After a few dozen email conversations, grammatical and content edits by our beloved friends, and the addition of critical annotations, the IEF is proud to announce the release of The Dictatorship of Postfeminist Imagination.from the preface:
This text is a sort of meta-critique of anarchist practices of feminism. It was provoked from this editor, generally, because of a certain absence of critical feminist theory within a milieu which adopts the assumptions and imperatives of identity politics. It was provoked specifically, because of the intelligence which the text “Is the Anarchist Man our Comrade?” and “Why She Doesn't Give a Fuck About Your Insurrection?” honed in on—of which many of us already know: the affects produced by our practices of consent, accountability, community and identity are weak. Moreover, because the forms, which mimic legal practices, that are taken up to combat internal gendered and sexualized oppression are empty of a consciousness of their historical development. Although this text is responding to particular texts and particular utterances which followed, as a sort of ethical practice, this text refuses the limitation of the milieu that speaks to itself in a particular jargon. By revealing the discourse that is taking place and staking a claim in it, this text intends to overflow its sad boundaries.
The text has multiple voices, contradictions; seams which exist as a threshold between this idea and the next. It always does. It is assembled merely as a temporary space which these bodies who are attached to worlds and their meanings communicate. Although it comes from an editing process which seeks to weave an amalgamation of intelligences and sensibilities into—at the very least—the raw intellectual materials to reveal a political position, this text is also only one such rudimentary position in a long history of feminist theoretical development. And although the voices which are put to use by this assemblage may very well scoff at certain feminist writers, it would be foolish not to examine this history.
The writers, or worlds, which inhabit this text are both infantile and full of a decade of scars. We've been experimenting with our lives, our bodes, spaces, and temporalities, and we've met similar and unique pitfalls. The theory we write is an extension of the theory we inhabit. We start from the horror that we are all potential perpetrators, because we are not sure we have developed the spoken language, or gestural vocabulary to articulate our experiences, and because we can't count past one in four—or was it one in ten? We love power, we even sometimes love to authorize, but we're terrified by the means which we must encounter our power. Because we know it's often at the expense of others.
Hating the irreversible time of daily miseries
and their repetition,-Liam Sionnach | IEF | 2010
