Introduction
2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/23289252-11131649
ISSN2328-9260
AutoresChristopher Lee, Eric A. Stanley, Jemma DeCristo, Ren-yo Hwang,
ResumoDemian DinéYazhi's 2019 piece, my ancestors will not let me forget this, glows as a chemical remembrance for a world stolen by colonial terror and in joyful celebration of the United States' inevitable undoing. As the cover image for this issue, Demian's neon and aluminum sign is perhaps most urgently a reminder for us all that genocide is recursive, illuminating the words, "every American flag is a warning sign." Demian's piece, along with Leslie Feinberg's insistence that anti-imperialism is Pride's precondition and Major's read of it all, offers not simply an alternative path for trans analysis and action but also one that confronts where we assume "trans" properly lives. Rather than wading into disciplinary formations, here we suggest, with them, that colonialism's death symbolizes trans life as much as, if not more than, a pink and blue flag ever could. This is perhaps another way of suggesting that the only banner under which we might find trans liberation is that of total communization and the end of the state form as we know it.This special issue emerges from exhaustion. Seemingly endless cycles of reform-decay, boom-bust, and progress-pacification erode our capacity to think beyond forms of mediation and resolve. Within this time of despair and dreams, how do we keep abolition dangerous? How do we keep our people safe? Against aimless defeatism and generic alterity, many of us feel captured by the current moment's contradictions. Stuck, perhaps, but not lost. Here, rather than conceding to what Nat Raha (2017: 632) calls our "states of brokenness," how can we find a way out of, or at least through, the manifold crises of racial capitalism's durability?While this special issue travels with the terms anti-imperialism, anarchism, and abolition, they are neither presented as interchangeable nor offered as antagonisms. These capacious signs offer us ways of reading the unfolding present as much as they guide us toward the necessity of direct action. Rather than, once again, reproducing a struggle between communists and anarchists, which lives primarily on the page, we think about where the two meet. This is not to silence their necessary differences but to gesture toward inhabiting how such differences lead us somewhere else. In other words, we are less concerned with the intricacies of these differentiations than we are with learning together new possibilities of destroying the world that is destroying us.We offer this issue as nondefinitive and against the very idea of the last word. Like any writing, it can only represent fragments of possibility, especially when possibility seems to escape us. We intentionally built this collection around a series of conversations with insurgents who are producing vital trans theory outside, and oftentimes against, the academy. While some are antagonistic to the idea of a classroom, others remain more ambivalent; however, they are all writing/doing/thinking from prison cells, SROs (single room occupancy housing), squats, or on the streets. This is not to cathect onto spaces of imagined alterity, but to reaffirm our commitment to knowledge's beautiful flow. We also chose to include the work of a number of more junior scholars whose work pushes us. While never enough, we are committed to making this volume accessible to those in prisons and without institutional affiliation. Though we have made every effort to decenter the academy as the basis of our study, we also recognize the limits of our editorial vision for this issue. Our hope, nevertheless, is that this range of intellectual and teachable materials might inspire even a glimmer of the unruliness that has halted the construction of new carceral facilities and set fire to police stations.Out from under a mound of curls a white woman flashed a bright smile accented by thickly drawn red lipstick as she walked down Market Street in San Francisco. As she is clad in a mélange of pin-backed buttons from various global anti-racist struggles, one could almost overlook the thickly taped stock Winchester rifle she brandishes with a grin (fig. 1). Sure the rifle was fake, so what? Gripping this rifle sure as hell did more to intimidate her enemy than clutching and waving a rainbow flag. To be clear, Tede Matthews was not marching with the new proto-police snitch squad the "Lavender Panthers," started by SF Pride cofounder Raymond Broshears.1 No, Matthews, a queer poet, drag performer, and organizer, is arming herself against the US government. The rifle signified for Matthews the need for fabulously militant queer direct action against the mounting US imperial violence being waged throughout the global South, in Southeast Asia, Africa, and particularly in South and Central America.To understand what led Matthews to take to the streets, as she often did, is to consider both the possibility and impossibility of anti-imperialist movement building in the United States, a question that Matthews's good friend and comrade June Jordan pondered in her own writings. Jordan (1975: 41), who would later offer a eulogy to Matthews when she died of AIDS in 1993, asked what could be done to halt the violent procession of US empire: What does life and death mean to us, in America? Are we capable of grief, of something like atonement? Or are we limited to a boundless capacity for backslapping the winner-types? Can we undertake a moral response to death, to the losers of life and destiny: can we atone for the lives we take away, the destinies we shunt into extinction? These