#liberatory politics for all

[dionysus-complex]

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[vestian-dynasty]

Accusing transgender women of being transmedicalists and against nonbinary people is particularly laughable and reveals an assumption that the only people who can have complicated genders are TME. Do you think the victim of third-gendering and de-gendering might have a complex relationship to gender? That perhaps the woman whose primary identity to most people is a porn category could have a complicated gender identity? Indeed, I don’t think I know a single transgender woman who doesn’t identify as some flavor of nonbinary. Among she/theys, she/its, exclusive it/its and they/thems, neopronoun users, he/hims, she/hims etcetera, it strikes me as obvious that a transgender woman would have a complicated relationship to gender. But when you don’t speak to us, don’t interact with us, take basic liberatory politics as signs of bigotry, and make callouts for us as a hobby, of course you’d see us as a monolithic single gender category that can’t possibly understand the complexities of gender! We’re women, after all!

It’s a massive self report in my eyes that these people are so eager to cast the specificities of transfemininity aside to get an easy dig in on us. It’s embarrassing

[ghelgheli]

I don't think now, at the time Iran is viciously defending against US imperialism, is the time to be making left-communist critiques of them.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not some unimpeachable bastion of anti-imperialism in western asia and it is dangerous to withhold critique just because it is opposed to US hegemony. The IRI is a theocratic ethnostate pushing back against euro-american imperialism while enacting its own centuries-long imperialism on the ethnic and religious minorities that fall within and around its borders. On a weekly if not daily basis, the IRGC, the paramilitary basijis, as well as the regular police harass, arrest, and kill not only such minorities as Kurds, Balochs, and Ahwazi Arabs (don't have to look far for this), but also ethnic Persian political dissidents and gender and sexual minorities.

The history of the 1979 revolution speaks to the development and rise of Khomeinism in the 1970s as a bourgeoisie opportunism that claimed the martyrs of Iranian communists while at every turn promising the disenfranchised baazaaris the protection of their private property. The purge of the Mojahedin in the months after the revolution, the associated purge of all deemed communist, and the immediate suppression of Kurdish autonomy movements in the northwest, all form the legacy of Khomeinism. It is important to be honest about this, to be honest about the reformulation of institutional misogyny and the other ills of Pahlavi Iran under the IRI, while simultaneously recognizing that the revolution was successful in one thing: exorcising the puppeteering hands of the united states from the country. It is important not to fall into the trap of valorizing an imperial power, while understanding that the only liberatory future for the people on the plateau and surrounding regions is revolution from within and below, not external intervention. These are compatible and, indeed, complementary halves of a whole politic!

As a Tehrani, and particularly as an ethnic Persian/Iranian Azerbaijani (Iranian Azerbaijanis being subject to linguistic and cultural suppression, but nonetheless perhaps the most integrated minority), it strikes me as my responsibility to talk about this. And it is something I talk about regardless of what is going on. As an esoteric Shi'a, it especially seems like my responsibility to talk about what Khomeinism has wrought.

And all of that is to say nothing of the fact that in my post I was just critiquing left-Shi'a infatuation with Khomeinism qua ideology, with no mention of the IRI—whose relationship with Khomeinism is varied, nebulous, and I would say secondary to the three decades of theocratic nationalism that has developed since Khomeini's death.

[opencommunion]

one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

[rotzaprachim]

the extent to which some college encampments have managed to independently recreate borders, guards, checkpoints, and identity tests/quizzes (and arguably passports/identification) is a phd in itself and a really mediocre 21st century lord of the flies knockoff

you need a wristband to enter? That’s a passport. Encampment for a specific political orientation? That’s an internally ideologically defined identity test. You need to keep people at the entrance and exists to make sure everyone who enters and exists is an ally or good person or outright not trying to infiltrate the camp? Congrats. That’s a checkpoint. Asking questions to make sure they have values that align with yours? Checkpoint. You quiz people on their identities or relations to political ideology? That can even become an ethnically defined internal identity.

I don’t mean all of these things are inherently bad, but it is worth noting and reflecting how quickly they were set up by people whose stated ideology is to oppose ALL of them. Provides a lot of insight into how important praxis actually is, and the uncomfortable fact a lot of liberatory and rebellious nationalisms or ideologies have gotten damn invested in borders checkpoints and guards in the transition to actually holding structural political power

[vriskarlmarx]

it kind of grinds my gears how much of the commemoration of the coup (both here in chile but also abroad and online) is centered around the figure of allende specifically. there is obviously an affection for him as a figure on the part of former UP militants and people who both benefitted from and generally believed in allende's project in the 60s through '73, and i don't really have a problem with that, but i think it's an issue when allendist nostalgia clouds the judgement of more serious political analysis and action.

like the very obvious thing that it obscures is that there were actually several thousands of victims of murder, forced disappearance, torture, exile, incarceration and sexual violence. to have public discourse and political discussion focus overwhelmingly on the murder of one person does not do justice to all those people, many of whom may have supported allende's government but whose political projects far exceeded his in terms of radicalism. the popular movement in chile in that time period included socialists, communists, miristas, lautaristas, anarchists, and people who were organized workers not affiliated with a political party, and not all of them were even affiliated with the UP, and all of them were targets of the dictatorship. it is erroneous in terms of historical analysis to flatten that plurality to just one person, when there was a huge and powerful popular movement that both backed and exceeded him.

