Written under the name “Joreen”, J
o Freeman this essay explores power relations within radical feminist collectives and was inspired by her time in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960’s. Joreen reflected on the experiments of the feminist movement in resisting the idea of leaders and even discarding any structure or division of labor. Freeman described how “this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied”. As a solution, Freeman suggests formalizing the existing hierarchies in the group and subjecting them to democratic control.
As always, we are meeting at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street on unceded Lekwungen Territory. That’s on Tuesday, June 04 @ 7pm (doors at 6:50). See you there!
Our last meeting sparked a lively discussion around art and it’s role in anarchism and resistance. For our next reading we will explore a chapter from Anarchy and Art written by local author, and all around good guy Allan Antliff. In this chapter Allan interviews one of “Anarchism’s better-known contemporary artists”, Susan Simensky and explores the intersection of art, anarchy, and activism. YOU can find a .pdf to download and read for your self on the right hand side of our website.
For the next anarchist reading circle, we will be discussing a selection from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A history of Collective Joy. A history of how the European peasantry was itself colonized and de-paganized by the Church (and particularly by the Reformation and Enlightenment values), pointing to a discussion of how people of European descent can ‘re-indigenize’.