queries are not rhetorical: I am thinking of Chile. Where is the outcry, the movement from nausea, from shame, from silence, into an act, a rising, that will redeem, that will attempt to redeem that recent historic slaughter?Matthews undoubtedly heard the call of her would-be comrade, Jordan, and was up to the challenge, because she already was an out and proud draft dodger and anti-war activist. Just a few years before arriving in San Francisco, Matthews had fled to Boston to avoid conscription in the US imperialist war in Vietnam. When FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) agents surveilling anti-war activists tracked Matthews down and showed up to his door and demanded he turn up for military induction, "He [Matthews] showed up in high femme attire and camped his way through the army physical, declaring at one point, 'Dahling, I AM a homosexual fantasy!' and convincing doctors he was unsuitable" (Hobson 2016: 73). Matthews had been, as he would for much of the 1970s, living as a woman, getting by on drag gigs and sex work money, but most often identified as a "faggot, sissy or a queen," identities that also appeared in the title of a workshop Matthews led on anti-rape and anti-femmephobia (72).Not long after moving to San Francisco, Matthews joined a group in which he likely met Jordan, Gays in Solidarity with Chilean Resistance (GSCR), which formed in response to the US-backed fascist coup in Chile to overthrow socialist leader Salvador Allende. The 1970s in Chile marked a period of brutal antigay repression, and groups like GSCR attempted to document, share information, and stage direct actions. When drag performer Lola Puñales was brutally tortured, raped, castrated, and killed by Augusto Pinochet's death squads, queer and trans collectives were among the few groups responding to the antiqueer enormity perpetuated by the US-backed fascist regime. In 1974 the GSCR staged a direct action and picket line around the Chilean consulate in San Francisco, barring anyone from entering and demanding an end to the violent persecution of queer people and all people in Chile under the authoritarian Pinochet regime. GSCR organized a solidarity action with the radical sex worker collective COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to have sex workers refuse service to sailors from the Chilean ship the Esmerelda who had been the military perpetrators of Pinochet's torture programs of queer Chilean civilians. This organizing was not only done by queer "outsiders" but also queer Chilean exiles who fled Pinochet's most concentrated purges for the Bay Area throughout the mid-1970s.Small, communal channels of queer communication and support sustained this radical internationalist organizing. For instance, Matthews temporarily served on the San Francisco Sentinel, one of the many platforms for a new generation of queer internationalist and anti-imperialist politics in the Bay Area. Rather than the monopolized sprawl of what we now know as social media, periodicals like the Sentinel focused on smaller nodes of connectivity, which seemed to make such politics all the more possible, even in the face of the utter nonresponse Jordan observed to the steady march of US empire.Far worse than the apathy Jordan decried, queer political concern would quickly turn toward homosexual rights and other modes of participation in assimilatory pro–US democratic processes that were imperialist at their core. In the fight for access to and participation in the global corporations and war machine that Matthews fled and foiled, the political will to gain admission to state power was easily assimilated into the objectives of US empire. The desire for incorporation and the legacy of such conscription have made queer/trans internationalism, as Jordan forewarned, unlikely, if not impossible. Any fragmented sustenance, real or imaginatively gained, from participation and representation in such imperial projects remains merely incidental, temporary, and selectively doled out.,It is not as if trans internationalism was, in Matthews's time, being constructed "on behalf" of a projected other. As her own flight from conscription and warmongering attests, it was out of shared interests to live in the demise of US empire. In the early 1980s in San Francisco, a group of anarchists and communists came together to form Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention or LAGAI (Meronek 2016, 2018). LAGAI, which Matthews, Deeg Gold, Cole Benson, and several others cofounded, was specifically organized as a response to escalated US intervention and its state-sponsored resourcing of El Salvadorian fascist death squads in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Trans/queer groups like LAGAI, along with one of its later offshoots, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), coordinated their work with active anti-imperialist struggles abroad while cohering an anti-assimilation politics that sought to dismantle the US war machine from within."Assimilation is NOT liberation" was a frequent LAGAI slogan throughout the Reaganite 1980s. During the first Iraq invasion, LAGAI deployed an even campier slogan and campaign, "We like our queers out of uniform," complementing ACT UP's famous interruption of a CBS evening news broadcast with their demand to "fight AIDS, not Arabs." LAGAI and other anti-imperialist queer/trans groups organized de-recruitments to deprive the largest death squad in the world, the US military, of its human resource. Groups like LAGAI nourished this legacy of queer anti-imperialism, culminating, in 2003, in the largest street protest in the history of the Bay Area, the "Direct Action to Stop