So I'm reading Melanie Maddison's  heaving art zine Coluring Outside the Line #3 (www.myspace.com/colouringoutsidethelines)
and was struck by the interview with Juliana Luecking who is a spoken word/audio/video writer and essayist. One of Luecking's projects is a series of video shorts, 'People are a Trip' where she asks people on the street a bunch of beautiful questions. She presented her current list of questions in the zine, so I thought I'd have a stab at answering them as a kind of zine-generated assignment.

What is your favourite part of the day?
Habitually, there's this state between midnight and 4am where I get really viscreal if I can't sleep. At this time I like to write allegorical stories with creatures and latent magick, answer questions, write letters, burn candles and write about autobiographical gore. There's something sycnhronized about this time of night and accessing the bloodier, stubborn parts of yourself.

How did the world begin?
Right now I'm interested in psychic transformations and how time can be folded and licked, like an envelope.

What does god look like?
I had a vision of the goddess when I was in bed, a little time ago. She was not one static image but all these flashing, morphing body aspects. She went from being a kind of line drawing to this person-looking thing, but flashes of different colours, limbs, vibrations. That was her manifestation to me. But I see her, I see divinity, in so many things, the appearance and the company of this type of energy is absolutely everywhere. I sometimes have hallucinations/visions that I am an insect crawling up my own body which in itself is a planet. I know my veins are actually trees.

Do you have a religion?
I have a compassion and I have a compass set point of direction. I'm a witch.

What happens after you die?
Right now I'm interesting in how we die all the time when we need to. And that being this really healthy thing- shedding off past marks and lives. I died, closely in body, almost twice. Psychially, I'm dying right now and it's one of the most amazing transformations, everything is sensitive, I am returning to a primal urge of being, drive and athleticism. It's a heightened state of beauty, aptitude, maturity and integrity.

What is one thing you know is true?
That survivors of sexual violence are key to the revolution that will happen.

What would you like to change in the world?
Like a forest fire, I would like to burn down high streets, build community gardens and art centres. This is such a difficult question. Let's start from a recognition of pain and a politics/ethics which comes from that pain, and a committment to autonomy and independence, and that everyone knows what is best for them.

Do you think there is election fraud in your country?
I am grappling with the implications of anarchy and the importance of community control. I'm trying to conceive of a dissolution of nation states (what we've seen happening over the past few decades is the replacement of national sovereignity with the political slew of commerce. I want to see the dissolve of capitalism commerce). You know I want to say that the electoral process is a fraud, especially without direct representation. But that seems obvious. I also want to think about how we elect to give our power away, in each tiny moment and detail that that happens. And how we can have a political consciousness which is based on action and consent.

Why is Osama bin Laden still free?
This is the question I don't want to answer, I feel ignorant and feel like in this gap (...........................) there should be a potted history of the United States of America, and its governmental actions.

If you were in charge of your country, what would you do?
I have to super hard imagine this. Despite not wanting to be in charge of a country I will answer in the spirit of the question. Imagine right now I had the state power and finances to effect change in 'my country'. What to do first? There's questions of economics. Let's do that first. All fuel and transportation systems would be reclaimed from corporations and 'nationalised' (public transport would be free, all energy would be from renewable resources, we would have a localisation food revolution). Abadoned buildings would be given over to the community for safe houses and community centres. I would demolish all airports and create something sustainable there. I would call a 'state of capitalist emergency 'and we would seize all the supermarkets and big businessess. Everything would come under worker control. All troops would pull out of all war zones, in negotiation with the people's leaders of areas under occupation. We would rip up the national curriculum and start again- teaching children how to be self-expressive, independent, tuned on, safe, collaborative and to be aware of people's resistance movements and the art of living with respect to land, creatures, ancestors and sentient intelligence. Right now we would prioritise health, housing, education and the right to self-sustanenace  for all peoples.

What is the most beautiful thing you've even seen?
I'll tell you about one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever heard and felt. It was at a silent dinner made by a hearth path for forty or so people. My lover, sat next to me, was toning and making sounds with some other new friends we had made at this camp. I cried freely and with so much love. I felt and heard the journey of her life's soul as she made those sounds. Her music became this vibration which I hold like true beauty, in my mind.

What kind of music do you like?
Sounds.

Have you seen a space alien? Do you believe they exist?
I've heard great things about the feminist spaceship.

