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Title: Queer anarchist autonomous zones and publics
Author: Sandra Jeppesen
Date: September 2, 2010
Language: en
Topics: queer theory, autonomist, autonomous zones, queer
Source: Retrieved on May 21, 2020 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363460710370652

Sandra Jeppesen

Queer anarchist autonomous zones and publics

Abstract

Global anarchist movements and queer politics are integrating in

mutually informing ways. The characteristics of this synthesis include

liberatory theories and practices of embodied genders and sexualities in

private and public, direct actions to visibilize and extend queer

publics, and queer intersections with capitalism, the environment, race,

disability, public space, private property and citizenship, among

others. This article will critically analyze three cases of

anti-consumerist vomiting, including an erotic performance, a punk zine,

and a Pink Panthers direct action, to investigate the politics of queer

anarchist autonomous publics that extend the anti-homophobic and anti-

heteronormative politics of queer counterpublics toward challenging

homonormativity through intersectional anti-oppression and liberatory

value-practices.

From anti-homophobia to anti-heteronormativity

In the 1990s North American queer activism and queer theory shifted from

an anti- homophobic position that resisted the heterosexual imperative,

with an emphasis on AIDS activism, growing gay villages, and same-sex

marriage (particularly in Canada), toward more complex challenges to the

heteronormativity of institutions, laws and cultural practices. The term

homophobia has fallen out of use by activists, as it contains within it

the suggestion that there are legitimate psychological grounds for

individuals to fear or have a phobia of homosexuality. Instead we use

‘heterosexism’ which points to the systemic nature of oppression against

queers through cultural, political and economic structures favouring

heterosexual- ity and heterosexuals. Heterosexism is the form of

oppression resulting from the ideology of heteronormativity. In A

Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Nikki Sullivan argues that

heteronormativity does not exist as a discrete and easily identifiable

body of thought, of rules and regulations, but rather, informs – albeit

ambiguously, in complex ways, and to varying degrees – all kinds of

practices, institutions, conceptual systems, and social structures.

(2003: 132)

Similarly, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner suggest that

‘Heteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia

against gays and lesbians; it is pro- duced in almost every aspect of

the forms and arrangements of social life’ reprodu- cing itself

systemically in ‘nationality, the state, and the law; commerce;

medicine; and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of

narrativity, romance, and other protected spaces of culture’ (2000:

318–19). This affects life practices such as parenting, joint bank

accounts, hospital or prison visiting rights, travelling, immigrating,

movie watching and inheritance. Heteronormativity frames hetero-

sexuality as a universal norm making it publicly invisible, whereas

homosexuality is meant to be private and thus becomes visible in public

(Duncan, 1996: 137). Furthermore, heteronormativity requires the

stabilization of bodies into two cis- gendered categories (male,

female), whereas queer bodies may be transgender, transsexual, intersex

or otherwise challenge this stabilization.

Two anti-heteronormative strategies that engage publics have been used

by activists. Groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation challenged cultural

norms by making interventions in heteronormative spaces such as shopping

malls and bars. Activists ‘reterritorialize various public spaces

through an assortment of strat- egies like the policing of

neighbourhoods by Pink Panthers dressed in ‘Bash Back’ T-shirts or Queer

Nights Out and Kiss-Ins where groups of gay couples invade straight bars

or other public spaces and scandalously make out’ (Hennessy, 1994– 95:

51). Interventions announce the presence of queers, interrupting the

heteronor- mative public by challenging the assumption that queer

sexuality belongs in private. As Hennessy argues, ‘The queer critique of

heteronormativity is intensely and aggressively concerned with issues of

[queer] visibility’ (1994–95: 36) in hetero- normative publics. The

second strategy is the creation of queer counterpublics engaged in

spaces like gay bars and villages that facilitate queer activism, dis-

courses, cruising, and socializing. Berlant and Warner have found that

sex-oriented queer commercial spaces such as S/M bars, cafes, porn shops

and bookstores are important sites for queer counterpublics: ‘there are

very few places in the world that have assembled much of a queer

population without a base in sex commerce’ (2000: 327). In these spaces,

the public is predominantly queer, as the spaces create

‘nonheteronormative worlds’ (2000: 329).

Exhibit A: ‘A garden-variety leather bar’ that ‘hosts a sex performance

event’

‘A boy, twentyish, very skateboard, comes on the low stage at one end of

the bar, wearing lycra shorts and a dog collar. He sits loosely in a

restraining chair. His partner comes out and tilts the bottom’s head up

to the ceiling, stretching out his throat. Behind them is an array of

foods. The top begins pouring milk down the boy’s throat, then food,

then more milk. It spills over, down his chest and onto the floor. A

dynamic is established between them in which they carefully keep at the

threshold of gagging. The bottom struggles to keep taking in more than

he really can. The top is careful to give him just enough to stretch his

capacities. From time to time a baby bottle is offered as a respite, but

soon the rhythm intensifies. The boy’s stomach is beginning to rise and

pulse, almost convulsively... the top inserts two, then three fingers in

the bottom’s throat, insistently offering his own stomach for the

repeated climaxes. (Berlant and Warner, 2000: 328–9)

This example of erotic vomiting engages non-heteronormative erotic play

thereby creating a queer counterpublic of the audience. ‘Counterpublics

are, by definition, formed by their conflict with the norms and contexts

of their cultural environment’ (Warner, 2002: 63). A queer counterpublic

then engages queer sexualities and pro- duces opportunities for the

circulation of discourses about them that are in ‘conflict with’ or

resistant to heteronormativity.

