"Victoria" Anarchist Reading Circle
Reading for Revolution
In this 2012 article, J. Rogue examines the history of essentialism in anarchist and socialist feminist movements. Through transfeminist critiques of essentialist viewpoints, Rogue delivers a powerful statement and call to action for all anarchists to “integrate the principles of (trans)feminism into our organizing within the working class and social movements”.
As always, we are meeting at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street on unceded Lekwungen Territory. That’s on Tuesday, June 18 @ 7pm (doors at 6:50). See you there! You can find the reading on our website on the right hand side.
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.
As always, we are meeting at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street on unceded Lekwungen Territory. That’s on Tuesday, May 21 @ 7pm (doors at 6:50). See you there!
For the next anarchist reading circle, we will be discussing Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Paradise Built in Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster.’ During our last session we had a discussion about the whole ‘pessimistic/optimistic’ debate regarding human nature, whether or not our intrinsic sociability or orientation to help each other would arise in the event of system collapse (or if we even have such an orientation), etc.
As always, we are meeting on unceded Lekwungen terrritory, at Camas Books 2620 Quadra street at 7pm (doors at 6:50). The reading is available for download on the right hand side of our website.
After discussing Öcalan’s text on “Democratic Confederalism,” the group decided to continue studying his work. We chose to read “Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution.” The text is available as a .pdf from this link: http://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/liberating-Lifefinal.pdf
As always, we meet at 7pm at Camas Books on 2620 Quadra st on unceded Lekwungen territory.