What are fences for?
Historically, to take away the common land from the 'common people'.

What is marriage?
Yoga.

Is there a question you would like to be asked?
How can I support you in your fierce healing journey?

So it's 3:54 am, and a bird is singing hula hoops out front.  I slept for 12 hours last night. Today I made soup for my family,  laughed at the boys whopping up the Man U game (don't know the final score), and worked on a CD-Rom project about feminist zines, music, gender and ethnicity.

I'm not sure if I can go to sleep yet. I have that kind of itchy state insides. Where I feel annoyed by people's everdayness. Where I'm trying to work out what *want*, *desire* and *fun* actually means to me now. Not what it meant 8, or 5, or 1 year ago. Big shifts are happening. Saturn is crossing round my bloc. I'm not quite at the point of admitting that my tastes are kind of different, and that off-framework things make me happy. And that sometimes I enjoy hanging out with sound, air and motion more than people. (I'm thinking of a zine slogan: "I'm not shy. I just hate people").

Clean thought gives me goose bumps. Pulling up words, typing, bridging a structure, coming up with something interesting. Sandwiching food metaphors into a sentence and using words like hair, teeth, paper birds, clavicle and insects.

I'm pretty strict if truth be known. I gorge on the astounding. And the goofy; the absolutely no one looking kind. And it feels like I should just sit down somewhere, chop the tips on my fingers off, and pull out the never-ending script.

Should I write when I'm feeling agitated? Sometimes I feel like I wanna mean-mouth, almost performatively. Hyperbole my discontent, attack. But I think that's just a caprice for being in front of the computer for almost as long as I've been awake.

I don't have a soft side, it only comes up when I'm around folk.

I'm thinking of self-defence, psychic and financial and sexual. To erect energetic fields, both incoming and out. The point where I really do sleep a whole night before making a decision.

I 'came out' to my father and mother the other day about my abuse and cutting history. It was kind of easy. Just poppped out my mouth like butter (not the details though, never the details, not yet).

I'm interested in the 'what's left' state: when I tell all my secrets, name all the perpetrators, drain all the guilt. Rub the last grey worm off my bicep when I bathe. No longer have stabbing hallucinations when I pass someone on the street- my stomach, they will knife me in my stomach.

Mental health. Last year I had a series of breakdowns, and the year before that. The year before that was bad. What gets me vulnerable? Sometimes I think I just run out of the experiences I need and mundanity cracks open my skull. You know? When you lose all energy nagging your housemates to tidy up, when you go the same route to work three days a week, when you feel too much too much in your classes cos you've always been gobby and smart but kind of confrontational. When everyone is beers and smokes and style and strictly horizontal band age. And dogs whimper when you stick your hand out for them to smell. When academia becomes the farce it really is- the industry of using someone who has been published to qualify your thoughts, simply though virtue of having a sentiment expressed in Arial point 10 in a book or a journal somewhere. And how academics of grrrl culture, as one example, either totally don't get it- feeding into media generated historonics- or don't really say anything more interesting and analytical than the zinesters say themselves. Why bother studying these cultures, unless there's a big paradigm shift. Unless you uncover the logics. Why not focus on collecting the histories- instead of building critique through a sandcastle made in air.

Me and the university are unsteady partners. I'll go back to him one day but for now I'm enjoying chewing the grass out in the field.

I'm mean and mean and mean. Not really.



 

I'm  doing some feminist homework:  settled down on the couch with a cup of Earl Grey I'm reading volume one of the weighty tome, The Women's Movement Today: An encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism (edited by Leslie L.Heywood and  published in the States by Greenwood Press). My once sharp pencil is now getting blunted on all sides as I underline, exclamation mark, cross and generally have arguments in the margin with my little piece of lead. This first book is a primer of third-wave feminist writing, collected documents which have been reprinted from anthologies, books and magazine pieces from the States. It's at once fascinating and maddening.

I'm told that third-wave feminism is about hybridity, multiplicity, contradiction, pleasure, cultural activism; that it's sites are webpages, grrrl zines, punk rock gigs; that it's fights are anti-globalisation, violence against women, body image, sexuality, etc etc. Like this is all new. 

I admit that the so-called 'third-wave' is taking place on the boundaries. It's less on-the-streets and more get-off-the-internet. It is transnational, mutli-allied, concerned with local and international issues. It's also been mightily informed by pop culture and diy ethics, and pursues the alternative, in terms of sites of communication, as much as possible in a globalised, consmer techno-culture driven world. Third-Wave, to be clear, has become synomous with riot grrrl, Bust and Bitch magazine, and....well, very little else.

