"...I was realising that the path-breaking queer work, at least in the English language, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often very influenced by utopian socialism. So, even though I had learned, as a properly trained Marxist, to disavow utopianism, it was interesting to realise ... the utopian socialists were often better than the Marxists around issues of gender and sexuality. Marxists often had a too narrowly framed perspective of human experience focused around capital, leading them to disregard issues that didn't have to do with capitalist production and productivity from the point of view of capital." An interview with Alan Sears, on his new book, Eros and Alienation.
"Resistance sometimes is overtly political, and sometimes it is simply living the way that you're told not to, which happens in all kinds of ways. The thing about resistance is it generally takes more than one of us at a time, and that implies community formation. Resistance from below has taken a lot of different forms, and this is where Nat Raha's work on trans social reproduction is important, looking at the different ways that trans people have created the possibilities of transness through bold, interpersonal, embodied work, but also through building the kind of community that's necessary to live through a struggle against the normative, and to survive in the most basic senses. That community building that's there in a bunch of different ways in trans and queer struggles is building on possibilities and needs that are particular to their struggles, but creates possibilities for realization that extend way beyond queer and trans communities. "I find it shocking that some people on the left are saying what we need to do in the face of Trump and the far Right is to get back to a more narrow, class-centric politics, or that the Left has been subsumed by wokeness. Whatever the language, these perspectives are failing to defend the most basic trans rights. If you just look at who Trump, among others, is attacking, it becomes necessary to reflect on what it means for us to think about migrant rights, trans rights, workers' rights, and so on at the same time. I think that there's something about the utopian perspective that allows us to think open-endedly about how these things are not zero-sum games cast against one another, but that we are talking about a broader process of human becoming of which all these issues are a part."
"Resistance sometimes is overtly political, and sometimes it is simply living the way that you're told not to, which happens in all kinds of ways. The thing about resistance is it generally takes more than one of us at a time, and that implies community formation. Resistance from below has taken a lot of different forms, and this is where Nat Raha's work on trans social reproduction is important, looking at the different ways that trans people have created the possibilities of transness through bold, interpersonal, embodied work, but also through building the kind of community that's necessary to live through a struggle against the normative, and to survive in the most basic senses. That community building that's there in a bunch of different ways in trans and queer struggles is building on possibilities and needs that are particular to their struggles, but creates possibilities for realization that extend way beyond queer and trans communities. "I find it shocking that some people on the left are saying what we need to do in the face of Trump and the far Right is to get back to a more narrow, class-centric politics, or that the Left has been subsumed by wokeness. Whatever the language, these perspectives are failing to defend the most basic trans rights. If you just look at who Trump, among others, is attacking, it becomes necessary to reflect on what it means for us to think about migrant rights, trans rights, workers' rights, and so on at the same time. I think that there's something about the utopian perspective that allows us to think open-endedly about how these things are not zero-sum games cast against one another, but that we are talking about a broader process of human becoming of which all these issues are a part."
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