relatedly, i think insisting on carrying out memory this way also treats 1973 as a definite ending. and it is the ending of the project of the UP, sure, but it is not the ending of liberatory aspirations in this territory. it didn't even end them for one single solitary minute. the movement that backed and exceeded allende was able to regroup and rearticulate into old and new organizations that resisted against the dictatorship, sure, but also openly fought for communism/socialism/anarchism (depending on the group) not just through '89, but also well into the 90s and into today. we are very much still here, and still being targeted by the state that cynical commemorates allende every year. pretending that this is all about him overlooks the people who have been killed at the hands of the state since the return of democracy, too, like alonso who was killed 3 days ago in this year's commemorative march, and claudia who was killed in the same circumstances 26 years ago.

the other thing is that allendist nostalgia is reformist in nature, so it's not surprising to see this kind of thing from reformists (though i still don't like it for the above reasons), but it's pretty surprising to see it from people who espouse revolutionary projects. with the utmost respect, this sort of nostalgia and capital-R romance that enshrines allende as some sort of tragic hero only lends credence to a failed reformist project. perhaps the big lesson to be learned from the UP project is that reformism in our political context is doomed to failure, which does not mean that what happened wasn't unjust and horrific, but it is what happened and if we are going to move forward with any degree of seriousness then we have to recognize it for what it was and learn from it.

[pumpacti0n]

We should always be aware that it isn't some innocent mistake that authoritarian "leftists" have constantly failed to acknowledge systems of power other than a vulgar "anti-capitalism" or "anti-imperialism", like they've carelessly left out an ingredient in a cake recipe.

"Whoops, we've acknowledged one abusive hierarchy, but the other ones slipped through our fingers, silly us!" Nope. The reason this analysis of power isn't included in their ideology and praxis is because they consider these hierarchies useful to their projects.

This is why they'll mock or ignore discourse related to youth liberation, disability justice, gender self-determination or anti-patriarchal struggle, for example, or engage in apologetics for capitalist regimes in other countries -- they want to "have their cake, and eat it too".

A key reason why "the left", as some might call it, is not as powerful as it could be isn't because of some lack of discipline (or "degeneracy"), but rather a lack of intersectionality, a criticism that many of those within the black radical tradition, (black feminists and transfeminists more specifically,) have been highlighting in one way or another for at least 50 years.

Authoritarian "leftists" don't want to sacrifice the power that these hierarchies afford them, which explains why they're largely not opposed to prisons, borders, police, the enforcement of gender roles and even capitalism itself, if it's under the purview of the "socialist" ("workers") state and its bureaucrats.

And this is why I keep putting "leftist" in quotes...We're not free until we're all free, so the implication that we should settle for addressing one or two systems of domination while allowing all the others to flourish until we address them in some vague point in the far future is a distortion of what truly radical liberatory politics should entail.

It's simply a myth that we can address capitalism while leaving racism, ableism and misogyny etc. intact, as if they aren't mutually reinforced by one another, as if fascists and reactionaries will forget that they exist once capital is abolished. This is a fantasy, a delusion.

Authcoms love to pose questions like "without a state to enforce class rule, how will the proletariat defend itself?" but a better question would be: "if we fail to acknowledge the hierarchies that atomize and disempower the masses, how could we ever be a threat to capitalists in the first place? how would abandoning the most vulnerable populations serve the interests of the "working class" and "anti-imperial" struggle?

For example, (cis) women make up approximately 50% of the world's population -- so if women are still subjugated by patriarchal rule and the gendered division of labor, how will we have the numbers to fight?

Similarly, a significant portion of the world's population are currently incarcerated. If we don't abolish prisons, allowing the State to continue extracting labor from prisoners and destabilizing untold millions of social relations in the process, how can we hope to match or exceed their powers?

If we do not challenge the capitalist, productivist logic of endless resource accumulation, with its constant pollution of the environment and the displacement and erasure of indigenous peoples and non-human animals, there will be no habitable planet left for us during this "revolution", because we will have destroyed all of it in the name of profit...so what would be the point?

These aren't minor concerns that we can put off indefinitely, and it isn't some innocent mistake that they are left out of the discourse, but are instead deliberate attempts to co-opt liberation struggle for the sake of advancing counter-revolution and authoritarian projects.

It's no wonder then, that they are eager to dismiss any criticism of their projects the result of "western propaganda", as if these same critiques aren't leveraged by very people belonging to populations they constantly tokenize whenever it suits their agenda.

They'd much rather treat every marginalized community as some monolith or as primitive victims in need of saving and representation by a vanguard. This chauvinist, colonial, assimilationist, antisocial attitude is endemic in (often white,) authoritarian circles, because it forms the basis of their position towards racial and gender hierarchies, that they are a natural and inevitable factor of organization itself. They are wrong.

In this sense, they aren't meaningfully different from the capitalists they pretend to hate so much. In truth, they are just jealous and greedy for more cake.

[boringkate]

Kinda wild to be living in this era of increasingly normalized cosmetic surgery and manipulated imagery clashing with like a maybe simultaneously increasing level of fat acceptance etc.

