Tag: love and rage

Anarcha-Feminist Abortion Struggle: Reproductive Freedom and Dual Power

The Supreme Court’s plan to reverse Roe v. Wade means that abortion will likely soon become illegal for many people across the United States. As we search for effective responses, we can look to anarcha-feminist strategies to protect abortion by building mass movements and grassroots reproductive healthcare infrastructure. This week, I published two articles about this history; check out the excerpts below.

In the Washington Post, I contextualize our present moment and present The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting.

Beyond voting for candidates who support abortion rights at election time, what is to be done? The historical experiences of the feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s offer alternative strategies. Feminists originally won reproductive rights through mass mobilization in the streets combined with widespread underground provision of abortion and other health care. These actions forced the Supreme Court to affirm a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

[In the 1980s-90s] anarchists (anti-state socialists) within the feminist movement rejected voting and legal reforms in favor of radical grass-roots activism. Instead of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot!”

Following the example of second-wave feminists, anarchists framed abortion as a question of bodily autonomy and women’s liberation.

Heading into the 1990s, amid new right-wing attacks on abortion rights, anarcha-feminists in Love and Rage built grass-roots infrastructure to perform abortions and provide for reproductive health more broadly. They sought to build autonomy on their own terms by organizing self-help groups in which, San Francisco activist Sunshine Smith explained, “women learn the basics of self-cervical exams, do pelvics on each other, and learn how to do menstrual extraction.”

Anarchists believed this kind of infrastructure was key to bodily autonomy and helped lay the foundation for building revolutionary dual power: radical institutions that challenged the hegemony of the state. If women controlled their own bodies and institutions, they would no longer depend on the state to protect their rights.

The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous health infrastructure and grass-roots struggle offer alternatives — or at least a radical complement — to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”

In It’s Going Down, I explore the anarcha-feminist model for providing reproductive care and building dual power in “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom

As the Supreme Court prepares to reverse Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate, it is clear that action at the ballot box is insufficient to protect abortion. Reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them.

Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the struggle for abortion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. They were convinced that Roe v. Wade would not last forever and that they could not depend on the state and the legal system to protect reproductive freedom. Anarcha-feminists took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: defense of abortion clinics, construction of grassroots reproductive health infrastructure, and an anti-state approach to building feminist dual power.

Anarcha-feminists physically protected abortion clinics from the likes of Operation Rescue, which was formed in 1986 to act as anti-abortion shock troops.

Anarcha-feminists established autonomous infrastructure and self-help groups in which people learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anarchist put it in a 1991 article, “medicine is something we must take into our own hands. Because how can you smash the state if you’re still walking funny from a visit to the gynecologist’s?”

Anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. They argued that this would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy that was independent of the state and its laws.

Anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain abortion rights. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of reproductive justice. Thus, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98) argued in its draft political statement that “our freedom will not come through the passage of yet more laws but through the building of communities strong enough to defend themselves against anti-choice and anti-queer terror, rape, battery, child abuse and police harassment.”

Establishing reproductive healthcare infrastructure is a key component of feminist dual power that challenges the hegemony of the state and capitalism. This kind of infrastructure prefigures—and concretely establishes—a world defined by mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomy.

The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting

I published a new article in the Washington Post’s Made By History section today, check it out here!

The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting: ‘We’re pro-choice and we riot!’ How anarchists reframed the fight for abortion

The argument:
The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous health infrastructure and grass-roots struggle offer alternatives — or at least a radical complement — to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”

Writing Movement History: Fall 2021 Posts

I was based at the Brooklyn Interference Archive for Fall 2021 conducting dissertation research and interviews with support from Cornell’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. During this time, I wrote sixteen new blog posts, which I am collecting here:

Sept 12: ‘To Repulse The State From Our Uteri’: Anarcha-Feminist Abortion Struggle

Sept 14: ‘We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We Hate the Government!’: Queer Anarchism in Love and Rage

