… if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves (compare Rep.), they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.
Plato, The Symposium
“To remember” – to recall, to not forget, to bear in mind, to look back on, to cherish and to prize, to celebrate; it is this rich semantic field that we labour when we return to the past and extol riots and rebellions, not to confine the past to the past, but to give it life still, in the here and now. “All sensation is already memory”, wrote Henri Bergson. But should the memories die, our experience becomes the less for it.
To remember the Stonewall riots of 1969, we share two texts: a selection from the Queer Nation Manifesto of 1990 and (Verso Books blog) and a reflection on gender subversion from the CrimethInc. collective, and between them, a brief and immensely lucid discussion by Judith Butler on the politics of gender.
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“Anti-Sex” and the Real Sexual Politics of the Right
by Lee Shevek
(butchanarchy.medium.com/The Anarchist Library)
So common is the conceptualization of reactionaries as having “anti-sex” politics that it is hardly remarked upon. They hate sex workers, they hate it when women and other marginalized genders have a lot of sex, queer sex, or extramarital sex, they want to keep children from any form of sexual education, etc. What do these all have in common? Sex! So it really must be that the right-wing is anti-sex.
It is an easy conclusion, too easy, and so reductive as to render itself useless as a framework for political analysis. Reactionaries are not, nor have they ever been, anti-sex. Instead, what they really believe in is the politics of compulsory sexuality and patriarchal sexual control. Not only is reducing right wing ideology to being simply “anti-sex” inaccurate, it also positions those in opposition to reactionary politics as necessarily “pro-sex.” This frames sex as an inherent political “good” to be defended, when in reality what is in need of defending is bodily autonomy and consent.
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