#immer autonom

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Anarcha-Feminism

Various Authors, Quiet Rumors: an Anarcha-Feminist Reader

Various Authors, Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-Defense, and Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender

Kristen Anderberg, a Man’s Heaven is a Woman’s Hell

Words to Fire Press, Betrayal: A Critical Analysis of Rape Culture in Anarchist Subcultures

Courtney Desiree Morris, Why Misogynists Make Great Informants

Ray Filar, Notes Toward a Theory of the Manarchist

Mona Eltahawy, How Many Rapists Must We Kill? 1

Mona Eltahawy, Inciting Liberation

J. Rogue, De-Essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement

Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira, Feminism and Organized Anarchism

E. Connor & Beck Levy, Your Options Are Limitless: A Polemic

Lee Cicuta, Intimate Authoritarianism: The Ideology of Abuse

Lee Cicuta, Cry like a Fag, Scream Like a Woman

C.E., Undoing Sex: Against Sexual Optimism

Sky Palace, “To Be Liberated From Them (Or Through Them)”: A Call for a New Approach

Lovely Alyxander, Since 2010 At Least 1300 Women and Children Have Been Sexually or Physically Attacked by UK Cops. PT 1 – PT 2 – PT 3

Estelle Ellison, Pushing Back Against Mass Abuse Apologism

Anonymous, Why She Doesn’t Give a Fuck About Your Insurrection

Ramona, Safer Spaces, False Allegations, and the NYC Anarchist Bookfair

Lilith, Gender Disobedience: Antifeminism and Insurrectionist Non-dialogue

Feminism

Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Sara Ahmed, A Killjoy Manifesto

Sara Ahmed, The Complainer as Carceral Feminist

Anonymous, Dangerous Intersections

Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman

Young Women’s Empowerment Project, Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive: Illuminating Methods Used by Girls in the Sex Trade to Fight Back and Heal

Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Sex

Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Work

Linda Martín Alcoff, Norming Sexual Practices (from Rape and Resistance)

Madeline Lane-McKinley, On Complaints and Apologies: Feminist Theses Against Carceralism

Emi Koyami, Understanding the Complexities of Sex Trafficking and Sex Work/Trade (Foldable zine version)

L. Cornum, First Women, Then the Nation: Confronting Colonial Gender Violence in Canada and the US

M. Sandovsky, Letters to L: Paranoia and Visions

Rebecca Hall, Not Killing Me Softly: African American Women, Slave Revolts, and Historical Constructions of Racialized Gender

Hannah Summers, The Illusion of the “Real” Rape Victim

Donna Haraway, Situation Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Ann Ferguson, Sex War: The Debate between Radical and Libertarian Feminists 2

Joy James, Violations

Monique Plaza, Our Damages and Their Compensation: The Will Not to Know of Michel Foucault

Stephen P. Knadler, Leo Bersani and the Nostalgia for White Male Radicalism

Moya Bailey, They aren’t talking about me…

Transfeminism

Various Authors, Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-Defense, and Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender

Lee Cicuta, Butch Anarchism

Jules Joanne Gleeson & Nathaniel Dickson, The Future of Trans Politics

J. Rogue, De-Essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement

Emi Koyami, The Tranfeminist Manifesto 3

Sayak Valencia (translated by Olga Arnaiz Zhuravleva), Necropolitics, Postmortem/Transmortem Politics, and Transfeminisms in the Sexual Economies of Death

Jennifer Worley, “Street Power” and the Claiming of Public Space: San Francisco’s “Vanguard” and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism

Joni Alizah Cohen, The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project

Talia Bhatt, Understanding Transmisogyny, Part I: MIsogyny and Heterosexualism

Talia Bhatt, Understanding Transmisogyny Part II: Homophobia and Trasphobia

Talia Bhatt,  Understanding Transmisogyny Part III: Constructing the Transsexual

Talia Bhatt, The Third Sex

May Peterson, Dialectical Feminism: An Unburial Theory

Sara Ahmed, An Affinity of Hammers

Anarchism

Lee Cicuta, Against a Liberal Abolitionism

David Graeber, Oppression

David Graeber, Dead Zones of the Imagination

David Graeber, i didn’t understand how widespread rape was. then the penny dropped

