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Public Engagement Project
Introductory sentences
What is Liebig34?
Queer-anarcha-feminist project - 'Liebig34 was an anarcha-queer-feminist house project' ' Now Liebig34 is an anarcha-queer-feminist project, without a house, but with a lot of heart, rage and ideas.'
was a squat - evicted 9th October 2020
What is cosycoldkitchentalks?
space to be open with our emotions, for feeling collectively, for imagining a new future - 'show a different side to activism'
a digital space for anarcha-queer-feminist resistance
To what extent can squats retain their political influence as a direct action protest form once their physical space is taken away? Where is the space for emotions in the politics of squatting? What does Cosycoldkitchentalks achieve by providing this space? Which emotions are presented? Which are left out?
reword this so it's less academic
drawing on the thinking of fellow activists (inclusive citation!) and scholars - we see our fight against capitalism and patriarchy in dialogue with the sisters who came before us and the sisters fighting against their own struggles globally
The case for an anarcha-queer-feminist squat
Feminist
'home' as the site of patriarchal oppression
Chapter 6 - Women's Oppression Today
'Feminists have consistently, and rightly, seen the family as a central site of women's oppression in contemporary society. The reasons for this lie both in the material structure of the household, by which women are by and large financially dependent on men, and in the ideology of the family through which women are confined to a primary concern with domesticity and motherhood.' 214
'The family-household is consequently not merely a site in which a division of labour exists, but a set of relations between household members by which women are systematically dependent upon, and unequal to, men.' 209
By providing a physical space in which men are not permitted, Liebig34 ensured that women were not subject to the structures of oppression that the family-household obliges on women (domestic violence, unequal division of housework). The nuclear family upholds capitalism by keeping women subservient to their husbands, by keeping them trapped in a system which prioritizes the reproduction of labour over happiness and freedom. Squatting rejects the ideology of family
Silvia Federici - 'It is important to recognize that when we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of one of the most pervasive manipulations, most subtle and mystified forms of violence that capitalism has perpetrated against any section of the working class.'
Queer
'home' as a site of exclusion for queers
expand on Barrett - implicit in her argument is the exclusion of queer folk in the ideology of the family and household
the importance of queer spaces
'Historically, lesbians have struggled to find space in cities, as gay neighbourhoods typically focused on the interests and lifestyles of young gay men.' 62 (Feminist City)
'Geographer Gill Valentine also writes about the crucial importance of friendships among lesbians, who may have been rejected by family and other friends upon coming out. Lesbian friends become a surrogate family and take on many of the roles of care, support, celebration, and so on that are typically assumed by family of origin.' 62
'In a pattern familiar to observers of gentrification across dozens of different cities, the presence of alternative communities - students, artists, queer folks - seems to be a trigger for neighbourhood transitions from derelict to desirable.' 'lesbians are particularly vulnerable to displacement.' 62
Queering the ideology of family and home
understanding queer as a verb - Liebig34 was a symbol in Berlin for an alternative path for community, kinship and love - in its ruins, it is now a symbol of state violence on queer lives and collectives
Anarcha
the right to self-organize collectively
anarchafeminist manifesto - 'Anarcha-feminism means women's independence and freedom on an equal footing with men. A social organization and a social life where no-one is superior or inferior to anyone and everybody is coordinate, women as well as men.' 85
'Anarcha-feminism implies that women themselves decide and take care of their own matters, and together with other women in matters which concern several women.' 'It must be fought both individually and collectively against male domination, attitudes of ownership and control over women, against repressive laws and for women's economic and social autonomy and independence.' 85
'The traditional patriarchal nuclear family should be replaced by free associations between men and women based on equal right to decide for both parts and with respect for the individual person's autonomy and integrity.'