Dudes spend all day looking at jpegs of twenty two year old girls who have spent a bajillion dollars and gotten BBLs and implants and a dozen other surgeries and a full face of makeup and who then still had to be photoshoped to achieve the type of true marketability that comes easily to AI generated anime waifus. And those dudes won't even jack to those jpeg in a "Yes! Reject the fetishization and false dichotomies of naturalness! Embrace transhuminist bimbofication, babe!" type of way bc they're too head empty to even consider what goes into looking like that. I promise you that they don't know or care who Nina Arsenault is. Those dudes are jackin in a "This is what women and their bodies are supposed to look like! This is womanhood in its natural state! Tradwife material! Uncorrupted by the performative wokeness of a wide chin!" type of way.

And as a fat aging tranny porn slut (who doesn't have a bajillion dollars and is scared of getting cut open and is bad at makeup and doesn't even wanna be high femme) I obviously find it distressing. I feel like I'm expected to look like that. An unachievable goal that I'm only inevitability drifting further from.

I also feel tho like there's never been a better time to swoon over some frumpy babes. Like Instagram and snapchat etc may have put everyone's body dysmorphia into overdrive (totally nuked the mental health of their entire user bases) (made absolute normies think they have to LARP as celebrities which requires looking like celebrities), but social media (and I wanna explicitly include OnlyFans and other platforms that have democratized pornography) has also provided avenues for the types or body diversity that you wouldn't have found in a 2000s era magazine announcing that Brittany Spears is a fat pig or even in an equally profit motive driven Dove commercial.

Which you could (maybe correctly) interpret as all being part of our widening beauty norms. That it's totally internally consistent for society to be more accepting of women who have gotten liposuction and women who have gained weight. It's body positivity and bodily autonomy all the way down. Totally liberatory! But it feels less like a widening and more like a fracturing. In line with the fall of media monoculture and a growing political divide between young men and women. It's what you get when people are increasingly online and siloued off. The people following immaculate celebs and influencers on insta aren't the same people checking out your favorite dyke's 50th hastily taken underarm hair pic.

[txttletale]

can you elaborate on the reasons ? what criticisms do you disagree with?

criticisms i disagree with:

"they character assassinated jane" amiguita there was no character to assisnate.

"they character assassinated dirk" dirk is at his most interesting and likeable ever and is just about the only redeeming thing about these

"they were just written to spite the fans" if true tht would have been Epic, and Based. but they very obviously werent

"its too violent and sexual for cheap shock humour" did you. read homestuck, the web comic? what were you Expecting... also like it or not the sexual content isnt just random or gratuitous it is obviously trying to be a conclusion to the whoel coming-of-age theme of homestuck as a work.

"so-and-so is out of character" homestuck characters are malleable little dolls that can be rearranged to suit the narrative at a whim. this is true about all fictional characters ofc but it is like explicitly textually metaphysically true in homestuck

my criticisms:

the heavy-handed political messaging is fucking tedious and awful and so profoundly of its time in a bad way. its clearly a reaction to trump but it doesnt have anything interesting to say about him or fascism or racism or anything, really, except, um. Cheeto in the white house?. the whole Evil Jane plot is too stupid and contrived for the sake of the satire to take seriously but also its awful satire written by liberals who think fascism as invented in 2016 by the orange man

god can we fucking talk about how fucking embarassing the obama shit is. jesus fucking christ. for a start it's a callback to a running jhoke in homestuck that is straight up just super racist. and they decide to pivot from the joke being 'its funny that theres a black president', which is good, but they pivot it to 'obama seems so heroic and magical now that we're stuck with the Orange Man', which, admittedly, is better than Being Racist, but also sucks shit. he killed people amiguitas.

'post-canon' is cheap bullshit. like, the work makes a big deal about tryng to talk about What Canon Is, without ever acknowledging the concept of, like, IP law. claiming to just be a non-canon continuation like any other when it's made by people with the Official Exclusive Legal Rights just feels hollow and detooths any liberatory/deconstructive potential there. unironically my opinion of it would go up like tenfold if it had been actually published in AO3 instead of just joking about it.

in general i think that all of the attempt to deconstruct fiction or storytelling is rooted in a really weird and flawed model of storytelling. a lot of it seems to be taking an extremely long route to writing something bad on purpose and then saying 'see, if you wrote something like this, it would be bad'. Okay. i like deconstructive collapsing narrative shit in e.g. if on a winter's night a traveller because i think calvino has trenchant and interesting insights about literature and storytelling. i do think hussie also has those but they essentially dropped and explored all of them in homestuck and the epilogues just seem like an attempt to connect ohomstuck's disparate and contradictory approaches to Narrative into one overarching schemata and then crtiique that schemata, which i think is a doomed project that results in little of interest to me.

[bimboficationblues]

how is "nationalism of the oppressed" mythological

In a dual sense - 1) like all nationalisms, it relies on central myths, and 2) the idea of an innately revolutionary "nationalism of the oppressed" is itself mythical, not a useful analytical or political tool but basically a way of handwaving difficult tactical questions.

All nationalism is in some sense myth-making - it posits an underlying, intangible unity among a group of people with highly diverse and divergent interests and traits. This is part of the reason why nationalists so often talk in the abstract language of "national spirit" - abstraction is kind of the point. This intangible unity doesn't *have* to be ethnicity, it's frequently (for example) the highly nebulous concept of "culture." But the inevitable slide towards ethnicity - and I do think it is inevitable - is unsurprising.