So much defnitional arguments circulate; I'm not post-feminist, I am a working-class, queer, white, able-bodied, wiccan, young woman (to drop in my own identitity 'credentials' and points of privillege/attack)...., but how am I feminist? Some times it just seems that women are feminsit because they say they are. Which, sure, is important when we're faced with pernicious sexism, violence, and a maddening zeitgeist of post-feminism, media power concentration, and fear-baiting tactics (Islamophobia, anyone?).

But I'm getting to the point of pulling on my hair in frustration because everyone's talking about who they are, but less and less people are talking about what they are doing, or how we can disrupt/shut down/mutate and reclaim strategies of social change. I'm well-fed on feminist identifications and the maze of embodied difference, but I'm hungry for activism and actions and structural critiques which come out of this framentary and rich identity poltics.

If I hear one more time the 'third wave' is multi-ethnic, diverse, inclusive blah blah blah I WILL SCREAM. In my experience, it is not. It SAYS IT IS and brilliant, marginalised voices of women of colour have been published in the States, but here in Britain, here in feminist networks, (if even the name 'third wave' applies to what we are doing), the same-old same-old is happening. And self-proscribed third wavers have the audacity to claim that their's is a radical 'new' feminism (just another resistance product that has fallen under the logics of consumer capitalism- if it's 'new' then it's young and sexy and different. But as we all know, usual 'new' means conservative (think New Labour), or it means rousing rhetoric and little action (think New Labour).

I identify as third-wave in so far as I see my feminism shaped by historical conditions which have changed vastly since the 1970s. I see my feminism as shaped by the tools and technologies of late capitalism, which have intricatley shaped my modes of organisation and communication (who puts an ad in the local newspaper anymore advertising a new feminsit group? How quaint).

But I am also re-identifying and reclaiming the histories of the Women's Liberation Movement. And I balk at the suggestion that feminists then were raging monlithic essentialists, blinded by their gender affiliation and struggle only, and strictly, absolutely, driven by non-pleasure and non-complex and non-multiplicity logics. Sure, there were hegemonic strains (shaped by the class, race, sexual politics of publishing, teaching, media response and so on). But we have inherited an idea/meme of feminist history which is incredibly reductive. In only clinging to the moments of short-sightedness and oppression (for this certainly did exist between the 'sisters') we are contributing to that oppression by erasing the vital work of women of colour, working class women, transgenders, queers, and crips within radical women's movements of the past. We are suppressing and erasing their presence through our complicity with a dominant narrative of feminism which tells us that second wave feminism was a failure of 'diversity' and oppositional consciousness. I ally myself far more with the work done by Women's Liberation Movement women who build coalitions (even if these weren't entirely successful), then to third-wavers who on one hand wave their flags and announce that we are so multi-diverse-inclusive and on the other hand shakily admit their ignorance/privilege/unconscious prejudices but do nothing beyond admitting this, to instigating change (and don't even mention structural levels of oppression, must me-politics third wavers don't). I'm referring to 'third wavers' you might have noticed as if they were all white and middle-class. But I'm addressing a particular constituency. And including myself in half of that equation. But isn't it dangerous/sick: claiming all this great new inclusivity and doing without any of the real, hard work of achieving it?

Let's get past discussions of power post-feminsims vs.autonomous diy feminisms. Get over the we're the new generation, hear us make up new words and claim new alliances giddiness. Let's keep up the vital work we're doing but also drop our we-need-these-safe-spaces attachments to subcultural organising and discussion.

(and what are some of the vital work that is being done? I'd include feminist publishing, reproductive rights activism, teach-ins and feminists free schools, squatting abadoned buildings to create autonomous women's centres, volunteering at rape crisis centres, feminist libraries, migrant sex workers projects. And a whole smogasboard of feminist protest and feminist support. But according to the third-wave master narrative, we're all about high heels, sex in the city, blahblahblahblahblah....). Let's put our activism back centre stage and stop allowing 'pop culture' to dominate what the third wave feels and looks like. And let's expose consumer capitalist logics of reinvention (which is really just rehashing the new without any understanding of the past), and how we can engage with those logics as activists- such as subvertising for example- and how we can kick the other limitations and duplicities to the curb.