the War" directed against the US invasion of Afghanistan and the second invasion of Iraq. As in the broader period of the 1990s, the early aughts saw growing political education and radicalization around queer Palestinian and anti-Zionist liberation.Today we might read Jordan's and Matthews's efforts as simple calls for solidarity. But solidarity assumes, too easily, that the shroud of representation benefits us at the expense of punishing a southern global other. Instead, these historical actions rebuke our conditional individuation to collectively demolish the systems that kill and imprison us. Matthews's life of queer caring and militant presence names something far broader than solidarity, which obscures how the fight to bring down the pillars of US imperialism is simultaneously a fight for our lives.Meanwhile, our enemies make friends in the public places from which we are increasingly evicted. Tech companies like Google and Meta not only enjoy less militant opposition but also employ a small but significant managerial class of trans bourgeoisie to defend and expand their reach.2 These mostly white (but rapidly diversifying) trans techies design missile-guidance systems and drone navigation software, while waving their corporate-branded rainbows amid the gentrifying tourist event of SF Pride, which invades the very streets Matthews once patrolled in fierce defiance.3This iteration of trans visibility covers up the millions of Black and Brown deaths made anonymous via biometric and AI warfare, and it deepens the incalculable loss of Indigenous and colonized trans life in the global South taken through military-contracted corporate ecocide. Trans internationalism, then, must militantly abolish our intimacy with corporations, churches, and the states killing us, and in our name, all over the world, including here. What Matthews's spectacle reminds us is that it is neither some mythic covert action to come, nor a quietist legal rights–based reprieve, that will allow us to abolish the very imperial state that grants selectively tokenizing rights and legal "visibility."Whether flooding the counterorganizing platform of a Signal chat where we form agreements to never meet, or pleading in obscurity for the right to manage our pain in private via the strained global philanthropy of GoFundMe, our digital media counterorganizing landscape maps a different territory for us to traverse. Our current order of organized connectivity is supplied by US State Department–funded tech oligarchs whose supposed "countersurveillance" technologies provide the stealth we need to one day, someday, maybe show up a little against them. Whereas for Matthews's fabulous show of force, all the world was a stage and not a honeypot of depleted paranoia and unending campaigns of throwing coins into the abyss. We exist in a flood of hypercontent and a fantasy of anonymity that complements, if not cohabitates with, the hypervisibility of our current mainstreaming of trans as trans representation. Because we are bound together by mutually inhabited surveillance and by our coercive production of value and content, the public life of Matthews's show of force feels too remote. What remains of Matthews's legacy today, when consumer and client now index the dystopic horizon of what makes for trans politics?At the time of writing this introduction, an international campaign has been organized to put a stop to the proposed development known as "Cop City" in Atlanta, Georgia. This project threatens to raze hundreds of acres of what the Mvskoke call the Weelaunee Forest to build the largest police facility in the United States. The private-public nature of the Cop City proposal, with two-thirds of its funding coming from corporations and one-third from public spending, reveals the strategic alliances forged among business, political, and nonprofit leaders to expand police power in the aftermath of the 2020 uprisings. Indeed, in states like Illinois, California, Michigan, Texas, and Hawaiʻi, similar sites are being pushed forward to train officers in new forms of warfare and urban combat.4Against this perfect storm of developer land theft and state takeover is the organized resistance to halt the construction of Cop City, which has demanded a strategic coalition of abolitionist, anarchist, anti-colonial dissent. Such efforts are embedded within and inspired by the broader and longer history of revolt against state dispossession. The land that Cop City would stand on holds these interlocked histories of dispossession and violent rule—the forced removal of the Mvskoke people from the Welaunee Forest, the recasting of stolen land into slave plantations, and redevelopment of these plantations into the Atlanta Prison Farm (closed in 1995). While a veneer of reform rested on this prison facility once known as the "honor farm," lauded for its more humane approach to rehabilitating low-risk offenders, recent research into the site has revealed the atrocious conditions faced by its captive laborers, including overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of medical care, and widespread abuse.5The redevelopment of the Atlanta Prison Farm couches itself, once again, in the empty promise of progress. The Atlanta Police Foundation, a nonprofit led by a board of directors that include executives from nearly all of Atlanta's major corporations, has proposed that the training undertaken at the new police facility will "embrace . . . cultural sensitivity" and "set a national standard for community engagement, neighborhood sensitivity and devotion to . . . civil rights."6 That all this action is being pushed through under the guise of reform gives cover to a massive