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- [00:01]
A
Well, welcome to everybody and thanks for coming out on such a freezing, freezing cold night. Welcome to this panel on anarchism and sexuality. I'm Claire Hennings from the Gender Institute here at lse and the Gender Institute is co hosting this event with the University of Leeds, represented by Richard Clemson to my left, one of our panelists. And thanks also to Stickard at LSE for co funding. So the logistics, bit of it, just to get that out of the way, please turn your phones off now and check that you've done that. I think I need to do any. No, I've done it. I'll introduce our wonderful speakers. They will speak. That's sort of all part of the program. And then you will ask short, pithy questions that generate lively and informed discussion and I will collect clusters of those for our panel. And then when we are all done around eight, you'll follow us up to the Gender Institute for a reception where you can have a glass of wine or something else, water or juice, whatever, and have a look at books which are up there from AK Press, the Anarchist Press, from Feminist Review and from Sexualities. So don't leave us at 8 o'.
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B
Clock.
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A
Come and follow us up to the Gender Institute. Can you hear me okay?
- [01:41]
B
Yes.
- [01:42]
A
So the panel this evening is part of a broader project on sexual freedom which is interested in exploring counter histories to sexual rights based on models of sexual equality. This panel contributes to this work through a focus on the history of anarchism and sexuality and the importance of historical and international perspectives for how we think about sexual politics today. Martha Ackelsberg, who is in the middle there, is interested in political communities and their impact on power as well as power relations within those communities. She's a leading authority on women and gender in the anarchist movement in Spain during the Civil War and wrote the key book many of you will have read, Free Women of Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, which AKA Press published in 2005. She's also the author of many other texts, but just to pull a couple out. Resisting Citizenship, Feminist Essays on Politics, Community and and democracy in 2010. And she contributes to US debates about gay marriage. Currently she's beginning a new project on the politics of historical memory in Spain. To her. Well, to her right as you look. Terrence Kissack is the author of the hugely important and influential Free Comrades, Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917, published in 2008, also by AK Press. He has a long association with GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, and is currently working on extending those archives to include contemporary oral histories. Terence is also giving a seminar on Monday, Sex in the Archives, in conversation with me at 6:30. So take a look at that and do come along if you can. Richard Cleminson, to my left, your right, teaches in Hispanic Studies at the University of Leeds. He lectures on Spanish history, gender studies and the history of sexuality. He's written about anarchism and homosexuality, the history of hermaphroditism and the history of eugenics, for which he's just been awarded AHLC funding. I came across Richard's work first reading a review that he wrote of Terence's book, and then I read everything that he had written in English. Given that you publish in so many languages, that actually wasn't as much as I had hoped and is one of the few people working on that particular period of anarchism and homosexuality in the uk. So please join me in welcoming our panel this evening. And I think, Terence, you're going to kick us off.
- [04:46]
B
Is this working? Okay, great. Well, first I want to thank the London School of Economics for hosting this event, the Gender Institute in particular, Claire, Mija and James, who were so nice to me and welcomed me here. And of course I'd like to thank Martha and Richard. But mostly I'd like to thank all of you for coming out tonight. And I look forward to hearing from you what thoughts you have on this subject. And if you have fierce critiques of my book, please be kind. So what I thought I would do today is give a brief introduction to some of the characters, the people that I wrote about in my book. I'm not going to assume that everyone's read the book, and in particular, so this is the turn of the anarchists in the United States at the turn of the century, late 19th, early 20th century, and in particular, what they had to say about homosexuality. And in fact, they were the first in the United States to articulate a politics of homosexuality. So it is a pretty significant change in the way we understand the history of queer politics if we want to create a genealogy of queer politics in the United States. This is a pretty big shift, and it happens within the anarchist movement. And then finally, I'm going to just briefly touch on some of the ways in which the past speaks to the present. I have a good friend, and whenever I talk to him about a project that I'm doing, he always asks, so what? Which is kind of rude, but also very informative, because when you're doing something, at least if you're doing something with the intention of it being a political work as well as a fun work of history. It should have some way to speak to the present. So we'll touch a little on that. All right, so who were the anarchists and why were they interested in sexual politics? I thought to illustrate that. Well, first of all, I should note, not all anarchists were sex radicals. Let's be very clear about that. Many leading anarchists had very little to say, or what they had to say was what we might call quite conservative. So I'm really looking at a subset, I suppose, within the movement, sex radicals. But who were the anarchists? I thought I'd give you a little quote because let them tell you rather. So this is Emma Goldman. Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion, the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property, liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth, an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life according to individual desires, tastes and inclinations. Now, there are many definitions of anarchism, and I'm sure that there are probably anarchists in this room who would contest that particular definition. But broadly speaking, I think that that captures what I find interesting in this definition. And if we look at other kind of political articulations on the left, it goes beyond needs, it talks about desires and inclinations. So it's a very. You can already see the hint, the space in which politics of sexuality might emerge and why it would happen amongst anarchists. So how does that translate into an anarchist politics of sexuality? So I'm going to give you another quote, and this from Victoria Woodhull, who was an inconsistent anarchist at best, but this was her anarchist phase. So she says, I have an inalienable and natural right to love whom I may to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please. And with that right, neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right. And it is your duty, not only to accord it, but but as a community, to see that I am protected in it. This is a fairly radical articulation of sexuality, period, but particularly in the period in which it was articulated, it was quite radical. Women's rights activists at the time, in the United States would often make claims based on the moral purity and even asexual nature of women in order to gain access to the public sphere to clean up corruption, et cetera. She's laying claim to the right of. Of her desire. But in a larger note all anarchist sexual politics are really grounded in a critique of patriarchy and in, well, just that, free love. The anarchist views of sexuality was framed and articulated I think most best by women such as Emma Goldman, Voltaire and Declare and others. And it was not a view broadly shared across all the anarchists but nonetheless it was the gateway, if you will, to the articulation of a politics of homosexuality. Without the critique of patriarchy that was articulated by anarchist women primarily there would not have been a politics of homosexuality which of course also speaks to women. But it is the generative moment, it is the opening which creates the space which didn't exist in other political movements on the left at that time. So I said that I was going to introduce you to a set of characters that. That's, you know, actors in my book. That's not actually. That was a lie because my book is not so much about a set of people as it is about a set of frameworks in which the anarchists articulated their politics. So how did they talk about same sex desire? How did it come up as a subject and what did they have to say about it? So for example, there was a whole discussion around Whitman and Whitman's poetry which celebrates the love of comrades. And here we see something of a transnational connection since many of those anarchists who were engaging in that discussion were actually reading English writers, Edward Carpenter, who similarly were using Whitman as a way to articulate, frame and validate same sex desire. The anarchists also responded to the trial of Oscar Wilde. They engaged the kind of emerging science of sexology the kind of late 19th, early 20th century attempt to create a science of sexuality with all the categorizations of sexual types. They were quite interested in particular Emma Goldman. And in fact Emma Goldman gave lectures across the United States she and other anarchists to inform the public about sexuality. In fact, she was in some sense herself a sexologist. But she framed and she read those texts in very different ways. She read them through a liberatory lens, if you will. And then one of the more interesting kind of ways in which the topic emerged in the anarchist movement is through a discussion of prison and in particular through Alexander Berkman's imprisonment in the Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary for 14 years. When he emerged, he wrote a memoir so I'll touch on. So the first time that it really came up as it were and it kind of shifted the discussion by it I'm talking about homosexuality was the Oscar wilde trials of 1895. This audience is probably more familiar than an audience in the United States might be with those series of trials but it was one of the first transatlantic sex scandals fed headlines in Utah, across upstate New York And Oscar Wilde was no stranger to the United States. He had toured in the United states in the 1880s and he was famously illustrated everywhere as a kind of foppish aesthete. But he was also known as a political writer and certainly the anarchists had engaged with him as a political writer. So the anarchists knew of Wilde. Most people knew of Wilde. He was a very well known figure of the era and when his trials resulted in his being imprisoned for two years the anarchists reacted quite actively. They reacted not only because they knew Wilde and some of them agreed with some of his political ideas some of them disagreed quite a bit but because they understood Oscar Wilde's predicament as similar to many of similar to the predicaments that their own comrades had faced an attack by the state on an individual for their personal life. There had already been any number of anarchists and people who were sex radicals who had been imprisoned or at least brought through the judicial system for advocating for birth control, for printing obscenities and the anarchists identified Wilde as one of these cases but it did allow them to begin to speak in a new way about same sex desire. So it was again kind of a turning point and of course it also evoked the specter of prison and if you look in anarchist, sexual, excuse me, anarchist discourse writ large the prison is both a metaphor for the power of the state it's the ultimate end of liberty, right? They pull you from your life and imprison you. So it's. And it's also the fact that many anarchists themselves Kropotkin, others spent Bakunin a good number of years in prison. Now one of the more interesting texts that came out of the anarchist period of this time is Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. And as I said Berkman was charged with the attempted murder of Henry Clay Frick. I don't want to run over.