Militanices+ everyday acts of feminism + information and education + coalitions + alternative sites of economies and communication + a committment to process and not just product + an engagement with the state and mainstream media = an interesting place to ground a movement. This swell of radical feminist activism is growing. I've penciled in 2010 as the year of full-on feminist revolt. Look forward to seeing you all at the pre-launch party.

 

Right now I'm  45 days sober (with one evening of light hallocengenics).  My booze history is one of false security, bravado, ecaspism,  high jinxs,  crashes, crushes and A&E visits.  Drink, especially half and half mixes of vodka and fruit juice shook up in a water bottle and secreted around in a bag, was how I met many social occassions.

This is just a short blog as my head is thumping. Today  was a nice birthday lunch for my 60th-year mamma and a whole lot of bullshit from a substance abuse brother. Which involved scams, lies and disrespect. And which makes me want to punch a wall.

Living with someone who has been addicted to heroin for over a decade is disappointing. Over and over and over again.

Hey good folks. So I've been queasy  as to what I should put up on this site- it's kind of an online CV to scoop more freelance work and it's also a despository of writing, articles and ideas (once I get my shit together and upload everything) so that I don't forget. Feminism is my tick tock life blood. It's drives me crazy why people have such a n attitude problem about it- like hairy and lesbian are some big slur, ohhhh  you  kill me. Shot down dead. Can't recover from that one.


My pretense for writing was about love and witchcamp, to things currently getting me excited in life, but you're gonna have to hold on for that. Feminism. Let's tackle this one straight out.  Love women? Love yourself? Love your mother, sister, girlfriend, the crazy old woman across the street who sometimes drops her pants and pees in public? Then you are a feminist. Love your brother, son, dad, bio-boy friends? Then you are a feminist. Love your trannie-lovers,  co-cospirators, family members, and the way that Rae Spoon sounds weeping under a willow tree? Then you are a feminist.


I'm not being flippant. Feminism (or whatever you call it, womanist, riot grrrl, women's rights, mujuere,  and so on) is the very simple belief that you are worth a shit and that you will fight , in whatever way possible, to maintain your dignity, live a good life, and not let corporations/bullies/fear/ *inject whatever* fucking diminish you.

And I'm not one of those liberal, do-it-yourselfer's who think that personal attitude is all it takes to kick the imperialist-capital-hetero-patriarchy in the gnads. As if! Ok, first off, do-it-yourself culture is a radical feed-into many other social movements and it's about a psychology and material committment to  self-sustainability. I'm a diy-er with a pagan kick- immanence is the basic principle of ethics, and my politics can only follow suit. I am an anti-alientation propagator.


OK, more rants later kids. Seriously. If you're not a feminsit, a what point did you decide to hate yourself? Feminism is  probably nothing like you imagine, all media generated historinics. At it's best it's unruly, passionate, fun, and fucking hard work. It's a critique of power. Simple. Feminism is a critique of power-over (exploitation, violence,  self-hater culture, rape culture,  and the fucking audacity of capitalism. Capitalism tries to kill you. Have no illusion my Western consumer-bred friends, Capitalism hates you).


I like theory and I know blog-posts are inevitably simple. Already my mind is screaming about intersectionality, privilege, being too glib. But let me be provocative, okay? Let me lay it  out in simple terms. Let us  name an enemy: alientation. And how power-over systems (you all know the laundry lists of oppressions, right?) seriously fuck us up. And that at the base we need several stratiegies. Identity politics, pushed out and made unruly ('queered up' in terms of challenging the basis of biology as identity),  automous organising,  community-based politics. And some fucking art and spirit. We would be poorer if we left out our creative spirits and sense of play from ideas and committments to  change. Dare i say  "revolution"?. Let's think of another name.  Something that fits better with my reality of small, incremental changes. Right now we have two prorities.  The first is survival (economic, psuchological, physical, emotional, spiritial, sexual,  creative). The second, very concrete thing we can do, is educate, mediate, and transform a very simple power relation: that expectancy that others have power over you.  We need to be able to realise, manifest, and transform simple  effects of power- make visible its abuses and strengthen its resistances. Power is inherent in all of us. This power-shift is about linking individual based change into the ripple of change-within-institutions and change-apart-from-institutions. It is about collective practices. Power can only ever be a relationship. Capitalism is only a relationship. We need to figure out ways to change these.