If you identify the unifying force of a people, the thing that makes it a "nation," with something like language/religion/culture, those things are fairly fluid both in space (taking a variety of different forms across different places) and time (changing over time for any number of reasons). This is especially the case because those traits are basically "open," at least theoretically: other people can move in, learn a language, convert to a local religion, and/or learn the techniques and style of local cultural production (and in the process change the character of the culture). So the supposed unity of "culture" is very obviously made up. (It's also worth noting that, insofar as nationalism is coextensive with statecraft, we often see efforts to preserve or create a "national culture" or "national unity" that leaves out or represses certain groups and practices; figuring out what constitutes "the nation" is a highly arbitrary process.)

Ethnicity is also fake - it is a "myth of common descent" - but that quality counterintuitively makes it a more stable foundation for a nationalist political project, because it is 1) derived from something in the past, making it harder to contest or observe, and 2) an immutable trait within the myth's context. You can't identify or convert or learn your way into being a part of the ethnos, you either are or you aren't. This makes for a much more stable boundary line around who is included or prioritized within the polity and who isn't.

As for why "nationalism of the oppressed" is mythological: it is not a meaningful historical category. When people invoke it they are collapsing a bunch of different projects and movements, some of which are conservative and some of which are revolutionary. I also reject the idea that nationalism's goodness is contingent on whether it is practice by an oppressed or oppressor group and nothing else - lest we forget that Zionism was once considered a kind of "nationalism of the oppressed."

For the socialist or the revolutionary, nationalism should be considered a kind of tactic; it is not a good in itself. Any revolutionary or liberatory movement is going to have to make decisions about what they want the movement to look like - its positions, rhetoric, propaganda, goals, etc. Nationalism is a historically popular means for doing things like rallying people to your cause, establishing basic principles for statecraft, cultivating a new political and social culture, etc. This is basically Frantz Fanon's argument in Wretched of the Earth - consistent with his arguments in his previous book, Fanon rejects the notion of a prepolitical national unity. He does not want to wade around in the primordial soup for a "true history" for colonized countries to return to or emulate. But nor does he reject nationalism as a strategy for combating colonialism on the field or in the body. Rather, he wants a class-driven national culture that is emergent from within the process of anti-colonial resistance and that ultimately gives way to an internationalist, universalist humanism once its purposes have been achieved. It's an extremely qualified kind of argument. I don't totally agree with it, but it's an argument that I can wrap my head around and endorse in the broad strokes, because above all it is talking about nationalism as a means towards something.

The kind of people who bastardize Fanon and try and recuperate him into their insipid microwaved politics have this entirely fictional idea of nationalism as an innately revolutionary end, that if you put nationalism in the hands of the right people it will automatically gravitate towards liberation and will not introduce the same kind of problems that the nationalism of colonial powers or capitalist countries has. This is just demonstrably not true (*gestures vaguely at cross-pollination between black nationalisms and black conservatisms, the historical relationship between nationalism and liberal statecraft, the success of right-wing religious or ethnic nationalist movements like Hindutva or Ba’athism in post-colonial countries, etc.*), and is basically just weird, idealist nonsense about how being oppressed makes you morally virtuous.

It also has the effect of obfuscating class politics - ironic, since the people that most frequently utter this line are ML(M)s. There are quite a few "nationalisms of the oppressed" that presume the working-class of a country or a group has more in common with its local bourgeoisie or professional-class counterparts (frequently the spearheads of nationalist movements, if we wanna talk about "class character") rather than the working classes and oppressed groups of other countries.

What the "nationalism of the oppressed" myth does is effectively evade hard strategic questions. Instead of asking "how will this help the cause? what problems might it introduce? does this conflict with long-term goals and are the short-term victories going to be worth it?" it just assumes from the outset that none of those questions are worth asking. It assumes that nationalism is an automatically better foundation for a movement than humanism, or cosmopolitanism, or internationalism.

[and-her-saints]

american who grew up protestant: all religion is bad because of [feature unique to christianity] and [feature unique to abrahamic religions]! i can’t believe all of us christians grew up being taught that [teaching unique to protestantism]! this specific religious issue affects everyone [by "everyone" they mean "americans"]!

like obviously there’s massive nuance to this but it’s sooo tiring hearing some american WASP or whatever discussing religion without knowing anything about religion in other countries, different cultures, Indigenous religions and spirituality, ethnoreligions, religious persecution, or religions other than christianity (or religions other than christianity, islam & judaism at *best*).

you cannot “destroy religion” your way into collective liberation.

you cannot argue for “a religionless world” without inherently and inadvertently calling for cultural genocide.

most of these exvangelicals don’t even care to explore the ways they’re still part of the cultural hegemonic majority. they don’t care to realize they’re still *culturally* christian, and that just because they now don’t believe in a god, it doesn’t mean their values, their perspective, their ethics, their cosmology, their politics *are no longer* influenced by their experience of their specific brand of protestantism/christianity. they are, most of the times and by all means, Christian Atheists™️

they have no interest in unpacking how their critique and disdain for “the Old Testament God” has historically affected and continues to affect Jewish people to this day. they have no interest in unpacking how their open mockery of Jesus also offends Muslims, not just their hometown church.