rejection of neo-liberal feminism
individuality traps us in the structures of oppression
we are stronger as collectives
Why emotions sustain us in our fight against capitalism and patriarchy
emotional self-reflexivity is essential to sustainable activism - to avoiding burnout both individually and collectively
'emotional sustainability' 'is the ability to understand one's emotional responses and process them in order to continue to act effectively as an activist' - focus on the long-term
recognizing one's emotional 'needs and commitments' and negotiating these with resistance and activism'
'Organizational structures and processes enable activists to transform personal emotions such as anger and hopelessness into a "collectively defined sense of injustice" - 27
Sara Ahmed - 'to catalog instances of violence is to create a feminist catalog' 30 'this incident is not isolated but part of a series of events: a series as a structure' 30
negative emotions becomes a response to structures of oppressions
many activist spaces, squats included, are 'bounded by a spectre of youth, lingering machismo, and particular performance of 'radicalism' that serve to exclude the complexity of many activists' emotional experiences.' 33
unhappiness
Sara Ahmed - 'We would understand unhappiness not as a failure to be happy and thus as causing yet more unhappiness, but a refusal, claim, a protest, or even just some ordinary thing, a texture of a life being lived.' 58
the nuclear, patriarchal family is a false promise of happiness - Liebig34 is a manifestation of unhappiness
anger
Audre Lorde - 'Anger is loaded with information and energy' - understanding each other's anger helps us to understand each other's oppressions and lived experiences
'When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.'
'My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone.'
'The feminist manifesto takes direct aim at the implicit goals of liberal feminism as necessarily welcoming, polite, and inclusive, instead advocating for a vision of feminism that is difficult, contentious and unruly.'
despair/sadness/grief
'When we interrupt grief's processes, ignore them, it can lead to apathy, addiction and unhealthy forms of anger.' 'At every turn, we are persuaded that grief is a wild, unacceptable emotion that must be handled, managed, overwritten and hidden.'
'Grief is the opposite of indifference. Grief is an evolutionary indicator of love...' We grieve because we acknowledge how important the object of grief was to us. It is this emotion that helps to guide us forward and motivate our future actions.
'During times of massive collective loss, let us rebuke apathy by reimagining social justice organizations and formations as vehicles to metabolize and transform grief into agency.' 'When social movements have neither the infrastructure nor leadership to enable the mass metabolizing of grief, they fracture under the weight of it, just like people do.'
'White supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy are ideological and structural systems that both beget and reject grief, fuel destructive violence, and keep communities clinging to the old world, clinging to how things were instead of imagining what it could be, clinging to the ideology of control.'
hope emerges from 'metabolizing' these negative emotions
when we understand our negative emotions fully, we begin to understand why we feel this way, and what we can do to mobilize our feelings into action
Squatting without a squat?
practices of exclusion in physical activist spaces
Feminist City - 'Marches and protests also implicitly normalize able-bodiedness, with their emphasis on motion, the ability to take over any space, and the possibility of physical confrontation.' 109
Space for emotion in the spaces of activism - The familiarity of places facilitates community, but may too quickly become closed and exclusive spaces - feeling left out of an activist movement because one cannot belong to an activist space 29
digital feminist practices
Feminist City - despite the loss of queer women's spaces, 'queer women have always had to find ways to appropriate space.' 'Although the nature of these places available has been deeply altered, lesbians and other queer women, trans and non-binary folks continue to find ways to make life-saving friendships and to create new kinds of creative and inclusive spaces as part of their urban toolkit.'
building global collectives through digital spaces
digital feminisms transnational activism in German protest cultures 'digital activism can provide an important challenge to neoliberal sensibilities by foregrounding wider social structures and thereby precluding the reduction of the political to the personal but also by reasserting historicity and materiality.' 8 'their political work consists in laying the groundwork for a collective politics precisely by making visible the links between personal experiences and wider inequalities'
Concluding remarks - not just a woman's feelings
compare liebig34 to 'ordinary' squats - their aims are different
where are your feelings expressed in your activist circles?
Sara Ahmed 'Our emotions are opened up when we refuse the commandment to be loyal and joyful. We don't always know how we feel something intensely. Put all those feelings into your kit. See what they do. Watch the mess they stir up. A survival kit is all about stirring things up and living in the stew.' 246
when emotional reflexivity occurs in the digital space, it has physical dimensions too - it helps sustain us in demonstrations, in organizing collective events, in our attempts to find new homes where we can live freely