The Child and Its Enemies

mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create weird, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is Shannon Clay, author of We Go Where They Go, a history of anti racist action.

Shannon: Hello. Yes, me, Shannon. He him. I’m stoked to be here.

mk: So to start us off, who were Anti Racist Action and how were youth and teens involved?

Shannon: Cool. Yeah. So Anti Racist Action was I’m sorry. I realized I maybe to give a bit of introduction about myself could have done that a second ago when you teed me up for it.

Sorry about that. Yeah. So I am 1 of the 4 authors of a book called we go where they go with the story of antiracist action which first title is a history of this group called. Anti racist action other three coauthors were all in area back in the day I was not so yeah as far as what anti racist action was ARA, as it’s often called, was the like primary anti fascist movement.

In the so called us and Canada for 15 to 20 ish years. Our book covers the history from when it started in 1986 through the early two thousands groups continue to call themselves ARA to this day. But that’s the main history that we cover. It started in the twin cities. Like Minneapolis and St. Paul in the skinhead scene. And then lots of other like punk and other youth subcultures of basically people were in these youth spaces. And then all of a sudden Nazis started showing up in those spaces. And kids joined together and got organized to fight back very literally like in terms of organizing and then also often physically to defend themselves and their communities and their scenes and their friends from a very real and immediate threat of fascists.

And then from there, it grew significantly over years, it coalesced into a more like formal, but still very decentralized network. in 1994. It’s a huge history. Maybe for that reason we, we can’t, I don’t think we’re trying to cover everything, but yeah the basic gist is that yeah, 1994 got into this network, which continued to grow Probably not probably there were like hundreds of chapters over the course of areas life with many people involved doing all kinds of things from again, like fighting Nazis in their own scene to then expanding out to go out into a more public facing world and contest.

The Ku Klux Klan was a really big one in the Midwest, Ohio, Indiana many states around that region in the nineties, lots of other things. As far as youth involvement it very much was throughout its whole history, a youth movement. I mentioned how it was started by kids who were in their own scenes and.

Yeah, just had to get together to take care of each other basically. And also to yeah, to make a like political statement that also they were politically opposed to racism. And yeah, I think like throughout its entire history, you continue to have maybe 20 somethings at the upper end maybe through, at least the period of our book again, towards The early 2000s really yeah, upper twenties was probably the upper limit of the vast majority of involvement in era.

And area was always very like conscious and proud of this, that they were a youth movement. And that sort of went in both directions of both, like bringing in this sort of youthful energy and a lot of like youthful cultural things into their anti racist organizing. And also going the other direction of trying to make anti racism, a part of the youth cultures that they were in which punk is like a really big example of that.

Also some like techno scenes in, especially in like Canada and stuff like ska scenes, hip hop, all of these things Yeah they really throughout ARA’s history it was always very much a youth movement and aware of that and proud of that and tried to inject that into their politics.

mk: As you’re talking about, the punk scene has historically been considered a space for young, usually queer and trans folks, and I’m wondering how you conceive of that. groups like A. R. A. fitting into a broader youth liberationist politic and subculture? By trying to make punk spaces and obviously all of society less racist, were they explicitly doing youth liberationist work, or were they more working towards this intersectional approach to anti racism that so happened to be within a youth subculture?

Shannon: Yeah, great question. Both those things and neither of those things. I don’t. Yeah, let’s get into it. Use the word like intersectional. For example, 1 thing is I would not. Tend to say that had a very intersectional approach if for no other reason than, that term wasn’t really in use by area people.

I think it was invented. I forget when the original essay was published that came up with intersectional, but it was like, around the same time that I already started. By the time that intersectionality, really had spread that was not really a big part of areas explicit analysis.

I don’t think. But maybe I would describe area as like their objective what they were trying to do. Was pretty explicitly like anti fascism. They did over the course of their history have different people pulling in different directions of how much they also wanted to work in other things like for example, like reproductive freedom was like a really big thing, but you can think of if like their primary objective was anti fascism I think they’re like tactics to get there were youth focused or youth liberation focused ARA, started as a youth movement because they were responding to things in their own scenes.

They were the ones being targeted for alternately like both recruitment if they were white or also violence by these fascists including white kids, obviously, especially like kids of color. They were being targeted by these fascists, like in their youth spaces. So then they responded to that fascism, like with anti fascism and then their anti fascism was itself youth focused because they were in their youth spaces, so I think it’s a really cool and interesting thing where they didn’t necessarily need a super explicit, like youth focus when they were starting out because they already had it. Or so like when I say they didn’t need it, they didn’t need to like work hard to inject a sort of youth liberation politics into it because they were already Yeah.

Doing that and already living that if that makes sense as far as they were all these kids getting together. And yeah, trying to make again, like their spaces safer for themselves and for their homies. And then different people to different degrees and over time, then expand that also into a. Broader outer, like critique of racism and fascism in the U S.

So later on it was a two way street where later on and over time, both the sort of youth liberation stuff and the anti fascism both grow and then continue to influence each other later. You have area groups like consciously choosing to do cool shit for like youth scenes or youth spaces just for their own sake slash also to grow the movement and to recruit people into it.

An area also take their anti fascism beyond just youth spaces, where they are also like going to clan rallies, which were in more of a public sphere and not only in the youth spaces, but all both the anti fascism and the youth focus continued and they influenced each other. And then they also didn’t.

Always have to only be in conversation with each other. Like I said, sometimes you can just like do youth shit cause it’s cool and fun. And yeah.

mk: Thank you so much for bringing this up. I really agree that in youth spaces, we don’t necessarily need an explicitly youth liberationist politic because the very act of teenagers and youth articulating anarchism, because that’s what we need in our lives.

And, family abolition, because that’s where we’re facing oppression, et cetera. Yeah. That is inherently youth liberationist. And I was talking to someone about this at an activist conversions recently. The people who need youth liberation the most are the people who are already adult, but haven’t unpacked the trauma of their childhoods because they think it was justified by compulsory education or the nuclear family.

If you’re a teenager and you’re already resisting those things, calling it youth liberation might not do that much for you, other than obviously finding communities and spaces and theories that feel resonant. But in terms of calling someone out, oh, you need to work more on youth liberation, that’s a charge that I think adults tend to face more than teens do, and for good reason.

Because with the exception of a few teenagers who really condescend to younger children, which, as a teenager I’ve had to push back on that a lot, there aren’t that many. Ages, young people. And when there are, it’s an internalized thing, thinking that the hate that we face is ethical.

But I feel like what you’re describing with A. R. A. really did that well, because their views were so youth liberationist, but it also wasn’t this idea that, oh, we need to work on youth liberation, because obviously doing that work with this positionality was, of course, youth liberationist. On this topic what do you think about this strategy of starting movements in youth spaces and then making them more generalized?

Because I’ve been part of movements like that, and they’re great, but if an adult is at the helm and the goal is to radicalize youth without caring about the struggles that we face, then it starts to get into racist territory. So I’m really curious about your thoughts on this in the context of ARA.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s, especially that last part you mentioned of and then when you have like an older person who’s like trying to engage, but like, how much are they like, trying to educate or, recruit young people basically versus like work side by side with them.

Yeah, it’s tough. I think it’s tough. I think it’s very, not to get too meta on the question, but I think the question is also very good because it’s like such a good sort of, you can do such a parallel for so many other things of for example, like white people trying to organize in for anti racism or like in predominantly POC spaces.

Or straight people trying to like work for queer liberation, like what’s that sort of just when you mentioned,

mk: yeah, like as a folks having tried to organize a GSA at my school only to watch straight people try to take it over. I feel that very acutely.

Shannon: Yeah. Okay. So I’m sorry, I gave a lot of meta commentary on the question.

So the question itself was like this strategy of starting movement in youth spaces and then making them more generalized Like how ultimately like youth liberationist, do we think that is that’s the question, right?

mk: Yeah. Do we think it’s youth liberationist for movements to start in youth spaces and then expand? And if so, how do we make it youth liberationist and keep it from this elite capture dynamic in which an adult infiltrates a youth space, radicalizes people, then starts an ML trope.

Shannon: Too real. Yeah, great question. I think short answer. Yes, I think it’s a good strategy. To I think if you can build movements in youth spaces, then yeah, it’s almost like technological, then like you have organized youth into a movement.

And that’s a really powerful thing. And then that also, those movements don’t even necessarily only have to be like, quote unquote, about youth in the, for example, in the case of ARA. being most obviously about like anti fascism still, like we discussed then when you like, because it is a group of youth doing it, it has that youth liberationist dimension.

So yeah, I, I think it is a very powerful model to get people organized to get people bring people in when they are, It’s again, just such a common theme across like many different dimensions, but just like seeing that people who you have something in common with or like out here doing this thing, it just feels very much more accessible.

Then if, for example, you’re like a teenager and then there is a group of yeah, all these 30 something hardcore theory bros or something, I’ll doing something. So let’s see. Yeah, one thing it puts in my mind is that can also be like, A movement of movements. I think is an important and valuable thing.

And so yeah, I think obviously in our like quest for liberation, any one movement, much less anyone like single group is not going to do the whole thing. And so that’s why I think it does make sense to like, have movements that are organizing in specific spaces or like for specific things.

That then they don’t have to be too like limited or, for example, if you have like a group of youth who are working on youth liberation things I think that’s awesome. And as far as to construct, maybe a counter argument to it to be like but that’s of course not enough.

And we need to grow into these other things. That’s when I think the, again, like movement of movements would be a very useful that you can have. Youth focusing on youth liberation spaces and queer people focusing on like queer liberation. And you can have all these different movements. And all these different identities but then none of them being like mutually exclusive that of course.

mk: Kids can be youth and queer. Wow.

Shannon: Exactly.

mk: All of our listeners.

Shannon: Exactly.

It’s 2024. What kind of, yeah. I, sometimes I like to joke of what kind of 15 year old in 2024 isn’t a little gay. But I don’t know. It’s okay.

mk: Statistically, 20 percent of Generation Z identifies as queer in France, and this is in a time where homophobia is rampant and we have a neo fascist state. I’ll just let that be there.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s why I was like, holding back that I sometimes joke about that, but of course, yeah. Let’s see here. I guess to try to wrap it up Yeah, I think it is a like valid and powerful strategy to have like youth dedicated spaces and youth dedicated movements for reasons that honestly might be like pretty self explanatory of like why that’s cool and valuable of again, just like seeing other people who look like, if I’m this young person, I’m seeing other young people organizing that is like motivating and more accessible to me.

And that, again, I think it can take place as part of this broader ecosystem of resistance movements that can all be overlapping and sharing members and sharing ideas and sharing propaganda and all learning from each other and working side by side.

mk: Yeah I am. I definitely agree there that making it own voices is absolutely necessary for youth liberation. I really value youth live movements that are intergenerational and very intentionally non hierarchical. Because if something has even the slightest hint of hierarchy and explicitly liberationist movement, then pretty soon that will get towards ageism.

And then the 50 year old will start announcing that because they were once a teenager, they can speak on this. Which, But I also think that the idea that teenagers should only organize with each other and not really be in the broader anarchist movement is profoundly ageist, as is the huge stigma around adults who maybe want to have mentorships or friendships with anarchist teens.

Because that’s absolutely necessary to social movements. And if we can’t have intergenerational friendships and community and organizing together, we also can’t really combat ageism. If someone doesn’t interact with teenagers. then they’ll end up being ageist toward us. So I feel like that separatist impetus, or perhaps like the fear some people have that if someone is an adult they’ll necessarily be ageist, is pretty unfounded.

But I think the fact that hierarchy enables ageism is something to be incredibly mindful of. Which is most anarchist teenagers I know avoid the DSA and similar organizations because, who is in leadership really determines what happens, and it’s impossible for a teenager to get onto leadership.

And of course, due to this podcast being anarchist, that much was obvious, but yeah on this topic how would you define youth liberation in punk spaces and subcultural spaces generally? What can it mean for punk to be anti racist and anti ageist, and how can those struggles be intertwined?

Shannon: Cool. What can it mean for punk spaces to be anti racist and anti ageist? How are those struggles intertwined? And in punk? Okay, I think A couple of first thoughts to briefly touch on some things that we’ve alluded to. I think so in punk sort of explicit youth liberation politics, using that term and with the.

More like theoretical and generally anarchist, like underpinnings beneath. It is pretty rare in punk rock from what I see. Whereas what is extremely common is the, of course natural instincts that, like. The natural instincts that like ideologically liberation grows out of, like the feeling of being a young person and being like, yo, like this fucking sucks.

Like a lot of shit is really getting me down in a way that I don’t think I’m okay with. That and that sort of lived experience, which, of course, is very valid, I think, is the much more common thing. And then it’s rare to see people super explicitly, I think turn it into a deeper sort of read of society that’s 1 thing I think was really cool about era was again that while it started as a very natural thing, over time, there were people trying to push it more explicitly as hey, this is something we should. Yeah, just be explicitly aware of and care about and and so I think that is really cool. For punk spaces to be anti racist. I think anti racism is punk has a trickier relationship with anti racism really because it’s often I would explain ARA in terms of the punk scene. And so if people are familiar with punk, then maybe this can be helpful. And if not use this, however helpful it is, but ARA like punk was like often white. And different like cities could be like very heavily white could be super white. And you have to like always balance, both acknowledging that as like a real thing that was happening while also not. In the case of like punk, I think people then sometimes go too far in the other direction and say Oh, punk is just like white people shit in a way that is then shitty. Cause you’re like erasing the presence that like, there are people of color in punk who are like doing really cool shit and have been since the beginning and so you don’t want to erase that But you also need to be able to acknowledge the ways that punk spaces can often be super white.

So I hope that made sense in the case of both era and the punk scene at different places and times. I’d say that the two are like, pretty white things that in different places and times have very important exceptions to that, that in a city like Baltimore or something, like it’s a pretty diverse scene because like it’s fucking Baltimore. They’re not a ton of white people in Baltimore. If anything, they’re probably like disproportionately present in the punk scene. But still, yeah then you have a a punk scene that like has more melanin than a lot of other places. And so I guess, what does it mean for like punk spaces to be anti racist?

I think it can be, That can depend, on which punk spaces we mean almost where again, like if it’s a punk scene, like of a bunch of kids of color, which totally does exist in many different cities, then like just doing the thing, obviously, just like we were talking about with age, like they’re already there and doing the thing.

So that has like important anti racist value. I think probably like kids of color, punks of color I probably know that and they don’t need me to explain to them like how to be anti racist. But then on the other hand, you have spaces that might be pretty heavily white in punk spaces.

