Genderfringe: Radical Queer Reading Group

Saturday July 10, 2021 2-4 pm

Genderfringe is a queer anarchist reading group and a place to explore nonstandard understandings of gender and sexuality with aim toward eliminating identity itself.

“To be free from governance entails being free from gender. Being free from gender entails being free from categorization, normalization, and exploitation of governance.” – Lena Kafka

Through theory, literature, and personal workbook-style exercises, the group will explore marginalized concepts of gender, including gender outside neoliberal conceptions of trans and cis bodies. Our aim is to offer each other tools to expand our understanding of how gender works materially, so that we can each apply our own agency to how we live within or outside this structure of oppression.

Genderfringe will meet once monthly for six months, beginning Saturday, July 10th 2-4 pm and continuing on second Saturdays of the month, to discuss offered readings. Further discussions will happen in the group Discord server.

Meetings will be in person at Yes We Cannibal and will include Zoom participants from around the world.

We’ll want to note from the start that “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive” by Lee Edelman is assigned for the last session and is book-length, for anyone who wants to start it early: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lee-edelman-no-future. All other session reading lists focus on essay-length pieces and are intended to be more easily read in a month’s time. 

Session 1: Introduction – Anti-Identity

• Gender Nihilism: an Anti-Manifesto: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alyson-escalante-gender-nihilism-an-anti-manifesto
• Gender Nihilism by Alys Rowe: https://automaticwriting1.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/gender-nihilism/
• “Against Articulation” by Ausonia Calabrese: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ausonia-calabrese-against-articulation
• “Dude, Where’s My Phallus?” chapter from The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Judith Halberstam (pdf)
• “Are You Perfectly Gendered?” checklist from My Gender Workbook by Kate Bornstein (pdf)
  • Pair w May Peterson’s tweets on “compulsory manhood” to balance out of datedness re: AMAB experience:
  • https://twitter.com/maidensblade/status/1381507568858718217?s=20 
  • https://twitter.com/maidensblade/status/1249368942910550017?s=20