A few weeks ago, my girlfriend dragged me to downtown LA to attend the annual Zinefest. On the second floor of a small used bookstore, zine makers from around the country cramped together to sell their art. Everyone had something to say in their small paper booklets. Some people used their zines as a vehicle for their comics, some for their drawings. Some for their writing, some for their photography. It seemed mostly to me like everyone was just trying to sell something, and the stale air was making me tired and nauseous and I didn’t feel like buying. Just as I was about to subtly try and edge us towards the exit, I heard a girl at the table to my left say that she was giving away her zines for free. Free seemed like a reasonable price to me, so I meandered over to peruse her work.
I picked up the first thing that caught my eye. It was a thin pamphlet, in photocopied black and white, with an anarchy symbol and the title “Anarchist Queer Person of Color” handwritten across the front. Cautiously I opened it. I read its intoxicating eight pages three times in quick succession. I closed it, and looked around, wondering how my mind could have expanded so vastly without anyone around me noticing. I read it once again, slowly, letting each of the ideas it presented bounce around in my headspace and develop. Truthfully, the zine presented me with more questions that answers. In light of this Chicana Feminism class I find myself in, I was left with, and am still left with, one main question: Is anarchy the natural progression of feminism, especially for women of color?
Women of color, especially queer women of color, experience oppression in many layers. The oppression of sexism, of racism, of homophobia. These oppressions are of course not just person to person, but systematic and institutionalized. Everyday, we find the government encroaching on us, further exacerbating and normalizing our oppression. From the immigration laws of Arizona, to the proposed forced sonograms that will have to precede abortions in Texas, to the lack of marriage equality in several states, we can see the government stripping women, people of color, and the LGBT of their rights and of their respect. Laws like these assume that we are incapable of rationality. In the eyes of the law, women are too unstable to own their bodies, people of color are not to be trusted, and homosexuals are too abnormal to deserve the sanctity of marriage. And too often, the eyes of the law become the feelings of the citizens. As long as we live in a world where groups of people can be legislated against based on gender, race, and sexuality, we cannot be free from oppression. People begin to forget that these things are the results of arbitrary decisions, and start to believe that they are norms that should go undisputed.
History has shown us that it takes generations of non-dominant groups to create enough force behind their ideals to change laws and thus change social norms. The suffragists, the civil rights movement, the Bolsheviks. But what if, instead, we did away with government and its abilities to create laws and social norms that hinder our existence as minorities? History has also shown us that whoever is in power, whether in democracy, socialism, monarchy, or fascism, does not like to give up that power. Dominant groups loathe the thought of officially, and therefore socially, conceding any power to non-dominant groups. Anarchy, ideally, does away with government and the societal stratifications it creates. Oppressed groups, like homosexuals and women and people of color, would no longer have to worry about changing the government and its laws to change the ideas of people. Instead, they could focus on changing the oppressive ideas that people have without needing to first dismantle the government induced institutions and systems that propagate these ideas.
Like many other forms of society, anarchy is probably far better in theory than in practice. What about criminals? Won’t we still need laws and government for them? Well, maybe, or maybe we’ve just become so blinded by the way that things are that we can’t think of solutions that don’t fit into the little boxes we know so well.
Anarchist Queer Person of Color Zine. Anonymous. 2012.