Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism - Libcom

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liberationist, proposing instead of good works, a perpetual undoing of social mores, aiming to reach or having claimed achievement of a state of nature just below the surface. Taken to its furthest extreme, the Bataillean nihilist-libertine, who realizes the impossibility of his project, and so conceives of it as a pure suicide/pure murder. But God isn’t coming, not through human action. The great wall, the great project of the true community, will be forever incomplete and its builders will have died for nothing. From here, describing the movement of the for-human, or of the community as it actually exists, becomes possible. Separated from the immanent Self or communityas-communion, we are left to search, painfully, for explanation. We are without recourse to a pure nature or pure godliness, any part of the world which we can claim is truly good, to make the world adjust to. The image of Eden contains “nothing to refer to, nothing to look at.” 23 In this vacuum, we write, communicate, attempt to make sense of the world, act in ways we hope will make sense, inevitably failing and communicating that failure. To abandon the Christian communion/community — the one shining future, made manifest now and dictated by the elect — without succumbing to an expedient, apathetic faux-nihilism, imagining all the world as natural, inevitable, doomed. This space, communicative and concerned with movement, internal to this world as it seeks to move beyond it, does not set out to effect a complete new world, nor is it resigned to reform or consciousness raising. A radical approach to sex “is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call [it] the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” 24 As a part of this (anti)project, I try to talk about sex using the frameworks that speak most accurately to the pain, incommunicable and inconsolable, I endure within gender — marxian and poststructuralist feminism, discourse and history without referent to the prediscursive or ahistorical. 23 De Beaufort, “Things We’ve Noticed.” 24 Marx, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998). 30 C.E.
Trying to heal from trauma managed to fuck me up worse because I started to ask “what do I want? What do I really want out of sex?” and diving down in search of my damaged sex drive I couldn’t find anything, really. Lots of urges to be close and feel safe, wanting to be validated and watched and all that shit, but nothing that feels innate. Without getting drunk all I can manage is Bartleby’s famous line, “I would prefer not to.” Upon the words of catechism, that I am made in G-d’s image, I choke for fear of lying. If there is something of a species-being that remains in me, it seems irretrievably lost. I am told the orgies I witness are a rupture, that something different is happening, but I don’t see it. At the end they return to work, return to this fucked up world that makes them crazy and wanting and cruel and all I ever saw was a moment where everyone stopped caring about how normal it all was. How boring to expect that at the bottom of everything, if we only push harder, there will be something good. All Sade got was a lot of corpses who never had what he wanted. Where did the old feminists think difference would emerge from? What in this world could make up the next? I ask this not to mock them but because I keep returning to it, expecting the answer to be different, expecting that I’ll find it by accident some day and then everything can be okay. But it’s not coming, so what now? IV – SEX AND SUBJECTION Not unlike “natural” labor, sex, while presumed to be a pre-existing fact of the body, necessitates elaborate social production to bring it into existence. The analogy with labor becomes clear in that “this is a strange commodity for It is not a thing. The ability to labor resides only in a human being whose life is consumed in the process of producing. ” 25 To characterize labor as natural, and thus ahistorical, would serve as a mask for the reproductive labor that brings it into being; likewise, to characterize sex as natural obscures the social 25 Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). UNDOING SEX: AGAINST SEXUAL OPTIMISM 31
Page 2 and 3: LIES JOURNAL liesjournal.info liesj
Page 5 and 6: TABLE OF CONTENTS LIES COLLECTIVE 9
Page 7 and 8: LIES COLLECTIVE EDITORIAL NOTE They
Page 9 and 10: our oppression. Rather we turn our
Page 11: NOT-SEX AND SOCIAL RELATIONS
Page 14 and 15: eclaimed your natural pleasure. The
Page 16 and 17: point in a relationship which is co
Page 18 and 19: of being and self definition, as in
Page 20 and 21: Whereas earlier radical feminism ad
Page 22 and 23: Perhaps more subtly, this politic r
Page 24 and 25: eyond this register of suppression
Page 26 and 27: to discover it, to liberate it, to
Page 30 and 31: production that brought it into bei
Page 32 and 33: the structural position of silence
Page 34 and 35: ut only as an object for an active
Page 36 and 37: such excess is meted out sparingly
Page 38 and 39: itself. Loneliness, which is really
Page 40 and 41: me or ask them to stop or yell at t
Page 43 and 44: CLÉMENCE X. CLEMENTINE AND ASSOCIA
Page 45 and 46: systematically excluded women from
Page 47 and 48: of mitigating her alienation and in
Page 49 and 50: the couple, not its destruction. Ca
Page 51 and 52: plants and animals. Get into space.