Christianity hurt you. but that does not give you a free-pass to be weird about all religious people and their beliefs. especially when their background, experience, level of privilege, geographical location, and religion practiced looks nothing like what you used to do. because, believe it or not, not “all religion” is the same. it’s soooo not that simple.

“end all religion” sounds like a liberatory chant when your ex-religion belongs to the cultural-religious hegemony of your region and has a strong political and social power (which IS to be criticised and dismantled, don’t get me wrong.) however, “end all religion” sounds a LOT less liberatory when you’re a persecuted religious minority. because “when” we do “end all religion,” who do you fucking think is going to be ended first?

TLDR: good for you for deconstructing. 👍 now, deconstruct some more. 👍 atheism is fine, anti-theism is a harmful pipeline.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Palestinian liberation is a feminist issue. While this truism should need no elaboration, it has, as with so much that relates to Palestine, necessitated discussions, clarifications, analysis and documentation, again and again. Palestine rights activists have long been familiar with the all too common phenomenon known as PEP: Progressive Except for Palestine. Less known, but no less common in feminist circles is FEP, the Feminist Except for Palestine phenomenon. Books such as Evelyn Shakir’s 1997 Bint Arab recount incidents of FEP going back to the ’60s, with many Arab feminists being shunned by their American friends over their support for Palestinian liberation. FEP had one of its early expressions on a global stage at the 1985 United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya, when Betty Friedan, an icon of second‑wave western feminism, with its slogan ‘the personal is political’, tried to censor the late Egyptian feminist Nawal el‑Saadawi as she was about to walk up to the stage to deliver her address. ‘Please do not bring up Palestine in your speech,’ Friedan told el‑Saadawi. ‘This is a women’s conference, not a political conference.’ Sadly, little has changed in global north feminism’s rejection of the very humanity of the Palestinian people, as evidenced in their continued exclusion from national and global discussions of women’s issues. White feminism has continued to align itself with orientalist imperialist militarism; Ms Magazine cheered the Bush Administration’s US war on Afghanistan in 2001, calling it a ‘coalition of hope’, and suggesting that invasion and occupation could, indeed would, liberate Afghan women. The white feminists in the Feminist Majority Foundation, which bought Ms Magazine in December 2001, never consulted with Afghan feminist organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who denounced both religious fundamentalism and western intervention in Afghanistan, and who opposed the US attacks on their country. More recently, hegemonic feminism’s desire to exempt Israel from criticism led to the fragmentation of the Women’s March, the coalition of women’s and feminist groups that came together to denounce the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US. The co‑chair of the 2017 Women’s March was Brooklyn‑born Palestinian American Linda Sarsour, a grassroots organiser who had long championed Palestinian rights. When journalist Emily Shire asked in the New York Times ‘Does Feminism Have Room for Zionists?’, Sarsour responded with a resounding ‘No’. Many felt threatened by her outspokenness and visibility. Another Palestinian feminist, Mariam Barghouti, also asserted in a 2017 article that ‘No, You Can’t Be a Feminist and a Zionist’, and explained that: ‘When I hear anyone championing Zionism while also identifying as a feminist, my mind turns to images of night raids, to the torture of children and to the bulldozing of homes.’ In the wake of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, white feminists are denouncing the unsubstantiated accusations of sexual violence against Israeli women, without addressing the Israeli state’s amply documented gendered violence against Palestinian women, children, and men. ‘Feminism cannot be selective. Its framework comes from true and absolute liberation not just of women, but of all peoples,’ Barghouti continues, building on bell hooks’ analysis of feminism as a complete liberatory movement. ‘A feminist who is not also anti‑colonial, anti‑racist and in opposition to the various forms of injustice is selectively and oppressively serving the interests of a single segment of the global community.’ Simply, ‘feminism’ that aligns with regimes that engage in racial and ethnic oppression is gendered supremacy; no ideology that hinges on supremacy and discrimination is reconcilable with feminism.

[northern-passage]

Liberation is a Daily Practice also during Christmas

This year, the holiday season arrives with the hardships of displacement, homelessness, starvation, and lack of shelter from the cold. Churches across Palestine have cancelled their historic Christmas festivities in protest of Israel’s settler-colonial genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza to pave the way for grief and political action.

While succumbing to the sedative of consumerism is commonplace during the holiday season, this year, such distractions will not halt our commitment to our values of freedom and justice. We pledge to counter the colonizer’s Christmas capitalism with our mobilized solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The Israeli regime and its imperial abettor, the United States, rely on the general public to remain distracted by consumerism so that they can continue to profit off of the genocide of the people of Gaza.

We, Queers in Palestine are steadfast in our presence in the streets and on our land, strategic in how we consume, and focused on the road to liberation. We are calling on everyone to join us in action:

Keep Palestine central during the holiday.

Keep countering the hegemonic colonial narrative: talk about Palestine in the family, friends and community gatherings.

Resume the disruption of the flow of commerce: commit to a sustained boycott of Israeli products, institutions, and corporations complicit in genocide. Where we spend our money shapes our reality.

Attend actions, keep taking to the streets and bring your loved ones with you.

Raise the flag of Palestine wherever you are.

Remember all those whom we have lost, support and aid the injured survivors and the grieving, and stand behind the ones who are steadfast in their resistance by all means possible.