Sept 16: Neither East Nor West: Anarchism and the Soviet Dissolution

Sept 20: On Writing: Identity vs. Practice

Sept 21: Living Communism: Theory and Practice of Autonomy and Attack

Sept 26: Creating ‘New Porn’: Anarcha-Feminism vs. Onlyfans

Sept 29: Reading Amyl and the Sniffers’ ‘Capital’ Politically

Oct 2: Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

Oct 13: ‘Anarcho-Beef People’: Against All Domination at Anarchist Gatherings (1986-89)

Oct 17: Building the Movement: The Rebirth of Anarchism, 1986-89

Oct 19: A Roving Band of Anarcho-Punks: The Vermont Family’s Revitalization of American Anarchism

Oct 28: Analyzing Biden’s Spending Bill: A Debate Between Sectors of Capital

Nov 6: White Workers and Race Treason in Revolutionary Struggle

Nov 23: ‘Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches’: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording)

Dec 8: Learning from Ithaca’s Socialist Mayor: Electoralism and Movement Building

Dec 12: Red and Black Unite: The Paris Commune and Socialist Democracy

“Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches”: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording)

I recently organized an online panel at the Boston Anarchist Bookfair on November 14th (2021), which was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. My own talk, which begins around 41:20, is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98).” It is based on research and interviews that I have been conducting for my dissertation on North American anarchism in the late 20th century.

My talk explores the theorization and practice of revolutionary intersectional anarcha-feminism, with a major focus on abortion and reproductive freedom but also addressing queer and trans liberation, debates around pornography, CUNY student struggles, and the fight against patriarchy within Love and Rage itself. You can watch it here:

As I say in my presentation, if you were involved with any of what I discuss I would love to talk to you about it! Check out more about the anarchist oral history project I’m involved in here.

A Roving Band of Anarcho-Punks: The Vermont Family’s Revitalization of American Anarchism

The Vermont Family was a roving band of anarcho-punks that helped build the American anarchist movement in the 1980s. They were a key element of the connective tissue that linked the dispersed anarchist milieu. The Family originally came together within the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,” in which hundreds of people walked from Los Angeles to Washington, DC over the course of nine months in 1986. As many of the liberals dropped out or retreated to cars, a core group of anarchists coalesced to form a traveling “anarchy village” which grew from 15 to around 70 or 80 people. They ran the village through consensus and promoted anarchist politics within the march. After the march reached DC, the Family stayed together as a loose network of travelers, comrades, and friends.

The name of the Vermont Family came from a sort of collective joke. One punk in the anarchy village shared a story about Vermont: apparently it was written in the state constitution that in 1991, two hundred years after its founding, there would be a popular vote on whether the state would remain part of the country. Thus, a fantastical plan was hatched to convince anarchists to move to Vermont and push it to secede from the union. It goes without saying that this did not happen, and it turned out that Vermont had no such plan to put its status to a vote (the similarity of this plan to the later right-libertarian New Hampshire Free State Project is interesting to note). But the moniker stuck as both an inside joke and badge of identification, and many people in the crew adopted it as part of their names.

The Vermont Family formed on the road and stayed on the road throughout their existence until 1989. In their years of traveling, they played a crucial role that has gone unacknowledged in the histories of this era: they formed the interpersonal connections that were necessary to build a continental network of anarchists.

This past summer, I interviewed a person named Mike, who was one of the core members of the Family. He pointed out that in the age of the internet, it is hard for us to understand how an anarchist milieu could function in the 1980s. It required people to travel and make physical connections between far-flung collectives and projects. Some of the Family traveled in an old bus, some hitchhiked; like a punk version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Band of Pranksters, the Family spread anarchy everywhere they went. A few of them even made their way to West Germany, where they lived in squats and participated in the larger, more militant movement there. They took what they learned back to the US, where they helped to popularize models from the German Autonomen: squatted social centers, infoshops, and black bloc tactics.

When major actions or gatherings were planned in an American city, members of the Vermont crew would show up months in advance, put down temporary roots, and help organize a bigger and better event. They were central to the series of annual national convergences—Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989—that established continental networks of dedicated anarchist militants. The Crew stayed on the road until 1989, when a large number of them went to San Francisco to help organize the 1989 Anarchist Gathering. Finding fertile ground, many of them settled down for the long term in the Bay Area. They established several large collective houses that served as major hubs for both the local and national movement in the 1990s. Many of them remained active in Love and Rage, Anti-Racist Action, and other anarchist projects.

