exploring outside this dichotomous line drawn by identity. Well, where does identity come from? It is constructed. And because power constructs our identities and interpellates us into these rigid boundaries, we have real, lived, material differences. There is an outside to this false dichotomy. It’s called deconstruction. There is a real need to address the construction of differences by power, because these differences are what alienate us from each other and stop us from coalescing. To disavow them is a huge mistake; it is basically to claim colorblindness, genderblindness, classblindness without asking how race, gender, class, and sexuality have built us as individuals, have provided us lenses through which we interpret the world, and have accorded us unique privileges or oppressions that those without our constructed identities and experiences can never understand.

This refusal to address identity was apparent by the choices made on pointing out the oppression felt by queers in this society. As a midwesterner hearing from midwesterners, I understand the obviousness in identifying (pun not intended but ha) capitalism and Christianity as the main sources of violence to queers who grew up in the midwest. As a woman, I also understand the obviousness in partially addressing but mostly skirting patriarchy as a tool oppressing queers. As a white woman who strives to be an antiracist ally to racialized struggle, I understand and am outraged at the obviousness in neglecting to address white supremacy and colonization (and imperialism!) as tools oppressing many, many, many queers (queers here meaning being defined, by white heteronormativity, as sexually nonnormative…in no way do I seek to impose an imperial definition of queerness on anybody).

So the speakers recognized race when convenient, but never interrogated how race informed their own analysis of queer oppression. For instance, an evil capitalist shopkeeper was described as “white supremacist,” or the word “fascism” was dropped here and there, or it was recognized that queers of colors participated in actions. But these invocations stood empty of significance - race became a shield used to delegitimize the enemy, rather than an analysis employed to critically process our own methods and theories. This is worse than tokenization - it is thingifying race as a tool used only against our enemies, instead of a politic through which we investigate ourselves. This is disavowing our privileges rather than confronting them. Straight up, this feeds structural racism.

Religion was consolidated into the expression of midwestern Christian protestantism, a virile strain that I, too, experienced as a queer growing up in Missouri. G-d was picked out as the one reason used to oppress queer people. The speakers spoke of a G-d without recognizing this G-d as one of Christianity. Maybe they meant that in Judaism and Islam, as well, but the way they spoke of G-d did not reflect my experience as a Jew nor my radical queer Muslim friends’ reflections to me about Islam. This uncompromisable characterization of G-d through only one expression of G-d upholds Christian supremacy through an operation I call Christian centrism. By erasing a multiplicity of experiences of G-d, the speakers held up Christianity as the arbiter of religion, thus recentering Christianity and recognizing its supremacy. The way the speakers related G-d to assimilationism was a strong argument - I mean, normativity often is enforced in their name. But not only does this refuse to tend to the counternormative believer in G-d - such as the heightened surveillance and persecution of Muslims post 9/11 - but it also neglects to investigate the ways religious persecution is informed by structures of power. Though the name of G-d and the practice of religion have been used as tools against queers, women, people of color, immigrants, other religious peoples, and on and on, religion-bashing does nothing but scratch the surface of a much, much, much deeper epistemological issue. Weber provides an intersectional analysis of class and religion by theorizing how Protestantism was constructed to support capitalism. Likewise, religion is continuously reconstructed to use as a tool of racism, colonization, and genocide. This is something we need to address instead of compartmentalizing and demonizing the empty signifier “religion” and its best friend “capitalism.”

One of the parts of this presentation I enjoyed the most was its critique of the academy and queer theory. I touched upon my own analysis of the academy earlier, way up there, which I have come to by sitting in the ivory towers and aching to be in the streets. While I sit at home and engage queer theory for my thesis, I often have these thoughts run through my head about gatekeeping, abstraction, intellectual masturbation, co-optation, passivity, comfort, assimilationism, etc etc etc. What bothered me about this section is that while these critiques are valid and neccessary, they aren’t new. I’m a kind of “credit where credit’s due” type of gal and sitting here listening to a bunch of white men talk about the problems in the academy as if it’s this radically new thing really irked me. Feminists and queers of color have critiqued the shit out of queer theory before it was even a theory. Listing off a bunch of white queer theorists to laugh at and then assert your unique critique is not only elitist, but completely reerases all the work and experiences of people of color inside the academy who have been asserting this shit for ages against a structure which does them violence and tries to kick them out. All of the theorists listed for the audience to laugh at were white (if I’m not mistaken), again, reerasing queer and feminist of color critique of the academy and of racially uncritical theories. How is this any better than the liberals who categorize all of black bloc as a bunch of white men wanting to unaccountably break shit? It’s not. Please, stop erasing people of color and confront your whiteness.

Ok, so I am actually really excited to read this book and to engage with a lot of the theory and method it provides. Please don’t take this rant as a “I hate this book and these people” or “never read this shit it’s stupid,” that is not what I mean at all. What I mean is, “This sounds like a really amazing praxis; it has these problems I have identified from the book release; how can we grow this praxis to better address power as a whole?” In other words, “How can we use this tool in a way we can strike at the root?”

Before I left, and after critiquing the shit out of queer theory, the speaker directly quoted or closely annotated Judith Butler, reclaiming queer as a verb rather than a noun, a doing of the nonnormative or, if you will, an undoing of the subjugation of normativity. I agreed with much of what was said in this room, but want to pose a challenge the editors of this volume, and the readers, and the critics, and everyone: come on, let’s queer that shit. Let’s get uncomfortable, let’s get mad, let’s get depressed, guilty, angry. Let’s throw things at the wall, at each other, at a window, whatever. We need to smash capitalism, we need to queer heteronormativity, we need to fuck patriarchy. And we absolutely need to take on white supremacy in our struggle against oppressive power. We need to, continuously, keep queering anarchism.