Empires and colonial entities spend billions in the hopes that we may reach a moment of frustration and to convince us that we have no agency over our fate and political future. Capitalism sells us instant gratification, and we reject that notion which aims to pacify and debilitate those who are committed to the struggle.

The Palestinian liberation struggle is cumulative of the past 75+ years, and this past month we have witnessed massive ideological shifts in the global narrative, as well as heightened political mobilization around the world, as a result of the dedication of those who have remained steadfast and committed to fighting for justice. 

Yet, it is imperative that we keep going, and to remember that no normal life and “business as usual” can go on while an entire population is being wiped out of the face of the earth. So we urge those standing in solidarity with us to commit to the daily practice of organizing which doesn’t take a break even during the holiday season.

-- Queers in Palestine

A Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine | No Pride with Genocide

[hailmaryfullofgrace55675]

"Changing the well-established definition of “trans woman” to accommodate people who were assigned female who are bigender/genderfluid/nonbinary/detrans/retrans makes it harder for trans women to talk about themselves, their experiences, and their identities without constantly clarifying their AGAB."

"Changing the well-established definition of “woman” to accommodate people who were assigned male who are transfeminine makes it harder for cis women to talk about themselves, their experiences, and their identities without constantly clarifying their AGAB."

Literally no difference between what you're saying and terf rhetoric 🤨

Thanks for sending this ask, because I’ve actually been preparing a post about this exact take but it felt kind of “look at me, I spend 16 hours a day borrowing bad posts from the future to complain about” to post it unprompted.

So, the superficial persuasiveness of this ask relies on an unfortunately common misunderstanding of what this whole “transgenderism” project is about.

The understanding that a lot of people work on is that transgenderism is about “identifying how you want to identify”. This works okay for most encounters with trans people. It appeals to a basic libertarian impulse that also works for a lot of other stuff. Generally, people should get to do stuff they want to do and define themselves how they want to define themselves, and when applied to transgender desires this results in people expressing their felt relationships with the social construct of gender and transitioning.

This is not actually what transgender political activism or transfeminism are about. The project of transgenderism did not start with the application of the general concept of personal liberty to the sphere of gender, it started with the concerns of actually existing people: people whose felt and lived relationships with gender were contrary to - crossing - “trans” - the male or female roles they had been assigned.

The transgender project is the project of transgender liberation. It is the project of enabling access to social and biomedical transition. It is the project of enabling escape from the coercive social process of gender assignment. It is the project of creating space in which people who desire to cross the boundaries of their assigned genders can live fulfilled, happy, dignified lives; openly or quietly. Maybe sometime in the next few centuries it will become the project of total liberation through gender abolition, but for now it is the project of making gender work for trans people.

“Changing the well-established definition of “woman” to accommodate people who were assigned male who are transfeminine makes it harder for cis women to talk about themselves, their experiences, and their identities without constantly clarifying their AGAB” is a poor, transphobic understanding of the history of gender and of the impacts of trans activism on cis women, but to the extent that it is true, it is good. It is the transgender project. It is the transfeminist project. It is the gender-liberatory project. Cis people SHOULD have to specify that they’re cis. They SHOULD see it as not the only way to be a woman or a man. Cis women should adapt to understanding that they were not merely “born female” but rather assigned femaleness at birth. They should adapt to understanding that they do not have “female bodies” but rather whatever physical features they have and that these features are shared by people of many gender and not shared by all women. Is it inconvenient to learn about marginalized people and adjust your language to accommodate them? Sure, it can be. It’s also the right thing to do.

The TERF logic in “saying trans women are women is inconvenient for cis women” isn’t “uses of language can cause inconvenience for groups of people”, it’s “transfeminism is bad because it says cis women are privileged and not the only real women”.

There is no such implication in “using trans woman to mean a woman who is trans regardless of assigned gender is inconvenient for trans women”. Aside from sentence structure, these are not parallel statements. The underlying logic of “trans women are women” is the underlying logic of the transgender project: that trans people’s relationships with womanhood and manhood are as legitimate as cis people’s relationships with womanhood and manhood. It is the transfeminist claim that trans women ARE women, real women, that womanhood includes trans women and actually always has. It is the historical analysis that for as long as there has been gender assignment there have been people who crossed those assignments and for as long as there have been men and women there have been people who were told to be men and became women instead. The underlying logic of “AFAB trans people who identify as women are trans women” is “the words trans people use to talk about trans stuff don’t really mean anything, so I can use them for whatever”.

Quite simply, “AFAB trans people shouldn’t identify as trans women because it causes intracommunity problems for trans women, the assigned male kind” is not TERF logic because it is an argument in defense of trans women, in defense of the legitimacy of trans women’s identities and experiences as particular and meaningful, and against transmisogyny. “Trans women shouldn’t identify as women because it causes problems for Real Women, the cis kind” is TERF logic because it is transmisogyny with a feminist gloss.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Open" "AI" isn’t

Tomorrow (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "open source," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code transparency, reusability and extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. The point of software freedom was technological self-determination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement. The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "Free as in Beer" when really it means "Free as in Speech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous – and more instrumental – package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis – it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

Thus, by dribs and drabs, the freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves – they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

In the Big Tech internet, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn't be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.

But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "OpenAI," which is a particularly egregious openwasher).

The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.

Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals.