And so I think that is something that maybe I can speak to a bit more directly and as a white person. That then it comes down to this sort of like perennial question, right? Of What does it mean to not be a part of, but to want to be in solidarity with a oppressed, marginalized group?

So that can be, like, older people wanting to be in solidarity with younger people, or cishet folks wanting to be in solidarity with queer people. Or white people wanting to be in solidarity with people of color. Yeah, I don’t know if I have a like super specific prescription for like white kids in punk spaces other than just to put the politics out there, I think is like really important. And that might sound basic, but I think in sort of cultural spaces it can be interesting how sometimes it’s taken for granted that, for example, like a punk scene is like anti racist and cool.

And then because it’s taken for granted, people like, don’t feel the need to talk about it a ton. And then you turn around and all of a sudden you’re like, wait, all of a sudden I’m like hearing a bunch of whack shit, like I’m hearing people say whack racist shit in like my punk scene don’t they know that punk is anti racist and it’s wait, but if we weren’t, I guess we weren’t putting it forward enough to like, make that clear to make people believe that understand that if you’re going to be in this space anti racism really matters. And yeah to use a lot of words to get to a pretty simple point, I think punk spaces just need to be like, Very open and explicit about including the politics and not let the politics be removed. And then you end up with, maybe just a bunch of really macho dudes who really love like chugga, hardcore loud music. And then. It was such a, it was such a great question with there are so many directions to potentially take it.

I want to try to wrap up here. But then you also asked about what it might mean for spaces to be both anti racist and anti ageist. And how the struggles can intertwine. Yeah, I don’t know, I think I unfortunately I can easily imagine or I’ve been in spaces that are like anti wage ageist but aren’t super anti racist.

Again, coming at this is like a white person. You can be like in youth spaces that are going to contain that again, at least like intuitive anti ageism, but might be like really white and aren’t automatically anti racist. So I don’t know if you’re like a white kid, who’s trying to do this shit, I guess I would just say stay humble and keep trying.

And I think honestly, I don’t know, like giving a shit and like understanding that this is something that needs to be like taken seriously and thought about all the time and needs to be a lens for like many different things that you continuously work for and aren’t necessarily super perfect in every time, but that is something that you just continue to work hard to incorporate if you’re like white kid in these youth spaces.

Be aware of what spaces you’re in. If you’re in a space, that’s like super white why might that be? And that doesn’t even mean necessarily that it’s like a problem to be fixed by quote unquote, like recruiting people of color. Maybe people of color have like their own spaces they’d rather be in and it’s not obviously like their job to show up at our shit to make us feel better and cooler. And we’re a part of a more diverse scene or something. But it’s I think one, one lesson that I’ve taken out of things like that as again, like a white person is to maybe instead of is to, yeah, be aware of what spaces I’m in and when those are like, heavily white spaces and to like, counterpoint to then go and, you can maybe seek out the spaces where people of color do want to be not in a weird, shitty culture vulture way where you’re just like showing up and like taking and consuming or thinking that because you’re giving a shit about like culture of primarily people of color, that makes you super woke or anti racist.

But yeah, just being aware that I think again I don’t know, the world is like that movement of movements thing. There are so many different things. That, you can have a music scene in one city that’s like pretty white and you can have a music scene in that same city, that’s like maybe a lot of kids of color and I don’t know, at a certain point you may not be able to if you’re trying to make your white scene more like anti racist, you may not be able to like, quote unquote, fix it by like bringing in a bunch of people of color, which might feel like the thing you’re supposed to do but instead maybe one scene is just going to be pretty white and one scene is going to be a lot of people of color. But what we should be short, what we should be ensuring is that those scenes are like, can walk side by side and support each other. And yeah be a part of the same sort of broader movement towards towards liberation and towards taking care of each other and towards Yeah, again, in the case of like white people, like giving a shit,

mk: thank you so much for bringing this up, like this idea that it isn’t about who is in our scene and it isn’t about pressuring people to be in our scenes who don’t want to be. It’s about making sure that every community that we have is welcoming and that our politics are explicitly anarchist. And like in my view, ideally, youth liberationist movements are for everyone, but at the same time, like sometimes cultural spaces really do just need to be cultural spaces and what allyship looks is to have spaces that are, as you say, side by side with them. On the topic of your personal experience were you into punk and anarchy as a kid? And what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you at that age?

Shannon: Yeah, I don’t. So yes, I was I was like introduced to politics and specifically anarchism through punk rock as a kid and like through the internet, I think I like YouTube auto played. Johnny hobo and the freight trains for me, which I think for a certain like super hyper specific genre of like punk anarchist and a certain generation of a punk anarchist kid. I think that’s 100 percent of us were introduced to music by this person, Pat Schneeweiss AKA Johnny hobo or ramshackle glory ring that dishwashers union.

Yeah. So it was like the internet, I was already into punk. Like as a sort of musical genre and then yeah then being, randomly again, through like the algorithm, which come to think of it feels pretty shitty to say yeah, just like randomly introduced to Punk music that was much more like explicitly anarchist.

And again, not treating it as the like background vibe, but like explicitly I don’t know, fucking lecturing the listener about here’s why the police are your enemy. Which I think is really cool and important. And so then from there and again, through the internet, I found out about more shows happening in my local community, in my local city and started going to shows.

And then the overlap between punk and politics was not always as strong as I would have liked. Sometimes the punk scene was pretty apolitical and most of my political friends were also into punk, but then we were, like, the minority at the punk scene of, people actually I don’t know, maybe that’s inevitable that if you’re in a cultural scene, maybe the majority of people might always be, like, generally supportive, but not necessarily turning their whole lives into another aspect of it, like the politics, but yeah.

So then. Like I said the punk scene in the organizing spaces didn’t overlap a ton, necessarily, for me, as much as I might have liked them to as much as they might have in, for example, the history of, hey, anti racist action in A. R. A., punk and organizing spaces were often very closely linked.

But yeah, so while they weren’t the same thing to me to answer your question about what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for me when I was younger I think I, I may have been pretty lucky in that regard. I don’t think I faced big barriers of accessibility. I think. Honestly, if anything, what I would have liked more of is what you mentioned of the inter-generational youth liberation spaces or just inter-generational spaces in general. That like when I started coming around in the punk scene, pretty much everyone was like, five or six years older than me, but not significantly older.

And then in the political scenes that I was in, I was, I got involved through student organizing. And so then it was all people who were, the same age as me in college. Yeah. And so then by the same token that it wasn’t super alienating of I was surrounded by people who were not a very similar age to me.

I actually would have loved to have more elders around I think more feelings of oh, there are people who have done this shit before. There are people who are like older than 25, but still give a shit, still show up to things. Yeah, if that’s okay, if that’s not just like completely inverting your question too much, I would say what I would have.

mk: It isn’t at all. anti ageism goes in both directions, and I’m so glad you brought that up. And honestly, I feel like that’s necessary for youth liberation too, because one of the most common critiques anarchists use Base is, oh, this is just a youthful base, you’ll grow out of this. And the existence of adult anarchists in our spaces and the possibility for youth to have mentorships and friendships, etc. that are outside the bubble of youth spaces is so important to our liberation. So I honestly think that spaces being more accessible to people who aren’t, the stereotypical age of an anarchist organizer is equally necessary. I was going to ask what advice you have for kids and teens who want to get into anarchism or subculture or anti racism. I know you covered a lot of that, but is there anything else you wanted to share in that regard?

Shannon: I was actually just about to say something as part of that last question that so yeah, when you, I think we both mentioned, and so I would maybe if I could. Yeah, but I think my advice to any kids who need to hear it is like, That yes, there are older anarchists out there and so good, right?

I just know that if someone had been able to tell me that when I was fucking like 16, I would have really loved to hear that. Like they’re out there. You’re, it’s not like inevitable that you’re going to fucking turn old and turn into a Democrat and and and also you’re not crazy because like you see the world this way and it seems like no one else does except for like other 16 year olds or something.

mk: Yeah, just chiming in. Sometimes as we get older, we feel more resonant in our anarchism. Like I got radicalized when I was 13 and two years in I have new pronouns. So if that’s any indication.

Shannon: Yeah, it I am very grateful and humbled by the way that like my anarchism has evolved over time. And I do feel very yeah very lucky to have been able to like, I feel like anarchism is a really important part of who I am. And so as far as my anarchism has been able to grow over the years, that’s like me as a person going over the years in a way that’s, that I’m very grateful for. But yeah I guess to, to simplify it a bit, as far as any message for the kids out there?

I would just say the older people who still give a shit, are out there and if you feel really alienated or isolated, cause you don’t know any of them I hope it can be of some reassurance that like they’re out there somewhere. And they’re probably wondering where you are too. As I have honestly, just in the last 18 months, as I finally have met anarchists who are like older than myself, which side note is a huge reason that I’m so grateful for this ARA project. And ARA was not all 100 percent anarchists, but very anarchist influenced through the course of doing this project. I’ve been able to meet so many like older, like 40, 50, 60 year old anarchists who are still active. That yeah, they are out there. And I’ve met a lot of people of that age who in turn are wondering of like, Where are the kids? Cause, cause they go to, cause we’re all in our own bubbles. And so like they go to their meetings maybe, and, they’re all working alongside all their like 40 year old comrades who are all like yeah. And then facing their own struggles of trying to juggle making a living under capitalism and maybe provide for kids and all these other things. So I would say to, as far as an advice thing, I think that we are all out here and a lot of us are like looking for each other, but don’t know where to look.

And so I would say one big thing I’ve learned over the years is I’m just going to dive into the like negative term for it. I think how much of like politics is basically like networking, which is such a gross word, obviously to me. And at least for me and my like class background, I, that was the thing that was thrown at me is like when I was 17 and a junior.

Of like something career something networking. And I was like I don’t fucking want, I don’t give a shit about a career. So I don’t but in fact, like it is a skill to be able to go out and find like minded people and forge those relationships. And it’s a really important and valuable one.

And it’s not some shitty, like cynical thing where you’re like trying to find people who can do something for you. It’s Yeah. Think of like how much you value your friendships and how beautiful our relationships are and how much they make worth life worth living. Wouldn’t it, isn’t it awesome that you can go out and try to forge more of those connections.

And so it is just if you haven’t done it already, like that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. Yeah, you can go out and look for, I think we’ve been talking about like bubbles and about like youth specific circles, for example, should exist side by side with other movements or groups.

Try to just go find those other groups and maybe, and you don’t have to do it in the sense of am I going to quote unquote, join and like full time be in a group or something. But just trying to find what groups are out there and going to some of their stuff sometimes at least just to meet people.

And you can even explicitly say Hey, I’m not necessarily super interested. In dedicating as much time as you guys are to the thing that you’re working on, but I wanted to show up to meet you guys because I’m doing this other thing. And wanted you to know about that. And we’re doing our different things, but supporting each other.

Yeah, I can be long winded sometimes, but the message is pretty simple. Like there are older, cool people out there who didn’t sell out and try to like, go out and find them and you don’t have to do every single thing with them, but you can go to like different groups and you don’t have to agree with 100 percent of everything that’s going on or with their emphasis.

Cause you don’t have to like. Quote unquote, join and dedicate your life to a group. You can just show up sometimes different things, different places, try to meet people. And then, like, when you guys can help each other out, then you know each other, and that’s great.

mk: Thank you so much for touching on this. The idea that we really want our youth specific spaces, and we also need intergenerationality to remind us what’s possible in the anarchist movement. And, there can absolutely be, like, a sense of intertwinement and mutual care between those. That’s why I love being part of, Bashback and other anarchist tendencies, in which, all of that is normalized and it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. And I feel like that’s something ARA did really well. On that topic, do you have any shameless plugs regarding your book or other organizing?

Shannon: Mainly just the one, which is the book. It’s really fucking good. Yeah. I think listening, you like assume that like the author has to say that, or of course, every author thinks their book is good. Our book is so fucking good. I don’t give a shit dog. I know it is.

mk: Like having self published one. I feel the same way. I get it.

Shannon: Cool. Yeah. But yeah, so our book is we go where they go, the story of anti racist action. You don’t have to read it or seek it out if you don’t want to, but if you’re wondering if it sounds like something you might like, I bet you will it’s a really cool it’s very heavily based on.

The first hand accounts that like oral histories interviews that we did with people who were there it’s largely a story. We tried to make it a story of kind of. Are telling its own story as far as these people who are in anti racist action also not at all in a cheerleading way it’s a lot of really thoughtful, really dedicated people who are both giving their own first hand knowledge of what they did but also with like really sharp. Awareness and with the benefit of like 20 to 40 years of hindsight very wise things of, yeah, just the benefit of hindsight of things that they might’ve done differently and lessons learned and all this thing. So yeah, very accessible.

It’s a lot of it is like interviews told first person, a lot of cool stories, a lot of fun shit, a lot of good politics, a lot of pretty pictures and flyers and stuff. We go where they go. The story of anti racist action was published by PM press. You can get it from that website or. I think like bookshop.

org, maybe bookshop. com is, yeah something where you is a website where you can just order any book and it just like automatically connects you to your nearest independent bookstore. So that’s a good one. Yeah, sure.

mk: That one of our listeners right now is thinking this sounds amazing, but I’m 12 and my parents don’t know I’m an anarchist and I can’t purchase books. Where can I find a PDF? What would you say to that kid and anyone else like them?

Shannon: You, if you have a way to pay for things online, I think the ebook is like 8. If you can, yeah, from PM press. org.

mk: Thank you so much. Yeah. And also just a shameless plug for any during the world looking to get into anarchist theory the anarchist library. org has most historical anarchist theory and some of the newer stuff as well. If you’re someone who’s interested in anarchism, but maybe can’t pay for things online, and maybe can’t, talk to your parents about being interested in anarchism because who wants to do that I would highly suggest it.

And yeah so much. Yeah. And are there any other anarchy resources you’d like to share before we close out?

Shannon: I don’t think so, no.

mk: Super fair. Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Shannon Clay, and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies.

Shannon: Thanks. Thanks, everybody.

An anarchist educator talks GEDs, queer youth organizing in schools, how to navigate academia as an anarchist, free schools, homeschooling, unschooling, and other queer insurrection <3

mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids flipping out anarchy and deliberation. Here at The Child and His Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create feared, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent of the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Negro, and organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is Jordan, a radical educator, here to talk about all this.

Jordan: Hi, yeah, my name is Jordan. I use he, him pronouns. I’m from Nebraska on the Great Plains Otoe, Missouri treaty lands. And I’ve been a GED program facilitator for the last 10 years. I’m an anarchist. I’m a feminist. I’m an abolitionist.