Important to this resistance is the liberation of the body from some of

its private and public constraints. Theories of privates and publics

tend to assign sexualities (homo/hetero), genders (male/female)[1] and

races (white/non-white) to private or public domains in ways that

re-enact binaries and stereotypes. Specific sexual acts, behaviours,

objects, bodies, or spaces, however, are not inherently only either

public or private. Warner suggests that the terms public and private

‘seem to be preconceptual, almost instinctual, rooted in the

orientations of the body and common speech’ (2002: 23), whereas it seems

that notions of appropriate public and private behaviour are highly

socially constructed. The example he gives is not about publics but

‘privates’: ‘A child’s earliest education in shame, deportment, and

cleaning is an initiation into the prevailing meaning of public and

private, as when he or she locates his or her ‘‘privates’’’ (2002: 23).

However, there is nothing intrinsically ‘private’ about one’s genitals,

rather this is something children learn when they are told to cover up.

Spaces where people may experience the pleasure of privates in public

include nudity clubs, clothing-optional beaches, naked sports teams,

saunas, naked yoga classes, and sex parties. In these spaces the body

does not ‘naturally’ orient itself toward the privacy of sexuality or

sex organs. Human sexual parts are not hidden away like our internal

organs are (livers, kidneys, spleens), rather they are on the surface of

the body. They are the surfaces of our bodies: almost every part of the

body’s surface is potentially sexual in some way. Thus what Warner calls

the ‘orientations of the body’ are not toward privacy as he claims, but

rather toward a proliferation of public sensualities and sexualities.

Bodies liberated through unlearning can be both private and public at

once, or neither, as we choose. The liberation of bodies calls into

question not just notions of privates and publics but the entire set of

social norms that this binary frames. Part of this includes the liminal

spaces of bodies, including clothing and affect, as specific instances

in which the public/private distinction is thrown into crisis. Warner

suggests that ‘Clothing is a language of publicity, folding the body in

what is felt as the body’s own privacy’ (2002: 23). Humans emphasize the

privacy of our ‘privates’ by covering them up. Similarly, feelings are

meant to be experienced and expressed in private. ‘Some bodily

sensations – of pleasure and pain, shame and display, appetite and

purgation – come to be felt, in the same way, as privacy’ (2002: 23).

Sensations emanating from the body and gazes fixed upon the body are

thwarted in their attempts to cross the threshold from private to public

by our socialized conceptions of propriety: we must cry, vomit, fall in

love or have sex behind closed doors. However, if the body’s own privacy

is intrinsic to it, why do we need clothes to fold the body into

privacy? Is it not more liberating for sensa- tions and emotions to be

shared rather than to be entirely private? Warner’s claim for what is

naturally public or private with respect to the body risks the

reinscrip- tion of norms emanating from heteronormativity.

Queer citizenship has provided another framework for rethinking

heteronorma- tivity. Robert Corber and Stephen Valocchi argue that

‘sexual and gender norms... serve as prerequisites for membership in the

nation’ (2003: 15). The nation, through the legal system and its

heteronormative capitalist discourses, establishes rules for entry,

belonging and success, from which queers are systematically excluded.[2]

Belonging in a queer nation can be achieved by transgressions of sexual

and gender norms. ‘Even as the nation-state establishes and enforces

these norms of belonging, spaces open up in which individuals can

exercise sexual agency, partly in resistance to these dominant

understandings of sexual citizenship’ (Corber and Valocchi, 2003: 15).

Warner situates agency for the sexual citizen within the queer

counterpublic. He argues:

A public, or counterpublic, can do more than represent the interests of

gendered or sexualized persons in a public sphere. It can mediate the

most private and intimate meanings of gender and sexuality ... It can

therefore make possible new forms of gendered or sexual citizenship.

(2002: 57)

Non-oppressive queer social relations can be developed through

counterpublics creating spaces for queer sexual citizenship yielding the

agency to participate in a ‘process of world making’ (Warner, 2002: 57).

However with increasingly militarized borders, citizenship is a fraught

category. A system of sexual citizens and non-citizens, with inferior

rights accorded to the latter, entails a hierarchization of sexualities

whereby some would have ‘sexual citizenship’ and others would not. Who

would adjudicate such citizenship?

How would national citizenship intersect with sexual citizenship? Are

non-citizens of the nation-state able to access sexual citizenship?

Bobby Noble has shown that in Toronto same-sex bath-houses, presumably

sites of ‘queer citizenship’, the current entrance policy is ‘show your

dick at the door’, a trans-phobic white-centric polic- ing of bodies

(Noble, 2009). The concept of sexual citizen holds within it a policed

border that refuses some people (i.e. non-white, trans or intersex,

immigrant, people who do not conform to western beauty standards, people

in poverty, people with disabilities and so on) admission into queer

counterpublics. Queer activists thus challenge theorists to consider the

nation, capitalism and other inter- sectional forms of oppression in

their challenges to heteronormativity.