"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not… a technical term of art, but more … marketing and a signifier of aspirations." Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.

That's how you get Meta claiming that LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.

But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements. This isn't the fault of the AI industry – the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice – but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas. At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that rely on existing products, rather than displacing them.

The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation. In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations have been proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.

For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies – such as requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior – wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric systems that we see as superior alternatives to Big Tech. This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.

The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free, and now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.

But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization – all things that "open AI" fails to deliver. The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on – but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training. And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd/

Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.

One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to iOS and vice versa.

Another example: MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.

The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies. Zuckerberg boasts about how PyTorch ropes developers into Meta's stack, "when there are opportunities to make integrations with products, [so] it’s much easier to make sure that developers and other folks are compatible with the things that we need in the way that our systems work."

Tooling is a relatively obscure issue, primarily debated by developers. A much broader debate has raged over training data – how it is acquired, labeled, sorted and used. Many of the biggest "open AI" companies are totally opaque when it comes to training data. Google and OpenAI won't even say how many pieces of data went into their models' training – let alone which data they used.

Other "open AI" companies use publicly available datasets like the Pile and CommonCrawl. But you can't replicate their models by shoveling these datasets into an algorithm. Each one has to be groomed – labeled, sorted, de-duplicated, and otherwise filtered. Many "open" models merge these datasets with other, proprietary sets, in varying (and secret) proportions.

Quality filtering and labeling for training data is incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and involves some of the most exploitative and traumatizing clickwork in the world, as poorly paid workers in the Global South make pennies for reviewing data that includes graphic violence, rape, and gore.

Not only is the product of this "data pipeline" kept a secret by "open" companies, the very nature of the pipeline is likewise cloaked in mystery, in order to obscure the exploitative labor relations it embodies (the joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians" comes out of the South Asian clickwork industry).

The most common "open" in "open AI" is a model that arrives built and trained, which is "open" in the sense that end-users can "fine-tune" it – usually while running it on the manufacturer's own proprietary cloud hardware, under that company's supervision and surveillance. These tunable models are undocumented blobs, not the rigorously peer-reviewed transparent tools celebrated by the open source movement.

If "open" was a way to transform "free software" from an ethical proposition to an efficient methodology for developing high-quality software; then "open AI" is a way to transform "open source" into a rent-extracting black box.

Some "open AI" has slipped out of the corporate silo. Meta's LLaMa was leaked by early testers, republished on 4chan, and is now in the wild. Some exciting stuff has emerged from this, but despite this work happening outside of Meta's control, it is not without benefits to Meta. As an infamous leaked Google memo explains:

Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/leaked-google-memo-admits-defeat-by-open-source-ai/486290/

Thus, "open AI" is best understood as "as free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses, and whose work product is guaranteed to be compatible with the giants' own systems.

The instrumental story about the virtues of "open" often invoke auditability: the fact that anyone can look at the source code makes it easier for bugs to be identified. But as open source projects have learned the hard way, the fact that anyone can audit your widely used, high-stakes code doesn't mean that anyone will.

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL was a wake-up call for the open source movement – a bug that endangered every secure webserver connection in the world, which had hidden in plain sight for years. The result was an admirable and successful effort to build institutions whose job it is to actually make use of open source transparency to conduct regular, deep, systemic audits.

In other words, "open" is a necessary, but insufficient, precondition for auditing. But when the "open AI" movement touts its "safety" thanks to its "auditability," it fails to describe any steps it is taking to replicate these auditing institutions – how they'll be constituted, funded and directed. The story starts and ends with "transparency" and then makes the unjustifiable leap to "safety," without any intermediate steps about how the one will turn into the other.

It's a Magic Underpants Gnome story, in other words:

Step One: Transparency

Step Two: ??

Step Three: Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has gone on record as objecting to "burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits" as an impediment to "innovation" – all the while arguing that these "burdensome mechanisms" should be mandatory for rival offerings that are more advanced than its own. To call this a "transparent ruse" is to do violence to good, hardworking transparent ruses all the world over:

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Some "open AI" is much more open than the industry dominating offerings. There's EleutherAI, a donor-supported nonprofit whose model comes with documentation and code, licensed Apache 2.0. There are also some smaller academic offerings: Vicuna (UCSD/CMU/Berkeley); Koala (Berkeley) and Alpaca (Stanford).

These are indeed more open (though Alpaca – which ran on a laptop – had to be withdrawn because it "hallucinated" so profusely). But to the extent that the "open AI" movement invokes (or cares about) these projects, it is in order to brandish them before hostile policymakers and say, "Won't someone please think of the academics?" These are the poster children for proposals like exempting AI from antitrust enforcement, but they're not significant players in the "open AI" industry, nor are they likely to be for so long as the largest companies are running the show:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4493900

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[butchscientist]

From Queers in Palestine (here is their website, queersinpalestine is their instagram):

"Since October 7th, we have been witnessing an accelerated genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip and in all parts of Palestine, blatantly and publicly declared on numerous occasions by Israeli governmental and military figures. The brutality and lethal magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and its supporters produce increasingly harrowing conditions for those who remain alive in Palestine, every day, everywhere. This brutality has been sustained through the continued economic, military, diplomatic, and political support of world leaders historically and presently. We note, document, and narrate the hundreds of catastrophic massacres for the past 75 years at the hands of the annihilatory wrath of the Zionist regime; from Deir Yassin to the Tantura Massacre (1948) upon which Israel’s foundation is based, to the Kafr Qassem Massacre (1956) to Sabra and Shatila (1982), and this is just to name a few. There is no possibility of any liberatory political and social movement to achieve life and dignity if it is aligned with the genocidal death machine of Israel. Israel is founded on blood and is sustained through blood.