- [15:30]
A
You've got another 15 minutes.
- [15:31]
B
Oh great. Henry Clay Frick was the manager for Andrew Carnegie's Steel Empire and it's actually Berkman was a revolutionary anarchist obviously he attempted to kill Frick, it was unsuccessful and he was put in prison I would say that Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is the most important political text dealing with homosexuality to have been written by an American before the 1950s. You can debate whether Berkman is an American you can actually debate whether there's such thing as an American anarchist politics since anarchism is by its very nature transnational one might even say anti national but it is the most important work of homosexual politics ever written by an American before 1950s. Now Berkman's kind of the way in which Berkman deals with the subject so he's thrown into prison is very complex and it's one that is filled with ambivalence it is not a full throated defense it is a politics that emerges from hardship, from pain and from trying to build solidarity and comradeship in a very brutal environment When Berkman first encounters homosexuality he's actually being solicited by another guy in prison and this Berkman writes about his experience as if he had never kind of heard of this phenomenon before in his life and he's horrified and surprised Surprised to say the least and he reacts quite negatively. Now if he had ended there he would have joined the genre of many prison memoirs which kind of cites homosexuality as another form of degraded life in prison and as kind of an example of what life is like in prison. Right, It's a twisted and bitter fruit but he didn't and that's what is so interesting about Berkman's memoirs and I think he didn't because he had been active in the anarchist movement and so he was open to understanding sexuality, emotions, relationships in a different way and of course he had 14 years 14 hard years to rethink this question so when he next discusses this homosexuality in his memoirs he's actually talking about some extremely intense emotional relationships he has he has with some young men in prison I say young, he calls them young they're 19, 20 he doesn't really give their age and Berkman himself was probably in his 30s through most of this time it's unclear whether there was a physical component to these relationships and I'm not sure one would ever be able to know there's erotic imagery in terms of his imagination of his beloved who is locked in a cell across the prison and he's longing for him but whether or not there was a physical element we don't know but the writing certainly suggests an intense emotional relationship that I do believe has a physical component what that limit is I'm not Sure. And it's this discussion and I think this kind of framing that allows him to articulate an alternative to the dehumanizing kind of sexuality that was visible everywhere around him in prison. And his book balances these two kinds of sexual relations One, a very degraded relationship as he sees it, based on coercion and domination and the other, a relationship of equals based on love and mutual support in an environment which wishes to deny the humanity of those people incarcerated. So it's an extremely powerful journey that he is sharing with us and what's interesting about his book is that near the end he comes up with what I think. I think he contrives a dialogue with a fellow prisoner, fellow prisoner that he names as George. There's a whole chapter called Passing the Love of Woman in which he basically says well, I met this guy in prison. Well, he doesn't talk like that. He's more formal than I am But I met this guy in prison and we started talking about stuff, as it were and the subject of love came up and he started telling me about these intense, intense relationships he had in particular with this guy Floyd. And he loved Floyd and so he starts talking. Berkman is recounting how George was talking about Floyd and how the two were just inseparable and certainly there. There is physical element of the relationship although, again, a lot of ambivalence around what that would be. They're careful to say it's not that which is the kind of kid business, as it were, that still used the lingo of prison at the time but he definitely acknowledges it and he has this whole dialogue where George kind of confesses this emotional attachment and then at the end says, you know, there's a moment of silence and George says, you're. Wait, you're laughing at me. You're horrified by what I'm saying. And Berkman says, no, no, I don't. I understand you completely. And it is truly. And this is where he kind of cites this passage the love passing the love of women which is actually a citation from the Bible. Right, Jonathan and David which is a little strange for an anarchist to cite but it's also a powerful image which would be broadly known an image of two equals in love, Right? That is the comrades. And I think that's what he's trying to carve out there. So happily, Berkman does emerge from prison we know that because he wrote his memoirs it was then published by Goldman's Press and interestingly, as a preface to his memoirs he publishes an excerpt from Oscar Wilde's poem. I hope I pronounced this correctly because Americans are. It's a reading. Jail. Oh, thank God. That's not what it looks like to my eyes.
- [22:50]
C
But.
- [22:52]
B
He published this excerpt of this poem and if you're not familiar with the poem, it is Wilde who is in prison during his two years in prison and he's watching a man who's going to be executed for the murder of his wife. And it's a. It's a quite lovely poem and it also speaks to the way in which prison brutalizes people and that is at the core or not at the core, but that is one of Berkman's purposes here in addition to telling his life. It's a condemnation of the prison and it's a combination of the state that would have such a system that would run its society and its judicial order based on incarceration and the treatment of people. So he cites this poem by Whitman which is effectively the same thing but it could not have escaped readers and it certainly didn't escape me and I don't think it escaped anyone else that by citing Whitman, excuse me, Wilde, he's also invoking the most famous figure of the time to have been revealed, as it were, as a sodomite. So that's just a couple of. So the. The reaction to the Oscar Wilde trial, particularly Berkman's discussion the prison memoirs of an anarchist. The timbre and the tenor of the anarchist engagement with sexual politics is. It's not a full throated kind of queer radical politics that we would see now. It is embedded in a larger political project but I think it is very much something that continues to inform our own present. I'll just put one and then turn it over to Martha, which she mentioned, or actually Claire mentioned that Martha has written a bit on same sex marriage and one wonders what the anarchist would have to say about same sex marriage. I think it's not an easy thing to reject as so many rights and resources are linked to marriage, particularly in the United States. Access to health care, access to. Access to the body of your loved one if they're in prison, excuse me, if they're in hospital, et cetera, not if they're in prison or prison. Or prison. That's true. Conjugal visits. That's right. But at the same time the marriage sets up again this inside, outside, charmed circle of legitimacy and doesn't escape, I think, the critiques that the anarchists made of state sanctioned, church sanctioned relationships that create an inside and an outside and that are kind of embedded in other power relations, namely patriarchy. So I think those are some of the questions which I hope will inform our discussion. Moving on.
- [25:38]
A
Thank you very much.
- [25:54]
D
All right, maybe.
