Book review - Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson (eds.), 'Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power’

Abstract

Anarchism and Sexuality reaches out to revise existing histories, question present relations and put into action unimagined futures. This critical text emerges out of a conference, on the intersections of anarchism and sexuality, organised by the editors in 2006. Comprised of nine scholarly essays, four ‘poetic interludes’, an interview with Judith Butler and a preface by Judy Greenway, the text offers an interdisciplinary insight into the complex relations between ethics, power and everyday intimacies. It is a politically motivated collection, exploring how to make possible and liveable outlawed, non-normative and/or subversive desires, sexualities, movements, writings, gatherings, genders, collectivities and artistic expressions. Each piece engages with the overarching themes of the title, some proposing nuanced and thoughtful analyses of queer, desire, subjectivity and autonomy, and others examining historical trends of affect, anarchism, post-anarchism and post-structuralism. The authors are driven by an overarching passion to bring together (post-)anarchism and sexuality (particularly post-structuralism and queer theory), and most assert the absence of this intersectional dialogue in the broader and separate studies of anarchism and sexuality. The collection is further consolidated as a whole through the presence of recurring themes, histories and theoretical engagements, namely love; a politics of the everyday; a move away from governmental revolutions to micro-level actions; intimacy as political; caring for self and others (ethics); how power is resisted, mobilised and rendered ethical; and sex as both radically relational (even when with the self) and the potential to create less violent modes of coming together.