These on Identity Politics | Anarchist news dot org

From anti-oppression means attack Patriarchy extends its influences to all arenas of society including resistance. Resistance does not originate from a location that is exterior to power. There is, in fact, no location that is exterior to power, only different assemblages of resistance and complicity.

Power is simultaneously material and discursive, micro and macro. Both the material/ discursive and the micro/macro binaries are western fictions.

There exists a certain politics which has become popular in the Bay Area that overemphasizes the micro and discursive components of power at the expense of comprehending and responding to its macro structure.

While the material structure of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is composed partly of discursive formations (gendered and racialized notions of self and other, presence and absence, gender performativity, etc), it is composed largely of material infrastructure (borders, detention centers, prison cells, riot police, surveilance cameras, tazers, guns, tear gas canisters, factories, freight ships, ports, mines, nuclear reactors, etc).

There is a politic that power can be written away. While the subtle symbolic work of power provides those with the ability to do ?intellectual work? with myriad opportunities for theorizing, any discursive work on the subtleties of power which does not also come into conflict with the material infrastructure of power is simply a ?production of information?.

The greatest break with the symbolic work of power happens in the conflict with the material infrastructure of power which these symbolic formations seek to justify.

When the gestures that mark a material conflict with the infrastructure of power are gendered as ?manarchist,? resistance becomes, in this paradigm, untenable. While it is true that ?to act? is gendered as masculine while ?to be acted upon? is gendered as feminine, it would be a grave error to universally problematize these gestures on which masculinity has been inscribed.

The overturning of heteropatriarchy must not be understood as synonymous with the performace of feminine gendered actions and the avoidance of masculine gendered actions.

This falsehood would have us complicit in the materiality of power for fear of being complicit in its metaphysics. We are already complicit. We must no longer fear the re-emergence of power relations in resistance in such a way that prevents us from engaging in resistance.

It is not the man who attacks the infrastructure of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that is a patriarch, but the man who defends it.

Source: http://anarchistnews.org/content/these-identity-politics

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