- [25:55]
E
Yeah.
- [25:55]
D
Okay. I have some images. So we're trying to figure out how to best do this. I want to share with you, do some of the same kind of things that Terrence did share with you this evening. Some of what I've learned and some of the puzzles I've been thinking about with respect to the treatment of sexuality, especially women's sexuality, on the part of early 20th century Spanish anarchists. My work has focused, as Claire mentioned, on the activities of Mujeres Libres, an organization of women founded in Spain in the 1930s. But I've also argued, and you'll hear this coming through, that it's impossible to understand what they were doing without understanding the larger context of the anarchist movement in which they functioned. So let me begin by saying a little bit about what they took anarchism to be, because there's some similarity with the Emma Goldman quote that Terence offered us, but also some differences. So I guess you could put the new slide on. Now. This is gonna. You have to poke it again because one of these fly in things. That's the only time I did this. But anyway, anarchism, at least a collectivist anarchism, in which Spanish, which was so prominent in Spain, offers us a theory of society that aims for an egalitarian, non hierarchical society to be organized in a communalist, voluntarist fashion. They rejected domination in all its forms and looked to a society characterized by mutual respect and reciprocity. But it was not a liberal understanding of freedom. For them, freedom was a social product. True freedom could be achieved only through social struggle and change. And this is going to come through in a number of different points. As did socialists. They recognized that economic organization and structures of power and dominance based on control over the meaning of. Of production was an important source of power and inequality. And they agreed with Marx that those structures of power dehumanize both the people who are the targets of them and also the people who are exercising it. And they agreed that the only way out of such relationships is through the self organization of the oppressed. The process of organizing and struggling collectively changes people's perceptions of themselves, raises consciousness, and itself creates a new reality. But they also differed with socialists on a number of points which I think is worth mentioning here. They did not privilege economics in the way Marx did. They did not see economics alone as the source of all difficulties. And they thought that there were other forms of domination, the church, the state and patriarchy, which also had to be addressed independently if a fully free society were to be achieved. Okay, so now next one. Equally importantly, they had a lot to say about the relationship between means and ends in social struggles. You cannot create an egalitarian society through authoritarian or inegalitarian means. Since existing society creates a sense of powerlessness on the people who are on the receiving end of these relationships. There has to be something that's going to enable them to experience themselves as capable and competent beings. So the key question is, how do we do this when they were themselves very aware of the social construction of reality and the ways in which we are affected by the societies in which we live. And the answer was that revolutionary society had to grow from the ground up. You had to start from the daily practices in which people were engaged and enable them to see themselves and act differently. And yet, at the same time, as one of the members of Mujeres Libre said to me, you can't improvise a revolution. You need preparation. And for the Spanish anarchists, preparation was in part about education and in large part about direct action. Revolutionary activity had to begin where people are, not through intermediaries like political parties. And they must be activities which change the realities in which people live. So one important place where that took place was workplace struggles and strikes. Anarchist organizing had begun in Spain in around the 1870s. And a second place was quality of life protests and other forms of community based struggles. This is not early 20th century Spanish struggles, but you get the idea there that addressed ongoing daily activities and changed people's consciousness of themselves and their possibilities. And I think there are important parallels here to things like women's health collectives, collective shops and bookstalls, squatting, tenant strikes, occupy, all these kinds of things that in a sense engaged people, people created, and it changed the realities for people on a day to day basis. They experience, for however short a period, a kind of a new world, or what it might mean to live in that new world. But critical to this process was education. They believed that literacy in particular, because illiteracy was very prevalent in Spain, that literacy would lead to an improved sense of, and a greater ability to gain information about the world, both in terms of simple literacy and in terms of developing what we might call cultural knowledge or conscientization, coming to an awareness of systems of oppression and of the possibilities through collective action to address them. Sort of what Terrence was saying about so what, I have a friend, an activist in St. Louis who runs these kinds of groups and says the questions they ask are what? So what now what? And you know, I think that's the kind of thing that they were trying to do here. Through schools, through playgroups, through theater, a whole variety of activities. Okay, what did they have to say about the subordination of women? I mentioned that anarchists were critical of hierarchies in general, including those of church and state, as well as of capital and class. And some of them actually used the example of the existing subordination of women in Spanish society to illustrate claims about the disempowering effects of hierarchical struggles. So Mariano Gallardo, for example, argued that societal gender inequalities were the result of denying opportunities to women. Woman's presumed inferiority, he wrote, is purely artificial, the inevitable consequence of a civilization which by educating men and women separately and distinctly, makes of the woman a slave and of her companero a ferocious tyrant. This could have been articulated by a 1960s or 70s feminist who was explicitly stating a kind of social constructionist understanding of human behavior and of the so called natural differences between men and women. But the fact that writers were aware of this and even used women's experience as a way of explicating the ways in which existing structures affect people, didn't necessarily mean that they took women's subordination seriously or made it a focus of organizing. Most anarchist writers agreed that women were severely disadvantaged and needed to be brought into the movement. But the movement, particularly the labor union aspects of the movement, rarely lived up to its stated beliefs. Most unions were slow to organize women, and they were very wary of women as workers, feeling that they, because they didn't support them, they worked for lower wages, and they thought of them as scabs. The same thing that happens in has happened in union movements in various places around the world. Nevertheless, there was also a different view. That women's subordination was as much a cultural as an economic phenomenon that would require programs of education on multiple levels in order to counter them. And at least some anarchists located women's subordination in her reproductive role and in the double standard of sexual morality. So these too would have to change to lead to the adoption of a new sexual morality and the widespread use of birth control if women were to be fully equal parties in revolutionary society. So, with all this as background, the early 1930s saw developing awareness on the part of women who were active members of anarchist movement organizations about the situation of women and girls, young women in these movements, they were always a minority it was very hard to get other women involved, partly because of the sexism of the men, partly because of the diffidence of the women, partly some combination of the two. So, as one of the three founders of what was to be Mujeres Libres wrote, the situation of the proletarian woman will require specific solutions apart from, and in addition to strategies to address class conflict. This was the central organizing insight, shall we say, of Mujeres Libres. So starting in 1934 in Barcelona and in 1935 in Madrid, small groups of women from the movement began to meet together to discuss what would be necessary to enable women to engage more fully and equally. And eventually that became the organization Mujeres Libres, which means free women, that had a two pronged strategy, the overall empowerment and education of women through literacy, sexuality, social awareness, all kinds of things, and the mobilization of women into libertarian movement organizations and unions. They had a very broad based program, including educational activities, workplace based apprenticeship programs, publications, provision of information about sexuality and birth control, and support for those at the front. Because we're in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, I should also mention, in case that was not. But anyway, I'm going to focus tonight specifically on their treatment of women's sexuality. But first let me mention one other interesting little factoid, that they did not define themselves as feminists, by which they meant those who focused on access to the vote, to education and to professional jobs. Those had long been the concern of middle class feminists in Spain, and they didn't think that they had any use or value for working class women. So that was. They didn't use that word. They didn't see themselves as having anything to do with them. And yet, as Antonina Rodrigo, another historian of the movement, has recently explained, Mujeres Libres did not define itself as feminist, but it would always defend what we would think of, I suppose, as feminist positions with the aim of women's developing a consciousness of her own abilities and capacities. Okay, so next slide. So, as Sorrel Berenguer, who was one of the women I interviewed, put it, and I think you can hear the defensiveness in her claim, to be a woman captivated by culture and by acquiring a new free consciousness, is neither to renounce motherhood nor to deny one's femininity. And even less is it to oppose moral values. It is rather to be in contact with life in all of its aspects and to be responsible for one's decisions without having to humiliate oneself or to trail behind men. So they weren't feminists, but that's the way they thought about it. And why a group just for women. It came, I think, out of the anarchist commitment to direct action, that only through their own autonomous, self directed actions would women come to recognize their own capacities. So as Lucia Sanchez o', Neill, one of these