No church in the wild

About this book

In a new book on “The Wild” I turn to anarchist thought to elaborate a queer politics for this particular moment of crisis and renewal. As many thinkers have proposed recently, a turn to anarchy makes sense at this time precisely because people’s faith in the state and in a politics of inclusion and assimilation is wearing thin, particularly in leftist circles; and, anti-hegemonic, anti-state and anti-assimilationist positions have been rendered thinkable by Occupy movements and other global expressions of radical dissent. My recent book, Gaga Feminism, in that it both calls for and describes an end to “the normal,” or that form of state power that manages people by disciplining them in relation to a fantasised norm, could be called anarchist. And my book on failure, in that it breaks with the all or nothing logics of success driven by capitalism, could be characterized as anarchist critique. In this new project, I seek to make explicit the stakes of a queer investment in anarchy that both reaches back to punk movements from the 1970’s for inspiration but also seeks other traditions of anarchy globally. But the existential question is: Who am I once I have given up my relationship to this thing, wildness, and have become domesticated within the order that seeks to rule me? Who am I? And I think that is a question that is embedded in what we are calling anarchy here. Who am I when I am colonized? Who am I separate from that colonization? (Jack Halberstam)