David Graeber, Two Notions of Liberty Revisited

William Gillis, When “Restorative Justice” Means Restoring Peace, Not Justice

William Gillis, Bad People

sasha k, Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism

CrimeThinc, Accounting For Ourselves: Breaking the Impasse Around Sexual Assault in Anarchist Scenes

Zoé Samudzi & William C. Anderson, The Anarchism of Blackness

Revolutionary Anti-Authoritarians of Color, An Anarchist Introduction to Critical Race Theory

Håkan Geijar, Affinity Fraud and Exploitable Empathy

unsalted, Red Flags: Before You Join That Org…

Youth Liberation

John Wall, Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities

Toby Rollo, Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child

Toby Rollo, The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Human/Child Binary in the Production of AntiBlack Racism

A. Mark Liddle, Gender, Desire, and Child Sexual Abuse: Accounting for the Male Majority

Mills & Lefrançois, Child as Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide

Ulrike Roth, Speaking Out? Child Sexual Abuse and the Enslaved Voice in the Cena Trimalchionis

Anarchasteminist, James Cantor, paedophilia, and the “Gender Critical” movement

Jenny Kitzinger, Who Are You Kidding? Children, Power, and the Struggle Against Sexual Abuse

Arthur Silber, On Torture: The Truth That Lies Within (Excerpt)

Lee Cicuta, The Right Wing Hates Children: the Weaponization of “Groomer”

Jennifer Worley, “Street Power” and the Claiming of Public Space: San Francisco’s “Vanguard” and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism

Wesley Ware, Rounding Up the Homosexuals: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth

Suzanne Zeedyk & Fionna Raitt, False Memory Syndrome: Undermining the credibility of complainants in sexual offences

More Recommended Readings

Reny Taylor, Indicted Victims: Black Males and Sexual Vulnerability Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, Burn Down the American Plantation

Joseph A. Boone, Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism 4

Walter Johnson, On Agency

northshore, Autonomously and with Conviction: A Métis Refusal of State-Led Reconciliation

William Gillis, One Giant Red Flag, Folded Into a Book

Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as Property

Books and Longer Works

Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

Patrick Joseph Ryan, Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

Emma Heaney, (Ed.) Feminism Against Cisness

1 We include Ann Ferguson’s piece as a recommendation because it is a reasonably succinct and accurate contemporaneous summary of the feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, including the things both “sides” got right or got wrong, but its conclusions and suggested resolutions to the problem are a bit outdated and reflect Ferguson’s discursive context at the time it was written. Among other things, the piece passes rather quickly over the topic of sex-positive feminists’ endorsement of “adult/child sex” and alliance with the boy-love movement, which contemporary readers will likely find jarring, especially because of how starkly different it is from the other topics of debate in the Sex Wars. (We note that the words “very young” are doing a lot of legwork in Ferguson’s conclusion.) The fact that it provokes no more comment than any of the other topics of debate must be understood as an indication of just how much the debate about “adult/child sex” (and whether “boy-lovers” constituted an oppressed sexual minority) was as prominent a point of contention between sex-positive feminists and antiporn feminists as any of the more well-known debates of the time, although contemporary liberal feminists usually elide, selectively forget, or downplay this aspect of the conflict.

3 While the Transfeminist Manifesto is an important seminal text, it is also shaped by the time and context in which it was written — it’s sort of a snapshot of a particular era in some ways — and Koyami could not benefit from the twenty years of development of transfeminist thought that we are benefitting from, in no small part thanks to her. At times, Koyami approaches from an attitude of seeking to “reconcile” anti-trans feminists with anti-feminist trans women, and as a result it can feel like “we can all learn from each other’s perspectives,” in a way that misses the mark. We love some aspects — that Koyami demands a feminism that understand so-called “biological sex” to be socially constructed (often through medical violence against intersex people), for example — but we disagree with some of the other ways Koyami approaches transfeminism, most specifically her approach to “the question of male privilege” in the third section. We asked some transfeminist comrades for their thoughts, and one woman said, “I don’t think it’s hard to understand why she went for this move, as indeed many have, but especially when we look at her conclusion, I think it’s just reproducing the already transmisogynist bent of existing feminist analysis.” We agree, and this describes our issue with that section pretty well.