From anti-heteronormativity to anti-capitalism

The vomit performance described earlier can be interpreted as capitalist

consump- tion. The ‘top’, or the dominant capitalist ideology,

force-feeds products to the receptive consumer or ‘bottom’. As ‘the

bottom struggles to keep taking in more than he really can’, as in

middle-class debt-driven consumerism, and ‘the top is careful to give

him just enough to stretch his capacities’, the same way capitalism

stretches our capacities, ‘a dynamic is established between them in

which they carefully keep at the threshold of gagging’ against consuming

too much. Berlant and Warner figure this as erotic and the vomiting that

follows as a sexualized ‘climax’, as the top offers his stomach for the

stream of ejaculate/ vomit.

Susan Bordo considers vomiting emblematic of the contradictions between

capitalist production and consumption:

In advanced consumer capitalism ... an unstable, agonistic construction

of personality is produced by the contradictory structure of economic

life. On the one hand, as ‘producer-selves’, we must be capable of

sublimating, delaying, repressing desires for immediate gratification;

we must cultivate the work ethic. On the other hand, as

‘consumer-selves’ we serve the system through a boundless capacity to

capitulate to desire and indulge in impulse; we must become creatures

who hunger for constant and immediate satisfaction. (1990: 96)

Consumerism cultivates the construction of the desire for consumerism

itself, which extends beyond the desire for products to encompass the

desire for a situ- ation of consumption in which there is a secure

assumption that you can have everything you could possibly desire. The

body cannot sustain these contradictions, however, even as every queer

subject cannot participate in a counterpublic that calls for

marginalized quasi-privatized gay-village spaces of consumerism predi-

cated on public displays of perfect (white male) bodies indulging in

capitalist excess. Vomiting is a bodily expression of the

unsustainability of capitalism. This takes on a gendered dynamic as

well, as Bordo has found. Women are supposed to make ourselves so

‘slender’ that we almost disappear, a disappearance that leads to

multiple marginalizations in queer commercial spaces that demand

entrance fees (class), are dominated by cis men (sex), are spaces that

either reject or exoticize racialized groups (race), and demand specific

body images (able-bodiness). Bordo argues that this ‘embodies the

unstable ‘double-bind’ of consumer capitalism’ (1990: 99), as well as

suggesting the untenability of women’s bodies within mascu- linist,

heteronormative, racist, ableist, capitalist systems.

Queer commerce thus cannot empower all subjects. ‘Visibility in

commodity culture is in this sense a limited victory for gays who are

welcome to be visible as consumer subjects but not as social subjects’

(Hennessy, 1994–95: 32). It is precisely this social subjectivity that

is at stake in anti-capitalist queer social movements.

Exhibit B: Projectile zine

In the 1990s my friend Leah and I produced a zine called Projectile:

Stories about Puking, containing sections called, ‘Where to puke in

Toronto’, ‘The Montreal Puke’ and ‘The Red Puke’ partner puke reviews,

and ‘Colour-code yer puke’, with a cen- terfold depicting one of our

friends bent forward projectiling a stream of puke from his mouth. Other

punk issues covered included band reviews, condom reviews for sluts, the

punk Beer Olympics in New York City, squatting, and police brutality.

(Jeppesen and Visser, 1996)

We were always puking so we made a zine about it. For us puking was the

fullest expression of an authentic excessiveness in a life lived with

the kind of intensity disallowed by polite society. Puking at 7:00am

after drinking all night at punk clubs and after-hours bars in a subway

train full of commuters was the ultimate cathar- sis. Your head heated

up, your face started sweating, your body trembled, you vibrated from

toe to head, and that surge produced something of you, a kind of

self-production, a collectively approved explosion against everything.

The com- muters, staring in disgust, reproduced your disgust at society,

as you passed the affect of disaffectation back to them.

These moments created and accelerated our passion and self-rebuilding.

