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Title: What is Anarchasexuality? Author: Anarqxista Goldman Date: 2022 Language: en Topics: sexuality, gender, anarcha-feminism Source: Retrieved on 2022-04-17 from https://archive.org/details/what-is-anarchasexuality
It may not have totally passed you by that we live, at least here in the
affluent and powerful West, now also called the Global North, in a time
of sex and gender turmoil. There is argument, and sometimes political
and legal action, taking place over how people refer to themselves and
perform their lives in the context of sex and gender activity and
expression. This is not a trivial matter for, in fact, [besides the many
lives it harms or otherwise affects] it cuts to the very heart of the
organisation and understanding of civilization — if by the term
“civilization” we mean the organisation of people who live in close
proximity to one another in variously connected communities and
societies. In recent centuries in this context diverse sexualities and
gender expressions [homosexuality and transgenderism are obvious
examples here] have been exposed to the light [but not to reality for it
is my firm belief that they have always quite naturally existed — across
numerous cultures — as expressions of a nature that exists in whatever
way it is possible to do so] in ways not always, or even usually,
emancipatory. Diverse sexualities and gender expressions are, more often
than not, either criminalised, pathologized as “deviant” or issues of
mental ill health, or both. Both sex and gender, as intellectual
historians such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have demonstrated,
have been subject to, and, in some senses, formulated by, authoritarian
epistemologies of control which seek to dictate terms in order to
politically coerce what is and is not allowed to exist or take place.
This has the obvious corollary of sex and gender-based oppressions
stemming from patriarchal power operating according to a dynamic of
domination and subordination along heteronormative and dimorphic lines.
An anarchist must respond to this. An anarchist, I would argue, must in
fact enter the fray and seek to define what an anarchist and
emancipatory ethic of sex and gender might be [by living it out!] This
is what is going on below in what I have decided to term an expression
of “anarchasexuality”. This text, however, is not a dogma and will
inevitably be subject both to change and to being surpassed as imagined
new and better formulations emerge in interaction with others. What this
text is, then, is an always preliminary attempt to bring understanding,
clarity and proposed anarchist virtues and values to a contested area of
life whilst utilising an avowedly anarchist hermeneutic to do so. All
that said, therefore:
What is ANARCHASEXUALITY? I offer 13 suggestions:
stable;manifests with more or less fixity and stability in differing
people;can, in some cases, be perceived as a choice;is performatively
reinforced and so is neither merely “genetic” or “biological” nor
entirely “voluntary” or “environmental” and so is a coalition of biology
and environmentally-conditioned behaviour, proclivity and disposition,
choice and not choice;is something that people can accept or reject as a
matter of agency and affirmation;is in all cases subject to social,
cultural and epistemological coercion and constraint.
sexualities and genders and regards such things as impositions of
power/knowledge – especially in the case of its most obvious example, a
heterosexual understanding of sex based on a sex binary imposed as a
controlling and patriarchally-policed normativity. This is to say that
sex, gender and sexuality types are all regarded by the anarchasexual as
FICTIVELY REAL and so as voluntary human categories of thought rather
than as nature’s own blueprints. For the anarchasexual, nature has no
blueprints; it is a what can happen that will happen, a diversity
engine, and therefore does not invite either moral or normative
judgments as such, politics and culture notwithstanding.
kinds, each with their own physical possibilities and impossibilities
[including especially intersex bodies]. Anarchasexuality, however, seeks
not to unduly pathologise bodies nor to force them into a dimorphic
frame of reference or to praise some to the shame of others. If a bodily
form [for example, at birth] is neither a medical danger nor causing the
person with that body any pain then it should not be unduly interfered
with by authoritarian third parties working from arbitrary normativities
— aside from that person’s own personal choice to change [not correct]
it [perhaps in later life].
much as, if not more than, for reproductive purposes. Certainly, it in
no way ever restricts sex to reproduction [as nature does not either]
and sees the production of bodily pleasure as an entirely worthwhile
human pursuit, one of pleasure creativity and care of the self.