4 Content Note: although many of the texts dealing with subjects like sexuality and exploitation recommended on this page necessarily cover sensitive and difficult subjects, there is a long-standing academic tradition of treating topics like sexual exploitation of colonized subalterns or children (in this case, both) with an equivocating attitude toward their oppressiveness, even sometimes bordering on excusing these oppressive practices, generally in the name of what might be called “vulgar social constructionism” or a mistaken conflation of intellectual cultural relativism with ethical relativism. While this text by Joseph Boone is not the worst of this tradition, it may be difficult for some readers to stomach due to its tendency (in our opinion) toward relativizing the harm of white European sex tourism in colonized regions and sexual exploitation of young people. The reason we recommend it is because it explores the under-discussed topic of orientalist sex tourism in South-West Asia and North Africa among European and ex-pat white cis men of the academic and literary elite, many of whom are highly regarded as literary “Great Men” in the leftist and radical intellectual milieu. We believe there is value in deconstructing the elevated legacies and reputations of cis white “Great Men” in the context of the exploitation (especially of subaltern, colonized, racialized, and subjugated people) they participated in, especially when the erasure of that exploitation acts as a colonialist epistemic mechanism through which white cis men’s elevated reputations are constructed and upheld.

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Content Warning: SV, SA, CSA, Incarceration, Abuse, Racism

Every rapist is a cop without a badge.

Every cop is a rapist with a badge.1

Almost no rapists are ever imprisoned. Prisons do not punish rapists.

In fact, many rapists thrive and succeed in their careers, attaining power, wealth, and prestige.

On the other hand, survivors who kill their own rapists or abusers are very likely to be incarcerated as a result. Prisons punish people who fight back against rapists.

Prisoners are routinely sexually assaulted in prison; assault by guards, staff, and authorities is anecdotally more common than assault by other prisoners. In other words:

Prisons are run and operated by and for the benefit of rapists; prisons reward rapists with access to a group of victims who cannot escape or resist. Prisons punish violent resistance.

Abolishing prisons therefore necessarily entails liberating a population of survivors who killed their rapists. It entails liberating them from the custody of prison guards who are also rapists.

The Prison Industrial Complex is not and never has been an institution for punishing people who violently dominate & harm others.

The Prison Industrial Complex is not an institution of justice.

The Prison Industrial Complex is an institution of racial slavery.

Although abuse & assault are complex phenomena and people who are marginalized can and do engage in these acts of domination, the great majority of all sexual violence in the so-called United States is committed by cis heterosexual white men (regardless of the gender or age of the victim.)

The Prison Industrial Complex vastly disproportionately mass incarcerates Black and Indigenous people.

The Prison Industrial Complex disproportionately incarcerates Black, indigenous, queer, or trans people, women and minors, for killing or violently resisting their rapist. Especially if the rapist is a cis white man.

Black and Indigenous people are not disproportionately violent. White men are. But white men are not disproportionately imprisoned. Instead, a majority of prison guards are white men.

The great majority of prisoners are not rapists or abusers.

Ergo, the great majority of Black and Indigenous prisoners are not rapists or abusers.

Rapists & abusers are disproportionately non-imprisoned, free adult white male citizens protected by the law, the community, and the cops.

Black and Indigenous people, trans, non-binary, and queer people, women, and children are the majority of victims and survivors of sexual violence.

Among these, people at more than one intersection of oppression are at even higher risk of rape.