We were not caught up in surfaces of life, the body, cleanliness, linear

time. Instead we lived in urban grit, by crumbling graffitied walls

under train bridges, displaying the broken glass edges of our skin,

enjoying the feeling of the piercing needle going in welling up our

eyes, the tattoo gun drilling down through our skin. Scarification,

cutting, branding, vomiting and fucking intensified our lives. Puking

was the cul- mination of a night of fully engaged participation in the

most intense gruelling enjoyable expressive living. Fucking was the

culmination of an intense connection to another person, a letting go of

bodily control, a full-on head-on encounter with another being. Both

explosive and expulsive, they gave a sense of finality to the

proceedings: Now I’m done. I have lived tonight to the fullest extent of

my capac- ity, exceeding norms on so many fronts. ‘Where to puke in

Toronto’ lists the grittiest corners of the city, back alleys with the

stench of French fry vats and dead pigeons, ‘behind Sneaky Dee’s just

outside the kitchen (or just inside)’, dark graffitied streets,

abandoned houses, gravelly urban parks like the ‘junkie park at Dundas

and Bathurst’ or ‘Kensington park in the sex bushes’ (Jeppesen and

Visser, 1996). These were places we loved, we marked our territory with

sex and vomit. Puking and fucking in public spaces and naming those

spaces our own created a liberatory underground culture. This piece

de´tournes the tourist guide ‘Where to dine out in Toronto’ turning

consumption/dining in public by the privileged classes into

production/vomiting in public by the underclasses. Puking was explicitly

anti- capitalist, anti-consumerist and anti-spectacle. The two partner

puke reviews tell relationship stories through vomit rated by ‘colour’,

‘texture’, ‘sound’, and ‘loca- tion’. What did it reveal about the

relationship? ‘I always think of [them] fondly and somewhat pathetically

when I’m hungover’ (Jeppesen and Visser, 1996), con- cludes one review.

Puking and fucking drew us closer, creating zones of unmediated shared

intensities. Vomiting is a sex-like manifestation of the non-normative,

the ejaculate/projectile stream is a ‘fuck you’ on the pedestrian

sidewalk of society. It expresses only its own intensities. It is the

Deleuze and Guattarian body without organs (1983), literally ejecting

its own organs, intensely embracing other bodies without organs. Love

and intimacy are created in these moments which would be shameful in

consumer culture where intimacy is produced in circumscribed places

through consumerism – fancy restaurants, expensive gifts and so on. The

excesses of affect and intimacy produced by vomiting and sex in public

challenge hetero- normativity and its direct ties to capitalism.

Moreover, the boundary between public and private is thrown into crisis,

per- haps even evacuated by the eroticized vomit performance and

Projectile’s ‘stories about puking’, whereby both create non-shaming

spaces as the body’s innards are put on display. Not just the

sexualization of the act of vomiting, but the collapse of bourgeois

decorum in the act of ‘puking’ are transgressions of boundaries linked

to the public/private divide, including non-normative sexuality, public

performance of bodily functions, the reinscription of positive affect

onto normatively negative acts, an overshare of expressive personal

proclivities, an outward display of punk pov- erty through the lack of

private space in which to vomit and so on. Furthermore, the zine, as a

form of autonomous media, creates its own fluid anti-capitalist

autonomous public. Queer radicals have thus become anti-capitalist,

recognizing ‘that heteronormative forms, so central to the accumulation

and reproduction of capital, also depend on heavy interventions in the

regulation of capital’ (Berlant and Warner, 2000: 327). But gay

capitalism has been quick to establish norms of homosexuality consistent

with consumerism.

From anti-capitalism to anti-homonormativity

As we have seen, an important part of queer politics is the reclaiming

of hetero- normative public space for queer public sex and safety.

Berlant and Warner’s account of queer counterpublics takes recourse to a

spatial taxonomy related to cap- italist private property rights and

commercial development. ‘In late 20^(th)-century‘‘post-industrial’’

societies like the United States, the (in)visibility of class divisions

continues to be spatially regulated by urban planning’ (Hennessy,

1994–95: 67). Ownership and control of space is at stake in queer

liberation. ‘By letting the language of real-estate development serve

queer public intimacy, Berlant and Warner provide a powerful and

necessary critique of heteronormative privacy and put forth a compelling

defense of the social networks and queer culture created through public

sex’ (Castiglia, 2000: 156). Spaces mapped out for queer pleasure via

communal intimacies are crucial to queer counterpublics. For Warner, ‘A

counterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a

horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from

authority and can have a critical relation to power’ (Warner, 2002:

56–7). Anti-capitalist queer organizing assumes a critical relation to

the new power hierarchies that have been established within queer

culture, to unlink queer culture from consumerism, offering critiques of

gay villages steeped in commerce, the ‘pink dollar’, the gay niche

market, and corporate sponsorship of Pride marches.

Exhibit C: The Pink Panthers, Montreal, 14 February 2004

Operation ‘Pepto-Bismol Please!’, designed by the Pink Panthers

collective to denounce the commercialization of Valentines Day, took

place as planned late this afternoon in Montreal’s Gay Village. After

puking on the doorsteps of the Village’s most prosperous shops and bars

catering to gay businessmen, members of this radical queer group flooded

the neighborhood with counterfeit coupons, symbolizing the reign of the

pink dollar and the capitalist compliance of today’s average gays and

lesbians (Les Panthe‘ res Roses, 2004).

