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Title: Anarchism and the Body
Author: Michelle Campbell
Date: August 21, 2018
Language: en
Topics: culture, identity
Source: Retrieved on 01/13/2021 from https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/18339
Notes: Originally published in the 2018 issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. The full issue is available here: https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/issue/view/1267

Michelle Campbell

Anarchism and the Body

This special edition has its origin story in a conference held at Purdue

University in the summer of 2015. Scholarly anarchism still retains a

healthy DIY culture, and when I decided many months before that I wanted

to get a group of scholars and activists together to talk about

anarchism and bodies, all it took was a community and an intellectual

hunger. Before I had gotten up the gall to organize a whole conference,

I had long wondered: where is the body in our anarchist theory?, how do

we account for it?, and how does it figure into our praxis?A motley crew

of activists and academics, many of whom consider themselves both,

arrived in the heat of the Indiana summer ready to engage in both theory

and praxis. The conference program was diverse both in content and

approaches. Panels consistedof papers centered on structures of

domination and liberation; anarchist publications and cultural

artifacts; the laboring body and class organizing; “troubled”

reproductions; art, anarchism, and literature; street actions and

imprisonment; anarchism and modern humanity; and anarchist theology.

There were also roundtables and workshops on anarchist pedagogy,

surveillance security, and bodily health and safety during militant

actions. I can honestly say I have never attended a conference where, in

the same afternoon, I learned about nineteenth-century South American

free love, and thenI learned how to wash chemical deterrents out of eyes

during a street action. Nor have I ever been to a conference—or

anywhere, really—where a woman felt comfortable enough tobreastfeed her

child during the middle of her talk without skipping a beat. It was a

rupture in time and space that we all needed.

I went into organizing this conference with the knowledge that very few

contemporary anarchist scholars connect anarchism and the body except

through sexuality or sexual experience, often through the domain of

gender studies. Although my own research is grounded in gender studies,

I wondered what I was missing by viewing the body only through that

particular lens, especially as an anarchist scholar. Do contemporary

anarchist scholars examine the possibilities of our minds? Yes. The

ethics of our souls? Certainly. I wondered: what weren’t we saying about

the bodies we lived in and through? How do anarchist activists,

theorists, and educators think, act, and exist bodily with themselves

and with others? The original call for papers illustrates some of these

concerns: “This conference seeks to be the first of its kind that is

dedicated to questions of anarchism in conjunction with questions about

the body conceived of as real, social, perceived, constructed, or

institutionalized. [...] We encourage innovative papers that engage with

multiple aspects of anarchism intersecting with multiple disciplines and

fields.”

We were certainly not the first to wonder or write on these questions.

Classical anarchist feminists like Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman

linked the female body to patriarchal and state domination through labor

and marriage in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. In her

essay “Sex Slavery,” de Cleyre writes, “Let Woman ask herself, “Why am I

the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain?

Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled

by my husband?” (2016: 348–9). Indeed, for de Cleyre, the domination of

the mind and the body are of equal importance: “These two things, the

mind domination of the Church, and the body domination of the State are

the causes of sex slavery” (2016: 352). Likewise, Emma Goldman links

marriage and capitalism in her essay,“Marriage and Love” because they

are both institutions that poison the body (1910: 241). Similarly, in

her definitive essay “Anarchism: What It Stands For,” Goldman explains,

“Real wealth consists in things ofutility and beauty, in things that

help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to

live in” (1910: 61). For both de Cleyre and Goldman, consideration of

the physical body was not only foundational to their anarchist critiques

of domination, but it was also integral to their visions of successful

liberation.

Over one hundred years since the time of de Cleyre and Goldman, most

contemporary anarchist theorists today connect anarchism and the body

through sexuality. Jamie Heckert (2011), in “Sexuality as a State Form,”

explores the intersection between queer anarchism and poststructuralist

articulations of power and biopolitics. Heckert both critiques and

explores the ways in which representation, particularly of the body or

its performativity, can enact violence through speaking for an

individual rather than allowing the individual to speak for themselves.

In her article “Constructing Anarchist Sexuality: Queer Identity,

Culture, and Politics in the Anarchist Movement,” Laura Portwood-Stacer

(2010) uses interviews withcontemporary North American Anarchists to

explore how queer critiques are used within anarchist circles and

communities. Her goal is to invest in an authentic identity that resists

dominant sexual norms as a strategy for anarchist political projects.

