M-L-M Mayhem!

The cult of the princess, with all of its feudal and patriarchal aspects, is so intrinsically tied to the socialization of little girls that my daughter was already consuming it, despite the fact that both my partner and I haven't been feeding it to her, because contemporary gender socialization is what it is. Meaning, it's fucking immanent. Thankfully, I had something of a breakthrough several days ago when my discovery of an unopened "Wonder Woman" bendable toy––a gift from one of my daughter's aunts––coincided with my daughter's decision to, in the midst of her claims about being a princess (which means, for some reason, nothing more than wearing dresses) suddenly declare herself a "super hero", pretend that a kitchen towel was a cape, and run about the kitchen/living room.  And yes, before you say it, I am aware that Diana is the princess of Themyscira (I used to be a comic geek, peoples, thanks to a dad who read me his original Daredevil comic

Due to our current living situation , taking our daughter up to daycare (which is close to where our home was) has become something of a difficulty.  In the past, I could just carry her down the street and, in three minutes, have her deposited in her class with her friends.  Now, it takes around forty minutes of stroller maneuvering.  Even still, it is a privilege to be able to take Samiya to daycare since so many people are not able to access or afford these services.  We are definitely lucky to have a childcare subsidy, which is difficult to get, that allows us to pay for daycare at a severely discounted rate while continuing to work and thus afford our bills while maintaining our respective careers. Play, play, play on those padded mats! To be clear, many of the children at my daughter's daycare are from proletarian families––and often single parent families––who are able to afford daycare due to similar subsidies, family benefits, and welfare.  Since there is no such thi

(In lieu of other posts, book reviews are an easier way to keep this blog a-hopping!) I have to say that, aside from the design principles, I have not been a fan of semiotext(e)'s intervention  series.  The Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection was made more politically significant by Glenn Beck's ravings than any actual movement––even the bourgeois press that wanted the French state to be correct about its supposed "home grown terrorism" has grudgingly admitted that there wasn't any anarchist conspiratorial actions.  Then there are all of the Tiqqun books, the IC's predecessor, that the series is releasing––annoying trash theory that is sometimes, particularly in the case of Theory of the Young-Girl , just misogynist even though the authors would like to pretend, as is typical of this elitist radicalism, that anyone who would charge them with misogyny "doesn't get it." Excuse me while I stifle a yawn.  All of this being said, Ser

As expected, my recent post on the problems with "sex positivist" feminism caused some controversy.  And though most of this controversy was anticipated, and the complaints about my position most often generated the predictable poverty of thinking (and intentional misunderstanding), there were some criticisms that were more interesting and salient.  To be fair, I think that the post in question was not especially good: it was unfocused, it lacked a clear structure, and was generally a rant derived from a few related frustrations that just happened, at the time the post was written, to coincide.  Even still, at least one of the complaints that made it unto my comments string (keep in mind I am ignoring all of the bullshit complaints and "critiques" that were levelled on other sites where it was reposted) was interesting enough, regardless of how it was phrased, to inspire this specific post.  The comment in question was arguing that all of my articles and discussion

I first realized that the "sex positive" turn in feminism––with its treatment of pornography, "sex work", and sexual practice in general as emancipatory––represented a rightward drift in mainstream left activism in 2005.  Before then I found it disagreeable but could, at the very least, countenance some of its arguments: I might have been uncomfortable, for example, with its pro-pornography position but I understood that there were indeed problems with the way in which some anti-pornography radical feminists agitated within the bourgeois legal system; I might have been annoyed with how it framed all radical feminists as "sex negative" due to misreadings of Dworkin's Intercourse  but I also recognized that Dworkin's analysis––as masterful as it was––was not without its problems.  But it was in 2005, when the film Sin City  was released, when I decided this "sex positive" brand of feminism was intrinsically liberal if not implicitly reactio

For my first post of 2014, and because my collective blog on leftist parenting didn't succeed in getting off the ground, I'm going to reflect on some of my most recent thoughts about being a father of a girl who is now over fifteen months old.  Since she is a significant part of my life, and parenting takes up a significant chunk of my time, I obviously spend more time thinking about raising her than I do about my academic life.  And aside from the logistical thoughts regarding how to organize everything else in my life around her schedule, and how to share childcare equitably with my partner, I also find myself ruminating quite a bit about the larger ideological problems I will be forced to encounter as she grows up in a capitalist world. Particularly, I have thinking a lot about a certain poem by Caitlyn Siehl ( it is not your job ), that has been circulating on innumerable tumblr sites, which succinctly explains some of my fears regarding my daughter's future.  Maybe I

I'm taking a break from my "stalinism" series (which is becoming longer than I intended) in order to promote the  First Conference for a Proletarian Feminist Movement , planned and organized by the PCR-RCP initiated Proletarian Feminist Front in Montreal.  This preliminary and semi-open conference will take place on November 30th to December 1st in Montreal.  Although it is intentionally beginning small (which is why the call-out, linked below, was not released until now), the idea is to build a national feminist front carefully, following the manner in which the Revolutionary Student Movement has been building itself with similar conferences. As many of my readers will be aware, the Maoist movement has been promoting "proletarian feminism" for some time, most significantly in the works of Anuradha Gandhy and Hisila Yami. The PCR-RCP has long been involved in investigating this kind of feminism and how it is precisely demarcated from bourgeois feminism.  For s

One of the reasons I stopped being an anarchist was because, due to anarchism's often unquestioned utopianism, I was incapable of theorizing a mechanism that could suppress reactionaries.  Instead I wanted to believe that a revolution, if it was truly a revolution, would somehow convince those reactionaries who were too cowardly to fight and die for their beliefs in the moment of revolutionary upheaval, would somehow be convinced of the righteousness of the cause.  I believed that any attempt to build a state capable of legislating against their behaviour would be authoritarian and that this legislation, amounting to "Stalinist gulags", was also counter-revolutionary. This is indeed an extreme form of utopianism because it is premised on the idea that there is some root and nebulous human nature that, once we remove the authoritative mechanisms, would flourish and immediately evolve into something entirely socialistic.  Humans would become as they really are (as if the

I know I said, back when I first posted on the birth of my child, that I would write about revolutionary parenthood on another blog.  The problem, however, is that this other blog has failed to develop; the other two parents involved, who have more experience than me, haven't yet posted anything.  And since parenthood has now become a massive part of my life, I cannot just pretend that it does not exist.  No, I'm not planning on making these kinds of posts normative here (really, this is mainly just pressure to launch that other blog), but I feel like, in lieu of a proper platform, I should write something about my the importance of raising a child as a communist. First of all, I feel the need to discuss the problem of raising a child who is nominally a girl  (because she has two x  chromosomes and because of this will be socialized as "female" and thus will be perceived as "female" until if and when she decides otherwise) in the context of the vestigial i