we've seen her already wrote in 1935, it is not he, the male companiono, who is called upon to set out the roles and responsibilities of the woman in society, no matter how elevated he was, might consider them to be. The anarchist way is to allow the woman to act freely herself without tutors or external pressures that she may develop in the direction that her nature and her faculties dictate. So partly what I'm trying to emphasize here is that this perspective was to their minds a logical consequence of the anti hierarchical social constructionist views they had developed. Anarchists. And they were applying them to the situation of women. They in fact saw themselves as calling the movement to live up to its stated commitments to challenging hierarchies in every area. So how did sexuality fit into this whole picture? On the one hand, sexuality, particularly constructions of women's sexuality, was a significant focus of of social critiques written in the 20s and 30s, often by men, but also by women, including those who would eventually be found in or active in Mujeres Libres. Radical writers of the 20s and 30s argued against the dominant views that they saw represented most dramatically by the Church, that sexual expression was a normal and necessary part of human life. They advocated an end to male dominated monogamous marriages, an end to the sexual double standard and to prostitution, which they saw as its direct consequence, and for providing women information about sexuality and birth control that would lead to the opening up of possibility of women's truly experiencing sexual pleasure. And they didn't here use a language of rights, but they talked about women's personhood. Okay, next slide. A good example of this can be found in the writings of Etta Verdarn, who wrote in a sketch about Alexandra Colontai. She tried to distinguish very carefully between love and sexual relations. She asserted that the latter were simply physical needs felt equally by women and men, no different from those of eating or sleeping. She struggled against the widely accepted but false belief that sexual satisfaction without love is a symptom of moral perversion, especially in the case of a woman. Obviously any notion of free love or broader sexual possibilities has to be connected with birth control. And here there were a variety of views. Some anarchists, mainly men, opposed birth control as unnecessary and as a potential break on the revolution. Drawing on Kropotkin's ideas of mutual aid and solidarity within species, they opposed Social Darwinism and insisted that with revolutionary transformation and a more equal distribution of the world's resources and Spain's resources, no limits on births would be necessary. On the other hand, pro birth control neo Malthusians argued that limiting both births was both an anti capitalist and a pro feminist strategy that would deny capitalists unlimited numbers of desperate workers and would enable women to live better, fuller, freer lives. So they aimed to convince working people of the advisability and the possibility of limiting births without advocating abstinence, trying to reorient attitudes to separate sexuality from procreation so that women too could experience sexual pleasure. As Mary Nash, an historian of the period, summarized the control of births was tied in with personal independence and autonomy, the creation of new men and women, the attainment of freedom, the development of sexual potential and conscious motherhood. Connected to the advocacy of birth control was a commitment to amor libre free love for both men and women, conscious motherhood and ending prostitution. Among women writers, I found virtually no mention whatsoever of lesbianism or homosexuality, although Lucia Sanchez Ornel, whose picture you've seen up here a couple times, who was one of the founders of Mujeres Libres, was herself a lesbian and was well known to be one within the organization. But they didn't want to talk about it. So amor libre free love was seen by a number of anarchist women writers as a manifestation of the natural tendencies of both men and women. In the years leading up to the war, Amparo Poch, who was another one of the founders, wrote articles and a pamphlet discussing women's sexuality, emphasizing the importance of sexual expression and autonomy for women. And for her, giving women this information, allowing them to experience themselves as sexual beings, was a matter of advancing women's moral autonomy as well as her capacity for pleasure and self development. But they all recognized, as I think will not come as a surprise to at least any women in this room, that the situation of women with respect to free love needed to be addressed very carefully. On the one hand, while sexual connection is necessary for the species, argued that it was time for women to stop seeing love as the sole reason for their existence. Partly because love rarely lasts and partly because there's so much more to life properly understood, she said, monogamy doesn't necessarily mean forever, but only so long as the feelings between the two people last, and that even though a family may have been created that cannot be and need not be an obstinate to the cultivation of other tender loves and feelings outside it. But the other sort of caveat was that even those who considered themselves anarchists had too often accepted conventional understandings of marriage as a relationship of property. So, as Lucia noted, there was much work to be done. Sexual liberation would be achieved only within the context of a larger social revolution. Woman's emancipation, she wrote, must develop in her the consciousness of herself as a free being. And that achievement will come through education and the uprooting of illiteracy in both the intellectual and the sexual arena. Without broader cultural shifts, advocating free love would further contribute to the subordination of women, as in oh, you don't want to go to bed with me, you really think you're so liberated. Which they heard as well as I'm sure some others may have heard that maybe not anymore, I don't know anyhow. And others argued that women's struggle for autonomy would have to be internal as well as external. An article in the early issue of the magazine on women's double struggle argued that while women struggle against capitalism together with men, they have to struggle alone and often directly against men in the internal struggle for self definition. Okay, so advocating free love, of course, was related to a critique of marriage which the anarchists had opposed both as an institution supported by church and state to preserve pre and protect property, and as a prop for male domination in the household. Their advocacy of free love was a clear rejection of institutionalized marriage in the male dominated household. And one of my favorite quotes from them comes from an article on criticizing people who were getting married in labor unions as rather than churches or going to like justice of the peace. And Lucia wrote here, if we spent all those years asserting that the free consent of both parties is sufficient for a union between them, and that a wedding certificate was nothing other than a contract of sale, how can we explain these absurd ceremonies in union halls? We must not simply dress up bourgeois morality and new clothes, clothes preserving it in its entirety, but in new form. Interestingly, they never questioned the sexual division of labor in the household or the assumption that the responsibility for home and child rearing would fall primarily to women. But they did speak of the need to overcome male dominance within the household and noted a couple of them, as one pointed out, they struggled, they went out on strike. But inside the house, worse than nothing. I think we should have set an example with our own lives lived differently, in accordance with what we said we wanted. But no, for them, the struggle was outside. Inside the house, our desires were purely utopian. In addition to this, let me run through quickly here, conscious motherhood related to questions of birth control and marriage. They believe strongly that women should be able to choose whether and when to have children, and that when they became mothers, they should have the information they needed to be able to raise and nurture their children well. So despite the fact that none of the three founders of Mujeres Libres were mothers, they did a lot of writing in the magazine about child rearing and motherhood and finally prostitution as the war went on. And more and more of Mujeres Libre's articles and activism focus on prostitution, which they recognize as a consequence of economic oppression, sexual repression, and double standards of morality to which women were subjected. So they advocated this program of liberatorios de prostitucion, places where prostitutes could go to be retrained so that they could have other occupations and they didn't need to sell their bodies. So what can we make of this? To our contemporary ears and eyes, these ways of talking about sexuality probably seem far from radical. Whether in the US or the UK and even in contemporary Spain, critiques of marriage calls for recognizing relationships not sanctioned by the church or for access to birth control and abortion are for the most part relatively mainstream, and their campaign to end prostitution by offering skills training could well seem almost quaint. And they made no mention whatsoever, as I said, of homosexuality beyond questions of what the sort of politics of that decision were about, which I addressed in an article for Richard a couple of a number of years ago. I think their writings challenge us to think about sexuality. This gets back to the so what? Question from perspectives rather different from our own. They were trying to address issues of sexuality without engaging in a language of rights or of identity or of presence. The language of rights was surely available to them, even if the other discourse courses wouldn't have been. But they argued strongly for women's capacities for pleasure, their abilities as human persons as well as lovers, wives and mothers, the necessity for women's empowerment, as much sexual as intellectual and economic, if social revolution were to be meaningful. And similarly, while they recognized that so much of sexuality was experienced as personal and individual, they insisted on talking and writing about it as socially constructed, arguing that changes in the ways women experience their lives, even on the level of sexuality, would require collective action to change those structures. And so, although they did not use a language of public and private, which has been so central to much late 20th and 21st century feminist activism and theorizing, their strategies clearly challenged that would be dichotomy. They did not see a private domain that was somehow separate from a public one, but rather a system of interrelated hierarchies that constructed and affected every aspect of life, from large industries to individual families, from politics to prostitution, and even to love.