According to Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman: ‘The Pink Panthers,

initially con- ceived of at a Queer Nation meeting (they are now a

separate organization), pro- vided a searing response to the increased

violence that has accompanied the general increase of gay visibility in

America’ (1992: 161). Les Panthe‘res Roses, The Pink Panthers, was ‘a

group of radical queers based in Montreal, who use[d] direct and

creative action to confront the established order’. Formed in 2002, Les

Panthe‘res Roses held their first anti-capitalist action at Montreal Gay

Pride in 2003, ‘[d]istribut[ing] hundreds of Anti-Ad Kits on

Rene-Le´vesque Street’ (Les Panthe‘ res Roses, 2004). In 2004 they

organized an anti-homonormative Valentine’s Day vomiting direct action:

A member of the Pink Panthers, before vomiting on the steps of the store

Megavideo, revealed that the most infuriating thing for him was the

capitalist appropriation of emotions like love and liberty, which have

always belonged to everybody and should never have become dependant

[sic] on consumption. He feels that multinationals and others who profit

off of Valentine’s Day are doing something that by its very nature

(competition, salary reduction, waste of natural resources) has nothing

to do with the love of another person. (Les Panthe‘ res Roses, 2004) The

Pink Panthers used their vomit action to denounce capitalist

exploitation of gay consumer dollars and ‘natural resources’ or the

environment, linking these two issues. They also noted that,

‘businessmen make themselves out to be the most enthusiastic proponents

of gay liberation, while at the same time using their phallocentric

power to exclude everyone who is not a white man’ (Les Panthe‘ res

Roses, 2004). They add masculinity and race to the environment and

capitalism as axes of oppression that intersect with and in queer

subjectivities and liberation. The Pink Panthers’ anti-homonormative

action includes a greater diversity of queers who might live in poverty,

and/or be women, and/or be bisexual, and/ or be trans, and/or be people

of colour, and/or be sex workers, and/or be dis- abled, and/or not

conform to the dominant beauty image, and/or otherwise devi- ate from

gay stereotypes. They challenge barriers to participation for doubly or

multiply marginalized queers in counterpublic spaces inside urban clubs

or shops, where some modes of oppression might be reinforced (e.g. by

racism, the ‘dick at the door’ policy, beauty standards, social class

belonging, ageism, ableism and so on). Furthermore, the Panthers’

message was created in the streets, accessible to all passers-by,

claiming public spaces and moments as queer autonomous zones free of

oppression.

Direct action vomiting critiques the homonormativity of the queer

counter- public that includes gay villages, corporatized Pride marches

and the like. The Pink Panthers’ vomit actions make Berlant and Warner’s

erotic vomit story seem somewhat limited, as does the academic public

created by representation in an article such as this one. Sitting in a

bar vicariously experiencing some- one’s intense eroticism positively

revalues and simultaneously degrades it, as the performance risks

becoming commodified. The Pink Panthers’ statement critiques queer

counterpublics for commodifying affect through ‘the capitalist

appropriation of emotions like love and liberty’. While the erotic

vomiting scene Berlant and Warner witnessed is hardly a Valentine’s Day

card, it does partic- ipate in the queer consumerism of gay bars that

reifies homo-norms, for exam- ple that queers all go to leather bars, or

that being queer is a hip young urban lifestyle choice. These

stereotypes become homo-norms in urban queer counterpublics.

While queer visibility in heteronormative culture is important, Mall

Zaps and Kiss-Ins also tend to reinforce queer stereotypes through

mainstream practices such as shopping and public kissing. Richard Dyer

has found that ‘Gay people, whether activists or not, have resented and

attacked the images of homosexual- ity ... The principle line of attack

has been on stereotyping’ (Dyer, 2006: 353). Gay stereotypes tend to

emphasize white middle-class cisgender gay male consumerism.

‘Particularly damaging is the fact that many gay people believe

[stereotypes], lead- ing on the one hand to the self-oppression so

characteristic of gay people’s lives, and on the other to behaviour in

conformity with the stereotypes which of course only serves to confirm

their truth’ (2006: 353). Kiss-Ins and Mall Zaps perform the ‘truth’ of

certain stereotypes revealing both internal (within queer groups) and

internalized (within the self) oppressions.

Ironically, this tends to both deconstruct and simultaneously reinforce

both heteronormativity and homonormativity. ‘One of the modes of

[maintaining het- erosexual hegemony] for gays is casting gay

relationships and characters in terms of heterosexual roles’ (Dyer,

2006: 356), including kissing in malls or public squares posing as a

heteronormative couple. Kevin Michael DeLuca describes a famous gay

kiss-in poster by Gran Fury thus: ‘One sailor has his arms around his

partner’s waist. The other sailor’s arms are around his partner’s neck.

In other words, it is a classic kiss’ (1999: 18). This image inserts

queer subjectivities into the public sphere, demanding access to power.

At the same time, it risks becoming a homonormative image, as the men

are both beautiful, white, thin, and middle class with matching short

haircuts and outfits. Certainly there is also a level of irony in the

perfor- mance. Nonetheless acts and images like ‘these simply bolster

heterosexual hege- mony, [whereas] the task is to develop our own

alternative and challenging definitions of ourselves’ (Dyer, 2006: 357).

Self-definitions must move past white privilege and other dominant

homo-norms. A Kiss-In emphasizes public kissing, not a norm in all

ethno-cultural groups. Shopping imagines all queers as middle- class

consumers who escalate environmental devastation. ‘These stereotypes of

wealthy free-spending gay consumers play well with advertisers and are

useful to corporations because they make the gay market seem potentially

lucrative’ (Hennessy, 1994–95: 66). Queer activism, in earnest attempts

to challenge hetero- normativity, has inadvertently reinscribed a

homonormative subject complicit with capitalism, racism, environmental

destruction, ableism, patriarchy, beauty myths and so on. Radical queer

activists attempt to move beyond this deadlock without abandoning the

notion of queer culture altogether.

