A Very Brief Introduction To Radical Queer Liberation

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Queer liberation is the shedding of all static identity and the forceful overthrow of social and political norms that maintain a cultural hegemony which leads to the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of queer people all across the globe. It is the recognition that all identity, no matter how “real” it seems, is nothing more than a self constructed illusion, utilized first in order to help us identify ourselves with others who are like us and who share our interests, and against those who do not, thus helping us survive. However, under the regime of the Spectacle, it has been repurposed and made completely arbitrary, something that is determined not by our relations with others but rather by our relations to commodities. It is in this way that it has been turned into something with the sole purpose of controlling the individual and keeping them dependent upon the capitalist mode of production, which is the only mode of production that can provide what is necessary in order to maintain these commoditized identities.

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Queer: something that is strange or odd. Something that is other.

Under the Spectacle, love is, for the most part, only an economic and political relation; a sign of status, success, stability and commitment. Marriage does not unite two people by the power of love; it unites them by the power of law and commodities. In other words, the married couple is united by their alienation, all the while the alienation of both individuals is just that; individual, isolated, separate from the other.

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Under late stage capitalism, it is not enough to understand that you are alienated; you must also understand that your alienation is alienated. Alienation under capitalism, which once was something that workers recognized in themselves and in each other, has itself been alienated and atomized. A 19th century factory worker could clearly see that not only was he alienated in a certain way, but that his fellow workers were alienated in the same way; they all labored together, struggled together, fought together, saw themselves in each other. Alienation, which once produced solidarity among the workers, does not even do that anymore. This is due to the nature of life and work in modern society. Workers once lived in communal barracks, slept in bunks beside each other, got up at the exact same time, and was forced to stare their alienation straight in the eyes, we now have been spared of that burden. Now, our alienation is individualized. Our problems are no longer social, no longer something that exist within a large network of other problems; they are unique, individual, psychological. “You’re not sad because you’re poor and steeped in debt! You’re not sad because your body is treated as a sexual object to be used by men for their own pleasure! You’re not sad because you can’t find a good job! You’re just lazy and won’t take control of your life!” 

As such, we are no longer even capable of recognizing our common struggle. Each individual’s struggle has become a collapsed star, a black hole, that does nothing but gorge itself upon the seemingly random and stray objects that meander within its gravitational field, and the more it eats the larger and heavier it grows, the more all encompassing it becomes, the harder it becomes to control. At least, that is what they would have you believe…

This, obviously, is not how humans actually are. It is what we have been pushed into being by all the forces of modernity. It is the task of queer liberation to smash these material conditions by building and sustaining direct, communal, human based relationships that exist outside the field of commodity production. But this is not an all or nothing game. Whatever space that can be taken, take it. Whatever minds can be changed, change them. Whatever days can be seized, seize them. Do not cede any territory to the forces of Capital and Empire. They are ruthless like wolves and will take any opportunity to further chain you down. Therefore, we must be just as ruthless in fighting back, not for some far future, but for the here and the now. 

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Queer Liberation is the process of transforming and revolutionizing the sexual, romantic, and platonic relationships that make up our everyday lives, and the eventual abolition of that which distinguishes them from each other. It is the recognition that we all exist under similar - if not the same - conditions, and that in order to survive, we must put aside our differences (most of which are self constructed) and join together. It is the process by which our alienation is recognized as being not individual and isolated, but rather, as a condition that is inherent to capitalist society. “XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated - but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. (The Xenofeminist Manifesto, 15).

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The XF Manifesto states that “xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat… reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom.” (21).

It is true; reason longs to be free. But what exactly does a “free reason” entail? Free from what? Emotion? History? Bias? Certainly not, for it is impossible to free reason from such things, seeing that reason itself is merely a tool to help the individual navigate these territories. Thus we see that the term “free reason” isn’t very helpful. So let us propose another term; “possessed reason.” That is, reason that is possessed entirely by the individual who uses it, reason which is merely one of many tools found in their arsenal, which can be used for many purposes. Such a reason is the ultimate tool of liberation, for following it to its logical end, one reaches the conclusion that they are, in fact, a nothingness, and that it is from this nothingness that they can build their own monument to the corruption of their own humanity. “We want neither clean hands or beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.” (47).

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“Nothingness! Corruption! That’s insane!” Well yes, isn’t that the point? If sanity is that which confines us to our metaphorical (and literal) prison cells, why would we wish to keep it? Why would we want a “free” reason when we could have our own, self possessed reason? How can we free ourselves if we allow who we are to be controlled by others? That is the main question of Queer Liberation? How do we escape our enslavement and realize our nothingness? How do we use nothingness as the foundation for a wholly unique corruption, a corruption that belongs to us, and only us? A corruption that rejects things in favor of people, and which further rejects restricted, sacred relations to free and liberatory ones?