From her ethnographic evidence, Portwood-Stacer concludes that there are

several pitfalls in attempting to create a queer anarchonormativity. The

author also concludes that sexual identity politics, when performed

collectively, are a useful tool for fighting against social norms.

However, the power used to enforce such a sexuality within anarchist

communities needs to be wielded in a way that “maximize[s] those

effect[s] that contribute to emancipatory political projects, and

minimize those that do not” (2010: 491).

Anarchism and sexuality can also be about refusing to participate in

hegemonic structures of domination or engaging in participatory actions

that subvert or undermine those same structures. Breanne Fahs in her

article “Radical Refusals: On the Anarchist Politics of Women Choosing

Asexuality” (2010) suggests that asexuality has been a lifestyle and

political maneuver for sexual and gender equality that has long been

forgotten. She reviews the history of the “sexual liberation” of women

during second-wave feminism in order to detail the problems of both

sexual repression and sexual “freedom” in a system of state and

patriarchal control. Fahs argues that sexually liberated women are still

participating in a system of repression when engaging in acts with

multiple partners and sex without consequences because women are

expected to be sexual. This expectation strips women of the agency to

decide their own sexual wants and needs. Fahs argues that asexuality may

be helpful “todismantle the entire institution of sex” (2010: 451). By

refusing to participate in any sexual activity, Fahs explains, women are

able to rob the institution of its power over bodies and relationships.

In “Post-Anarchism and the Contrasexual,” Lena Eckert(2011) connects the

metaphor of the dildo from Beatriz Preciado’s Contrasexual Manifestowith

that of Haraway’s cyborg. Eckert explains that the dildo is effective in

undermining “hegemonic structures of desire, pleasure and bodies when

applied as a subversive quotation. Quoting or mapping the dildo on any

body part (or the entirety of the body) means to question the body as a

sexual contest; it questions the possibility of framing or defining the

context” (2011: 81).

A notable exception to the scholarship linking anarchism and sexuality

is Richard Cleminson’s “Making Sense of the Body: Anarchism, Nudism and

Subjective Experience” (2004). For early twentieth Spanish anarchists in

particular, Cleminson argues, “the body [...] and the social relations

that emanated from it and around it, came to be a material resource as

well as a discursive device on which anarchists bestowed significations

that allowed them to denounce capitalist social relations” (2004: 715).

For these anarchists, the body and its experiential processes were

deeply ingrained in their political becoming. These influential essays

began the conversation about what anarchist scholarship can bring to

bear on the question of the body. This special edition aims to continue

and complicate that conversation.

Two essays included in this special edition, which were original to the

“Anarchism and the Body” Conference, expand our understanding of the

gendered and the geographical body, moving away from a white North

American or Western European understanding of anarchism and the body.

Benjamin H. Abbot’s “‘That Monster Cannot Be a Woman’: Queerness and

Treason in the Partido Liberal Mexicano” and Mariel M. Acosta Matos’s

“Graphic Representations of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Language

Anarchist Publications” are new voices in the study of anarchism and the

body. For Abbot, an important part of recovering anarchist history is to

show the ways in which anarchist narratives both reinforced and

complicated gender roles in the early nineteenth century Mexico.Ey

examines the ways in which this played out in Ricardo Flores Magón’s

Partido Liberal Mexicano (the Mexican Liberal Party), the first

coordinated movement against the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz,

especially through the gendered rhetoric used in dissident newspaper

Regeneración, a publication Magón wrote for while jailed. Along the same

lines, Acosta investigates what she has coined as “Graphic Alternatives

to Grammatical Gender,” or “GAGG” in Spanish language anarchist

publications in the last fifty years. Through a linguistic and

rhetorical study, Acosta finds numerous graphic representations that

both subvert and reject linguistic sexism that has encoded gender norms

into orthography. Not only are textual artifacts important for our study

of the history of anarchism and the body, but they can also help to

shape the possibilities of our future through suggesting possibilities

of becoming.