And I am a father to three kids.

mk: So when you originally pitched this to me, you expressed an interest in GEDs as an option for teenage humans looking to evade the statism of compulsory education. Can you talk a bit about this?

Jordan: Yeah, I was thinking so school districts have attendance policies and those policies lack the nuance to recognize really any of The complexity is impacting young people’s lives that would lead them to miss class and after a certain number of absences, an escalating series of consequences ensue.

This includes, this can include a referral to juvenile probation or sometimes diversion. And these truancy cases can also lead to caregivers being subjected to state surveillance, it can lead to young people being removed from the home. And while, there are circumstances where young people would benefit from being in a different environment or under different care.

I’m sure that the child and its enemy’s listeners can imagine myriad ways in which community care can be implemented or implicated without carceral systems being the driver of those interventions, but as it is now carceral systems of surveillance and control are all too often the consequence of quote unquote truancy.

The G. D. Routes. Even in a program that’s structured similarly to conventional school. Can provide a fresh start, right? And there might also be community based programs where you live that offer much more flexible structure. Thankfully that’s the type of program I’m involved with. You could also, you could attain your GED with the help of, with friends, trusted mentors.

You could also go the kind of library card autodidact routes and do a lot of this work on your. But there are, right? We should recognize that there are some barriers for young people to be able to access the GD. Some pro Programs will pay for testing, but, costs are associated with the GED.

You need ID from your state, like a state issued ID, and that often means, the name on your ID is the one you have to answer. To there there will be age based eligibility in your state, and that can vary some from state to state, like when you’re old enough to withdraw from school.

And the GED is not going to offer a lot of the opportunities that you might find in your public school, like art or drama or sports. So that’s another thing to take into consideration. You also, when you, if you want to pursue like post secondary ed. Which is totally still a possibility you very much, you very likely might lack the prerequisites to just jump into a four year university type setting, but those credits can still be obtained usually like at a community college yeah, so those are some of those options, some of those things to think about, also accommodations.

For learning disabilities are very, they make it really onerous the process to try to get that we can talk more about that if you want, but yeah, those are some of the barriers so all things to take into consideration but again, you have a different level of scrutiny from the state as a GED student, then you will.

Would as a traditional student. Yeah, that’s those are some of those initial thoughts.

mk: Thank you so much for bringing all that up. I find it fascinating and horrifying how even with this state sanctioned thing that is very much within compulsory education, there’s still some form of state repression and some form of stigma around it.

It’s almost as if statist beauty standards for education will never apply to queer and trans folks. Actually, that’s exactly what it is, because statism is deeply unethical, as our listeners know. How do you think that this can look for us For those of us who want to pursue higher education without engaging in statism, like I’ve known so many teens who have academic special interests and might want to for that reason, or maybe are fleeing homophobic states or harmful family situations so on an excuse to try a different location what can it look like to navigate college without engaging in that Commodification of life and education.

Jordan: Yeah. A tough question that a lot of us have faced, and but I think, my. The answer to that address is that we live in a society that individuates success and failure. Of course we know that’s a lie, that’s, not real. More predictive of someone’s academic success than their own intellectual capacities is the breadth of their network of support and the ease at which they can access that.

That’s where my head went with this. And I think of many of our quote, high achieving students those that receive accolades, high marks and scholarships are convinced. Instead of the same fallacies of meritocracy that delude those that are more generally accumulating into fewer and fewer hands, money, power, and prestige in our society and those those fallacies include, because I worked hard, because I’m smart and because I was blessed by God there’s no mention in those reasonings, Of the caregivers, that read read bedtime stories, or fed them, or drove them to their practices, and attended their events no mention of clean air and drinkable water, no mention of lead contamination, or the lack thereof, no mention of the unearned privileges of gender, race, and class, or the unfreedoms associated with those socially constructed modes of life, Oppression right the flip side of that coin many of your listeners will know that their immediate family.

The only people that are really sanctioned to be your network of support under our current paradigm can’t always be relied upon for the kind of support that students require. My best advice is to look, to our chosen families whatever your educational pursuits consist of. I think you should arm yourself with the love and care of your committed your community as you pursue those, academic interests.

Even if it’s, one peer Don’t go it alone. I was thinking of Kropotkin. In Conquest of Bread, there’s discussion of how capitalism doesn’t just exploit the labor of the living, but it subsumes into its, mass, all of the work that our ancestors did. And, all of the Discoveries, the intellectual developments and all those things become, used and abused by this system.

The work on behalf of those that actually did the labor was intended for the prosperity of future generations writ large and not for the profit of an increasingly fewer. A few number of expropriators the genes of crops that were domesticated by the ancestors of people indigenous to where I live are now the intellectual property of Monsanto.

We know better than this though, right? We have to reject the internalization of these fallacies. We are all interdependent, and we are all connected. So ideally, I think you would have a study group that is outside of academia, where you can develop your interests and sharpen your skills, and together with the support of your network and your developed analytic analytical skills I think you can confidently enter into those spaces and those spaces will benefit from your participation.

And there are benefits that you can derive being in those kinds of academic spaces, but it’s not. It’s not our home it’s not a resting place, it’s a site of struggle, it’s a contested space and, yeah we can’t concede that space to our enemies either yeah, it’s a site of struggle and, yeah, there are things that those kinds of intellectual pursuits and That kind of environment can benefit us and I think that we have stuff to offer to the conversation certainly so it’s, striking a balance there.

mk: I love this idea that being a queer anarchist teen in academia is conflictual as someone who has started an anarchist group at my middle school before. Like it’s so valuable to be in those spaces, especially because so many people there really haven’t had access to anarchism or access to queerness even, and desperately need peer support and care that’s outside of that graded judge.

community, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be the only place we derive our identity from. One can’t be an anarchist while also thinking that their grades define their worth. We all think that sometimes being alive, but I digress. So zooming out for a second, what do you think education would look like in your vision of queer and trans anarchy?

Jordan: Yeah. I think the first word that comes to mind is queer. Prefigurative or prefiguration, right? As with as with a lot of organizing for a better world, a world where many worlds fit, we have to be deliberately experimenting with the means of our collective liberation in ways that honor and demonstrate the principles and values we want to build into those worlds.

Those include, but are not limited to, autonomy, free association, participatory democracy, horizontality, and direct action. I would emphasize experimentation in this process. There are no panaceas. Young people are under different material conditions, and each of them brings their own idiosyncrasies.

idiosyncrasies to their, yes, to the table. And if I can pin down one piece of this, we would look to play. Play gives us the freedom to iterate, to experiment, to generate means of our pedagogy and relationship to each other and to our environment. And I’d emphasize that play is not the standard. Sometimes if we say oh, that’s just play it separates it from, real material conditions.

The real muscle memory and the neural pathways that build our capacity to do everything from the dishes to dealing with conflict are very real capacity to cause harm. I think that should be, at the fore of our educational pursuits. Early and often discussing, playing at, and dealing with the ideas of consent and community agreements and boundaries.

Again, how do we deal with conflict? How do we navigate and embrace our messy humanness? Polycentric and horizontal and messy systems are more robust and sustainable. hierarchical top down systems. That’s a shout out to Elinor Ostrom. This is the frustration and misery of many of our young people.

They know intuitively that there’s a better way. Better way. Yeah. And then if you like, basically anything that I’m saying in this interview, it’s coming from community, it’s coming from study. None of these are my original ideas. And a lot of this I’ve learned in community with my kids and with, their learning community.

So two of my kids go to a school whose philosophy is they say democratic self-directed, and the youngest is in a Montessori school. There’s a relationship there to unschooling. We’re going to get to that, I think. And, but yeah, so I can’t really speak to unschooling, but in this case our school has taught us a lot about Clicked resolution, which I touched on in conflict resolution is a huge emphasis in their pedagogy.

It undergirds really all of their offerings. So the young people vote on, we do like a rate choice voting on what they’re going to learn and pursue and study and inquire, that, time period a quarter semester and but the conflict resolution piece is always present in how they’re navigating that space with each other and learning from each other.

Yeah, a big shout out to. While learning. My kids’ school,

mk: I love the idea here that education isn’t just about factual information that we can call on. It’s about learning to build dual power and practicing what social organization might look like that’s anarchist. Like personally, even as someone who’s in the education system, I’ve learned much more in the practical sense from anarchist organizing than I have anywhere else.

And honestly, anarchist organizing teaches so many skills implicitly, like especially around technology in my case, like I would never know how to do the basics of digital security or graphic design or any of it. If I hadn’t been engaged in anarchist organizing since I was 13 and I feel like even for youth who aren’t into organizing or maybe don’t want to do anything that’s conflictual, which is totally valid, that idea of DIY and autonomous ways of educating each other rather than passively waiting to be educated are absolutely crucial.

How do you think anarchists can disrupt the education system in the here and now other than opting out and building alternatives? What would be the insurrectionary answer to this rather than the prefigurative one? And on that note, what are your thoughts on homeschooling and unschooling?

Jordan: Yeah, first, so the unschooling I will defer to other folks on, that, that know more about that that movement.

Homeschooling is interesting because it can be. An escape from that compulsory education, state education but it can also be like a retreat into like toxic family dynamics, right? So it’s it’s, it can be very much what you make of it. And, it can be used as a way to free young people.

It could be used as a way to control young people. Yeah, but I think it’s definitely something that a lot of folks are taking, more seriously and taking a close look at and really asking themselves, if it works with their family, with their community to be able to, meet the needs of young people and children in that setting, it’s totally achievable.

And there are resources to support that work, and the other, big question there. I think, the first part of that is, I think of solidarity, which will not be a new concept to your audience. School can be, I also, yeah, we need that. School can be a significant source of stress.

To the students and to the family. And I think of all the adults that we know that myself included, that still have the, the nightmare where you, we forgot your homework or you didn’t realize there was a pop quiz or, you’re, you have some sort of humiliating experience in the classroom or something like that.

But that’s like you pretty well recognized as as something that, we, many of us that share that experience have an after effect of right. And yeah, it can also, as I said, it can be a source of tension in our relationships at home and in our communities, especially If we’re on the receiving end of those attendance policies we talked about earlier so I currently work in an office with seven people and I see four to ten participants in a given day and this is enough, For me to drain my social battery, on some days and weeks where I need, alone time to recover or like nature time to recharge, but we have the expectation that our young people navigate school buildings with like Very often thousands of students, not to mention teachers, administrators and support staff, and these high social demands can be a source of anxiety for a lot of students.

And I’d say a significant percentage of the young people in my GED program sought out this alternative because of the social pressures. More so than simply being like credit deficient behind, In credits or something like that, but because they are feeling a sense of school misery, right?

A sinking gut feeling that they don’t want to go back there. And so in my experience, what we can do for our young comrades and others that are invested in the education system. Is recognize the reality of their experience, recognize those realities that I was just now trying to countenance and we are all in a state of constant development of our sense of self and place and with, ongoing genocides and climate catastrophe and ecological.

or, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as bell hooks would say, we have every reason to be alternatingly sad and determined indignant With rage, overwhelmed by love, despondent, joyful, and these are all our human emotions. And I dare say, in this context, that even the desire to end one’s life is human.

Yeah, I want to address this. Because as with a abstinence only sex education, or a just say no to drugs idea, if we can’t look at our messy human reality, we can’t help each other. And we can’t do harm reduction, we can’t understand risk, and while there are tools that I would encourage people to seek out from biomedicine, or psychology, psychiatry, those things can be vital, and but we shouldn’t only medicalize what has been called a sacred crisis of self.

The point being that your sensitivity to your world around you is not merely you being chemically unbalanced. This is a real response to stimuli. And the solution is not a world without you, I promise. The solution is our collective struggle towards liberation. The world with your presence and the presence of justice together, those things together, as as Martin Luther King who was murdered, with at least the complicity of the state said, there are things in our nation and in the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I call upon all people of goodwill, To remain maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination.

I never intend to adjust to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessity. It’s from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self defeating effects of physical violence. We keep us safe.

Some folks may need to have watch kept over them and other interventions. But people also need empathy. People need commiseration. We can’t fix everything. But We can be in solidarity with our friends that are going through dark places, and we can’t gaslight them they’re the thing that is unwell in this world.

We have to recognize the darkness and collectively commit to the fight back against it. Access to liberatory education is suicide prevention. Hosting. Housing, excuse me. Housing is suicide prevention. Environmental justice is suicide prevention. Anti imperialism is suicide prevention. Anti fascist organizing is suicide prevention.

And queer liberation is suicide prevention. So I feel like that’s not maybe the most direct answer to your question, but I feel like that’s our starting place to build networks of solidarity around the real world that we’re living in to be outside of and against until we can, Build that better world or as we build that better world and make it a reality in our relationships in everyday life.

That’s the best. That’s the best I’ve got for that question, especially in the context of young people trying to escape compulsory education and find their own path. Let’s and let’s, as. As we are at which is, often hurting. And that is that’s where I took that.

Yeah.

mk: Thank you so much for talking about that. The idea that mutual aid and queer networks of care and see mental health struggles not just as something to resolve and then move on from, but as a symptom of statist harm is so real. As someone who is neurodivergent, just by virtue of who I am, but has also had mental health challenges as a result of statism, honestly, like pervasive anxiety about state repression and the like, I appreciate that so much, because there will always be a range of neurologies and that is absolutely beautiful and necessary.

But if people are suffering in the mental health way, that isn’t like physical disease, it isn’t something to just. Medicaid and then ignore. It is something that statism causes and so often youth are totally ignored when we struggle with that. There are carceral hotlines, there are peer support groups that don’t do anything, but there isn’t flexual organizing, which is so often just what we need for our mental health.

So On that note, so many queer and trans young people, myself included, have faced anti queer bias at school, whether from administration, other students, or just the system of compulsory education. So from a queer liberationist standpoint, what can we do to resist anti queer bias in our schools?

Jordan: I continue with the theme, and I quote here, Mariam Kaba, everything that is worthwhile is done with other people.

There will always be the need for individual acts of defiance, and we will always have moments where we have to face the consequences of upholding our principles. The best way to resist anti queer bias in education is collectively. Across the lines, between educators and students, possibly across the divisions between age grades, across the queer and cis heteronormative divide.