- [54:02]
C
Okay, well, we've heard two, I think, very stimulating, enormously detailed interventions there, and there are no doubt numerous issues that we can try to tease out. I'm going to try to be quite brief, not even try to summarize, but just pick out four main aspects that I think are worth signaling and which I hope will also. We can develop those for another questions when we come to the, perhaps the most exciting part of the session, which will be opening the hall up to your and everyone's comments. I think both speakers showed us how vibrant and how necessary in many ways, anarchist notions were of social and individual collective transformation in different countries of the world. Not only, of course, in the United States and Spain, but also in the same period in Italy, in Portugal, in Britain, and in many of the countries of Latin America where anarchism and anarcho syndicalism had a very strong following. I think it's also interesting to just remind ourselves, or perhaps just think about the. The novelty, the innovative nature of many anarchist propositions for the time in which they were hatched. Terence spoke eloquently about the engagement of particularly American, but also worldwide anarchists in respect of the Oscar Wilde trial at the end of the 19th century. The indignation that someone could be imprisoned and humiliated in such a fashion for following their own particular sexual desires. So in many ways was a first, and I think there are other anarchist firsts as well, more related to perhaps my own field of work. The very fact that the first group or the first political group, well, the first group of any groups at all to articulate eugenics in Argentina actually came out of the Anarchist Protesta Journal. Now that might seem very surprising. What on earth were anarchists doing with eugenics? But I think it shows a particular understanding of the world and a particular understanding of science and of the question of sexuality that pushed anarchists towards explorations of the new, and which pushed anarchists towards explorations of what they believed to at the time could well be emancipatory vehicles. And I think again, there's a lesson here for us all in respect of the kinds of politics discourses, the things that we write nowadays. Remember that those things may well be heard and read in 100 years time. So a salutary lesson, I think there. But on the positive side, I think we've heard a great deal from These two speakers about what anarchism attempted to do and in many ways what it achieved. And as I say, there's perhaps three aspects that I'd like to signal. One, I think, is the connectedness between different kinds of struggle between different issues. For example, between the woman question, as it was termed in many countries, and female emancipation. The very possibility of women being able to use and enjoy their bodies in the way in which they wished. The whole question of birth control and how that was linked to female autonomy. And I think that there was a discussion in many ways about the economy, the political economy of the household. And that was one of the ways in which anarchist couples and also organizations discussed the question of the balance, what we've now perhaps called the gender balance of the household. There was also connection between those elements. And as Terence has illustrated, the issue of same sex sexuality. In many ways, the question of birth control was a stepping stone towards examining further questions such as homosexuality, as we saw in the case of the Americans. And this went beyond those particular issues into a broader critique of relationships based on dominance and hierarchy and relationships that were fostered by capitalism. And what was in most countries where anarchism was strong, an extraordinarily unequal and hierarchical and domineering state form that was generally a state form. That was that anarchists received at the sharp end, that is, through military or police intervention. And that allowed them as well to perform a critique of the prison. Not only as a questionable means for punishing individuals who erred on the. Into crime, but also as a corrective means. Anarchists believed that there were other means that were at the. That could be used at the behest of society. In order to channel people's deviant social practices, as perhaps the 60s sociologists would say, into different areas. So there's that connectedness and I think came over very clearly in the two speakers interventions, but also comes over very clearly in other national anarchist movements that were successfully articulated in the late 19th century, the early 20th century and of course beyond. The second question, I think needs signaling or worth perhaps pointing out, is the emphasis, as both speakers emphasized the emphasis placed on education as a tool in itself. Martha didn't actually refer in the Spanish to the twin kind of tactic or technique of Mujeres libres. That the notion of captacion, of captacion un capacitacion captacion, meaning to expand the membership of the organization in order to bring women in to Mujeres Libris and also into the broader anarchist movement as a fundamental contribution to the revolutionary process, but also this idea of capathita fion, which is always quite difficult to translate, perhaps something along the lines of making one capable. This was a consciousness raising activity. So making one capable, giving one the tools, enabling people to have the tools, and enabling people to design their own tools to effect a fundamental transformation of social, sexual, economic, political, cultural relations. So I think that dual strategy was extraordinarily productive and extraordinarily interesting. When we look back at it now, some 80 or so years on, that educational endeavor to transform lives was, in the Spanish anarchist case, perhaps one of the most renowned spread all the way from New Theater that was inaugurated by the Libertarian Youth through to something like 500 different newspapers and journals that at its high point, the Spanish anarchist movement managed to publish.500. This is of course, before the day of television and Internet, and 500 paper publications, some of which were extraordinarily high quality. I mean, paper quality as well as what was in them. I think it's quite extraordinary also, if we look back to the rather wonderful work of Jose Albert Junco, lamentably not translated into English, he documents the way in which these anarchist journals at the end of the 19th century, for example, were locked into debates on the values and the worth, the correctness or otherwise of Darwin's theories of evolution. They debated Darwin, Mendel, Lamarck and others, Weissman, in terms of human and animal evolution. These were journals that covered the whole panoply of human experience and attempted to interrogate all the different branches of human knowledge. Indeed, the Ruiz de Blanca was subtitled Review of Art, Culture and Sociology. The third aspect, which perhaps is worth pointing out or focusing on, is the question of revolutionary measures. The question of ends and means, I think, was present in most anarchist undertakings. And a couple of these revolutionary endeavors occurred to me as we heard our speakers. The first, perhaps, was those contained in the May 1936 Saragossa Congress of the CNT, the Syndicalist Union, as it fixed, as it were, its concept of libertarian communism, drafted by Isaac Puente, the medical doctor, and approved in that Congress one of the, perhaps again rather quaint aspects of this confetto Confederal. This libertarian concept of the National Confederation of Labor was the remedy for love sickness. If two people were locked in some kind of rather unproductive relationship, it was advised that one of these individuals should move to the next libertarian commune down the valley. So there was a solution for everything here in the Concerto Confederal. But during the Civil War itself, and during the Revolution, let us not forget, this was a social revolution, as well as a civil war during the Revolution in 1936, as well as the revolutionary measures introduced on the question of prostitution, the so called liberatorios project, which didn't quite come to pass. There were some incipient moves towards that process. There were also others, such as Mariano Gallardo, who wrote that the solution for prostitution and the solution for our collective sexual desires was to create houses of sexual satisfaction. And no one would pay to go into these. People would have a brief medical examination as they went in, just to check that everything was okay. Presumably consented to by the parties. Off one went into the house of sexual satisfaction. One satisfied one's desires if one was lucky, and then one could come back the next day. And one could come back the next day even if one wasn't lucky. So I think that those were kind of concrete proposals, however utopian, however scare brained they may well appear. But I think that one again must insert those ideas, those undertakings within a society that was highly controlled by the Catholic Church, where in the 1870s, 1880s, a few years previous to the 1930s, something like 70 or 80% of people were illiterate. So we see the contribution that is made by such undertakings. Likewise the question of free love.