I have not yet been able to find any documentation of the Vermont Family beyond my oral history interviews, but its story is central to the broader history of the revitalization of anarchism in the 1980s.

Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

Have you been involved in anarchist projects or organizations in the United States from the 1970s-2000s? We would like to interview you for an Anarchist Oral History Project!

Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD candidate writing his dissertation on the history of US anarchism in the late 20th century, with a particular focus on Love and Rage. Spencer has been active in anarchist and other left projects for the past decade, beginning with participation in Occupy Boston and currently consisting of helping to run a Marxist reading group and socialist night school where he lives in Ithaca, NY.

Connected to his dissertation research, Spencer is involved with a broader Anarchist Oral History Project seeking to interview a wide swathe of movement participants from the 1960s to today. He is looking to interview anyone involved in anarchist projects and organizations in the late 20th and early 21st century, particularly (but certainly not limited to) Love and Rage and associated groups like Anti-Racist Action. Spencer is located in NYC for Fall 2021 and will be traveling for research and interviews in 2022. You can reach him at spencerbeswick@gmail.com or emptyhands@protonmail.com.

Creating ‘New Porn’: Anarcha-Feminism vs. Onlyfans

What can anarcha-feminists in the late 20th century offer our analysis of the recent Onlyfans debacle, when the company unsuccessfully attempted to ban pornography from the online platform? Going back to Emma Goldman and the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists have long supported organizing alongside sex workers in their fight for better working conditions and, ultimately, an end to both patriarchal and capitalist violence. A century later, as debates over pornography raged in the late 20th century, anarchists in Love and Rage (1989-98) analyzed porn from an anti-state feminist framework. Although some members opposed pornography and advocated direct action to disrupt its production, most supported a new vision of liberatory pornography. This “new porn” would model consensual, joyful sex outside the rigid bounds of heterosexual patriarchy. Crucially, it would be controlled by sex workers themselves, who would have autonomy and self-determination in their work.

The debate in Love and Rage was kicked off in 1991, when anti-porn feminists argued in the organization’s newspaper that pornography perpetuated violence against women and reinforced male supremacy. In his 1991 article “Porn in Flames,” Richard Blake argues that pornography is inherently dehumanizing, oppressive, and violent. Although he disagrees with the state-focused tactics of Andrea Dworkin, he maintains that anarchists should resolutely oppose the porn industry and work against it. But what could this look like with an anti-state orientation?

Blake argues that the state cannot be expected to take action on pornography, and that even if it did, legal changes would not actually prevent pornography from being made and distributed.[1] Instead of seeking to outlaw pornography, He urges anarchists to “fight it in the streets and on the job and in the home, in the same places where you claim to be fighting the state which sponsors it.”[2] Ultimately, Blake maintains that “an anarchist movement that’s not dedicated to fighting the pornography industry isn’t a real anarchist movement.”[3] The fight against pornography was ultimately a struggle for freedom, equality, and justice. As long as pornography existed, women would continue to be exploited and abused by men for profit and sexual pleasure.

Most Love and Ragers, however, disagreed with Blake’s analysis. Although they were not “pro-porn” per se, most anarchists opposed the anti-porn movement for its moralism and common advocacy of governmental censorship. Anarchists supported organizing alongside sex workers rather than view them as helpless “victims” to be saved by either the state or misguided activists.[4] This, Laura Lib insists, is a much better anarchist approach to the problem of exploitation and oppression than a moralistic critique of the industry. Ultimately, they advocated for a new kind of pornography that would not oppress and exploit women, but rather be an avenue towards sexual liberation. What was needed was not to outlaw or abolish pornography, but rather to spread education and alternative models of sexuality.