But in doing this, I think the experience of the most impacted by this oppression needs to be centered. queer youth shouldn’t be organized by people outside of that experience. To say that organized queer youth can in principled alignment with other groups. Form coalitions, or they could agitate within established groups for example, a queer caucus within an existing student organization or student government, but as opposed to the individual candidate in that case participating in student government, thinking that they could reform the system from within either have a separate organization, that can choose to align with other groups as conditions allow or be self organized as like a cadre, a caucus, an affinity group within larger organizations that You have the clear objective of agitating toward collective liberation and away from the kind of performative reforms that, are gainable, maybe through some of the tactics of even on this smaller scale, like of electoralism, but does that really get us to collectivism?

Liberation and the other observation I had here is that, you really have to as a young person in these spaces, you have to work very hard to avoid being tokenized. It’s rampant in these spaces that are ostensibly for young people tokenism will elevate the stories of resilience, right? In this frame, barriers are to be like heroically overcome to inspire others.

Not ripped apart, not torn down. This obviously maintains the same system of oppression. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free. We don’t accept tokenism.

mk: Thank you so much for speaking to that, and like this exp The experience of being the only teenager in any queer liberationist group, and the only queer person in any teen focused group, is so real. And honestly, this is why The Child and His Enemies facilitates two online spaces on Discord and Signal, respectively, for anarchist teens to come together and build that translocal community, and maybe even plan meetups in various bioregions, and just do whatever it takes to Build teenage anarchist faces that are not about ageism and are not about tokenism.

Yeah, thank you again. And to close out, are there any shameless plugs that you have for various organizations or other media that’s meaningful to you? Yes,

Jordan: I do have some plugs. If I wanted to chat about some of the mutual aid organizing in my community,

The Lincoln and Omaha Street Medics, The Legible Distro, Mississippi State Prayer Camp and its Land Defenders. Shout out to them. Shout out to Black Cat House and Common Root. Shout out to Omaha Tenants United and the burgeoning Lincoln Sister Org. Lincoln Tenants United. Look out for them. And WOW Learning.

It’s cool, as I mentioned before. And there’s a really cool school for preschool age. Included in Omaha Falls one community childcare, which yeah, and I wanted to throw this in here. We talked about some heavy content today. If you’re looking, you need to talk to somebody now, you could call the nine eight eight you suicide or crisis.

Available in several languages. And and I’ll also make my contact available to any listeners who could use help navigating this. Yes, that’s it.

mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. This has been Jordan and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies. If you want to learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, our website is thechildanditsenemies. noplots. org. I’m MK Zariel, thanks for listening. Stay safe, stay dangerous.

Join us and Tom from Its Going Down, one of the more successful anarchist news organizations in recent years, to talk about what got them into this work, how its going now, and thoughts about what people should be doing in this moment. Music is “Wrecking Ball” by Mother Mother. Enjoy!

Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself.

Governance is inherently based on projected values. linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create queered, feral, ageless networks of care.

I’m your host, MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old. I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review Center. author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and organizer of some all ages queer spaces in my city and online. With me today is Madeline Lane McKinley, who’s currently writing a book called Solidarity with Children, an Essay Against Adult Supremacy for Haymarket Press.

Madeline: Hi there!

Mk: So can you tell us a bit more about your writing, who you are, what makes your life meaningful, what brings you queer joy, all of it?

Madeline: Absolutely. Yeah, I my name’s Madeline Lane McKinley. I go by she or they, and I’m an author, a cultural critic teacher, and a kind of a parent comrade to a 12-year-old non-binary artist and activist.

I’m also part of the Blind Field Editorial Collective. And we publish a lot of political writings on themes such as. Child liberation or cultural representations of child centered questions of the family and, sci fi, horror, comedy, all sorts of things like that. I’ve also done a lot of feminist organizing which is focused on community accountability and sexual violence, and especially child centered Mutual aid projects and political education.

And I’m also a cohost of the podcast genre reveal party where we talk about we’re currently doing a season on movies about school and representations of school. Which has been really fun. So I’m really excited to be here and thanks so much for asking me.

Mk: I know this is like the first time we’ve talked about this, but I am already in awe of the way you bring youth liberation into every strand of organizing from mutual aid to political education to art and media.

Like so many organizing projects try to talk about youth liberation. Liberation, but make it maybe its own campaign separate from everything else. And I love seeing it integrated into an entire anarchist praxis and an entire queer world making. So when we first got in touch about all this you shared with me that a chapter in your book is about the history of childhood as a concept.

Can you tell me more about that?

Madeline: Yeah. What I became really fascinated by. In researching that chapter, and I guess I had already been been thinking a lot about it with my relationship with my kid. And then also thinking so much as a parent about what the world. Looks like through, from a kid’s perspective in the last decade.

So I’d been really thinking about this question of childhood as essentially a site of impossibility in some ways. It’s often something that’s happened already and longed for. So I begin the chapter by thinking about the history of childhood. And there’s this really interesting book called Centuries of Childhood, which was written in the early 60s by this French demographer, Philippe Alliez.

And he like, invented childhood studies in a lot of ways and started thinking about his argument is that childhood as a concept did not exist until the 17th century. And I’ll say as a caveat that This is a very Europeanist history that he lays out and very bourgeois in lots of ways, but it is very useful to start with this insight that childhood isn’t just a natural state of being, that it actually had to be.

It’s an idea or a social construction. So Arias makes this case based on in part, at least on child mortality rates. He was a demographer but also on the social formation of the private family or what he calls the modern family in which the child becomes more and more of a central figure, especially this.

On right as inheritor of private property so more than just purely ascribing to this history. I want to think about the idea of childhood as a social construction, as I said, and not as a natural condition. And it’s in this time of Arias’s history that childhood becomes more more imagined as a kind of like quarantine.

State of not yet, not yetness not yet adulthood. And my argument is that it becomes defined in relation to adulthood, that there is no idea of childhood that isn’t constructed out of adulthood, some adult imaginary. And one of the things I was looking at was this really fascinating book by Marxist psychoanalyst, literary critic, feminist extraordinary Jacqueline Rose, and she wrote a book about children’s children’s literature, but specifically Peter Pan as a case study.

And her argument is that like childhood itself Children’s literature is impossible, that it is a kind of impossibility that children’s literature is not written by children, nor is it written for children. The purpose of so much of children’s literature is to discipline children and teach them to accept adult power.

That’s often the moral of the story for many tales. And none of this is to say that children do not exist. That’s a really important distinction to make politically, but. It’s important also to be thinking about childhood as a story that we tell each other or ourselves about children and about our own experiences of being children that seems to, at least in a mainstream way, naturalize and justify a state of, Disempowerment and subordination.

Mk: This idea of childhood as a social construct is so powerful and really reminds me of the narrative in the trans community that gender is a social construct, yet is still subjectively real for some people. While some people may experience gender to impose it, Through gender roles and through assigning it at birth and through state repression is still Necessarily transphobic and similarly the way we impose age through nuclear families and developmental pathways and compulsory education And even the way that we enforce age and linear time all only serves to assimilate Queer lives into a narrative that is featured and respectable rather than illegible to all control And like the enforcement of linear time not only Erases queerness like i’m sure our listeners are familiar with the concept of queer time and how a queer life path Doesn’t have the same milestones that others might but also erases the neurodivergent reality that some people Simply don’t experience linear time in say In a way that most of humanity might and you know to be ageist is to Limit all of what people of any age can be the queer community neurodivergent folks and everyone else So on that note, how would you say that linear time and imposed development as a construct tie into capitalism?

And the way that childhood is commodified

Madeline: So I’m going to do my best to answer that question. Which I think is really brilliant. And there’s a lot there. There’s enough there to spend a whole weekend talking to you about really. But. I think a short version is that childhood is a kind of false progress narrative for which adulthood is imagined as reaching a kind of stasis or completion.

Right? And of course, especially in this kind of like capitalist timeline of, schooling and then, post secondary and then getting spit out into the world of unemployment and precarity I think many people of, of my generation have grown really distrustful of what, Quote unquote, adulthood means which I think is really valuable politically.

By extension, I think the child is conceived as this kind of incomplete adult subject. And again, the idea of children is always defined in relation to adulthood which is an adult supremacist logic, obviously. It’s a way of understanding children as sites of ownership rather than as, full human beings and legally, politically, culturally, the child is then.

This figure of private property more than a human subject, right? So I think all of those are things that we can contest which mess with the logics of progress that I really hear in your question. And I would say that childhood and adulthood are both, we need to think about them both as these fantasies.

That’s ripe territory for commodification, but it’s it’s literally a story that we buy into.

Mk: I’ve never heard HSM described that way, like literally even as a person who’s experienced anti child HSM my whole life, I’m having so many realizations right now. But really, it resonates so much that us kids and teens are seen as incomplete adults. So as a result, our pressure to measure up to an idea of adulthood, that’s really just about being productive and controlled.

Like I think of the increasing pressure on high school students surrounding college admissions. And even like teens in the workplace and the fact that child labor is sadly still a thing in many places. Yeah. And honestly, there are always so many parallels to both queerness and neurodivergence and anything that has that inherent a temporality to it.

For example I’ve heard discourse in neurodivergent. Spaces about how people like me who are autistic tend to be seen as deficient, holistic people who are holistic, but somehow failing at life when really we’re not. We just have a different neurology. And similarly, children are not adults who are failing at being adults.

Children are just children. And that’s okay.

Madeline: Absolutely.

Mk: And even I hear this from adults, that the construct of adulthood tends to lead to a lot of individualism and hyper masculinized pressure that can lead people to mask, or to be closeted in their queerness, or whatever it is. On that topic, how would you say this all intersects with gender transness?

Because the nuclear family and linearity are so much about gender perception.

Madeline: Absolutely. This is obviously such an important political issue right now. We’re seeing, almost week by week, some national headlines around these issues, right? I want to say so what I can do here is just politically frame how we think about these questions and talk about them.

And I think that’s a really important whether or not we’re like, Political organizing or not, right? That’s something that we should just constantly be doing around this cultural moment to shift the conversation. But the issues we’re seeing about trans kids today stem from this kind of false binary between, there’s this either state power or parental rights.

What is, I’m granting child freedom, right? And obviously we have to think outside of that binary. Either way, the child is not understood as a, as a human being or is having intellectual or bodily autonomy, whatsoever. And the child in the private family specifically has this history of disciplining gender and sexuality, of enforcing.

An adult supremacist and white supremacist fantasy of purity and, strongly heterosexual and gender conforming. In terms of linearity, it’s again, this matter of preparation for adulthood, and there’s a logic of investment in the child that’s about succession and preservation of the family.

As a unit of private property all underlying this and transness and queerness really bring this into crisis in a lot of ways. And that’s why it’s, that’s why we have to be paying attention to it and actively working on this whether or not we are kids. Whether or not we are the caretakers of trans kids, whether or not we are trans kids we need to be collectively working on this because we’re all human beings and so it should be recognized as a collective project, but so often is the case with anything Focused on children, the political responsibility falls on people with proximity to children, which is too often not the case on the left.

Mk: Yeah, that idea that trans kids are forced to assimilate into either the nuclear family or the state to be able to access the care and solidarity and community we need, and even then it usually stops at healthcare rather than any more expansive idea of trans liberation, that is so real. In my experience, what trans youth tend to hear when we push back against anti trans legislation is either to detransition and follow the wishes of unsupportive families, or to advocate in a neoliberal way.

You’re trans, become a leader of the youth, join a non profit, the democratic party, whatever it is. The message trans youth get tends to not be, something that makes space for youth liberation. And the idea that Trans health is not just being able to access HRT and gender affirming care.

Trans health is bodily autonomy. Trans health is reproductive freedom. Trans health is anarchism. Because, honestly our mental health is definitely affected by the systems of control that we live under. And of course, the carcerality of compulsory education ties into this for trans kids, and all kids, in a way that the nuclear family does, too.

As we’ve seen with how anti trans legislation, like the Don’t Say Gay bills, affects school, this form of state Some repressive youth so much. So what are your thoughts on the homeschooling and unschooling movements? Are these youth liberationist or do these just hand control over to parents while having somewhat liberationist

Madeline: aesthetics?

Very good question. And so often yes, it is one or the other as I already said, like the only alternative we can imagine to This state disciplinary apparatus of schooling is parental rights. And that is often a situation of abuse of children as well. And it’s very complicated if those are the only two options that we’re really thinking through.

So pedagogical models of unschooling can be really incredible ways to, Trouble, the carcerality of the school system but at the same time on schooling is also really vulnerable to that model of parents rights. And that’s why the religious right, for instance care so deeply about that.

I don’t think it’s one way or the other, either sending kids to a kind of day prison, which exists to discipline them into being, productive future workers, and also as a child care system for workers, that is what public education effectively functions as as poorly funded as it is.

So there’s that on the 1 hand, and then there’s keeping kids in the private home where they’re vulnerable to all forms of coercion and physical, sexual, verbal abuse. And also enforced, forms of labor and caretaking in many cases as well. So I don’t think we have many good. I don’t want to sound too bleak about this, but I don’t think we have many good working examples of this.

We just have kind of these glimmers. Of possibility here and there and looking towards the future of this question, right? Finding more and more, I know my kid is going to go to this summer camp this summer. That’s organized by youth and facilitated by adult comrades. And I think.

Having more and more models and doing more experimentation like that isn’t the answer because we can’t have that happen at a a really deep level collectively across different communities. But doing more experimenting with things like that, projects like that doesn’t hurt and it can give us a lot of insight into what we could do and implement maybe at a neighborhood by neighborhood basis or things like that to create systems of support that are really bottom up thinking about kids needs and And creating solidarity like that.

I hope that makes sense.

Mk: It totally does, and I think you’re so right about the importance of youth autonomously organizing with adult accomplices. Personally even before I got radicalized that has definitely helped at my school, I started this queer and trans anarchist collective, and as a result, Like we’re no longer as dependent on the school to teach us about things like critical queer theory or queer history, or even like what gender can look like.

Because we use speaking engagements to platform queer adults, but we also teach one another about this stuff. Like I have taught so many seventh graders, what anarchism is, that might not be the best legacy for me to have at school, but I’m pretty proud of it. And that’s great. I think.

If we can empower youth to do this for one another and to create the spaces that we need instead of just waiting for adults to create every youth liberationist space, then I think we can actually bring about youth liberationist futures, or I should say, youth liberationist atemporal realities and a lot of what adult organizing can look like is like seeing how youth are organizing and standing in solidarity with us.

It’s the equivalent of how straight allies to queer liberation should not be starting a queer liberationist group. Instead, they should be seeing what queer people are up to and trying to support.

So on a personal note, how would you say that you experienced anti child ageism and youth liberation as a kid and teen?