People at more than one intersection of oppression are also at higher risk of incarceration. When incarcerated, they are then trapped in a cage guarded by white male rapists with badges and guns and tasers–instruments of authority, threat of death, and torture.

An abolitionism that centers the de facto protection, safety, and “rehabilitation” of rapists and abusers from the voluntary, autonomous, individual or collective insurrectionary resistance of survivors and their allies is an abolitionism that centers the protection and safety of non-incarcerated free cishet white men.

An abolitionism that benefits primarily non-incarcerated free cishet white men, and/or in any capacity seeks to shield rapists and abusers from being subject to their victims’ acts of direct action is an abolitionism that benefits the powerful at the expense of the marginalized.

An abolitionism that starts from the presupposition that “freeing and rehabilitating prisoners” is synonymous with “freeing and rehabilitating rapists, murderers, and abusers” is a racist program that falsely conflates incarcerated Black and Indigenous youth with “rapists, murderers, and abusers,” by accepting the fascist, reactionary lie that the mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous youth is in any way a project aimed at “punishing rapists, murderers, and abusers.”

When someone is seriously injured and requires therapy & care to recover, that is called “rehabilitation.”

Incarcerated victims of the Prison Industrial Complex & racial slavery have been seriously injured. Rape victims have been seriously injured.

Rapists are not seriously injured by their own decision to rape someone, and they do not need to recover from the experience of raping someone. (27a.) Abuse or trauma in a rapist’s own past is unrelated to their decision to rape someone. Their own potential experience of victimization should be addressed in its own context, not in the context of someone ELSE’S–namely, their victim’s–experience & needs.

An abolitionism that benefits disproportionately cishet white men at the expense of disproportionately Black, Indigenous, trans, & queer people, women, and children is not an abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex at all.

An abolitionism that centers the needs of rapists & abusers, and benefits white men at the expense of the marginalized is an accomplice and colleague of the Prison Industrial Complex, because:

Every rapist is a cop without a badge. And:

Every cop is a rapist with a badge.

1 Some resources on police sexual violence can be found at the following sites: (a.) The California Law Review, “Police Sexual Violence, Police Brutality, #MeToo, and Masculinities”; according to which at least 36.5% of police officers in a national study had committed some form of Police Sexual Violence, and crucially, their colleagues knew and protected them via the infamous “Blue Wall of Silence,” moreover Black women were found to be drastically more likely to experience Police Sexual Violence than white women; (b.) Stinson et al. “Police Sexual Misconduct: a National Scale Study of Arrested Officers”, which found that, in a study of officers arrested for sex crimes, egregious sexual violence by police officers are not isolated events, and most victims (71%) were under the age of 18 with a modal age category of 14-15; (c.) Isidoro Rodriguez, “Predators Behind the Badge,” in which one officer says that targeting Domestic Violence victims seeking help is like “shooting fish in a barrel”; (d.) Walker and Irlbeck, “Police Sexual Abuse of Teenage Girls: A 2003 Update on “Driving While Female,” which finds that 40% of reported cases of Police Sexual Violence involved teenagers, (e.) Buffalo News, “Abusing the Law,” which reports that an officer is caught in a case of sexual abuse every 5 days, and (f.) Lohse’s “Since 2010 At Least 1300 Women and Children Have Been Sexually or Physically Attacked by UK Cops,” an extensive 4 part series on police sexual violence and its victims and survivors. When we say, “Every cop is a rapist with a badge,” we mean that in the same way we mean “All Cops are Bastards.” There are no good cops because the ostensibly good ones still enforce the rule of the bad ones; there are no cops who do not protect and ally with rapist-cops, who do not explicitly or implicitly collaborate with rapist-cops against victims.

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Note: Reposted retroactively before December 21st, 2022 to be more in line with when this was reposted on Twitter.

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Recently asked a mutual for an updated reading list and recommended books. To be fair, I should have used Internet Archive to see that it has changed since the last time.

Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture Patrick Joseph Ryan, Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem Emma Heaney, (Ed.) Feminism Against Cisness