Suchergebnisse

Anarchists and homosexuals have periodically occupied similar positions in relation to US laws and policies: both have functioned as the needed outside against which the proper inside of political order can be established and maintained. Both have blurred the relation of words to deeds, speaking words that are forbidden because the words themselves are seen as dangerous deeds. Examining the deportation case of anarchist John Turner in 1903 and the 1993 Pentagon ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military, and utilizing the intellectual tools provided by Judith Butler in her analysis of speech acts, this article investigates the process of criminalizing an identity category as well as the political context from which that criminalization can be challenged. My goals are to make use of Butler's arguments about insurrectionary speech to understand anarchism's historical role in the American political imaginary, and to supplement Butler's analysis with greater attention to the histories of anarchist struggle. Adapted from the source document.

Printers and presses were central to the physical and social reproduction of the classical anarchist movement from the Paris Commune to the Second World War. Anarchists produced an environment rich in printed words by creating and circulating hundreds of journals, books, and pamphlets in dozens of languages. While some scholars and activists have examined the content of these publications, little attention has been paid to the printing process, the physical infrastructure and bodily practices producing and circulating this remarkable outpouring of radical public speech. This paper brings the resources of the new materialism into conversation with the networks of anarchist printers and presses. Printers and presses operated as nodal points, horizontal linkages among the objects, persons, desires, and ideas constituting anarchist assemblages. In their publishing practices, anarchists may have implicitly identified a constitutive condition of possibility for the flourishing of radical political communities in our time as well as theirs.

Government, media, and medical accounts of Emma Goldman converged to create her public presence in the U.S. as a "dangerous individual." The prevailing discourses constituted Goldman as violent, utilizing her alleged menace to distract attention from far more egregious violence against labor by state and corporate forces. Goldman responded by denying, confronting, and redirecting the alarmed gaze toward greater risks left underarticulated in hegemonic accounts. Goldman's bold confrontations with authorities constituted a kind of anarchist parrhesia, fearless speech, a relentless truth-telling practice that risked her own security in pursuit of her "beautiful ideal." The labor of remembering America's history of class violence hones our attention to the complex discursive processes by which some historical facts come to count in prevailing narratives, while others fade into obscurity.

A review essay on books by (1) Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women's Rights and International Organizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U Press, 1999); (2) Kathleen Blee (Ed), No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York: New York U Press, 1998); (3) Clara Fraser, Revolution, She Wrote (Seattle: Red Letter, 1998); (4) Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997); & (5) Nancy A. Naples (Ed), Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing across Race, Class and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1998). Berkovitch's book is a global analysis of the politics of the last century of women's movements. Blee's & Naples's works are collections of essays on grassroots women's politics. Fraser's book is a collection of her tales of a socialist feminist in Seattle. Kaplan's work is about environmental & housing activism of women in the US & South Africa. The books take the reader into rich & complex fields of local & global women's activism. 4 References. R. Larsen