Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and as “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.
Colonization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.
The history of gay marriage supposedly goes something like this: in the beginning, gay people were horribly oppressed. Then came the 1970’s, where gays—all of whom looked like the men of the Village People—were able to live openly and have a lot of sex. Then, in the 1980s, many gay people died of AIDS—because they had too much sex in the 1970s. This taught them that gay sex is bad. The gays who were left realized the importance of stable, monogamous relationships and began to agitate for marriage and the 1000+ benefits it would bring. Soon, in the very near future, with the help of supportive, marriage straight people—-and President Obama—gays will gain marriage rights in all 50 states, and they will then be as good and productive as everyone else
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Yasmin Nair, Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage
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Against Equality Collective
“Against Equality is an online archive, publishing, and arts collective focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics. As queer thinkers, writers and artists, we are committed to dislodging the centrality of equality rhetoric and challenging the demand for inclusion in the institution of marriage, the US military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.
We want to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility!”
wherethewavesbreak:
Squatters at an abandoned house in Buffalo, NY. They live and practice an anti-consumerist lifestyle.
They subscribe to freeganism, a bubbling stew of ideologies that draw on communism, radical environmentalism and old-fashioned frugality.