The Pink Panthers’ action of vomiting in public takes it out of a

commodified space. The vomit, however, was made of oatmeal not actual

vomit, producing a simulated vomiting against the hyper-simulations of

capitalism. The action goes into a space it rejects, and replicates that

which it rejects. This simulation and rejection is analogous to the

disgust shared with commuters, a kind of hyper- affect produced by

vomiting in streets or back-alleys or commuter trains. Only these

non-regulated, open-ended public spaces can be liberatory; as the body

itself becomes the message, the vomit becomes a kind of street-corner

text acces- sible to all. According to DeLuca, the body itself has

become an event-image, a text that can shift the discursive mainstream

framing of queer politics, as some ‘activist groups practice an

alternative image politics, performing image events designed for mass

media dissemination. Often, image events revolve around images of bodies

– vulnerable bodies, dangerous bodies, taboo bodies, ludicrous bodies,

transfigured bodies’ (DeLuca, 1999: 10). The vomiting body is a

‘dangerous body’ bringing forth new ideas. ‘Their bodies, then, become

not merely flags to attract attention for the argument but the site and

substance of the argument itself’ (1999: 10). Using their bodies, the

Pink Panthers’ puking action articulated a message against con- sumerism

and other exclusions, the substance of which was the vomit itself. Their

‘bodies simultaneously are constructed in discourses and exceed those

discourses’ (1999: 20) – or in this case, the discourse/vomit exceeded

the body – moving beyond ‘a class-specific ‘bourgeois (homosexual/queer)

imaginary’ [that] structures our knowledge of sexual identity, pleasure,

and emancipation’ (Hennessy, 1994–95: 70). Certainly not bourgeois,

vomiting on the steps of queer consumerism makes the point that pleasure

and emancipation should be available to all subjects, those who go to

gay bars, as well as those who are excluded. The public created is a

free and fluid autonomous public.

This kind of direct action demonstrates that ‘movements around gender

and sexuality do not always conform to the bourgeois model of

‘rational-critical debate’ (Warner, 2002: 51), nor do they remain legal.

Groups such as ‘Earth First!, ACT UP and Queer Nation have challenged

and changed the meanings of the world not through good reasons but

through vulnerable bodies, not through rational argu- ments but through

bodies at risk’ (DeLuca, 1999: 11). Engaging in direct action in open

public spaces the Pink Panthers risk criminalization. After the action

in Montreal, The Mirror ran the headline, ‘Puking Queers Make Splash!’

and featured an interview with a ‘self-described anarchist’, who used

the name ‘‘Olivier’’, – a pseudonym, as he acknowledges his acts are

illegal’. The use of pseudonyms is almost ironic as vomiting is not a

transgression of the law, but rather signifies a transgression against

the digestive system. The context of the action, however – in public,

against corporations – renders it ‘illegal’ and the pseudonym necessary.

Often regular behaviour (vomiting, having sex) is criminalized when

engaged by queers. Furthermore, there is a link between shame (i.e. the

private) and criminal- ization (i.e. privatization of ownership, space

and so on). Warner observes that ‘critically relevant styles of

publicness in gay male’ and, I would add, other queer ‘sexual culture[s]

are seldom recognized as such but are typically denounced as sleaze and

as crime’ (2002: 52). Puking punks and queers are sleazy, shameful

criminals who are bad for business.

And yet sleaze, perversion, deviance, eccentricity, weirdness,

kinkiness, BDSM and smut, although perhaps not openly homo-norms among

the new assimilation- ists advocating same-sex marriage, are central to

sex-positive queer anarchist lives. ‘Queer and other insurgents have

long striven, often dangerously or scandalously, to cultivate what good

folks used to call criminal intimacies’ (Berlant and Warner, 2000: 322),

figured as exciting sites of resistance. ‘Nonstandard intimacies would

seem less criminal and less fleeting if, as used to be the case, normal

intimacies included everything from consorts to courtiers, friends,

amours, associates, and co- conspirators’ (2000: 323). Here we come up

against another binary, however: normal vs. nonstandard. According to

Jamie Heckert, ‘LGBT politics maintains these categories: it intends to

invert their meaning, redefining sexual deviance as sexual identity of

which one should be proud and sexual normality as boring/ oppressive’

(2004: 106). The desire for certain behaviours to be recategorized as

‘normal’ is denounced in a queer anarchist world-making project that

considers all consensual, non-coerced intimacies and sexualities

legitimate, challenging homo- normativity via anti-oppression politics.