- [66:03]
A
A.
- [66:03]
C
Remarkable articulation in a tightly controlled Catholic society. But here I'm going to perhaps introduce some rather more ambivalent tones to the discussion. I hope this doesn't mean my forcible ejection from this hallowed hall, but what we see is that free love, for example, as Martha hinted, was primarily a heterosexual affair. It was primarily a monogamous affair. There were those around the edges of the free love debate, particularly those who followed the circle of Emile Armand, the French anarchist individualist, who believed that one could take as many free lovers as one wanted. But even then there was very little discussion of same sex lovers. I also think that even though.
- [67:05]
E
The.
- [67:06]
C
Question of Neo Malthusianism and birth control was quite clearly adopted by some anarchists, notably under Luis Bulfi and his Saludi Fuerza journal, established in 1904, for which he was imprisoned on more than one occasion, birth control techniques were virulently fought against by many anarchists who believed, as Martha, I think pointed out, that this would entail a perdition of the working class in respect of its historic enemies, the bosses and the landowning class. There are ambivalences as well over homosexuality. Lucia Sanchez Elronil, for example, lots of people knew about homosexuality. No one spoke about it. The Rizza Blanca, for example, When Federica Monsen wrote about homosexuality, viewed the criminal who was in the jail as being a far more worthy person to support than the homosexual, the invertido, the invert who had been imprisoned. But also, I think that there were over schematic, over simplistic notions of nature and what nature was understood to tell the anarchists. Nature was read almost as an open book once it had been divested from its religious connotations. So heterosexuality was seen as being natural. Other sexual desires were seen no less to be moral or even biological perversions. Likewise, the question of science. Many anarchists believed that science, often written with a capital S, was per se, emancipatory. All one had to do was to introduce science in the Latin sense of scientia, knowledge, but also science, perhaps more conventional, or how we understand it now in order to emancipate the workers. But I think finally, perhaps there was a lot of ambivalence as well over the question of power and how power could be articulated, how it could be combated, how it could be undermined, how it could be retained or contained or constrained in social relations. And I think that the revolution and civil war in many ways laid bare some anarchist theories on notions of power, not least, as we know, there was a sizable element of the Spanish anarchists who voted in favor of joining the Republican government. So I think it's useful. And these, of course, these things estas Scotia dwellin, these things are painful in many ways to relate. But I think that we need, if we're going to be able to see anarchism for what it was and is, we need to take the lessons from the past in order to hopefully forge a different kind of future, which I'm sure we are about to do in the next half hour.
- [70:10]
A
Thanks very much to our three speakers who I think have raised an enormous range of questions about the relationship between anarchism then and now to sexual politics. And I'm sure that there are lots of questions that people want to ask. So perhaps if people could put their hands up and let me know if you want to make a comment or ask a question. Participate in the debate. And I'll take two or three questions in the first instance, we may run a little over 8 o'.
- [70:42]
C
Clock.
- [70:45]
A
Who's going to kick us off? Yeah, that's in the middle there, I think, behind the.
- [70:55]
F
Yeah.
- [70:57]
A
Do we need a mic? Yeah, could you.
- [71:08]
B
Hello. Hello.
- [71:10]
C
Hi. I wonder, how do you educate someone in anarchy? And once you do so, don't you.
- [71:18]
B
End up putting anarchy on the top.
- [71:20]
C
Of the hierarchy of ideas.
- [71:24]
A
Okay, thank you. Other questions.
- [71:35]
D
Hi.
- [71:37]
F
Thanks for your talks and I thought you raised some really interesting points about sexuality and anarchy in marriage. And I was wondering if you could bring us up to date with your thoughts on the same sex marriage debates and sort of if from an anarchist perspective, if that's a useful place to be putting our energies.
- [71:58]
D
Yeah, thank you.
- [72:00]
A
Question at the back on the right.
- [72:06]
D
Hi, I was wondering if you could.
- [72:10]
B
Sort of enlighten me.
- [72:11]
F
I'm not really familiar with sort of anarchist theory, but if there was still such a sort of archaic idea about sex work and you know, there's about.
- [72:21]
C
This idea of, you know, liberating sex.
- [72:23]
D
Workers through practical skills.
- [72:25]
F
If this is sort of an attitude that is still, you know, sort of sex work, negative attitude and anarchism today.
- [72:34]
A
That'S probably enough questions to begin with. Do you think there's one there on the right? Okay, yeah, hi.
- [72:40]
D
Yeah, thank you for that. Similarly to you, I'm not that well read an anarchist theory, but I heard recently from the comedian Sarah Pascoe told us about in her latest show about how a lot of myths about female and homosexuality hark back to Darwinian theory. And I wonder if any of the panelists here tonight had any comments on why those ideas are still able to flourish and what's being done.
- [73:15]
A
Thank you very much. I'll take a second round afterwards, but I'll give our panelists a chance to fairly briefly maybe choose one of the questions or try and link a couple of the questions. Terence, do you want to start?
- [73:31]
B
I don't know if I can link all those questions.
- [73:33]
C
You don't have to leave them, but.
- [73:34]
B
I'll respond to and then hopefully pick up some extra points along the way. In terms of this is a question that there was a question asked about same sex marriage. This is a debate that is quite heated in the United States, I suppose globally, the issue has opened up and of course anarchists, the anarchists that I write about, Goldman, the anarchists that Martha spoke of, they had a sharp critique of marriage. And so it's very hard to reconcile or to think what would they say about present same sex marriage debates? I think a, they wouldn't want to stand in anyone's way if they really felt like that was going to validate their relationship. But on the other hand, I think they would have to ask what is the practical and political effect of validating marriage above other social relations? So there's that kind of charm circle, who's inside and who's outside. By creating a valid form of same sex desire, are we pushing to the sides polyamory, queer sex, kinky sex in ways that actually harm people in the community? And in terms of where we want to put our focus, if, if you're interested in a practical question, in the United States, as I said, and I suppose everywhere one's access to rights, public health, et cetera, are so embedded in marriage that to gain access people enter into marriage. So maybe the task is to ensure that people have access to housing and public health. And then that kind of creates a different context in which to have the debate. And then there was also a question around sex work. And I think it's absolutely true that, you know, when we look back and we look back at the late and now, Martha, you can speak more to this, whether or not those politics are archaic or don't seem to fit. But last evening at dinner we were remarking that there are essays like Emma Goldman's essay on the traffic of women that really kind of address the complexity of a politics that looks at prostitution not as a kind of let's save the fallen, but as what is a space in which female desire can, or male desire for that matter. Sex work can be realized outside of the context of penury, you know, so people are driven by absolute physical need, is that freedom? Or by the kind of patriarchal structures under which people live. So there's a space there, I think, for a much more liberatory discussion. And I think what's interesting about the anarchists is they bring kind of multiple perspectives, but they're certainly not without blinders.
