this is a post about abuse and the community dynamics that enable it
I am feeling particularly depressed at the moment by how many people in communities with supposedly radical and feminist values experience little to no fallout from abusing and assaulting people. This has come up four or five completely separate times in the last month or two. I am feeling particularly depressed by my own complicity in these situations, my decisions not to pursue the reasons why former friends no longer speak, not to ask people to expand on what they mean by describing someone as “a creep” or “a scumbag”, not to work at committing particular names and faces to memory. I’m a smart person but the main way I’m smart is not my memory or my concentration or my breadth of knowledge or the sophistication of my conceptual frameworks but that thing Lorena calls being quick or sharp, being good at connecting the dots, making correct inferences without prompting. I should be on this and I’ve deluded myself that I am when I’m not. But I think I could be if I wasn’t afraid to think about it.
![this is the first true selfie I took on the webcam on the computer I’m writing on. I was 21. extremely asymmetrical haircuts were In. I thought I should open with some kind of Important Selfie because this is a Notes Toward An Anarchist Theory of the Selfie post.
I used to be really against putting any photos of myself on my blog. partly I didn’t want to be seen as vain, or be judged by my appearance, which, can of feminist theory worms, my god. I think it’s fair to say there’s some internalised misogyny there. but it’s really a coming-of-age-as-an-anarchist thing. When I was eighteen I went to my first global summit protest, the g20 in melbourne. afterwards a lot of my friends were tracked down by their indiscretions and arrested. it was pretty scary. security culture became the buzzword du jour. for quite a while after that I didn’t put my real name on things, I never gave my surname in meetings, I untagged photos of myself on facebook, I changed my phone number every year or so, I took my phone battery out in meetings, I talked in code words, I installed TOR, I put a sticker over my webcam before it could take a photo of me. weird things that didn’t really take me off-grid (I mean, I still had a facebook account and a mobile phone, you know?). I stopped doing that partly because I wasn’t willing to commit to the level of paranoia that would make any of the above worthwhile, but mostly because I realised it was causing more problems than it solved. security culture makes you paranoid and cliquey. it makes resistance movements faceless, grandiose, intimidating, hard to get involved in. for someone with my privileges, living in the society I live in, the risks of political action are very rarely so great as to justify these sacrifices. if I wanted to do something risky that I thought was worth it, I would think protect my anonymity then, sure, definitely. but as a lifestyle — no. Safeguarding your anonymity for pragmatic reasons is one thing, and I want to stress that I totally support this and that there are so so many good reasons why you might want to remain anonymous. But anonymity as interchangeability, as its own virtue, as a liberal universalism even, in slogans like “we are everywhere” and “we are all [victim of brutality]” — that, I find questionable. We are not all everywhere. We come from different places. I lose followers every time I post a picture of myself. immediately, without fail. I sometimes gain net followers but I always lose a few people. I don’t mind, I think it’s fair enough. l don’t think women who look like me (or at least, women who look like the version of myself I choose to highlight) particularly need more visibility, and I totally get it if opinions from or blandly flattering pictures of normatively-feminine cis white women is not something you need more of in your life. the GPOY has often been theorised on my dashboard as a form of feminist visibility or vulnerability/oversharing (see also karaj on feminist narcissism and rgr-pop on vanity). Also, elsewhere, as a form of marketing of the self, girls doing the best we can to get social capital in a paradigm that judges on appearance. That’s not really where I’m coming from. My position on visibility is about two to four drinks away from “everybody stab out your eyes”; my position on self-disclosure has been described as advocating “the right of women to be like Ron Swanson”, which is not all that far off the mark. It’s more that I just want to acknowledge my context, especially when I’m talking about feminism and the body. I particularly don’t want to hide my whiteness. (obviously whiteness is not just about how you look, but like, appearance is a pretty solid clue here.) I like to have a face and a name, I like people to know some things about where I’m coming from, I like to attach myself to things I’ve said in the past and acknowledge them even if I’ve changed my mind. I want to be accountable, and I want the flipside of that, I want a reputation, not necessarily a big reputation, but some credibility. I want to be someone you can have a history with, build a relationship with. I want roots. none of this has to attach to my legal identity or even a friendship with me, my identities don’t have to cohere. but a reputation does need something somewhere to attach to. I follow almost eight hundred people and I have a clear idea of the personality and interests and history of only a few of them. they’re predominantly people who’ve posted pictures of themselves. it just makes them so much easier to remember. you’ll note also that I’ve never changed my tumblr url. I’ve never changed my name, either. while there are a lot of great reasons to change your name and I wouldn’t presume to know the factors going into any individual’s choice in the matter, a lot of people I’ve known change their name so regularly or go by so many names that it feels like shedding history. hunter made me notice that this one scumbag guy we know changes his name every time he burns bridges with another group of friends. lorena has a really hard time taking it seriously when a white cis person changes their name to something more ~interesting~ sounding, it even makes her kind of mad, like, cool, you get to choose to be weird and exotic. I think a name is like a place. there are a lot of potentially good reasons to move town. plus nomadic cultures are a thing, of course, and some people have roots within them. but I’m uncomfortable with the whole anarchist traveller thing, because politically speaking, I’m in favour of roots, history, relationships, accountability.
how many times have women in anarchism complained about abusive guys just going travelling as soon as they get confronted? and I’ve talked a lot about how living my home town is really important to me in maintaining a sense of groundedness and connection to people who don’t share every facet of my politics, not disappearing down a countercultural rabbit hole. isn’t that supposed to be the point of anarchism or any other politics of decentralisation? increasing the weight of human relationships, therefore the power of the community and of social pressure, therefore making hierarchical bureacracies unnecessary. if those aren’t your politics that’s one thing, but if you do want to remove the state and also want to remove social pressure then aren’t you just kind of a brat? absolutely none of this is prescriptive. I’m just tired of safeguarding my own anonymity. that’s my face. you’ve seen it before. my name is liz, if you didn’t know. it’s not an uncommon name. it’s not a remarkable face. it doesn’t matter. it’s a history and a geography.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md3y93aZMB1qzi4y4o1_400.jpg)