Madeline: Survivor of child sexual abuse. And so I do think about that a lot and about other kids. I knew who had similar experiences or who, I speculated might understand my situation. And and I also knew a lot of queer kids when I was a kid I was a kid in the 90s so there were all of them in the closet.

Mk: I’m so sorry you had to face that as a kid. It’s so painful to live in a society that governs queer bodies and exerts so much control and you are so loved. I’m so glad you feel safe sharing that in this space.

Madeline: Oh thank you. Yeah, I, it was everywhere. And so I didn’t feel that I was, particularly harmed by it more than anyone else.

I, I was around, but that definitely impacted me. And then having a kid also clearly shifted my thinking around these things. Later but just, yeah, as a kid, I grew up with this sense of responsibility for other people around me too. And that’s something I struggle with too, is feeling like too much responsibility, maybe for putting my needs aside a lot in some cases to, to my detriment.

I recently, and I know I’m like maybe Five years behind on this, but I recently discovered this like meme about older, what’s called older sister syndrome, which I heavily identified with but like much of my adolescence, I was what the portal is like. I had three half siblings from ages 10 to 14, so that was also a really big part of growing up for me, or whatever growing up means.

That’s obviously something we’re skeptical towards, but it did involve taking on a sense of, quote, unquote, adult responsibility in caretaking that I think really informed my thinking and as a kid, I felt like I had to get really good grades. I took the school system very seriously and internalized institutional power quite a bit.

And yeah, I think I just put a lot of pressure on myself to do a lot of things and ignore. Other elements of my situation and Yeah, into my 20s, I was just shaking that off a lot and like unlearning, I think a lot of adulthood can be about unlearning childhood whatever childhood really means.

Mk: I’m so sorry you faced all that pressure. And honestly, this governance by the school system, by the nuclear family, and this feeling like, This feminized labor dynamic of having to provide care while not really having supportive caring spaces yourself. Part of me wonders if that type of governance is why so many youth and teens really struggle with people pleasing and so many adults still do Like it’s something that we’re socialized towards in our childhoods And when we’re adults, we’re suddenly told to not have that and to be confident individuals But, how can we, when we have a childhood that’s so full of obedience and shame

I had never thought about that either, but that is such a strand of youth liberation, the idea of unlearning the anti child ageism that we carry over, even when we aren’t facing anti child ageism anymore, because I love Ayanna Goodfellow’s concept of ageism, Trauma, the idea that we all carry the BS that we internalized as kids, like I’m 15 and I still sometimes think about things I was told in preschool that do not serve me.

Like we’re all doing this throughout our lives.

Madeline: Yeah, definitely.

Mk: So on that topic, what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to resist ageism?

Madeline: I think my advice is to You might not be living in a place where there’s organizing spaces at least that are happening out in the open.

And I guess I always say organizing in scare quotes, like I don’t. I don’t really know what organizing means a lot of the time. I think finding comrades always for anyone at any age is really important. And learning how to support each other and trying not to judge each other and just showing up for your friends and working from there.

And building through that building collective power that with that, you have a better chance of pushing against adult supremacy in your life. Yeah. No matter what your context is, so I think together you can be creative, you can problem solve, you can find resources to support each other, find ways to be reciprocal not just ask for care, but care for others and do this every day.

And I would say that just needs to be a baseline, right? Of a kind of everyday practice. And if you’re not doing. Then you can’t really politically show up for anything else. So that’s the kind of create that threshold for you and the ones you care about to be able to be powerful and and work towards, whatever is important to you politically, whatever feels most urgent to you in your different situations.

Mk: Yeah, I love the idea that building collective power and building Liberationist networks of care can be the start of organizing Like that is so important to prefigure and I always think about how that is the kind of organizing that would still be Necessary in some idealized anarchist here. That’s a way to That it’s independent of hierarchy completely and I think we all need that for our mental health and it also really negates this narrative that youth are adults and waiting who are autonomous and Individualized and only exist to work towards some adult future But really youth can provide weird care and for our liberation.

We have to provide weird care speaking of actualizing anarchism do you have any shameless plugs for your organizing or other people’s organizing or stuff you think is cool?

Madeline: Stuff I mostly have writing projects in the works right now and That I can speak to, publicly I definitely know of a few projects that are not things that I can speak to publicly.

So in the category of shameless plugs, I have a book coming out soon with my friend, Max Fox, who’s an editor at pinko magazine, which is definitely a project. I recommend queer youth. We’re interested in. Communism and anarchism and child liberation to check out. A lot of free readings on the Internet.

Max also wrote an article called the traffic and children for para praxis magazine, which is free on the Internet, but I think would be appreciated by any of your listeners. Sounds like I’m plugging Max right now

Mk: is this titled by any chance a reference to the Emma Goldman essay, the traffic and women or.

Madeline: Yes,

Mk: amazing. As someone whose podcast title is a direct Emma reference. I love to see it.

Madeline: Good eyes. Yeah. So Max in my book is called fag hag and it’s coming up, coming out with Rosa press this year and it’s creative nine nonfiction, but it has a real, a really strong focus on child liberation questions.

And I think that’s all I can really speak to on my own behalf. Obviously wherever anyone is that, showing up for Palestine right now is so urgent and so important. However you can do that in the place you are. I always like to frame that, especially with with child comrades sometimes showing up for things politically just looks really different ways, right?

Based on the conditions of safety that various people live in. And degrees of autonomy that we can experience in our lives.

Mk: And there are definitely actions people can take that way. They don’t require being in certain geographical location. I guess I have a shameless plug. We talked about this on the podcast discord.

But if anyone has heard of Jewish voice for people Peace they have a daily power half hour on zoom that you can go to and talk about palestine actions and get reqs for what you should be doing that way usually ends up being petitions op eds, that kind of thing. If anyone goes to JVP dot org slash Gaza pH, then yeah.

So are there any other actions? Things that you’ve been into lately for Palestine that you would like to plug before we leave?

Madeline: No, just things that I’ve been going to locally. But it’s been great to see so many. There was a walkout at my kid’s school last month. Just, this obviously is happening to all Palestinian people, but it’s such an important flashpoint really for thinking about, like, how to have political solidarity with children.

This is an overwhelming number of children who are just being so horrifically harmed and impacted by this. And so I’ve been really inspired by especially. Actions at a local high school here and things like that. And yeah, I just want to say that most of the inspiring voices I’ve seen have been have been from youth.

So

Mk: exactly. Yeah. I love to see that so much. The idea that youth can advocate for other youth and our humanitarian rights, regardless of their circumstances, like that is such a powerful show of transnational, solidarity. And I love it. Yeah. So yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your Youth Liberation Journey.

I’m MK Zariel. This has been Madeleine Lane McKinley, and you are listening to the Child and Its Enemies.

Madeline: Thanks for having me on.

Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids slipping out anarchy and Youth Liberation here at the child and its enemies. We believe that youth Autonomy is. It’s not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control, and inspires us to create queer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zario, and 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and a trans liberationist organizer in the Great Lakes region.

With me today is Shuli Branson, the author of Practical Anarchism, host of Final Straw Radio, and creator of the Breakup Theory of Anarchism.

Shuli: Hi MK, I’m so glad to be here talking with you. I really admire the work that you’re doing, this project in general, And I’m also committed to the struggle for youth liberation, one of the most overlooked ways I think that hierarchy rules our lives.

I’m Shuli, she or they, and as you said I host the Breakup Theory Podcast along with my sometimes co host Caroline and River. I was a frequent co host of the Final Straw Radio, a long running and seminal anarchist broadcast, but I haven’t been doing that so much lately. I’ve been on the collective organizing the Another Carolina Anarchist Book Fair, which is coming up at the end of this month, June, in Asheville, North Carolina, and Like that, I’ve helped create many other events and spaces for queer anarchists encounter.

Mk: So the Breakup Theory of Anarchism is one of your newest projects and it sounds so relevant to youth liberation, especially in the context of family abolition and other liberatory ideas that involve restructuring what relationships and networks of care can look like. Can you define the breakup theory of anarchism for our listeners and talk a bit about its history?

And I will say I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, having recently gone through a breakup, and it is so important to talk about this in our anarchist spaces. So thank you for bringing this up.

Shuli: Yeah, I’m sorry to hear about the breakup, but I hope that you find The sort of the freedom in whatever you’re going through right now, even though it’s, and then you don’t let yourself experience the pain because that’s real.

Mk: I’m finding it really finding a lot of community and queer spaces. And I feel like that’s one of the most meaningful parts of what it what tends to be stereotyped about teenagers, but it’s also so true. Like we’re here to support each other through these times.

Shuli: That’s amazing. Yeah. Finding connection and not isolating is really good.

So yeah, my sort of coming to breakup as an idea, I started thinking about it in when I was writing the book Practical Anarchism. And I was thinking about anarchism as a practice of breaking up. It’s that’s something that anarchism can teach us. It came from many discussions I had and learning from other anarchists, plus my own experience in relationships, breakups, and then also organizing.

And one of the things that I felt anarchism teaches us to do is to end things. We don’t seek to create forever institutions or parties. We acknowledge that we need to retain the flexibility to move with conditions and to counter the tendency of power to collect and stay in certain places. I also wanted to emphasize this because in overturning hierarchies, we have to contend with the forces of naturalization.

That’s what tells us these power systems are inevitable and eternal. We’re born this way. These hierarchies are things like adults over children, men over women, straights over gays, bosses over workers, white people over everyone else. the West over the entire world, the state over other forms of social organization, and so on.

And so my trans anarcho feminist work is to denaturalize hierarchies and help destroy them, and then create conditions to transform the space into other things. I can talk more about the general ideas of anarchism and ending, but I found that this perspective helped Also specifically in our daily relationships, and this is something I became quite interested in, to locate anarchism not simply in the visible or invisible confrontation with the state, but also in our daily practices, how we relate to others.

In fact, I want to consider anarchism as a way of countering hierarchy in every relationship or interaction we have. No matter how small, I think a major form of liberation is knowing that we do not, that we have the power to end things whenever we want, whether we actually end them or not, like knowing that you can end it, I think is important and not being stuck in that idea of eternal eternity.

And we’re often put into situations beyond our control. Family is a major space for this. I think it’s the dominant experience of oppression for youth. Thinking about how to create escape routes and exit plans I think allows us to engage in the relationships on a more voluntary basis rather than simply through coercion.

As a child I felt totally suffocated. Anyway, these are some of the ideas and I could expand on anything you wanted.

Mk: This idea of relationships existing by choice, of not being bound to one another coercively, but instead experiencing atemporal and voluntary care, is so powerful. Would you say that the breakup theory is explicitly youth liberationist How and what can it mean more broadly for our relationships and interpersonal dynamics to be queer and be ageless and thus be impermanent and still meaningful?

Shuli: I like this question. So yes, I think for me, everything that I do has to be youth and career liberationists. And, sometimes these things are taken for granted, but I think we need to be explicit. And these are, these are perspectives that are often left out not even just because they’re assumed, but because they’re total blind spots for people.

Whenever I’m engaging with these ideas, it’s within the context of, youth liberation. Against adult supremacy and for trans queer liberation. I think adult supremacy is one of the most unquestioned, naturalized hierarchies that rules our lives and is really tricky to counter, especially in the ways that the state upholds blood relations, nuclear family structures and so on.

But we’re in this moment where it becomes so evident. that this is like the most intensely enforced hierarchy in the way that fascist christian rights along with right wing, sorry, fascist christian right wingers along with liberals and TERFs are attacking the possibility of trans youth. Through ideas like parental rights, or attacking the parents who support their kids freedom.

That, the idea that children are property of the parents is at the root of this. Property being one of the essential relationships that fuels the dominant ideology of state and capital. But to get less heady as an adult, I also just want to help promote youth liberation any way I can, listening to young people, lifting up young people’s projects and ideas, trying to create situations for young people to flourish with autonomy, calling out the obliviousness of this in so many anarchist spaces.

This is such a huge failure. And my. mind that they’re not inclusive of young people. And to twin this with queer liberation, I really think that we’re at a turning point where we don’t know what’s happening. We can’t predict it. Young people, though, are doing something to make a different world. I think it hangs in the balance, right?

Like it could be captured the work that youth are doing, but it could also be a path towards liberation. Obviously I’m in a bit of an echo chamber because many of the young people I encounter are queer, trans, and in their queerness, they’re finding ways to refuse this world. But I just think that it’s leading somewhere that we don’t know.

And I want to make space for that rather than, from a position of age or experience or whatever, knowledge that I’ve acquired. To think that I know better.

Mk: The idea of the very existence of us queer youth as refusal resonates so much. A lot of the teenagers I hang out with will joke about being too queer to function, and they’ll have an I’m too gay for this profile picture, but in actuality, Queerness is a refusal to be functional to the state, to compulsory education, to the nuclear family.

It’s a refusal of achievement. It’s a refusal to choose people pleasing over internal meaning. It’s inherently a negation of the state, as is talked about in queer ultraviolence. And in a way, that’s part of why it’s so meaningful for transarchists of all ages to support trans kids. Not just because we’re under attack legally, But because for us to exist disrupts the very idea of childhood and linear time.

So on that note about what adult solidarity looks like, how do you tend to apply the breakup theory in your organizing? And how can youth in anarchist spaces apply it?

Shuli: I just, I do this by leaving the groups that don’t work for me, just to touch on the first thing you said though I want to say Because I really like this idea of being too queer to function.

And I think that, there’s like the taking up of our refusal as a kind of action. But I think a lot of people, especially young people are being pushed into this position of seeing very clearly firsthand that things that as they exist don’t work for them. And so it’s not even always like a question of choice.

Like you cannot take up the paths that are laid out ahead of you. And opening these spaces of trends. Transition and queerness and anarchism put create a space to put that energy of breaking with the dominant world. But yeah, so like in terms of breaking up in my organizing, I’ve had the experience of running my head up against the wall and then being like, oh, this group doesn’t share affinity and I would be better off getting out of here or splitting with it.

This is happening a lot lately, actually, for me. And I think this is a way of letting go, allowing people to do their own thing, right? Because a lot of times, I think we, find ourselves wanting to control other people and that should be a immediate alert that we’re going down a bad path. So let people go do their own thing, even if you don’t agree with what they’re doing, right?

We can allow for a diversity of tactics. I think for youth in anarchist spaces they can engage, from this perspective. Break up perspective by determining when they work separately and when they work together with older anarchists. Feel emboldened to call out the erasure of youth self determination or youth inclusion when they see it.