From anti-homonormativity to anti-oppression politics and

alternative value-practices

Abandoning hierarchized binary categories is one strategy of

intersectional anti- oppression politics. As Heckert argues, ‘Sexuality

is constructed into hierarchies and is interconnected with other forms

of social divisions including gender, sexual orientation, class and

ethnicity’ (2004: 102). The Pink Panthers reveal and critique these

hierarchies in their media interviews. The Gazette, on 23 February 2004,

ran the wordy headline, ‘Pink Panthers use fake vomit, phony money to

preach in the gay village: non-violent but often bizarre actions aim to

encourage activism in gay community’. ‘Nathalie’ suggests ‘The gay

(political) strategy is very narrow- minded. They never consider other

causes, like women’s rights, the environment, globalization’. Similarly,

in The Hour of 29 July 2004, ‘Jubejube Molotov’ asks ‘What about drag

queens, trannies, gays of colour?... What about everyone who doesn’t

want to be married and have kids?’ Also on 29 July 2004, The Mirror’s

article, ‘Radical pink: Queer anarchists take on what they perceive to

be the racism, sexism and materialism of the gay establishment’, takes

up the Panthers’ critique of the ‘gay-geoisie’. The article suggests

that ‘some Montreal homosexuals feel at odds with the mainstreaming of

gay and are rebelling against the pigeon-holing of their identity based

solely on their sexuality and their supposed disposable income’.

Revealing the intersectionality of exclusions has the power to expand

queer politics and publics. This media coverage further expands the

queer autonomous public to include mainstream (The Gazette) and left

weekly (The Hour, The Mirror) audiences.

An intersectional analysis is considered crucial within queer anarchist

culture. Intersectionality, as Leslie McCall argues, is based on the

realization that ‘[s]ocial life is considered too irreducibly complex –

overflowing with multiple and fluid deter- minations of both subjects

and structures – to make fixed categories anything but simplifying

social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing

dif- ferences’ (2005: 1773). Nikki Sullivan has found that if

oppressions are divided into categories and addressed one at a time,

enacting other oppressions becomes a risk:

One of the problems with disassociating race, gender, and sexuality and

focusing primarily on one of the terms is that such an approach can lead

to the production of accounts of race that are (at least implicitly)

sexist and/or homophobic, theories of gender that are (at least

implicitly) racist and/or homophobic, and analyses of sexu- ality that

are (at least implicitly) racist and/or sexist. (2003: 66)

Accordingly, Hennessy opens out her queer anti-capitalist analysis: ‘the

racialized and gendered division of labor suggests that there are more

lesbians than gay men living in poverty and proportionately more of them

are people of color’ (1994–95: 69). An anti-categorical intersectional

analysis considers oppression on intersecting axes rather than the ‘silo

model’ of unrelated categories. Furthermore, the range of differences

within categories of oppression renders categories themselves nearly

meaningless (McCall, 2005) whereby a general failure to acknowledge this

has entrenched systemic oppressions. ‘Any system’, as Heckert observes,

addressing internal oppression, ‘that limits or stigmatises our

imaginings of the possible (be it anarchism or same-sex desires)... is

oppressive to us all’ (Heckert, 2004: 113). An anti-categorical approach

moves beyond labels to value individual experiences, and opens up the

possible imaginings Heckert advocates.

In fact, both Heckert (2004) and Dyer (2006) argue for the development

of a set of alternative values self-defined among our communities. These

values are not oppositional to mainstream values, rather they come from

a liberatory set of com- mitments driven by a very different conception

of life’s possibilities and priorities. This points to the problem with

the concept of counterpublics. Once the hegemonic discourse has been

established, a counter-discourse may challenge it but any chal- lenges

on this terrain, regardless of how indefinite their extent or diffuse

their networks, will have difficulty disrupting the power relations that

mapped the ter- rain in the first place. By Warner’s own admission, a

counterpublic ‘maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness

of its subordinate status’ (2002: 56), making lived equal relations

among heterosexual publics and queer counterpublics impossible. As

Heckert articulates, ‘Oppositional politics is based upon the same terms

as that which it opposes. Thus, it serves to maintain the definition of

the situation imposed by its opposition’ (2004: 105). A strategy of

counterpublics runs the risk of reinforcing exactly the hegemony it is

attempting to crack. ‘A successful radical politics... must not rely

upon transgression and opposition if its goal is to reconstruct society

around a different set of norms (e.g. co-operative, non-hierarch- ical,

comfortable with sexuality, consensual and so on)’ (2004: 108). With

alterna- tive values, instead we create and build our own autonomous

zones and become our own publics making spaces for participatory

engagement. ‘The political value of queer and public sex cultures is not

in their transgressive nature, but in their development of alternative

sexual values that attempt to move beyond sexual shame’ (Heckert, 2004:

113). Activists are therefore moving beyond shame and are simultaneously

developing a politics of shame (see also Moore, 2004).

Douglas Crimp takes up this deconstructive project, arguing that shame

‘is equally and simultaneously identity-defining and identity-erasing’

(2002: 64–5). Shame erases queer identities by disallowing them, and

simultaneously defines queer identities through emotional relations as

it ‘appears to construct the singu- larity and isolation of one’s

identity through an affective connection to the shaming of another’

(2002: 65). Shame produces a moment of intense emotion that creates a

bond between two people as their identities are negotiated. ‘Just as

shame is both productive and corrosive of queer identity... so too is it

simultaneously productive and corrosive of queer revaluations of dignity

and worth’ (2002: 65). Shame can be transformed into dignity in

transcendent moments of emotional experience, a transformation that is

critical to sex-positive, radically ethical queer sexual prac- tices

such as sex play, public nudity, public sex and polyamory.