development that would clear-cut large sections of forest, abandon the least resourced communities of Atlanta to ecological catastrophe, and further fund the racist, violent institution of modern policing.The Cop City development forewarns the selective incorporation by the state, in which gentler, more diverse, and more gender-inclusive forms of policing obscure our abolitionist demands: to halt the construction of new arenas and training grounds for policing, and to cede land back to the dispossessed people of Turtle Island. The organized resistance against Cop City reflects the need to reimagine the horizon of possibility beyond empty figurations of representation. The "eviction notice" delivered by Mvskoke leaders to Atlanta's government and police, for example, settles for nothing short of the total liberation of settler Mvskoke homelands and an immediate cessation to the "violence and policing of Indigenous and Black people in Mvskoke lands" (Harper 2023).In a cruel reminder of what it truly means to "reimagine policing," Cop City claimed its first victim before construction even began. During a morning raid conducted by police and SWAT teams to clear the proposed development site of forest defenders, Georgia state troopers shot and killed Tortuguita, a nonbinary Indigenous activist who took part in the protest encampment that obstructed development (fig. 2). Here the state's commitment to "cultural sensitivity" takes shape as coordinated attack and extrajudicial killing. Indeed, Cop City should itself be seen through the lens of an expanding global security regime, given that it would most certainly serve as a cross-training ground for police militarization through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), which has worked with foreign agencies like the Israeli Police Force since 1999.7 While the shots that claimed Tortuguita's life were regarded as exceptional within the history of US environmental activism, the global scale of coordinated violence against defenders of environmental and Indigenous rights suggests the murderous lengths to which state and corporate power safeguard its interests.The fight to stop Cop City is only one of the many grassroots struggles against police militarization and corporate land grabs. Yet it signals the acts of collective resistance necessary to deter the collusion of law enforcement propaganda and developer scheming. That the first person killed in the effort to stop Cop City was trans should be seen not as an exceptional marker of violent statecraft but, rather, as emblematic of a trans existence made unfathomable by the criminalizing, deporting, and death-dealing institutions of police and prisons. How many more trans lives will be lost to perfecting systems designed to liquidate all life under the deadly ledgers of law, rights, and representation? From the anti-imperialist internationalist organizing of Matthews and Jordan to the fight to abolish Cop City by Tortuguita and others, these movements point to how anti-trans and anti-queer death is nested within the usual business of police militarization and global security imperialism.Though the phrase "Stop Cop City" might appear to demand the prevention of a monstrous thing (and nothing more), it is in these acts of obstruction that we grow the possibility of something less disastrous in its place. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2018) explains, "Abolition isn't just absence . . . but a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently." Responding to the fear that abolition works only by "scorching the earth," Gilmore's call for presence is a reminder that we cannot retrofit a civil society built on colonial and carceral foundations. Abolitionist negation enables abolitionist presence by deterring the liberal logic of "change," which repurposes our existing, violent systems into more efficient and profitable ones. In Cop City alone, we see the destructive force following the path of redevelopment—the police training facility built atop the prison honor farm built atop the plantation. Rather than fretting over the scale of abolitionist clearing necessary to remake the world, we consider the worlds destroyed every day to make way for more death and captivity. It is not destruction, then, that is antithetical to abolition, but the destruction of life that civil society and capitalism require. On this generative necessity CeCe McDonald (2015: 2) writes, "There is no other way around the violence of the [prison] . . . we have to destroy it."In the aftermath of the 2020 uprisings, abolition as an idea and practice spread to spaces far beyond the imprisoned intellectuals that first theorized it. While defunding the police is the floor of abolition, it was repositioned by liberals as its ceiling. Here reformists in abolitionist drag deemed it too alienating for the people and too electorally ineffective to gain popular traction. Critics of defunding (as untethered from a militant abolitionist analysis) placed it within the zone of reformist reforms that did little to mitigate state violence. As this drama unfolded, both calls to defund and calls to abolish were taken up as "menaces to civil society" and abandoned in favor of "law and order" logic. Learning from and co-opting our language, cities increased police budgets under the slogan "Black Lives Matter." While the counterrevolution grows, the pedagogy of struggle teaches us that the streets will win.Further, if the counterrevolution is, as Herbert Marcuse (1972) argued, "preventative," and in this prevention it anticipates with shocking clarity our current condition, then reform is also prefigurative. It awaits, before a demand