1st Edition

Anarchism & Sexuality Ethics, Relationships and Power

Edited By Jamie Heckert, Richard Cleminson Copyright 2011
    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

    Preface, Judy Greenway 1. Ethics, Relationships & Power: An Introduction, Jamie Heckert & Richard Cleminson 2. Alexander Berkman: Sexual Dissidence in the First Wave Anarchist Movement and Its Subsequent Narratives, Jenny Alexander 3. Nobody Knows What an Insurgent Body Can Do: Questions for Affective Resistance, Stevphen Shukaitis. Poetic Interlude I, Helen Moore 4. Postanarchism and the Contrasexual Practices of the Cyborg in Dildotopia or ‘The War on the Phallus’, Lena Eckert 5. On Anarchism: An Interview with Judith Butler, Jamie Heckert. Poetic Interlude II, Tom Leonard 6. Love and Revolution in Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness, Laurence Davis 7. Structures of Desire: Postanarchist Kink in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, Lewis Call 8. Fantasies of an Anarchist Sex Educator, Jamie Heckert. Poetic Interlude III,J. Fergus Evans & Helen Moore 9. Sexuality Issues in the Czech Anarchist Movement, Marta Kolářová 10. Amateurism and Anarchism in the Creation of Autonomous Queer Spaces, Gavin Brown. Afterword: On the Phenomenology of Fishbowls, Kristina Nell Weaver

    Biography

    Jamie Heckert is a founding member of the Anarchist Studies Network. His writings on identity, ethics, non-monogamy, post-anarchism and ecology have appeared in a variety of activist and scholarly publications

    Richard Cleminson is Reader in the History of Sexuality at the University of Leeds and Associate Editor of Anarchist Studies. His research centres on the history of sexuality in Spain and he has published on anarchism and sexuality, the history of male homosexuality and hermaphroditism.

    "I feel in reading some of these pieces that the participants have invested a lot of themselves in their contributions. There is an immediacy and liveliness in a lot of these pages. The personal investment on the part of the authors helps make it so that there is much to relate to in Anarchism and Sexuality, on both an intellectual level and an emotional level."
    Michael Larson, M.A. Instructor at Point Park University, Pittsburgh, writing for Metapsychology

    "This is the book I have been waiting for—the book I want to give my students, share with friends, and draw from in my own work. It makes me grateful for my training in feminist theory, and ever more committed to using anarchy as a basis for sexual politics."
    Breanne Fahs, Ph.D., Arizona State University

    "Anarchism & Sexuality is a brave and rewarding contribution to the field of inquiry of sexuality and emotions." Elena Lindholm Narváez (2011): A Post-anarchist Momentum, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, DOI:10.1080/08038740.2011.646446