As Heckert argues, ‘sexual ethics are also of central importance.

[Warner] crit- icises sexual identity politics for focusing on identity

to the exclusion of sex. For him, sexual shame is the key issue to be

addressed in a politics of sexuality’ (2004: 113). In raw moments of

sexual pleasure, intimacy and disclosure we can make our most intense

connections to others, but only if shame is productively transformed

into dignity, joy and pleasure. Crimp advocates ‘a new slogan of queer

politics: For Shame!’ (2002: 68), for the shame produced in moments of

irresistibly sexy mutual vulnerability. Crimp’s conception of shame has

the potential to transcend not just shame but also heteronormativity and

homonormativity. Moments of sexual and other forms of bodily

vulnerability draw us to people, facilitating intimacy through a more

honest set of negotiated practices and consensual desires based on and

productive of trust, dignity, laughter, and respect for varieties of

non-normative practices including vomiting and/or sex in public.

Non-authoritarian social rela- tions and value-practices are required

for these moments, critical to transcending the painful experiences of

normative anti-queer social shaming.

Queer autonomous zones and participatory publics

Bobby Noble points to ‘the simultaneity of the relations between

gendered embodi- ment, sex play, and racialization inside homonormative

communities, neighbour- hoods and venues for cultural production’

(Noble, 2009). Similar critiques of the queer community have been taken

up by Gay Shame anarchist activists organizing in the late 1990s. In

That’s Revolting! Matt/Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore docu- ments their

personal experience in Gay Shame collectives in San Francisco and New

York City. ‘Gay Shame emerged to create a radical alternative to the

confor- mity of gay neighbourhoods, bars, and institutions – most

clearly symbolized by Gay Pride’ (Sycamore, 2004: 238). Gay Shame is

‘mostly anarchist leaning’ (2004: 239), and organizes gatherings, events

and direct action protests against capitalism and intersecting

oppressions. A San Francisco flyer asks, ‘Are you choking on the vomit

of consumerist ‘gay pride’?’ (2004: 239). Another poster entitled ‘Gay

pride, my ass: It’s all about gay shame’ (2004: 240) announces an

‘autonomous space’ (2004: 240) outdoors on Tire Beach with performances,

art-making, bands, instal- lations, DJs, food, kidspace, and ‘politics

and play’ (2004: 240). The event hosted ‘speakers on issues including

San Francisco gentrification and the US colonization of the Puerto Rican

island of Vieques, as well as prison, youth, and trans activism’ (2004:

241). The range of issues and events in the ‘autonomous space’ point to

a very different kind of sprawling, engaged public than Berlant and

Warner’s indoor, circumscribed, queer counterpublic. ‘We encouraged

people to participate in cre- ating their own radical queer space, and

people argued about political issues, painted, poured concrete and made

a mosaic, dyed hair, and mudwrestled naked’ (Sycamore, 2004: 241).

Participation is a key element in the formation of a ‘Queer autonomous

space’ (2004: 237) or zone, as are multiplicities of political focus

(Puerto Rico, kids, youth, prisons, trans people, art production,

gentrifica- tion and so on) and an over-arching anti-capitalist practice

that includes free entrance, barter and trade, dressing to ‘ragged

excess’ (2004: 240), and the provi- sion of ‘free food, T-shirts and

various other gifts’ (2004: 241).

Queer autonomous zones thus are open-ended spaces in which participation

of all comers is encouraged through a direct (rather than liberal)

democracy model. They are facilitated via engagement with a multiplicity

of intersectional anti- oppression politics. Interactions in queer

autonomous spaces develop sustainable social relations and

value-practices, based on mutual respect, consent, sexual lib- eration,

and non-normativity, in which people engage in open-ended processes of

developing alternative ways of being, feeling, thinking, engaging,

acting and becoming-liberated. The question is – what’s next? How do we

continue to expand our movements and theorizing to extend the

becoming-liberated of queer?

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments, Jamie

Heckert for encour- agement and patience with my process, and Sydney

Neuman for engaged proofreading.

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On the Author

Sandra Jeppesen is an activist, writer, and Assistant Professor in

Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Her

research is in guerrilla texts and autonomous media, including analysis

of discourses produced through anti-poverty activism, anti-colonial

no-border activism, radical feminist and queer collectives, anti-racist

pedagogies, and other social movement texts. Address: Communication

Studies Department, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West,

CJ 3.230, 3^(rd) Floor, Montreal, Canada H4B 1R6.

[1] Following Vade’s important article (2005) advocating the ‘Gender

Galaxy’ which reveals the falsity of the gender/sex divide and the

negative legal impact of this distinction on trans people, I am using

the term ‘gender’ to be comprehensive.

[2] In the USA this is particularly true. In Canada same-sex marriage

and human rights are protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,

and immigration processes are begin- ning to include same-sex partners

in sponsorship claims, as well as considering persecution for sexuality

as a basis for refugee claims. These processes however remain

heteronorma- tive. I’d like to thank Melissa White for sharing her

insights and research on this issue.