We are very pleased to announce the release of the second issue of the journal Bædan, as well as the free distribution of the first issue through the Anarchist Library.
In many ways, Bædan – a queer journal of heresy picks up where Bædan – journal of queer nihilism left off. Much remains invariant: the form, a general disposition toward hostility, and of course fiery gestures against Gender and Civilization (and all the theories, views of history, and identities which hold them together). Bædan – a queer journal of heresy, does however, take leave of the first by exploring new inquiries and critiques. In this issue we take aim at all manner of radical dogmas, ideologies, and sciences, while also exploring the the worlds of poetics, archetypes, and myth. The new issue is also an engagement with a constellation of recent anarchist endeavors to explore the hell we all inhabit. We remain obviously inspired by conversations within the anti-civilization and nihilist milieu, by recent developments in anarchist thought, by correspondence and critique, and by the actions and words of comrades who are imprisoned or remain at large.
If the first issue of Bædan was a knife thrust wildly in the dark, the second is an effort to examine our enemies in a new light; enemies who bear scars yet endure. In a sense, this issue follows through our initial attack and pushes beyond our own horrors at the consequences of words. We write at a time when everything which seemed slightly possible two years ago has borne its rotten fruit; when queer recuperation has become more powerful and accepted than ever, while the fetish for technology has reached an unprecedented frenzy; when so many efforts at subversion languish under the tyranny of cybernetic identity and aesthetics (even our own etymologies have become identities!); when friends turn away out of fear of the unknown, turn toward all the comforts and certainties of the past (identity politics, traditionalism, religious morality, activism, et al). The old enemies rear their heads and the terrain is as bleak as ever. And yet we take seriously that adage: “There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
Bædan – a queer journal of heresy, over two hundred pages of original content including: a scathing critique of gender and domestication, an exploration of the poetry of Percy Shelley, a vindication of anality and the fecal decomposition of society, an experiment with anarchist rituals and nihilist archetypes, correspondence (friendly and otherwise), and a new translation of Guy Hocquenghem.
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Bædan – a queer journal of heresy is available from Little Black Cart.
Bædan – journal of queer nihilism can be found online at The Anarchist Library.
Bædan – a queer journal of heresy is also on GoodReads.
If you are in Seattle or the Bay Area you can also contact us directly for copies:
[the name of the journal][at]riseup[dot]net
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From the inside:
In the past several years, the question of gender has been taken up again and again by the anarchist milieu. And still few attempts amount to much more than a rehashing of old ideas. Most positions on gender remain within the constraints of one or more of the ideologies that have failed us already, mainly marxist feminism, a watered down eco-feminism, or some sort of liberal “queer anarchism”. Present in all of these are the same problems we’ve howled against already: identity politics, representation, gender essentialism, reformism, and reproductive futurism. While we have no interest in offering another ideology in this discourse, we imagine that an escape route could be charted by asking the question that few will ask; by setting a course straight to the secret center of gendered life which all the ideological answers take for granted. We are speaking, of course, about Civilization itself.
Such a path of inquiry is not one easily travelled. At every step of the way, stories are obscured and falsified by credentialed deceivers and revolutionary careerists. Those ideas presented as Science are separated from Myth only in that their authors claim to abolish mythology. Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, History, Economics – each faces us as another edifice built to hide a vital secret. At every step, we find more questions than answers. And yet this shadowy journey feels all the more necessary at the present moment. At the same time as technological Civilization is undergoing a renewed assault on the very experience of living beings, the horrors of gendered life continue to be inextricable from that assault. Rape, imprisonment, bashings, separations, dysmorphia, displacement, the labors of sexuality, and all the anxieties of techniques of the self – these daily miseries and plagues are only outpaced by the false solutions which strive to foreclose any possibility of escape; queer economies, cybernetic communities, legal reforms, prescription drugs, abstraction, academia, the utopias of activist soothsayers, and the diffusion of countless subcultures and niche identities – so many apparatuses of capture.
[…]
To explore the conflict of the wildness of queer desire against domestication is to take aim at an enemy who confronts us from the beginning of Time itself. While our efforts in the first issue of this journal were a refusal of the teleology which situated an end to gender at the conclusion of a linear progression of time, we’ll now address the questions of origins which hint toward an outside at the other end of this line. As we’ve denied ourselves the future, we now turn against the past. In this, we have only the experiences of those who revolt against the gendered existent, as well as the stories of those whose revolt we’ve inherited. In the spirit of this revolt, we offer these fragments against gender and domestication.
From the back cover:
If there was no pre-existing and definite world without gender, then we cannot conceive of our struggle as being for a return to some pre-gendered whole. Rather we must conceive of our escape as the flight of domesticated beings into the wild. Not primitive or prelapsarian beings, we must become feral beings. We can understand queerness similarly . We aren’t naïve enough to project a positive or essential queerness into the unknown before civilization. Instead, we conceive of our queerness negatively, as escape, refusal and failure of gender. What we pursue then, is a feral queerness which bucks against all the apparatuses of constraint and subjection; a feral queer which appears as out of time, irrational, inappropriate and wild. We won’t find this in anthropology, history, economics or psychoanalysis. Instead we’ll employ magic, heresy, myth and exegesis.