- [76:43]
D
I don't actually have too much to add. I mean, I think what Terrence said about same sex marriage, I mean, the women of Mujeres Libres were fiercely critical of marriage and of people who were engaging in, you know, these kind of non state, non church forms of signifying a relationship. That was, you know, one of the quotes that I read. I think, you know, in a contemporary context. An additional piece is this whole question of. Personally, I think the danger of a focus on same sex marriage is to recenter a kind of heteronormativity or a kind of homo normativity, you know, so that certain kinds of relationships are recognized, other kinds of relationships are not. And you get a kind of secondary marginalization of anybody who doesn't fit the new norm. And I think what they were trying to do is to question that norm question. You know, the analog would be to question how is it that we get access to benefits and rights and does it make sense that people should get access to things that they need by virtue of the person that they're in a relationship with. That, you know, if you think about it that way, it doesn't make any sense. So in terms of the sex work piece, I was, you know, very aware as I was thinking about this, that they didn't talk about sex workers as people who needed to be liberated as workers. They saw women who were engaged in prostitution as people who did not. That that was not a free choice. I think they would have said, or maybe in fact probably did in that context, that in a situation of both severe male domination and extreme economic inequalities, you can't talk about choice. You know, one of they said only economic freedom makes possible the other freedoms, whether the level of individuals or community. A woman who lives in a state of economic dependence receives payment, even if from her legal husband. So they were making an argument very similar to that which Emma Goldman made in trafficking women, which made the same kind of argument. So given where they were coming from and where they saw where this was located, I don't think they would have been particularly open to this. And then there was one other question about education. What they meant by education was a whole range of things, some of which were mentioned by Richard, which I didn't have a chance to go into. But they weren't talking about necessarily sitting people in classrooms, although they were talking about sitting people in classrooms to let them learn how to read, because they really felt that literacy, being illiterate in a society means you can't get information about what's going on, and it's totally disempowering. So literacy was really important. But they saw education in a whole range of ways through the relationships that people had, through games people played, through theater groups, through songs, through going to the countryside, through magazines, radio programs, anything that could provide an alternative to the messages that folks were getting. And the best kind of education was when you were yourself engaged in doing something together with other people to change the situation that was keeping you in thrall.
- [80:46]
A
Richard, I wonder if you could ask the Darwinism question, if you don't mind.
- [80:50]
C
Yeah. Could I say anything about the other?
- [80:51]
D
Yes, you can.
- [80:53]
C
Okay. I'll try to be brief. Yeah. I think that the question of education and what do you do when people don't take that education on board, I think is a good, good one. But I think Martha's response for me chimes in with what I would say. In many ways, education was not something which was passive. It was A kind of toolbox, as it were, to act. So there was a relationship between what was coming in, as it were, and what may well come out or go out. And I think that kind of relationship means that the education that was being in broad terms, that was being offered or that was being made available was flexible in that way. But I think there's a certain teleology there. What do you do with those who do not then conform to the new? And I think that the argument there would be that anarchists have always realized that these things are a process, there's no necessary set horizon and that's either a weakness or a strength of anarchism. I agree with what was said here about the question of same sex marriage and I think it's a very important one, a burning issue in many ways. But I think that the debate, again, I think, needs to be changed. We need to be focusing on things like housing, health care and other questions. Having said that, I think that the value or what same sex marriage permits certain people to do is different from what it permits others to do. I'm going to come out as being, well, am I married? I'm certainly got a same sex partnership at the level of the Andalusian regional government. I couldn't even probably find a piece of paper it was written on now, but it worked for me at a time, at the time when with my partner who was a non EU person. These things have a different significance, I think. So I wouldn't rule out same sex marriage or criticise those who engage in that, but I think that that's not the issue. We have to shift the debate. Rather than accept the terms in which the debate has been forced upon us, we have to shift the debate onto broader questions of sexuality, health care, zero hour contract, etc. Etc. And finally the question of female inferiority in the canon of Western canon. Well, I think in many ways, of course, this comes from the Aristotelian and Galenic notions of what women were. They were the paler form of men. There was only one sex and men had developed much more than women. Women were locked into this kind of inferior, imperfect form and men were the most perfect form. So I think in many ways, so the argument went. So in many ways, I think that historic inheritance really played out very much in the 19th century.
- [84:03]
A
Thank you. And I suppose the other thing about the same sex marriage debate is that of course anarchists would be critical of it because of the ways in which it doesn't necessarily challenge the class system based in property. That would Be the other kind of engagement with that. Other questions. Yeah.
- [84:26]
E
Hi.
- [84:27]
F
Just as a contemporary anarchist, I was just wanting to answer your question about like contemporary anarchist views on sex work. And maybe I'll talk about queer sexuality as well, but I'm kind of nervous, so sorry about that. I think as anarchists, as kind of others said, various Libras talked about how struggles should be led by those most affected. So we learn from the sex workers within our own movement. I'm a member of the Anarchist Federation. We have sex workers in our movement who have educated us about the sex work. But also we don't have a view. We have a view of work within capitalism as being degrading, as being forced. Nobody has a free choice under capitalism.
- [85:02]
D
To go to work.
- [85:02]
F
And whether that work is sex work or other work. I'm a nurse, I'm a care worker. Does that mean that giving care is degrading because I'm paid to do it. It's complex. It's very complex under capitalism. And I think to kind of just pick on, pick on sex work as a form of work that's like more degrading than other forms of work. I mean, what about cleaners? What about all these works where we kind of. It's not necessarily done in a positive way under capitalism, but it's something that somebody's contributing to society and maybe it could be, hopefully will be contributed in a better way. Why do we look at sex work as degrading? Is it because of our views on women and what effects sex has on women, where sex gives men power but takes power away from women? And maybe that's why we see sex workers inherently degrading based on our kind of patriarchy, and talk a bit about queer politics within anarchism. I think we would critique the current kind of movement as being very liberal, based around kind of the pink pound, gay marriage and a kind of sanitized view of non heterosexual relationships, a privileging of monogamy within that. And like look at us, we're just like you really. We spend money, we get married, we want to have kids too. And sure, that's choices that like, like people should make whatever their sexuality, but that kind of sanitizing of it is something that we would be kind of critical of.
- [86:19]
D
It's fine.
- [86:19]
F
Why should I say that? No, it's okay. I'm just like, you don't be scared of me. Why should I have to say that? You shouldn't be scared of me because what I do in my bedroom or what I do Wherever I like. If it's not affecting you, it's not affecting you. And I think that is the basic anarchist principle. Do I sell what but harm none? The freedom to wave my fist is fine as long as it's not actually touching your nose. And so why should we try and be, oh no, we want marriage just like you. I agree with the critiques from the speakers who said, yes, we have to look at healthcare, we have to look at certain other ways and those should be addressed. But yes, kind of the idea of inviting the state into the bedroom is a bit kind of weird for an anarchist, although. I know, but we should also look at ways that we need to celebrate. So why is it, what are the kind of the positive things about humans? What is it about coming of age? Like we should be celebrating births and relationships and all those wonderful things in new, wonderful ways. And I think there's a default of like, we'll go to the kind of way that's provided by the church or by other religious establishments. You know, I know anarchists who still have bar mitzvahs because it's an important coming of age thing. And do we have those new celebrations, those new ways of doing things, do we have other ways of kind of celebrating the passage through the year and coming up with those ourselves? Because otherwise we are going to default to the kind of state one people want to celebrate their relationship so they end up having a wedding just for lack of anything else.
- [87:37]
A
Thank you.
- [87:46]
E
Hi. Very briefly, two points. I would like it if you could expand a little bit on the tensions between a liberal understanding of anarchism and a collectivist or egalitarian understanding of anarchism, in particular anarchistual politics, and whether it is relevant, you know, in debates about this today. And the other point was.
- [88:15]
D
It is.