looks forward to a time when gender expression of any kind by any person
is politically and socially more uncontroversial, a matter of personal
formation, self care and health [i.e. wholeness], and stands for such an
opinion in the present. However, it also does this without ignoring that
sexuality and gender are sometimes things which thrive on pushing
boundaries and so require resistance to push back against, as a yang to
normativity’s yin. Ethical transgression of norms is therefore not to be
regarded as a sin whilst control of sexuality and gender by retrograde
political forces is always to be resisted.
proclivities and multiple ways for human beings to create forms of
physical pleasure between themselves consensually or whilst otherwise at
play. Aside from the stipulation that they not cause harm that is
undesired by one participant or another, it refuses to pass any judgment
on such sexual expression or define any sort of “normal” in order to
exclude some form of expression or other from a wholly imaginary idea of
“acceptability” or “normality”.
issue, for example, with something like public nudity. Sexual and body
shaming, and harassment of people on such a basis, should become things
of a restrictive and hypocritical past.
acknowledged as a separate category of thought to biological sex [as it
should be], is something which either simply does or must follow
biological body type. Anarchasexuality fully recognises the reality of
“feminine males” or “masculine females”, for example, as evident in the
biological world and sees no reason to restrict such designations to
animals as if human beings were not themselves part of the great chain
of life. It should, in this case, then go without saying that
anarchasexuality has no issue with transsexuality or transgender [and
non-binary and genderfluid] people [whatever their other cultural
designation] and sees them as a natural and valuable part of the human
community in all cases, part of a manifestly evident natural human
diversity of existence and expression.
the usefulness and necessity of biological, social and cultural
DIVERSITY. Everyone need not be the same and, in fact, it will be better
for us all in the long run if we are not. Diversity helps everyone and
should be cherished and protected as valuable in itself.
appropriate spaces for different kinds of people are things that people
should be able to peacefully work out for themselves without needing to
demonise or attack those of differing sex or gender expression since
people, however they describe themselves or appear, are, in any way you
can name, more fundamentally the same than they are different. Human
beings, in fact, are a sexual and gender diversity of the same thing and
this is too often forgotten or ignored. So, we should all be able to
take a shit without getting in each others’ faces since basic privacy
has been a thing people have so far managed to grant to each other for
thousands of years.
but not that human beings must be compulsorily, arbitrarily or
authoritatively sexualised nor that each person articulates sexuality in
either the same way or to the same degree. [Asexualities are, thus, also
both evident and fully acceptable.] Fundamentally, anarchasexuals
believe in an egoistic freedom for people to define their own sexual and
gendered path and regard Self ID as necessary to achieve this in a
social context.
yourself as a sexual [or asexual] and gendered [or agendered] human
being entails immeasurable health benefits in terms of authenticity
towards and of oneself. As such, it always aims to support and encourage
people [including in terms of medical and health care] to find the sex
and gender expressions which promote their own self-actualisation and
full bodily and psychological health within a community situation which
is usually both necessary and desirable.
imposition of sex and gender oppression from within an anarchafeminist
understanding of the world that seeks to neutralise and decentralise
patriarchal power and its effects, whatever their source. It is
accepting of sexuality and gender expressions people may want to use to
describe themselves but insists that all such terms and terminologies
are human inventions that describe rather than necessarily explain human
existences in sexed and gendered ways. This is to say that the
anarchasexual regards human language and thought as fictive and
descriptive rather than as a tool of domination or inscription of
reality and seeks to use such things to emancipate and innervate human
lives rather than to oppress or coerce them. Therefore, the
anarchasexual conclusion must that be that so long as sex or gender is
classified as normatively binary in human thought [in PHND terms] then
women [of all kinds], those who may be described as “not-men”, and those
of diverse sexualities will always be subservient to heterosexual,
cis-gendered men as those imagined at the apex of an imaginary sexed and
gendered hierarchy. A revolt against the imagined normative categories
of gender and sexual expression is therefore seen as vital to the
destruction of such patriarchal power and the increase of individually
sexed and gendered freedom.