During these times, and in line with its long-standing exploitation of liberal identity politics, Israel has been weaponizing queer bodies to counter any support for Palestine and any critique of its settler-colonial project. Israelis (politicians, organizations, and “civilians”) have been mobilizing colonial dichotomies such as “civilized” and “barbaric,” “human” and “animal,” and other dehumanizing binaries as a discourse that legitimizes the attacks on Palestinians. Within this settler-colonial rhetoric, Israel seeks to garner and mobilize support from Western governments and liberal societies by portraying itself as a nation that respects freedom, diversity, and human rights, that is fighting a “monstrous” and oppressive society, illuminated clearly through the declaration of the Prime Minister of Israel “There is a struggle between the children of light and children of darkness, between humanity and law of the jungle.”

While these blatantly racist genocidal declarations take the stage, activists in Palestine and internationally are being silenced, harassed, detained, criminalized, workers fired from their jobs, and students suspended from universities. International feminist and queer activists, in solidarity with Palestine, are facing attacks and harassment by Zionists under the premise that those who support Palestine will be “raped” and “beheaded” by Palestinians for merely being women and queers. Yet more often than not, rape and death are what Zionists wish upon queers and women who stand in solidarity with Palestine. Zionist fantasies of brutalized bodies do not surprise us, for we have experienced the reality of their manifestation on our skin and spirit. Yet they never seize to accelerate in their explicit vehemence. It becomes evermore absurd when such framings are constructed against Palestinian society, in light of countless testimonies, reports, and documentations of sexual violence Palestinians have been facing throughout Israel’s 75 years of military occupation. From the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, men and women, who are subject to sexual torture and rape since Israel’s inception to this very day, to daily and escalating settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, to Israeli “civilians” filming themselves torturing kidnapped Palestinians as a TikTok trend, and the most recent harrowing footage published on social media platforms by Israeli soldiers which document the lengths of torture and sexual abuse soldiers and settlers inflict on our bodies regardless of their sexual orientation and gender – all forms of violence, including sexual violence are systematically and structurally part of Zionist domination over Palestinian life. And yet Israeli society continues to weaponize queerness for the purposes of justifying war and colonial repression, as if their bombs, apartheid walls, guns, knives, and bulldozers are selective of who they harm based on sexuality and gender.

We refuse the instrumentalization of our queerness, our bodies, and the violence we face as queer people to demonize and dehumanize our communities, especially in service of imperial and genocidal acts. We refuse that Palestinian sexuality and Palestinian attitudes towards diverse sexualities become parameters for assigning humanity to any colonized society. We deserve life because we are human, with the multitude of our imperfections, and not because of our proximity to colonial modes of liberal humanity. We refuse colonial and imperialist tactics that seek to alienate us from our society and alienate our society from us, on the basis of our queerness. We are fighting interconnected systems of oppression, including patriarchy and capitalism, and our dreams of autonomy, community, and liberation are inherently tied to our desire for self-determination. No queer liberation can be achieved with settler-colonization, and no queer solidarity can be fostered if it stands blind to the racialized, capitalist, fascist, and imperial structures that dominate us.

We call on queer and feminist activists and groups around the world to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their resistance to displacement, land theft, and ethnic cleansing and their struggle for the liberation of their lands and futures from Zionist settler-colonialism. This call cannot be answered only by sharing statements and signing letters but by an active engagement with decolonial and liberatory struggles in Palestine and around the globe. Our unequivocal demands are as follows:

Reject Israeli funding, refuse collaborations with all Israeli institutions, and join the BDS movement.

Strike: Silently or publicly, refuse that your exploited labor be used for the silencing of Palestine activism or the funding, support, and endorsement of military settler colonization and genocide.

Do what anti-colonial queers have done for decades, reclaim the narrative, and set the terms of the conversation, this time about Palestine. What is happening in Palestine is Genocide. Israel is a Settler-Colony. Palestinians are a Militarily Occupied and Colonized Society. Under international law, Israel Does Not have the right to “defend” itself against the population it occupies, while Palestinians Have the right to Resist their occupation. Demanding Ceasefire is the first step in holding Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity. We must also demand to break the siege on Gaza and the dismantlement of the Zionist settler-colony.

Contact your local representatives to pressure them into defunding the genocide, ending their military, diplomatic, and political support with Israel. Speak up against the ongoing and complicit criminalization of solidarity with Palestine and the colonial and Islamophobic projection of European Antisemitism on Palestinian and racialized voices, as we are witnessing particularly in France, the UK, the US, and Germany.

Shut down main streets. Organize a sit-in in your local central station. Interrupt the flow of commerce. Complacency is a choice.

We, queer Palestinians, are an integral part of our society, and we are informing you: from the heavily militarized alleys of Jerusalem to Huwara’s scorched lands, to Jaffa’s surveilled streets and cutting across Gaza’s besieging walls, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."