has even been dreamed, and then intercepts with brutal precision. Everywhere, the specter of "defunded police," whose funding has only ever increased, is argued to be the catalyst for a never-cresting wave of petty theft. Looted people expropriate a fraction of what has been stolen from them. And yet the punishment for stealing goods back from corporate plunder is far deadlier than any a CEO might face. Along with the massive increase of the actual police budget, an occupying army of deputized "community ambassadors" have been hired to patrol and harass trans/queer houseless people who call the streets home.8 In a wicked reversal of our abolition's language, these agents are hidden under the banner of "formerly incarcerated" or "formerly unhoused" community members. Here a public relations shield of identity is forged to proliferate incarceration, precisely as formerly works to displace and legitimate violence on the "current." How then, might we break from the catch and release of a carceral common sense that lives under the name of reform, which wins even as it loses?Among the issues that keep us tied to the idea of the state is that it is the best, or perhaps only, system of organized distribution. This becomes even more pressing when the alternative that is presented is the privatization of what is assumed to be the commons. Not only is privatization (and its propertied ethos) offered as the necessary mechanism of material exchange, but the very idea of the commons becomes accessible only via a gated road that leads to a private bridge and "a cost cutting measure," they say, that always costs more. More precisely, this formation falls under the dreaded name public-private partnership, a fatal mechanism of upward transfer, capital's jouissance. The state's response, or willful nonresponse, to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crystalizes these very antagonisms. A social justice church offered free testing in San Franciso's Tenderloin to increase "access," while the site was run by a tech startup that turned away those without smartphones and Google accounts (Toren 2020). After billions spent, these systems, hoarded under the name of distribution and access, remain inaccessible. Machine-automated allocation promises to expedite the logistics, shorten the routes, and clear the canals, but the supplies have always been chained; scarcity is the function of racial capitalism's structuring logics, not a glitch. The crisis is that of overproduction, and enough becomes that which the system cannot bear, so housing is left vacant, food rots, and COVID-19 tests are destroyed—this is the state's distribution plan.What forms, then, of anarchist subterfuge and mutual aid might be scalable as we build infrastructures of abundance, not for the few and the wealthy, but for all? What demands ought we make on the state, not to concretize its myth but to enable our collective flourishing and the state's destitution? What is made possible when the focus is shifted away from bettering systems of coercion to building sustainable networks of radical interdependent care?Free housing and health care. Free buses and hormones, free Palestine. We want to be free from the nightmare world of freedom's double, misnamed the United States. Free them all, free us all. This list, which does not belong to us and must never be finished, is what the state does not allow to be written. How do we move from the truth of these demands, when we are damaged by paradigmatic neglect? How do we give shape to the collective, while we are also falling apart?Anarchism is an incision. It cuts, not to hurt, but so that harm might remain a scar and no longer a threat. This is, of course, not a metaphor in a world constituted as state of total war. This battle is, of course, also not a metaphor, as death's fog remains. The missing who were murdered by the inaction, as action, of a system dedicated to COVID-19's spread in jails, prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, psych jails, halfway houses, congregate shelters, and many other spaces makes this plain. Here inaction and action constitute not opposites but the formula of state power, in which incoherence still finds its aim with terrible accuracy. This was first clarified for many of us in the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which, along with millions more, took Kuwasi Balagoon's life in Auburn Prison. It was during this same era when the struggle to free Marilyn Buck, led in the Bay by Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners, offered abolition as the antidote to the poison that is the world. We want to dwell here, in the cosmology of anti-authoritarianism's atlas—a hideout for the ungovernable. Rather than a question, perhaps we can stay in the declarative of Marilyn's truth as she continues to help us think about the questions that are woven through this issue: "They call me an enemy of the state, so I must be doing something right."9We end with another beginning as the conversations and analysis gathered here represent places to think from and not positions that live beyond their context. While the waves of fascism that are Amerikkka continue to break on those already broken by history, we hope words lead to actions and that those actions are reassessed and revised toward further escalation. The writing gathered here cannot offer a definitive proscription for the world to come, as the smoke is still too thick. With the light of burning flags to guide us, we remain with the fact that destruction can also be an opening, and that becoming enemies together is another name for friendship.
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