Dispatch from Medusa Rising
(she's gone members-only from here on)
We Say Persecution
As always, we must decide what our social contract means and how to live it. Are we preparing for a break-down so complete that we have a chance to re-write that contract? We must be. A death-drive is an endless hunger, and we must be prepared to restore life as we would live it.
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Medusa Rising is devastated at the persecution and erasure of women, LGB, black, latino, indigenous, AAPI, MENA and TQ peoples driven by the 47th US administration, its supporters, and its bosses. We say erasure because we mean it literally. Words, policies, data, workplace rituals, plaques, design elements meant to signal community—erased, deleted, painted over. Whole websites whose purpose is to support public partipation in human well-being and dignity are gone. The new false language is made of newsspeak, double speak, and meaning reversal. The dis-location is palpable. It unnerves, it enrages.
We say persecution because high ranking women, essential leadership and women in line for promotion, in the US military have been fired or their careers of accomplishment stopped in their tracks.
We say persecution because the DEI-hunts are on-going and punitive, intended to fighten and create compliance as much as silence or remove any noncompliant individual.
We say persecution because the ripping away of social and medical support for TQ people is traumatising (and as an example to others) and will cause physical harm to those whose medical treatment is suddenly denied.
As always, the erasure and persecution work hand-in-gauntlet. As always, the cruelty is both spectacle and end-in-itself.
We say persecution because a private, malicious, non-citizen of the US is now in possession of the identifying and economic data, from SSNs to bank account numbers, of nearly every citizen and guest in this country. The threat is live. How these authoritarians will use this data remains undisclosed.
As always, we must decide what our social contract means and how to live it. Are we preparing for a break-down so complete that we have a chance to re-write that contract? We must be. A death-drive is an endless hunger, and we must be prepared to restore life as we would live it.
RadMatFem, and Medusa Rising in particular, abhor this administration in both its philosophy and action. We do so because our social contract demands that the social prestige of one demographic never come at the expense, displacement, erasure, or harm to another.
We would not have pogroms against any immigrant for refugee throwing communities into terror. We would not have mothers double-spoken as 'birthing people' or female fighter pilots denied training, we would not have any human being suddenly yanked off of a hormone (mis)treatment regime that will throw their bodies into metabolic chaos. We would not have this country's history whitewashed as the only way to be a people is to embrace a people's contradictions and flaws. We would not have any government by resentment. Resentment is a death-drive, and death-drives are endless hunger.
The prinicple of enlivening difference insists that we reject the vicious glee in bigotry, the blatant chauvenism, and the homicidal disregard for human well-being within and across any border, any community.
RadMatFem rejects the visions of both Patriarchy 1.0 and Patriarchy 2.0.*
RadMatFem would build otherwise, toward the margins, toward new systems invented as we need them by peer groups and knowledge communities prepared to live not on each other or with each other, but FOR each other.
*The short-hand belongs to Jane Clare Jones of Culture War Blues where she recently used it this way to refer to the patriarchy we all know and loathe, and the new patriarchy made of the Butlerian/Transhumanist subversion of a materialist left position:
Neither Patriarchy 1.0 nor Patriarchy 2.0 has any intention of learning to live inside its ‘meat-suits’ or within our material limits, choosing tech-accelerationist escapism over grounded materialist responses to the approaching ecological catastrophe. They would like us to believe we have failed as a civilization because we just haven’t dominated shit hard enough yet, having been led to rack and ruin by wokeist ‘pussification’ and an insufficiency of ‘masculine energy’ (to quote the great nerd alpha known as Zuck).