And I think, youth strategies might demand different tactics and approaches than whatever the norm is in your community or the group that you’re working in, and that’s okay. Don’t let adults tell you that they know better, right? I think youth should be able to see that, and probably do know that firsthand, even though they’re sometimes like, shut down, that adults don’t know better inherently.

Especially when they’re telling you that They know how to do a revolution because clearly they haven’t done that, right? There’s a balance, I think, between innovation that comes from young people who haven’t been beaten down by circumstance, right? There’s a willingness to experiment and take different kinds of risks.

And then, On the other side, the lessons from experience that people who’ve been working for a while can bring. But I think that yeah, I just find that we tend to overemphasize the people who’ve been in it for a long time over the innovations of younger people.

Mk: For sure. And my organizing mentor always talks about this.

The necessity of spaces being multi generational. How we can’t just have teen spaces because then those tend to be really within compulsory education. But we also just can’t have adult spaces because that’s freaking ageist. So we need that dynamic of mentorship but also equality between youth and teens and that network of care that eventually makes age irrelevant.

And hearing this when I was first joining the anarchist movement was so necessary because I think a lot of younger anarchists don’t.

Speaking of tactics and what Youth Liberationist organizing is. What’s your experience been hosting the final straw radio? Have you always been into anarchist media?

Shuli: Yeah, so I got into anarchism through a kind of media through punk music and then zines and books that connected punk with anarchism.

And that happened when I was like 13 or so. And actually, going back to this intergenerational thing, which I agree is super important. And it’s something I’ve been. dealing with a lot because of encampment stuff so as a teacher and like engaging with students and seeing the clashes of that but punk was a space for me also where there’s people of all kinds of ages so that was interesting it also led to problems you know bad behaviors but anyway That’s a little bit of a side.

In terms of the final straw I was, as a listener, I like, I love being able to hear anarchist radio shows and podcasts, and I think it’s helpful to get reports from what’s happening in other places and other kinds of projects, what obstacles people run up against when they’ve found, success in what they’re doing.

From all over the world. And this is something the final straw does really well. It’s the kind of an international perspective. I think, obviously anarchist media isn’t everything. There has to be an element of hiddenness to anarchism stuff that we don’t share and don’t talk about. So it’s just one, part of practice anarchist practice, but I think the final straw is just such a wonderful project that I feel very lucky that I got invited by bursts.

Who’s, who’s been doing the final straw for, since the beginning to contribute in ways that bore out my own interests and talents. And this gave me a really amazing opportunity to have discussions with people I admire, which I love doing. That’s my favorite thing to do. And I learned new perspectives and ideas and having these conversations.

I also got to host round tables with William. Who’s another host of the final straw. And so we would invite guests on to have discussions about. issues that were vexing them in their organizing or to think about new directions to take things. And that was just a really fun thing to do. I really love the opportunity to think alongside people, like in the moment, having conversations, particularly people who inspire me.

So this is just one of my favorite things to be able to do it. It’s like a dream. And the other thing I would say is I’m so lucky that I got to record interviews and then burst with it. Edit them with his expertise because right now that I’m editing my own podcast. I’m learning how much labor that entails.

It’s very intensive.

Mk: I also think it’s definitely a thing. I’ve been learning audacity for the first time to create this podcast, and it’s really shown me how much it takes to produce anarchist media. And I think that’s one thing that is necessary in youth liberation. Like we need to Teen oriented skill shares.

We need accessible resources because otherwise there’s just a huge learning curve that’s prohibitive for so many people.

Shuli: Totally. I think that’s amazing to yeah, to learn how to do these things. And also I just think, for a while I was held up by the editing because I was like, This is just not something that interests me and isn’t where my skills or talent lie, but then I like, I just was like, Oh, I actually can do it, but I think there’s again, a balance between finding the things that you do well and pushing in those directions and then also broadening what you’re able to do.

But yeah, God, it’s a lot of work. And I, yeah, I was also just going to say like channel zero as this kind of overarching umbrella project is really cool because it brings together all these different media projects. And that’s like this liberatory alternative to the content that you just discover if you open up whatever Spotify or Apple podcasts.

So I just think it’s really good to have all these different shows grouped together. And it’s I think it’s important because if you like, if you follow the suggestions of these mainstream things, like through, listening to left podcasts, they’re not going to point you in the direction of anarchism that still gets left out.

So it can lead you down bad roads. Like you end up just like with Jacobin socialism or whatever voting for the Democrats. I think there’s so many Projects that are part of this network and they allow discovery of new things. And I’m so stoked that The Child and His Enemies has become part of that.

This I don’t know, universe of anarchist media projects. I think this is, youth liberation, anarchism, we are working against the kind of erasure the history of these kinds of projects, the long struggles for liberation, but also right now, the idea of anarchism is often left off the table, even though they use all the work we do and every kind of street movement.

And anarchism is just not ever seen really as a serious proposition or a way of engaging with the world and life. And I think that this is actually intimately tied to the idea of youth liberation because anarchism is disregarded as adolescent, something you grow out of when start to accept more realistic ideas, either like becoming a, bourgeois or an authoritarian Marxist.

And neither of those are satisfactory from my point of view. So I think we just need to fight this at all costs because it’s a losing game. Stacks the decks towards repetition that’s not only foolish, but is boring. And again, this is something I think we’re seeing right now. A kind of repetition once again.

Mk: I love that you got into anarchy mostly through punk spaces, and as you’ve talked about, youth driven and DIY media, such as this podcast and everything else on the Channel Zero network, makes anarchy not only more accessible to youth, but actively affirming and personally relatable. So were you into anarchy and punk as a kid and teen?

How did you organize and what would have made it more accessible for you when you were younger?

Shuli: Yeah, that’s such a good point. Stuff like this didn’t exist. We had a different kind of infrastructure through zines and stuff. So there was a thing called book your own fucking life, which was put out by Maximum Rock and Roll.

And you could go to the store. I think it came out. I can’t remember how frequently, like once a year, but it would tell you all the places that like across. The US, where you could go, and where there’d be punks, where you could book shows, and it was like this little compendium, it was like a bible to me but a lot of this stuff happened through zines, but I was also in this kind of early moment of chat, internet chat, IRC, where I met other punks, but punk, yeah, punk was like, just such an important way in for me, it’s not for everyone, but as someone who always bucked at authority but also could fit within structures.

Punk worked in a way. I was in this weird position as a kid. I did well in school, but I also got in trouble a lot. And punk giving me this coherent idea of anarchism was really helpful because it helped me understand both of those sides of myself. And then it, yeah, it gave me the space and DIY youth subculture, which I think is like a foundational part of who I am that experience of punk and it’s a way that you share, like you can meet other punks and you have some shared thing.

It’s the same thing with anarchists, same thing with trans people, and I especially love when all three of those overlap when I’m like with trans anarchist punks. But yeah, punk is like a part of the way that I see the world, and growing up in these spaces that are created by punks, Even when they sucked, which, in Boston was most of the time in certain ways, it made me feel that we could, that there are counter worlds that are possible.

I had to find my way out of this violent macho punk space in Boston that I grew up with to get to the trans queer world where I actually fit. And that took time, punk isn’t perfect, but this mess is a mess that I identify with. And then, in terms of organizing the thing that was, like, so fundamental to my childhood was all age matinees that I could access through public transportation.

I spent every Saturday at the show. And that’s not a specifically political or protest kind of organizing, but I think it, it vibes with what I think is one of the strengths of anarchist organizing, which is creating spaces for people to come together, do the things that they love.

And share, and then build the world together. And I think, there are critiques of subculture as a way into anarchism, and critiques of subculture just, But I think that it’s like a very special place that said in those spaces, I wish that my interest in revolutionary liberationist politics had been fostered more by other people in there because it, because the subculture also just becomes like a way to party for some people, and I was like, I’m, I was the kind of kid who liked to have a mentor and basically like punk was a shield for me against homophobic bullying. But that became like the primary source the primary use, of punk for me as a kid. And that took over from my ability to imagine liberatory futures until I got older.

So I think that it could have been better in a lot of ways. But I think punk has changed a lot. In the 90s, it was super violent and dangerous often. And, and and, it could be really macho. And I think that’s changed a bit in certain spaces, at least. And that’s so exciting.

Mk: That idea of being a youth and finding an imperfect scene and still getting some measure of support and care and world making through that is so necessary.

A couple weeks ago I actually had Jenny Bastian, the founder of this independent punk venue, Communication Madison, on and her work is explicitly all ages and queer and neurodivergent. And it gives me so much hope that things are changing like that. And that as. Teams who need mentorship and need care and need a DIY scene to be a part of that.

We have those resources. So what advice would you have for kids and teams who want to get into anarchist organizing in theory?

Shuli: I think, trust your gut, trust yourself, listen to it, find a way to hear what you want and need, and don’t, let it be credited out by other people telling you what it should be or how it should be done.

Find your people. Don’t sweat when you mess up or like something that you try fails like that’s part of it And I think don’t give any kind of credence to the idea that people know things once and for all, right? Like you always have to experiment and try again keep dreaming realizing your desires Even when they seem out of the form, out of the norm your desires are worth living out in ways.

And I think I was actually just talking about this with a trans friend, that putting weird stuff out there is like actually very important because then you find other people through the weirdness. You often think Oh, this is so weird. No one else will like it. But I’ve found that when you do the weird stuff, people are like, Oh, yeah, I needed this, but yeah, there’s no right way to do things. So just try out what comes to mind and figure out what works for you from that.

Mk: That makes such sense as advice for teenagers how anarchy is not about being perfect. It’s not about finding an amazing affinity group and spending the rest of your life with them.

It’s about really trial and error and figuring out what’s meaningful to us and as you talk about with the breakup theory, embracing endings as anarchism. On that note, any shameless plugs for your organizing?

Shuli: Yeah, I have a Patreon where I have, I post my podcast, although the podcast is also available, Spotify and all those places, YouTube, all those places, but I also post on my Patreon writing that I do, stuff that, becomes zines or something.

So you can go there to patreon. com slash The Breakup Theory. You can support me financially there, but I don’t have anything paywalled. I do appreciate the support, because being a public analyst does not pay very well. I’m always working to make ends meet, but I never, I want to have everything available.

Yeah, so check out my writing there. There’s Zooms and stuff up there. You can listen to The Breakup Theory wherever you find podcasts. And then I have books and other articles and stuff, and I love hearing from people. So if you want to check me out and reach out to me, you can check me out on on the website and communicate with me there.

My website, sj branson.com or on Instagram at Branson. I’m also to be found, but I like hearing what people are up to and what they think, so I encourage that.

Mk: Thank you so much for sharing your Youth Liberation journey. I’m MK Zariel. This has been truly Branson and here listening. The Child and its Enemies.

Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, to Anarchy Itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create queer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zario, I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog DebateMeBro, and trans liberationist organizer in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is Pearson, formerly the host of Coffee with Comrades and now just a super cool anarchist.

Pearson: Hey, what’s up? It’s so good to be with you. I’m stoked to have this conversation. It’s been a long time in development and I’m excited to sit down and talk with you. It should be A great time.

Mk: Yeah, agreed. I’m so glad that we could create a space like this is actually the first time I have featured a friend from the channel zero network on the podcast. So i’m This collaboration already.

Pearson: That’s awesome Yeah, I one of my favorite parts about being in the channel zero network and doing coffee with comrades was all of the cool cross pollination and the different kinds of conversations that it engendered in the You Ways that creative projects got to overlap.

So I’m thrilled that even though coffee with comrades is no longer around, I still get to participate that in different ways. Like I said, it’s really great to be here.

Mk: Yeah. Do you want to share your pronouns, your affiliated groups and any other organizing experience that you’d love for our viewers to hear about?

Pearson: Yeah, sure. So like you said, my name is Pearson. I use here, they pronouns, whatever works, I don’t really care that much. As the adage goes. Gender is a fuck and masculinity is a prison. So even though I was assigned male at birth, I don’t have any real affinity for it. Like you also mentioned, I used to host the podcast Life With Comrades, but unfortunately, sadly, that chapter of my life has come to a close.

These days I am a writer, a professor, I’m a parent I’ve worked with. A number of different groups like mutually disaster relief and the channel zero network, but I’ve also worked alongside folks in the libertarian socialist caucus in the DSA and student groups like students for justice in Palestine or the center for participant education.

So many folks who are liberation minded, I’ve had quite a few hats that I’ve worn over the years. So it’s hard to put that into a. Tiny, concise little script, but yeah I’ve had, I’ve been doing, anarchist organizing for cotton. I feel so old saying this, but well over 15 years now.

So that’s cool. And I’m glad that I’ve gotten to participate in it for such a long and protracted time and see how it’s developed and see the kind of really urgent and emergent ways that people are trying to challenge empire and trying to challenge the state and trying to develop networks and communities of kinship and care.

Mk: I love that so much and all the solidarity you’ve done with students especially is so meaningful as a teenage anarchist who’s been in the movement for two years now it is so amazing to see older anarchists really focusing on mentorship and friendship and care with youth. Yeah when we came up with this idea for an interview, you mentioned you wanted to chat about revolutionary movements and how they intersect with youth liberation.

While anarchism isn’t necessarily movement based, like I consider mine more anti futurist, more of the anarcho nihilist bend how, in your opinion, have more social movement type of spaces held space for kids and teens?

Pearson: Yeah, thanks for those kind words. I guess we can start there, right?

Because I think it’s so funny talking with folks and going to going to events, whether it’s something like the Asheville Another another Carolina anarchist book fair, the ACAB event that goes on in Asheville every year, or whether it’s going to events like the dual power gathering but you look around and I start to realize, oh, I’m like, I am starting to become an older person here and it’s been a weird kind of experience.

Cause I don’t necessarily think of myself as an old hat, like I don’t think of myself as like a veteran organizer by any stretch of the imagination. I feel like in many ways, I’m still flying by the seat of my pants. And there are plenty of people who, I Look up to and appreciate and admire and whose advice and insight I go to when I’m struggling, or when I don’t know what to do or what have you.

But at the same time I do think that there’s been like a market shift in the way that I’ve related to anarchist social movements as of late. And it’s something that has been Really, like a really recent kind of development. I think that I’ve come to terms with.

So I guess to answer your kind of more direct question, I think that social movements have done a. A mixed bag when it comes to how they have related to kids and teens and how kids and teens have had space made for them or how they have made space for themselves. I think that we are seeing a lot of that now in some really cool ways.