Liz Highleyman argues that “since the typical pornographic representations of sexuality are so narrow and incomplete, we can make expanded and alternative images of sex and sexuality available, images that convey our own values of equality, mutuality, and consensuality.”[5] Ms. Tommy Lawless agrees, explaining that she does not want to ban porn but rather see it “drastically changed”: “this is what creating ‘new porn’ means to me. It means asserting the personhood, will, and true desires of wimmin.”[6] This “new porn” would also move beyond the bounds of heterosexuality and the male gaze. Queer pornography in particular could perhaps play a more liberating role than the usual heterosexual focus. Pornography as such was not inherently good or bad but rather was a tool and a medium that could be used either to oppress or to liberate.

What does this analysis have to offer to the situation with Onlyfans? Sex workers turned to Onlyfans in part to escape their exploitation and lack of control in the porn industry. Onlyfans gave them a platform to establish their own sources of revenue that they ostensibly controlled. This enabled them a degree of autonomy and self-determination, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. But because sex workers did not actually control the company, the Onlyfans bosses could make its own decisions without the workers’ input; thus, threatened with a loss of credit card revenue, they decided to ban pornography from the platform. Although a mass outcry eventually forced Onlyfans to reverse course, many sex workers had learned their lesson: they needed to build a platform that they controlled. Several alternatives are gaining popularity, including some that appear more sex-worker friendly, such as one started by a notable gay porn star. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to compete with Onlyfans and survive in the capitalist market.

The problem is not pornography per se, but rather the social structures surrounding it: patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism, white supremacy. But until those are overthrown, self-determination and autonomy through organizing unions, worker cooperatives, and new online platforms would afford sex workers much more control over their lives, money, and working conditions. All this outside the purview of state control or censorship; a solution that the anarcha-feminists in Love and Rage could surely support.

[1] Richard Blake, “Porn In Flames,” 3.

[2] Richard Blake, “Porn In Flames,” 3.

[3] Richard Blake, “Porn In Flames,” 3.

[4] Laura Lib, “Love and Justice? Porn Debate: A Reply to Richard Blake’s ‘Porn in Flames,’” 7.

[5] Liz A. Highleyman, “1-900-XXX-Talk,” 2.

[6] Ms. Tommy Lawless, “D’Ya Believe in Homicide?” 3.

Neither East Nor West: Anarchism and the Soviet Dissolution

Since I’m based at the Interference Archive for a whole semester, I decided to start sharing interesting things that I find. Here is one: an anarchist analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union as it is happening, in 1990.

It’s fascinating to read an anarchist analysis of the Soviet Bloc at this time. Bob McGlynn of “NYC Neither East Nor West,” who had extensive contacts with anarchists and other lefty dissidents in Eastern Europe, wrote an article in the Love and Rage newspaper (April 1990) titled “Whoopie! East Bloc Explodes!” in which he expresses the great hope but also danger of the time.

The hope:
“Watching one Stalinoid dictatorship after another crumble with embarrassing speed is even more fun than drinking beer! (Well almost.). . .

Many wonder if this [East-West solidarity] movement is over. Not at all. In fact, it’s needed now more than ever, given that Western capitalism is poised to eat the East alive, through debt and capital penetration. . . .

Opposition movements in the Soviet bloc remain. These are made up of anarchists, independent socialists, draft resisters, ecologists, anti-nuclear activists, workers, women, youth, gays. The battle for relative civil liberties may appear to be won, but the war for everything else is on. . .

In many ways, we’re only just beginning. For instance, the sporadic contacts between anarchists in both blocs can now be cemented. In April and Italian group is sponsoring a large gathering of East and West anarchists – the first time ever. In a sense we are at point zero. Now we can really move.”

The danger:
“Western capitalism is poised to eat the East alive, through debt and capital penetration. . . .

The barbed wire and concrete borders are now being replaced by a border less tangible: that of money/commodity relations and rule. And this game, like the old one, has only enough room for a few players.”

In 1990, the future was open for action. McGlynn ends:
“The paradox is that as the world has gotten very interesting recently, it’s also simultaneously becoming increasingly monotone and banal. Pepsi power, etc. This, then, is prime territory for adventurers seeking seams in this seemingly seamless whole. It’s been remarked that with Stalinism collapsing, we are now ‘at the end of history.’ Rather, perhaps, we are only at its beginning.”