Lewis Call’s “‘A Thought Thinking Itself’: Postanarchism in Grant

Morrison’s The Invisibles” is an important analysis of the ways in which

a text can both exemplify and influence postanarchism through

subversion, fragmentation, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Call’s

emphasis on the visual imaginary to resist the symbolic as well as the

fragmentation of subjectivityto recuperate the Symbolic serves to

illustrate the ways in which literary and graphic representations (or

subversions thereof) can create a roadmap for thinking anarchistically

about bodies, their performativity, and their elusiveness.

Bodily inquiry doesn’t need to stay in the realm of feminism and gender

studies; the final two papers are a few steps away from that stricture.

Jesse Cohn’s translations of “Christopher’s”“The Affective Bases of

Domination” and Daniel Colson’s “Proudhon, Lacan, et les points de

capiton” help point us in a different, more theoretical direction.

“Christopher” argues for a libertarian pedagogy that incorporates

emotional education in order to heal the fragmentation of mind and body.

Such a pedagogy, he explains, can serve to help subvert systems of

domination while taking into account both psychoanalytic thought and

contemporary neurobiological research. This affective treatment would

enable individuals to resist hegemonic ideology and affirm the basic

tenets of an anarchistor communist community through an “interdependent

individuality” grounded in empathy. The second translated work was

written by Daniel Colson. It brings the Lacanian concept of les points

de capiton (quilting points) to bear on Proudhonian interpretationsof

the individual. In his introduction to the Colson translation, Jesse

Cohn aptly describes the result of Colson’s essay as revealing a

Proudhon who “in fact launches a pluralistic assault on all the utopias

that aim to reduce human diversity to a singlenormative image, an

inevitably despotic ‘Absolute.’” Colson’s argument will hopefully renew

interest in Proudhon as an important theorist from whom we still have

much to learn.

This special edition of Anarchist Developments in Cultural

Studiesserves, I hope, as a beginning for anarchist and radical scholars

to continue to reach beyond or build on an already established body of

work. Much work remains to be done not only to work through, postulate,

and discover/recover anarchist accounts of the body, but to use

methodologies and theories particular to anarchist studies that can help

us consider bodily difference, its artefactual representations, and

possibilities for future (in)habitation.

Works Cited

Cleminson, Richard. (2004) “Making Sense of the Body: Anarchism, Nudism

and Subjective Experience.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies81.6: pp.

697–716.

De Cleyre, Voltairine. [1914] (2016) “Sex Slavery.” The Selected Works

of Voltairine de Cleyre. Ed. Alexander Berkman. Oakland: AK Press. pp.

342–358.

Eckert, Lena. (2011) “Post(-)anarchism and the Contrasexual Practices of

Cyborgs in Dildotopia Or ‘The War on the Phallus.’” Anarchism and

Sexuality: Ethics Relationships and Power. Eds. Jamie Heckert and

RichardCleminson. New York: Routledge. pp. 69–92.

Fahs, Breanne. (2010) “Radical Refusals: On the Anarchist Politics of

Women Choosing Asexuality.” Sexualities13.4: pp. 445–461.

Goldman, Emma. (1910) “Marriage and Love.” Anarchism and Other Essays.

New York:Mother Earth Publishing Co. pp. 233–246.

Goldman, Emma. “Anarchism: (1910) What It Really Stands For.” Anarchism

and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Co. pp. 53–74.

Heckert, Jamie. (2011) “Sexuality as a State Form.” Post-Anarchism:

AReader. Eds. Sureyyya Evren and Duane Rousselle. London: Pluto Press,

pp. 195–207.

Portwood-Stacer, Laura. (2010) “Constructing Anarchist Sexuality: Queer

Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Anarchist Movement.” Sexualities

13.4: pp. 479–493.

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Michelle M. Campbell is a doctoral candidate in nineteenth-century

American literature at Purdue University. Her dissertation examines

nineteenth-century Midwestern Anarchist women writers, including Lucy

Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lizzie Swank Holmes, and Lois

Waisbrooker. Her scholarship can be found in Anarchist Developments in

Cultural Studies, MidAmerica, and the introduction to Lizzie Swank

Holme’s recovered 1893 anarchist-feminist novel Hagar Lyndon: Or, A

Woman’s Rebellion, which is forthcomingin 2018 from Hastings College

Press.