For example, we’ve got the student led protests in defense of Gaza and Palestine, right? We saw, Universities being occupied. We saw mass walkouts across the nation in high schools and then, and even in middle schools. But I think that we on the left have a really uneven history when it comes to trying to actually include kids in our movements, and I think this kind of comes from these two distinct and often like polar places, but there’s a real spectrum between.

These 2 things right? On the 1 hand you have folks who genuinely want to protect young folks from the state and from vigilante violence, right? They’ve seen horrific things firsthand. They’ve seen militarized police. They have seen Dipshits like Kyle Rittenhouse, waving an AR 15 and shooting protesters in during the uprisings in recent memory and they’re scared.

And I think that on one hand, this is like a reasonable and understandable threat matrix to be concerned about. It makes sense that those are. Real concerns. They are like legitimate sources of potential violence. And I think that we would be doing a disservice to ourselves and to others, if we are not aware of the ways in which that kind of plays out especially in the world today.

And I think it probably goes without saying that as a parent, the very last thing I want is for one of my kiddos to get arrested or hurt by the state. And the same, of course, holds true for anybody’s kid. But on the other hand You’ve got this kind of patronize patronizing attitude, right?

This whole idea that the kids are going to save us all that sort of thing, right? This generation is so woke. They’re so progressive. And I think it places way too much of an emphasis on young folks to the point where it almost can become a burden and it can be a excuse to abdicate Our duty as older people who are engaged in social movements or in liberatory struggles, because it’s a way of saying if the kids are going to be all right, if the kids are going to save themselves, then we don’t really have to worry about it.

And I think that there’s a really large spectrum that exists between those two attitudes. But I think that kind of encapsulates a lot of the ways in which people try to approach. It’s in social movements, right? And I think that it’s this this dialectic, right? I think it’s a bit more like a both and thing because obviously, kids are doing some really amazing and inspiring stuff right now, but I also want to recognize and think, critically about how We and I’m speaking to other older folks, other aging elder veteran, whatever you want to call us, because unfortunately now I do count myself among this category, right?

How do we aging elder veteran anarchists and revolutionaries create an intergenerational struggle, right? Where there isn’t this. Huge divide between the old and the young. I’ve had a lot of really wonderful experiences getting to meet older folks either at food, not bombs or through organizing at book fairs or through doing coffee with comrades.

It. And I want to be really intentional as I am getting older about trying to be if not a mentor, then a a sort of egalitarian way of relating with younger people and championing and recognizing the input and the value that. Folks have regardless of where they might be coming from, regardless of what age they might be because I’ve seen the ways in which intergenerational revolutionary struggle can be a hugely positive thing.

And I’ve been thinking about okay what does that mean for my role now? And so something that I’m just been piecing over and wrestling with now as a parent and as someone who’s in this weird liminal space, right? I think it’s really important to prize the autonomy and the agency and the experience of everyone.

But how do we do so in a genuinely egalitarian fashion? And I’m curious, MK, because I’ve talked a lot here just now about my own experiences, but I’m curious, like. Where, how do you see that intergenerational affinity between older folks and youth? Do you see it at all in your organizing efforts or is it something that is given lip service to but isn’t actually have sincere commitment?

I’m curious like what your experience is like.

Mk: So as a trans youth, I tend to see that sense of solidarity, especially in today’s trans spaces. And that is in large part because people are aware that the majority of transphobia tends to be specifically about fear mongering surrounding trans teens existing.

So when I meet trans adults, as a result, they’re very much about wanting to build a community of care with trans youth and Most of the anarchist spaces I’m in are predominantly queer and trans, so that tends to be the reason for that sense of solidarity. And usually that’s great, but sometimes it can get towards tokenism, not so much in the anarchist scene, but in more neoliberal spaces.

There will be a lot of fanfare surrounding the existence of a trans kid, but no one will really materially support the kid. And I also think I actually gave a workshop at Queer Smash Back about this very problem. Sometimes adults will either see us as an equal person and thus not understand that we face ageism, or see us as someone who faces ageism and not understand that we’re an equal person.

So I really think that intergenerational organizing means acknowledging that age is a social construct that exists and acknowledging that adult supremacy is a social construct that exists and actively working to dismantle it. We cannot be age blind, we cannot just pretend this doesn’t happen, but we have to build solidarity with people of all ages, whether or not they face ageism or compulsory development or whatever it is.

Thank you.

Pearson: Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense.

Mk: Yeah so on this topic, what youth liberationist tendencies do you see in today’s anarchist milieu, and how do they intersect with queer and neurodivergent struggles? As I mentioned, the queer spash back tendency really has a youth liberationist side, and that’s brought me so much joy as someone who identifies for that tendency.

But I know there must be so many other faces like this.

Pearson: Yeah, totally. So here’s the thing. I think a lot of this work is being done by kids. And as a result, I think that means that it often gets rendered invisible or undervalued. And I think, obviously, that’s a real shame, because even in ostensibly like leftist milieus, I find that Kids experiences and their desires and their autonomy is often dismissed, even, or, perhaps, especially when it’s paid lip service to and I think to a large extent, that’s because people are not actually surrounding themselves with kids.

They may not have kids themselves. They may eschew, having kids, or they may not have. Roles in life, either in work or in, in, in their community that bring them in close contact with young folks. And I think as a result that a lot of times people inherit the popular attitudes that are endemic to our hierarchical society.

And in this case, namely ageism, right? In this. This conception that adults have more agency and more autonomy and more power than youth and that youth need to be shepherded and protected and that they could never possibly conceive of, let alone act upon a genuinely revolutionary program.

And so I think that it’s a real shame. When that happens, and I think that as a result, a lot of times that work is, like I said, just sidelined or invisiblize and it’s, exactly why I’m really excited that a show like The Child and Its Enemies exists on the CZN to help elevate those struggles to help elevate those voices and to shine a light on what, unfortunately, is often marginalized work.

I think, if we’re talking about ideas for youth struggle if we’re talking about the ways in which intergenerational Affinity can develop into really fruitful forms of community and kinship. 1 book in particular that I would direct folks towards is this awesome intergenerational book on youth liberation called trust kids, which is a, anthology collection edited by my friend Carla Bergman, and it’s got poetry. It’s got art. It’s got like critical, thoughtful academic essays. It’s got very thoughtful, nuanced, personal, and narrative themes. Based essays, but it runs the veritable gambit between, writers, poets, artists, academics, essayists, and crucially kids themselves.

I think a lot of times when people talk about youth liberation, again, especially in our Leftist milus, they often will actually eshoo kids from being included in those conversations. And what I think makes trust kids such an awesome and invaluable resource is that it actually has contributions from youth, right?

Which is fucking awesome.

I guess the other places that I see this form of youth liberation happening is as a professor. I see it really, especially with my students. I work at a university satellite college that is a open source program.

And as a result, I get a lot of students from, typically marginalized communities, right? A lot of youth of color, a lot of neurodivergent people people with ADHD, people with autism people who have physical disabilities. And 1 of the things that I have found to be really eye opening and really engaging and really affirming.

Is seeing the ways in which these kids will not only advocate for themselves interpersonally, but the ways in which they try to advocate for 1 another as a whole, and this takes place to a number of different student organizations, but I also try to model that and provide tools for students in the classroom.

1 of the things that we do at the very beginning of every semester, we write a kind of collaborative. Community manifesto where everybody is interjecting. Everybody is contributing to this shared document that kind of sets the mood or the vibe or the environment for our learning.

And it’s based upon the critical pedagogy of people like Paula Freire it’s based upon the work that Francisco Freire did with the new school. And it also is based upon other anarchist or anarchic adjacent theorists, like people like bell hooks, people like Rob Hayworth, et cetera.

And so as a result students have a lot. Of autonomy over not just the way that they engage with the class, but the ways in which they engage with each other, the kinds of conversations that they get to participate in what we read, what we look at, what we research, what we discuss and as a result, have a huge degree of autonomy.

And I found that especially, because your question was geared towards questions about, how neurodivergent youth and how I see that happening. That’s 1 of the big ways that I see it happening is students advocating for themselves and for their needs and saying, hey this grading structure doesn’t actually work for me.

I need this spelled out a little more clearly. Or, oh, because of the fact that I struggle with deadlines, I need some more time and being able to work with people and find the best way to empower their learning is a really edifying aspect of my job. And I guess the last place that I see this.

As a parent with my kiddos both my kiddos are varying shades of gender nonconforming, varying shades of queer they are both neurodivergent and they are engaged with their friends and with, our friend group in our larger community in a variety of ways, whether that is being a positive influence in, the rural Midwest on our neighbors.

I had the other morning, 1 of our. One of the neighbor kids in our neighborhood came over and knocked on our door and she had missed the bus. And we’re driving. I, my, my kiddo had already caught the bus. And I, put on my shoes and jumped in the car and took her over because she was scared to tell her stepdad and that her stepdad was going to yell at her.

And on, anyway, on the way during the drive, One of the things that she told me this is a young kid, I think nine or 10. And the only kind of real morality that she’s been taught is a very regressive form of like patriarchal Christianity. And so I’m using her words.

These wouldn’t be my words, these were her words. And she said, like my. My parents taught me to not like gay people, but I think that Jesus wants us to love everybody. And so I love gay people. I love bi people. I love non binary people. I love trans people. And you know who taught me that?

And I was like, who? And she was like, your kiddos did. And I was like, super touched because I can, trust on my kids to to be A positive influence in the world and a positive influence on their peers and to get to see how those conversations are fruitful and flourishing is 1 of the most edifying possible things as a parent the last little kind of scenario that I will say just a.

Cause I’ve been on a long spiel here is our co op. Our co op is democratically run. We homes, we used to homeschool, both our kids now just our younger kiddo is homeschooled and it is a democratically run homeschool. And at the beginning of every semester one of the things that we do is we all sit down, parents and kids alike.

And go over what it is that we want to do with that particular semester, whether it’s just Hey, we want to have some social days, or, Hey, we want to have a pajama day, or we want to have a day where we talk about languages, or we want to have a day where we talk about history, or we want to have a day where we all dress up in Ren fair outfits and pretend that we are in the medieval ages and whatnot.

And being able to equip tool, equip kids with the tools to navigate democratic processes to, to model those and the reality and to point to them and illustrate to them in different ways. Hey, this is the way that like, actual democracy works that you have a direct say and how that’s different from.

The more representative forms of so called democracy that are occurring in the world especially occurring here in the United States. And I think that, all of these are small mundane kinds of ways in which. Organizing or practicing liberation happen. But I think taken as a whole, they represent this idea that anarchy is not just, Molotov cocktails and black block and smashing windows and throwing bombs.

It is a sincere commitment to care to community, to kinship, to mutual aid, to Having a direct egalitarian say over our own lives and having agency, and I think in particular, having that kind of agency and autonomy in an intergenerational way.

Mk: I love that all so much. Thank you so much for sharing about what youth liberation looks like in your life, what liberatory parenting and education look like, all of that.

So many people need to hear that. But the through line that stuck out to me the most was the fact that youth liberation can really just start with youth advocating for our needs, standing up to bigotry that we and our friends face. And. How you talked about your neurodivergent students learning to stand up for themselves by advocating for the accommodations they needed.

Youth liberation doesn’t always need to start with some grand social movement goal. It can literally just be about the problems in your community. I when I started the new middle school a couple years ago, I noticed a lot of homophobia and self repression. I was getting called slurs.

It was a mess. So I started a queer and trans anarchist collective. And now 20 percent of the school is in said collective and has transitioned,

Pearson: that’s dope.

Mk: Yeah we love, self advocacy. And yeah youth organizing has always existed, even though the lip service to it hasn’t. But a lot of it, as you say, is really specific to certain schools, or localities, or just our social circles, rather than formal organizing.

Yeah. So it’s easy for us young anarchists to feel so alone in the milieu and wonder if we’re the only one. Like I’ve been at so many anarchist meetings where I’ve been the youngest and everyone’s been amazingly supportive and it’s been a good experience, but it’s also been a little depressing that no other teenagers feel comfortable doing that.

More broadly, how would you say that the idea of revolutionary movement spaces intersects with youth liberation? Decentralized tendencies tend to be pretty kid and teen friendly, as they allow for autonomous organizing that take kids needs into account, like we just talked about.

And I’m curious about your views on how centralization affects that.

Pearson: Yeah, totally. As I’m sure will not surprise you being an anarchist, I am not a big advocate of centralization. I’m sure your audience and you yourself are well aware of kind of the the dangers that come from centralization.

I think centralization is a model that often. Often it’s maybe too generous. I think centralization is a model that invariably leads to forms of hierarchy and bureaucracy. And I think that as a result like we end up thinking about this particular tool that we think on the surface is going to make things more efficient or make things better.

And it actually does the opposite. It takes the wind out of our sails. It stymies our ability to respond or to react quickly. And as a result, what I think often ends up happening is that we have these really hamstrung organizations that are incapable of responding to the emergent crisis.

Crisis of our time, right? And think about something like an NGO or a non government organization, right? For not for profit kind of organization. I think that those, organizations can and do useful stuff all the time. And I think that it is just it’s nearsighted to just be dismissive about that work entirely.

Because even if we do have legitimate critiques of those structural flaws, I do think that there are opportunities to. Work within those spaces and ways to pull them more to the left ways to try to increase the amount of decentralization ways to increase the amount of agency and autonomy within those frameworks while also.

Being unflinching and full throated and are very legitimate critiques of those structural flaws. But that said, I suspect that many of your critiques and my critiques of centralized and highly regimented institutions stem from the ways in which they do harm whether that’s like looking at something like The boy scouts now the scouts right?

Hugely centralized organization that was ostensibly to trying to teach survival skills, trying to teach people the ability to be in nature, trying to champion a respect and even a love for our natural ecology or what happened? What’s the big news? The scouts have had rife with.

Sexual abuse and controversy because of the ways that they have covered that up. And it’s interesting hearing people who who I love and who I care about, who have been engaged in scouts, for example, who have had a hard, large degree. Of decentralization and have had a really beautiful, really productive, really amazing experiences where they’ve learned so much and they’ve been able to engage with the world and go camping and be in nature and learn survival skills that are really integral and really important for everyone to know and how different that unique experiences because of that decentralization because of that like detachment from this larger group.

How different that is from the very real ways in which the centralization of that body led to so much predation, led to so much harm and so much suffering because of the ways that people’s very real concerns about predators and their ranks or the ways in which sexual abuse was allowed to flourish.

And so I think like something like scouts is a really prime example, especially for youth of the ways in which. Decentralization can actually lead to some really beautiful and really beneficial things and centralization at its worst can lead to some really heinous and really horrific things. And I guess I bring that particular example up because I’m really curious what.