Indeed. But McGlynn’s fears were realized as capitalism remade the former Soviet Bloc in its image. Could this have been prevented with more effective anti-state socialist organizing and more widespread solidarity work across borders from below? Was a libertarian socialist alternative possible? Or was the choice always simply between Stalinism and neoliberalism?

“We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We Hate the Government!”: Queer Anarchism in Love and Rage

Anarchists in Love and Rage (1989-98) pushed the struggle for queer liberation in radical directions. Members actively participated in gay and lesbian marches, developed an anarchist approach to queer politics, and joined ACT UP in fighting for people with AIDS.

Anarchists often had a visible presence at queer demonstrations and pushed radical action at them. For instance, Jan Kraker from the NYC Autonomous Anarchist Action describes how AAA brought a militant edge to queer organizing at a 1990 rally commemorating the Stonewall uprising. They dressed in Black Bloc and brought a banner to the rally that provided direction for the otherwise inchoate crowd. Kraker describes how “what had been a [sic] unorganized mass of people outside a bar had turned into a spirited march behind a ‘Queer Without Fear—Autonomous Anarchist Action’ banner.”[1]

This exemplifies how Love and Rage encouraged broader movements to take a more radical, confrontational approach. It was not necessarily about convincing them to become anarchists or join the organization, but rather spreading new tactics and values that had been developed within the anarchist movement of the 1980s. In this vein, Liz A. Highleyman advocated collective participation in the queer march on Washington in 1993, arguing that “it is important that anarchists have a presence in the march to let people know that we cannot rely on laws and the government to guarantee queer liberation.”[2] Anarchist chants included “We’re fucking anarchists, we’ll fuck whoever we want!” and “We’re here, we’re Queer, and we hate the government!”[3] A group of Red & Anarchist Skinheads marched with a banner reading “Anti-Racist Skinheads and Punx Against Homophobia” and chanted “Oi! Oi! Oi! We fuck boys!”[4]

Beyond participating in queer activism, anarcha-feminists argued that there was something inherently queer about the anarchist rejection of all structures of social domination. For instance, Highleyman notes about the anarchist contingent at the 1993 march that “Gay, Lesbian, Bi, hetero or undefined, all the anarchists were queer in their own way.”[5] Lin L. Elliot goes further, arguing in a powerful article linking queer and indigenous resistance that the “new activism of the 80s and 90s has already shown us the way. ACT UP and, more recently, Queer Nation, embody an unmistakably Queer perspective; non-hierarchical, even anarchical, they combine seriousness with humor, politics with play.”[6] Queer and anarchist politics both embodied this non-hierarchical, fluid approach to the world.

This perspective prefigured later developments in queer anarchist theory. The Mary Nardini Gang argues in “Toward the Queerest Insurrection” in 2014 that queer is not simply a sexual identity but rather “the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability […] Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. […] By ‘queer’, we mean ‘social war.’ And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it.”[7] In this view, anarchism is inherently queer because it rejects the “normalcy” of capitalist patriarchy and struggles against all forms of hierarchy and oppression.

Anarchists also participated in AIDS activism, although they critiqued the state-centric elements of the movement. ACT UP drew upon many anarchistic values and practices: it was decentralized, grassroots, and direct-action oriented, and it operated outside of the state in many ways. Members formed alternative health networks, squatted buildings for people with AIDS to live in, provided safer-sex education, volunteer service organizations, and more.[8] Despite this, ACT UP focused largely on spectacular actions meant to pressure the government to act on AIDS. Anarchists generally rejected this strategy on principle.