- [88:16]
E
Important to highlight that we are talking about same sex desire and the freedom of desire more broadly, outside the strict language of rights and outside the language of identity. But then we have homosexuality and the heterosexual world on the other hand. Right. So I would like you to expand a little bit on what was there, you know, in terms of this freedom of desire in these other spaces that we may all today call bisexual or pansexual. Mostly thinking about the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century where this was pretty messy. Thank you.
- [89:03]
A
There's a couple of other questions that I'm just doing it in the order in which I've seen them. So if I don't get to you, then just come for a drink and grab people to carry on with the discussion. But there was Lawrence down at the front here, and then I saw the guy there.
- [89:19]
G
So I had two questions. The first was one element which was, I think, very interestingly common to both of the talks was a focus on anarchist sex radicals in a revolutionary context. And of course, we've had a couple of questions now about which suggest a very different situation today where the mainstream of LGBT movements are focused on rights, including the right to marriage. And so my first question is, to what extent do you think, or in what ways do you think that wider revolutionary vision is still relevant to sexual politics today? The second question, and this is a difficult one, but. So it's just an invitation maybe because both of the talks were focused on historical figures. And I'd just like to invite you, if you'd like to say something about your own visions of what an anarchist inflected sexual liberation might entail. So to exercise a bit of imagination in that regard, what sort of society might it be and how might relationships differ from the sort of world we live in today?
- [90:46]
A
Okay. There was a question at the back there, and then I'm afraid I'm gonna have to stop and give the panelists a chance to respond relatively briefly, but imaginatively.
- [90:59]
B
Thank you. Don't worry. This is a yes or no historical question. So one of you mentioned the engagement of the anarchists with the sexology discord from the late 19th century.
- [91:13]
G
I was just curious, did they engage.
- [91:16]
B
Or did anyone from that environment engage at all with the reconfiguration of sexual and subjectivity discourse and political discourse brought about by psychoanalysis? I'm a complete ignorant in anarchist, so I thought I might ask. And that's it.
- [91:31]
A
Thank you. Okay. I don't know how you're going to manage this, but we're clearly going to. We're going to run over. But maybe if you take two minutes each to pick a response to any or all of those questions in whatever manner you see fit.
- [91:49]
B
Emma Goldman read Freud, and when Freud toured in the United States, she responded, saw it quite favorably. She, perhaps naively, as many of the anarchists viewed sexology as a kind of where they. They understood it, they took it in as a liberatory discourse. I mean, I think they filtered it in a certain way. But yes, there is an engagement with the ideas of Freud, at least. As to the question of now, I've a little bit forgotten, but there certainly were tensions within the American movement between what were called the individualists and the communist anarchists. And then there were other varieties. But when it came to the question of sexual, the articulation of a politics of homosexuality. There they seemed in the main to meet on some shared ground. I also think that it's very difficult for us to understand the way they talked about it outside the lens of the binary today. But there are some hints in the way in which they talk about sexuality that, that seem to indicate that they're not operating in a world of heterosexuals, homosexuals and then kind of bisexual as a no kind of more desire, tastes, inclinations. But that sexological discourse does come in and quickly shapes things.
- [93:04]
A
I don't know if you're going to be able to get away without saying something about your vision for the anarchist.
- [93:11]
B
One of the things I appreciate about anarchy, because politics is it's very open to multiple interpretations. So I'm not sure that my sharing, my particular emancipatory vision would be the revolutionary kind of message that would set things off. Yeah, no, maybe after a glass of wine.
- [93:40]
D
I would say in terms of the questions I was raising about a liberal versus a non liberal understanding of freedom, where the anarchists, my anarchists, if I would call them, I shouldn't use that language, but on the liberal understanding, my freedom ends where your freedom begins. And we are in a sense competitors with one another for, for freedom. And for the anarchists that was just not the case. That we make things together and we in acting together, it's not like bumping into one another, it's just a different image. Now obviously that's, you could say Pollyanna ish, it doesn't always work, but that was the perspective from which they operated. I won't exactly answer your second question either, but I will answer the first in the sense of saying that I do think that a wider revolutionary vision is still relevant to sexual politics today. And I think partly what we were saying, each of us in different ways about the same sex marriage debate is that it's, you know, so much of what's going on in society now that we're asked to respond to on a kind of individual or one. Problem basis, we can't really do precisely because we're operating from way too small a frame. But if you start talking to people about how living under capitalist patriarchy doesn't work for people, that it's oppressive, that it's abusive, that there aren't in fact solutions to some of these problems without major social and economic change of the sort that all of these people were talking about, you know, that's in fact what we need I think, to try to address the problems of today. So I think even more, I mean, not even more, but equally today as before, we need that larger revolutionary vision. And that's why I think it's so hard for us to look back on what they were doing and really understand what they were getting at. Precisely because they had a context, they had a movement in which they were located that enabled them to move forward together and to feel like they could and they were making a better world. You know.
- [96:25]
B
Can I say one last thing? I do agree with the comment made from the floor about selecting out sex work as somehow, you know, that's the problematic profession that one needs to investigate. And to the degree that, and I think this speaks to what you just said, free choice around labor and around sexuality and around life, they're all tied together and it's a conundrum that we all face. So I just want to agree with that comment.
- [97:02]
C
Very briefly. I mean, huge question from Lawrence there. How does one answer? Well, I think, of course I could go and cite the contents of the libertarian manifesto of 1936, but perhaps more constructively, the anarchists, of course, did say that there were no blueprints to the future society. But certainly one thing that I would like to see is the breaking, the continued breaking down of that division that was mooted between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Not only that, I think the division between male and female, the division between. Between the genders. I think that a very interesting film which you may have seen is Lucia Puento's xxy, the Argentinian director featuring Elvara com as an intersex person who says that the choice is that there is nothing to choose. That's the kind of society that she wants to live in. In other words, you know, this. This pressure to actually choose in accordance with broader, rather oppressive discourses, we can collectively, I think, and individually try to sideline with the question of psychiatry. Well, I think that there is a link here because of course, the creation of heterosexuality, the creation of homosexuality. We have to remember that homosexuality as a term was only invented in the 1860s, before the term heterosexuality. These are inventions. And anarchism in the late 19th century as well as other social movements was grappling with these new inventions and how to position themselves within this new framework, this new sexological framework that was emerging. So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is that certainly in the Spanish anarchist movement and the Argentinian anarchist movement, and I think in the Italian anarchist movement, I think it's true to say Carl would no doubt I don't know may agree with me. There was a huge amount of discussion about the values and the possibilities that psychoanalysis opened for the revolutionary movement, and particularly in particular in Spain. I think Freud was less popular. More popular were Jung and Adler, and there's a little bit of Willem Reich in there as well. So I can't really say more about that because we probably have to end. But there was a whole swathe of ideas that was coming on stream in the 1930s that were, again, a transnational process. Reich also wrote about the Spanish anarchists as being the most radical in their sexual politics in the early 1930s.
- [99:57]
A
Thank you so much, everyone, for your.
- [100:01]
D
Hang on, hang on.
- [100:02]
A
For your fantastic questions. And as always in successful events, I feel like, you know, we're just beginning to scratch the surface of a proper conversation, which is a sign, indeed of the success and of the generosity of our speakers. And I hope that you will join us at the Gender Institute for the reception and come up to us and each other and talk about your anarchist utopia that you would like to leave LSE with this evening. And the Gender Institute is if you go straight down to the bottom of Houghton street and you turn left, it's the first LSE building past the Garrick Bar and it's the fifth floor and then you're there. So please join us. Thank you.