Backpain Bonus - LINKS DUMP
Content warning: discussion of state violence and patriarchy, if you don’t wanna see it, go straight to the Next Section.
This is Ospare, I am located in France and this is what it looks like :
Recently, “le 49-3”, a colloquial name for an article of the French Constitution which allows the executive branch of the government to bypass the National Assembly and instantiate any law and regulation they’d wish to, has been appealed.
This would allow the current cabinet to establish its widely unpopular pension reforms (le système de retraite à points) which has been debunked as not only flawed but intently inhuman both in its illegibility to the people supposed to count on it but also in how fucking unfair it is to any working person who can’t count on anything else than the fruit of their labor (that hasn’t yet been stolen from them) to live.
Striking workers are tired, political organizers are tired, students are tired, we’re all so overworked even as so-called vacations are rolling in for some and ending for others. Struggles keep going.
And then :
In the night of the 7th of march in Paris, cops charged against a peaceful march (without cis-men in it) organised by feminist collectives and political organizations.
The protest was broken up as unarmed, mostly unmasked and unprotected women and people where brutalised by state-agents in semi-paratroopers attires.
Essays and op-eds were written and easy images generated, men in black attacking women in purple, blood and sweat and tear, lbd shot in subway stations, palpable horror.
Manifestant(e)s #MarcheFéministe évacué(e)s de force dans le métro par #GendarmesMobiles #CSI #CRS
Station République, Paris, 7 mars 2020, source et images: @HZ_Press
I don’t have anything smart to say, this is just business as usual, right ?
State repression revealing to us that the “traditions”, the “usual” is an illusion that’s entertained just enough that the “mass” can swallow reforms while the active parts try and change some things. Eruptions of violence are framed as clumsy events (“bavures”), singular occurences.
There is no official and collected account of the frequency of police brutality in France.
There is no direct account of the racial categorization and ethnicity of the people brutalized or killed by police in france, as the state doesn’t officially recognizes race as an existing factor or social category.
The only thing we have is the maps we’ve built and the solidarity we entertain.
So it’s even more disheartening to hear that the Parisian head procession of the march that took place the 08 of march had some men and women trying to intimidate and even attack the lesbian-political part of the procession.
A disgusting set of behaviors and actions that was denounced by the collective “Pride Lesbienne” in a communiqué.
I’m not surprised but I’m still angry.
NEXT SECTION : behold the links I collected for you.
Sketches of an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging - bandilangitimph
A call for a non-state, non-nationalist project for the phillipine : hybridity, no-border solidarity, post-colonial becoming. It’s all so cool to see anarchist perspectives fusing with postcolonial thoughts in other places.
climate change, circulation struggles & the communist horizon - prolewave
talk of desperation and direct contact with the fuckery that is state power, as it uses any and every event and process as a mean of accruing power and/or capital, in that case : climate change as a justification for state repression.(btw les gilets jaunes are still going strong, they’re just not getting proper coverage)
“Calling for a more-than-human politics” - Anab Jain
Post-colonial considerations of futurity, not as prediction but as forecasting, sketches and notes on what could be. It’s interesting.
“Against Biology, Against the Sexed Body: Gender, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and the Molecular” - published in/by Saewol, a journal of queer becomings
Could also be called “For a material feminism that actually accounts for trans and nonbinary existences” and rejects the imperial constructs of sex and the shadow they cast on understandings and affirmations of gender itself” : it’s gender abolitionism that’s not fucking transphobic, nice !
The colonial politics of desirability, fitness and gay manhood by “Contributors” which should be cross-read with this article/interview about the top shortage memes that circulated a while ago and this piece of Queer Black history.
Been feeling about my body and presentation lately, been trying to figure out ways to think it but i never have the time and energy for it.
feeling seent
I think a lot about violence these days, fascism and the antis that answer it. Anti-s because antifascism is a whole array of methods and tactics and strategies, antifascists don’t all agree and go hand in hand, lots of skermiches and stupidity in that area of political activism as with all spaces.
I think about violence and the desire for it but I don’t want to expose all my thoughts here, it will make for a longer text, one I don’t even know I can share one day.
But it’s related to clothes and brands and anti/fascism, also : Swoosh.
I’m also thinking about what this whole newsletter-thing is to me. Like, is this an openview-journal-de-bord, a call for help, a rant-churner ?
I don’t know.
I started re-reading Ellis’ Global Frequency recently, with its fantastic images/fantasy of a global rescue/anti-terrorist agency, wondering why it wouldn’t topple governments as any proper anti-state militant would ponder upon reading these kinds of stories.
I don’t know, maybe Ellis wanted to get the story printed and sold ? :sob_emoji:
Thinking, thinking, thinking even as I’m always caught in the act of reacting, to news, to loss, to growth. Hoping I can find the time to breathe.
I am Ospare, this is where I am and this is what it looks like :
Send water and band-aids to ospare@substack.com - We been here, We still here.