Liz Highleyman critiques ACT UP from an anarchist perspective in her article “Anarchism and AIDS Activism.” She argues that “the government does not represent our best interests [so] it would be foolish to rely on it as a source of solutions […] we would be better off putting the time, money (including taxes), and effort that we currently devote to petitioning, supporting, and evading the government into alternative activities that meet our needs directly.”[9]

It is unclear from Highleyman’s piece, however, what she sees as the alternative: despite her call to “develop solutions that do not rely on the state,” would it really have been possible or practical to quickly develop effective treatments for AIDS without state intervention?[10] Indeed, Highleyman’s critique of ACT UP did not go unchallenged. In the next issue of the newspaper, a letter from Eric L. Sambach pushed back against her conclusion that ACT UP did not live up to the “anarchist ideal.” Sambach says that

ACT UP was not set up as an anarchist ideal, but to develop an effective response to the AIDS crisis. ACT UP members see a situation where rapidly growing numbers of people are dying as an emergency. In an emergency we do whatever works to enhance and save lives. Whether that action fits an anarchist or other model of social organization is another, and in these terms, theoretical question.[11]

Whether or not ACT UP strictly conformed to anarchist theory and practice was beside the point; AIDS activists took whatever opportunity they could to respond to an existential crisis. It may be useful to lay out an anarchist critique of state-centered AIDS activism, but to apply a “pure” anarchist standard to ACT UP verged on a dogmatic prioritization of anarchist politics over the lives of people with AIDS.

[1] Jan Kraker, “Faeries, Anarchists and Others Commemorate Stonewall,” Love and Rage, Vol. 1 No. 5 (August 1990), 4-5.

[2] Liz A. Highleyman, “Queer March in April,” Love and Rage, Vol. 4, No. 1 (February/March 1993), 3.

[3] Liz A. Highleyman, “Anarchists Join Queer March,” Love and Rage, Vol. 4 No. 3 (June/July 1993), 1. I personally witnessed a similar chant at the NATO summit protests in Chicago in 2012: “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re anarchists we’ll fuck you up!”

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid., 6.

[6] Lin L. Elliot, “500 Queers of Resistance,” Love and Rage, Vol. 3, No. 5 (June 1992), 2.

[7] Mary Nardini Gang, “Toward the Queerest Insurrection,” (2014).

[8] Liz Highleyman, “Anarchism and AIDS Activism,” Love and Rage, Vol 2. No. 6 (June/July 1991), 10.

[9] Ibid., 11.

[10] Ibid., 11.

[11] Eric L. Sambach, letter titled “Purpose Pragmatism and Privilege,” Love and Rage, Vol. 2 No. 7 (August 1991), 2.

Race, Gender, and Anarchist Cultural Politics

Check out the recording of the panel discussion I organized on Race, Gender, and Anarchist Cultural Politics! (See the description below.) We are thinking about hosting an event series on anarchist history this fall, please reach out if you are interested in participating! You can email me at scb274@cornell.edu

Anarchist movements have not only organized workers and challenged state power, but also produced vibrant cultures of resistance. In this panel, Kirwin Shaffer, Montse Feu, and Spencer Beswick examine how anarchists have engaged with questions of race and gender in their cultural production in Cuba and the United States.

Tracing diasporic networks and grappling with intersectional identities that traversed political and cultural boundaries, the presenters explore the mixed legacy of anarchist movements in their struggles to overcome racialized and gendered limitations to their emancipatory visions. ————————————————————————-

Kirwin Shaffer: “The Multiple Uses of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Cuban Anarchist Culture” 0:15

Montse Feu: “Women Fighting Fascist Spain: Protest and Solidarity in the United States” 19:56

Spencer Beswick: “Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation” 37:30

————————————————————————-

Panelists:

• Kirwin Shaffer is Professor of Latin American Studies at Penn State University – Berks College. He is author of three books on anarchism in the Caribbean (Anarchist Cuba, Black Flag Boricuas, and Anarchists of the Caribbean) and co-editor of the award-winning edited collection In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History.

• Montse Feu recovers and examines the literary history of the Spanish Civil War exile in the United States, US Hispanic periodicals, and migration and exile literature at large. She is the author of Correspondencia personal y política de un anarcosindicalista exiliado: Jesús González Malo (1943-1965) (Universidad de Cantabria, 2016) and Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020). She is co-editor of Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019).

• Spencer Beswick is a PhD candidate at Cornell University studying the history of anarchism and the left. A chapter he wrote based on the material for this presentation will be featured in a forthcoming book series on anarchism and punk published by Active Distribution. Spencer’s dissertation is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”