In 1892, a twenty-two-year-old anarchist named Alexander Berkman walked into a steel magnate's office and shot him. He served fourteen years for it, and it was in that Pennsylvania prison, not a lecture hall, that one of the most significant American texts on homosexuality before the twentieth century's midpoint got written.
Queer anarchism runs from Berkman's Prison Memoirs through Emma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde, at a time when almost no public figure would touch it, into the Two-Spirit traditions that predate the word "anarchism" by centuries and the decolonial history of their erasure. José Esteban Muñoz's argument that queerness is a horizon, not yet here, sits alongside ACT UP's dual structure, built so a small affinity group could chain itself to a stock exchange balcony without the open floor ever knowing it was coming. And there's Simon Nkoli, who came out to his co-defendants inside a South African treason trial that carried the death penalty, and went on to help organise the first Pride march anywhere on the African continent.
Where queer theory and anarchist theory pull apart gets named too: a canon built almost entirely by straight men who rarely theorised gender or sexuality at all, and a queer theory that can drift toward the personal at the expense of the structural. Neither tradition gets a pass.
Further reading: José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009) Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004) Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Mother Earth Publishing, 1912; available free via Project Gutenberg) Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 (AK Press, 2008) South African History Online, Simon Nkoli — sahistory.org.za
Tags: queer anarchism, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, José Esteban Muñoz, queer theory, Two-Spirit, Simon Nkoli, ACT UP, apartheid, Bash Back, queer futurity, LGBTQ history, anarchism
Show notes: Queer Anarchists. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 3
Queer anarchism has existed for well over a century under different names, a tradition both mainstream queer politics and the mostly white, mostly male anarchist canon have had a habit of forgetting was ever there, from a Pennsylvania prison cell to a treason trial in South Africa, asking where the two traditions actually meet.
In this episode:
- Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs and its unlikely place in LGBTQ history
- Emma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde and "The Intermediate Sex"
- Two-Spirit traditions and the decolonial history of gender variance
- José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, and queer futurity's disagreement with Lee Edelman
- Mary Nardini Gang's "Toward the Queerest Insurrection"
- ACT UP's dual structure and the Sell Wellcome action
- Simon Nkoli, the Delmas Treason Trial, and Africa's first Pride march
- Where queer theory and anarchist theory actually pull apart
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