Page 53 and 54: M. SANDOVSKY LETTERS TO L: PARANOIA
Page 55 and 56: Dear L, I’m learning to hold my t
Page 57 and 58: Our anger is experienced by others
Page 59 and 60: The beatings do not work, the accou
Page 61 and 62: SOGUMI SALT WEDGE (EXCERPTS) (UNTIT
Page 63: (UNTITLED) — did it for revenge
Page 67 and 68: JOMO CARING: A LABOR OF STOLEN TIME
Page 69 and 70: after the purported grandeur and tu
Page 71 and 72: airy room is not for us, the immigr
Page 73 and 74: and I bonded over many episodes of
Page 75 and 76: upper management. According to Sabr
Page 77 and 78: Back in the dining room later that
Page 79 and 80:
Before this, break times were somet
Page 81 and 82:
The never-ending series of question
Page 83 and 84:
including experiences that we may n
Page 85 and 86:
only a reflection of the way the el
Page 87 and 88:
We blame the bosses. Once, twice, a
Page 89 and 90:
others not so. They saw this as a u
Page 91 and 92:
I refused to sign. I wrote explaini
Page 93 and 94:
others said it in a respectful and
Page 95 and 96:
I wasn’t fired but our gains were
Page 97 and 98:
None of this is easy, and all the m
Page 99:
NOTES ON STRUGGLE
Page 102 and 103:
I spent no more than 15 hours in a
Page 104 and 105:
I met 3 women who were still in hig
Page 106 and 107:
I was 1 of at least 2 women who had
Page 109 and 110:
W.&.T.C.H. ON THE RECENT #OCCUPATIO
Page 111 and 112:
16% of Blacks that are “officiall
Page 113 and 114:
the injuries of unemployment and un
Page 115 and 116:
Whatever this occupation is, it is
Page 117 and 118:
And it’s not only about police br
Page 119 and 120:
Why was this phrase deliberately ex
Page 121 and 122:
actions. Drawing a moral line betwe
Page 123 and 124:
BARUCHA CALAMITY PELLER WOMEN IN UP
Page 125 and 126:
fought back the police, ultimately
Page 127 and 128:
was spawned, despite the fact that
Page 129 and 130:
Women’s labor in the globalized d
Page 131 and 132:
“personal” became a site for re
Page 133 and 134:
not as actions strictly within the
Page 135 and 136:
that had been taken over by women.
Page 137 and 138:
sector be women, because many had v
Page 139 and 140:
SEXUAL VIOLENCE AS STATE REPRESSION
Page 141 and 142:
other social or political implicati
Page 143 and 144:
JACKIE WANG AGAINST INNOCENCE RACE,
Page 145 and 146:
the patterns that structure politic
Page 147 and 148:
our strategies reinforce a framewor
Page 149 and 150:
Black convicts, initially a part of
Page 151 and 152:
The spatial politics of safety orga
Page 153 and 154:
The engineering and management of u
Page 155 and 156:
were quick to purge and re-articula
Page 157 and 158:
decidedly white, for it asserts tha
Page 159 and 160:
defend the police after an “occup
Page 161 and 162:
cion of articulated/explicit politi
Page 163 and 164:
them peace of mind amidst the state
Page 165 and 166:
ingly, less likely to seek counseli
Page 167 and 168:
not fit into a non-violent model of
Page 169:
that can be displaced for the sake
Page 172 and 173:
uniformity. “No more mothers, wiv
Page 174 and 175:
FROM TEA LIGHTS TO TORCHES: DELINQU
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On the night of June 5th in Minneap
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Dean Schmitz was not the first and
Page 180 and 181:
Jurors in the US were polled as to
Page 182 and 183:
them all in favor of a better world
Page 185 and 186:
MAGDA LLWHISK DON’T TRY TO DIG YO
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knives or kisses to the throat? wol
Page 190 and 191:
such a project is a “single syste
Page 192 and 193:
“Gender - Class - Dynamic” and
Page 194 and 195:
are intense pressures on population
Page 196 and 197:
TC writes: The sexed character of a
Page 198 and 199:
for gender in capital. In so doing,
Page 200 and 201:
women’s oppression. The problem w
Page 202 and 203:
nist theory of capitalist social re
Page 204 and 205:
We live in this world, but exist ou
Page 206 and 207:
through racialization, and that rac
Page 208 and 209:
I. FRAMING WHAT’S AT STAKE We are
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This is not to mention the consiste
Page 212 and 213:
III. QUESTIONS How do we assess exi
Page 215 and 216:
... “ALL THE WORK WE DO AS WOMEN
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class and the entire capitalist sys
Page 219 and 220:
an isolated, unique form of exploit
Page 221 and 222:
A stronger analysis would also inte
Page 223 and 224:
money. We women are expected to be
Page 225 and 226:
towns, women who work in big cities
Page 227 and 228:
are to “give it” for free for o
Page 229 and 230:
e able to choose where and how we w
Page 231 and 232:
with men altogether, or as straight
Page 233 and 234:
SUZAN COOKE “WE REFERRED TO IT AS
Page 235 and 236:
Well this was just sort of standard
Page 237 and 238:
They had also been picking up women
Page 239 and 240:
and the very stereotypical ghettoiz
Page 241 and 242:
We referred to it as coming out. Th
Page 243:
REVIEWSEW
Page 246 and 247:
discrimination and hate-bias have b
Page 248:
the extension of these struggles. S
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