A more robust attempt at creating a liberatory cultural framework for kids might look like I’m struck by the history of the ways in which physical fitness culture was like this huge deal in places like Spain before the Spanish civil war, as I understand it, there’s this huge support for youth programming.

That was. At least in part for kids and by kids, and I would love to see more of that. I think that a lot of that is getting done in fits and starts. I think a lot of it, unfortunately is the type of thing that. People are maybe afraid to start or maybe don’t know how to start or where to start because they think, oh this is going to take money or this is going to take time.

Or kids just are not, given the agency and given the autonomy to actually create those programs and not given the support they need by elders in their lives. But my hope is that something like that could come back because I think, survival skills, being in nature being able to relate to other people and relates to the non human world, I think is such a vital and integral thing.

And as a result, I think that when we lose that, or when we just say, oh scouts is bad. And this idea is bad. And because of all, because all the sexual abuse happened, we should never try to do anything like this. I think that there’s this interesting kind of through line where it’s yes, this is a terrible thing that happened.

Yes, this the blame should be. So it should be fully and full throatedly put upon the centralization that was endemic to this organization. But if we look at it at this other vector there’s this Other way of organizing ourselves, this other way of structuring ourselves that does not seem to lead to the same kinds of predation that does not seem to lead to the same types of harm and suffering.

And I think that we on the left who care deeply about our ecology, who Derek care deeply about our. Our non human kin, I think it’s really important for us to continue that particular struggle. Yeah, that’s a long diatribe, but I think I answered your question about centralization and the ways in which it’s bad and harmful and not good.

Mk: I love your emphasis on the necessity of youth being able to teach one another practical skills in spaces that are safe Like in my local anarchist community We really prioritize skill shares and resource shares and that’s something teenagers turn out for a lot because compulsory education Is not the most supportive way to develop as people However, that’s still something we need to be doing at rh and always You The Child and His Enemies actually has a discord server for kids and teens and adult allies who want to learn more about anarchism and want to help each other self educate.

And I’ve really been beautiful networks of care for him there because people actually feel safe to be imperfect and to grow and Deliberate one another. Unrelatedly actually speaking of this idea of like anarchist education and what it means for radical spaces to be and becoming, what was your experience like hosting Coffee with Comrades?

Have you always been into anarchist media or was this a relatively new project?

Pearson: Yeah, totally. I have always been into anarchist media. I’ve told this story many times before. But when I was, 14 or 15, I was struggling with trying to define what I was politically, like trying to find the right word for it. And it wasn’t until I read the comic book via V for Vendetta by Alan Moore that I. Was first introduced to the idea, to the term anarchy and to the idea of anarchism. And ever since i’ve had an abiding interest in anarchist media

my entire dissertation that I wrote for my PhD is like about anarchist media. I don’t call it anarchist media explicitly necessarily in that particular text. That’s what it is. Basically, what it was my master’s thesis is all about anarchism and hardcore music. Yeah, I’ve always been interested in anarchist media and I’ve also been interested in not just critiquing it or thinking about it, but also creating it.

Whether that’s writing poetry. I’ve got a number of poetry collections that are very inflammatory and anarchic. I’ve written many short stories. And I’ve obviously done Talk with Comrades. I enjoyed my time hosting that show. It ran for just over five years. And I, I have some bittersweet memories, but they’re more positive than negative.

Overall, I got to meet a lot of really lovely folks and inform what I hope are lifelong friendships with them. I got to have the opportunity to use that platform humble, though it was to give a voice to some really important work. And I’m glad that body of episodes exists and I’m proud of the work that we did.

So yeah, I’ve always been interested in it. It’s something that I’m always constantly engaged with whether it’s thinking about it critically and from an academic standpoint, whether it is reading it whether it’s reading anarchist fiction or anarchist writers, just for the fuck of it, or people who are maybe adjacent to to anarchist philosophy or anarchist ideals or whether it’s making it myself and poems and stories and, novel manuscripts and all that good stuff. So yeah, I think it’s super, super critical. And I’m glad that there are shows like the child and its enemies that are carrying that torch and running with it.

Mk: Coming to anarchism through punk and independent media and art is so meaningful and I think really sheds light on what there needs to be more of in anarchism because too often there’s a focus again on the movement stuff on Solely on action rather than on the anarchist culture we create.

And yeah, I got radicalized for classic queercore in part and also Emma Goldman. Yeah. So what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you when you were younger? And what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to do anarchist organizing?

Pearson: Oh, that’s a great question.

While I ponder it you mentioned queercore. Have you heard of the band CU Space Cowboy?

Mk: I have not, but I will Google them.

Pearson: They’re so good. They’re so gay. They are so great. They’re like they’re like a hardcore screamo band. But I’m pretty sure all of them are queer in one form or another their vocalist is trans.

They are explicitly like anarchists and come out of anarchist organizing. They’re great. They had a record that came out this year that has a really long name that I can’t remember for the life of me. I think it actually. I take that back. I think it might just be called Coup De Grace.

Anyways, great band. See you Space Cowboy. Great band. Highly recommend to you and your listeners, especially if you’re into, queer people yelling things and writing cool music.

Mk: Yeah, this podcast actually tries to platform queer core. Our intro and our outro are by the amazing queer feminist band Daisy and the Scouts.

And we always have a musical interlude by an independent queer artist. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up. They sound super cool.

Pearson: Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. So back to your question which is specifically, what would I have? What would have made organizing spaces more accessible for me when I was a youth?

And what advice would I have for kids and teens who want to get into anarchist organizing? I would say to the first part of that, right? Asking about whether they were accessible. They did. They weren’t, but they weren’t hostile either, if that makes sense, right? There wasn’t a sincere effort to open up space for youth.

But there also wasn’t a a feeling of Oh, I don’t belong here necessarily. One of my organic, like earliest memories organizing was in Orlando after there were a series of arrests for food, not bombs. And I remember just being disgusted and outraged and not, being accused.

Being very young, not really understanding coming from a very sheltered, background, not really understanding, like, why is this happening and not having a language to articulate it and being able to have conversations with people who had been arrested many times for having the audacity to share food with anyone who wanted it in the public.

Yeah,

Mk: I still hear about arrests for that. It is. I’ve had a friend call it the criminal mutual aid conspiracy, but really people should not be arrested for providing food or at all.

Pearson: No, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I can think of things that would have made those spaces better. But I, I.

It’s hard to think of ways that folks particularly catered to or accommodated young people. So I would say it wasn’t an attitude of exclusion. There was a degree of acceptance when I was getting involved, but I wouldn’t say that folks went out of their way to try and make. People comfortable or rather make youth comfortable when they were getting involved in organizing which kind of brings up the 2nd.

Kind of crux of your question, which is with the advice that I would give to kids and to teens who are interested in getting into anarchist organizing when I did talk with comrades, we had a. A much maligned, much misunderstood kind of tagline which I still love dearly which is fuck theory, do shit.

And a lot of people took umbrage with that particular line because they’re like, ah, theory is really important. What are you doing if you don’t actually do any theory? But what they failed to Realizes like it’s fuck theory and do shit. So there’s still, it’s not do organized thing.

It’s not do good things. It’s do shit. And it’s what it’s trying to point to is the messy fumbling beautiful, joyful ways in which we try to engage with each other. I think that there’s a really seminal quote by our mutual channel zero network homies in the crime think X workers collective where they say the change everything start anywhere.

And I think that is bar none. Some of the best advice that you could give to anyone who’s. Looking to get involved in anarchist political organizing, whether they are kids or whether they are teens or they are adults. I think that there are ways that each of us can get involved in our communities.

And unfortunately, they’re not all going to be super sexy. We’ve spent a lot of time in this conversation talking about what are ostensibly pretty mundane, pretty milk toast, pretty not boring, but pretty run of the mill ways in which people try to engage in organizing. And I think that those are some of the most.

Beautiful and emergent ways it’s not to say that getting in, in block and marching with hundreds of people through the streets and going to a demonstration isn’t also beautiful, but I think that the more ways in which we. Don’t just see anarchy as a one off event, but as something that we embody something that we do a way of inhabiting the world and relating to each other the better off we will be.

Yeah, if you want to change everything, start anywhere, whether that is at your school, whether that is in your home, whether that is with your friend group. How can you make the relationships that you have more egalitarian if you don’t know how to do it, then ask your friends if you don’t know how to, if you don’t have people who are like minded necessarily near you go to your local library and read some books or hop on the anarchist library online and download a bunch of essays that look interesting.

Listen to the other podcasts on the channel zero network. There are so many ways that people are getting engaged in the beautiful and life affirming and necessary work of social struggle. I think that. It’s really easy to get dejected. It’s really easy to get paralyzed. It’s really easy to think that, it’s a buy into the lie that you and your friends can’t actually do anything to change the world.

But the reality is that every time that we live in Ways that fight back against hierarchy. Every time that we live in ways that negate oppression in ways that uplift joy and kinship, that is a victory in and of itself. That is a transformation of the world. That is a transformation of the ways in which we relate to each other.

My advice to young folks would be stay wild, stay young, stay free. We are. All that we have, which is terrifying, but also really beautiful and affirming because it means that there is no salvation for us, but we can make it with our own hands. If we have the resolve, if we have the faith in one another, and if we have the boldness and the courage to try and to fail and to get back up out of the dirt and try again.

Mk: I love that all so much. And yet, starting small with organizing isn’t just about making things achievable and accessible, although that is important, it is in fact the only way societal change has ever happened, through usually small groups or movements full of small groups of passionate queer and trans people.

It might not seem like some monumental social movement now, but that’s okay as long as it materially changes people’s lives. It can be an anarchist group at a middle school. It can be a zine distro in your suburb that you’re sure no one will go to until it radicalizes someone. It can even just be unmasking and transitioning yourself.

A lot of anarchism starts with internal work. Nothing is too small to be anarchic and youth liberation is for all facets of our lives, not just the one time that we go do an action, but it’s a clearing of everything. So on that note, any shameless plugs regarding your organizing and media?

Pearson: Yeah, I have one more plug, but there’s one other thing that I want to say on that note as an adult before we wrap up going, I’m going a little off script here, but I hope that you’ll hear me. I think that one of the things that I have found that has been really edifying, I came into being a parent later in life.

I God, I have had the joy of getting to cohabitate and help raise my partner’s kids. And I think that one of the things that has been really eye opening to me through that experience is that like youth liberation is obviously about liberating kids and teens first and foremost but youth liberation also liberates us.

It helps us heal. The broken, despondent child that lives inside of us adults. So often, the child that has been spit on and derided and degraded. And it’s really painful to confront that. It’s really hard to look at the ways in which your Having the joy of being someone who you love, someone who you care for, whether they’re a student or whether they are a neighbor’s kid, or whether they are your kid getting to have opportunities and joys that you didn’t have as a child.

And it’s hard not to feel a little bit like. Salty a little bit hurt a little bit vindictive. But I think that at its best, what ends up happening is you realize that you’re starting to heal parts of yourself that have been so long neglected parts of you that have been like I said, sat upon and derided and sidelined and marginalized.

And when you make space as an adult for the kids in your life for the kids in your community, for the kids in your affinity group, what ends up happening is this weird thing where you start to heal all of that trauma that you’ve been carrying around in your body for so long. And it’s a tried and true.

Kind of adage, but, liberation is not just for you. It’s not just for me. It’s for us, right? We’re not free until we’re all free. And I think that the beauty and the promise of children’s liberation is not just that it will liberate youth and not just that it will liberate young people and teens and kids, but that it will also.

heal the child that is aching inside so many adults and that it will set a path towards liberation for us all.

Mk: Thank you so much for bringing that up. I agree that I really love Ayanna Goodfellow’s concept of age trauma, how all of us carry our experiences of ageism regardless of what our age is now.

And I think youth liberationist work can really be a part of healing for a lot of people. Adults, I know, like I’ve known people who have never questioned ages some, but not even in their youth, but as adults are realizing how much harm it causes. And as a result can realize that it wasn’t their fault when they were mistreated in that way as a child.

So yeah, I’m so glad that you brought this up.

Pearson: Yeah, totally. So anyway, to answer your question, shameless plugs, I have a whole hell of a lot of podcast episodes that you can check out and catch with comrades. We have a backlog of over 200 episodes. They are non anthological, or they are anthological.

They are non sequential most of the time. If they’re sequential, I made a point of making sure that you would know. But yeah, just find one that looks interesting to you and check it out, if that’s something that you are curious to hear about. I also have two different poetry collections that are available through The Anarchist Publishing House Rebel Hearts Publishing.

The first one’s called Watching God Become Human, and the second is called Your Mind is the Cathedral Where I Finally Find God. If you like rad poems, or sad boy poems, or romantic poems, or all of the above, There is something in there that you will love.

Mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey and all your thoughts on what social movements mean for teenagers.

And if anyone wants to learn more about this podcast, please look us up wherever you get podcasts or go to the child and its enemies that know blogs. org to follow us on social media and join our discord and signal groups. I’m MK Zariel. This has been Pearson from coffee with comrades, and you’re listening to the child and its enemies.

Mk: Hello, and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about Queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth. that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create weird, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zario. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog DebateNibro, and an organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is transfeminine YouTube influencer Lola Bloom.

Lola: Hello my pronouns are she, they, and I’ve been working with the Mariposas Rebeldas and Food for Life. I restock and participate in food distribution networks in my local area. I also organized a few events surrounding the Stop Cop City movement last year, and surrounding the fight for trans rights in my state the last couple years, actually.

But my main line of experience is with YouTube activism and community organization through my Discord channel. Thank you.

Mk: So what I’m super excited to chat about today is something utterly relevant to you. What it means to be an anarchist online, and what it means to be an anarchist in the world, which obviously intersects with technology for so many of us.

You’re really active in creating queer and trans positive online media on YouTube and Discord. Can you talk a bit more about the stuff you make and how it informs your broader trans liberationist praxis?

Lola: I believe that YouTube is a very powerful way for trans people to document their experiences and to showcase just how happy and successful they can be to a wider audience.

To me, vlogging has been very popular and has been, My way of showing people how we live and humanizing our experience in a powerful way. I think it also is very useful for trans people to exchange knowledge and skills that they can use to support themselves during their transition.

And I feel a lot of solidarity and community in the spaces that I’ve created during part of that journey. I’m really grateful for all the positive comments and exchanges that I get to as part of my channel. There’s something really special about being part of community where we’re all coming together To be able to lift each other up and support each other through really a hard and extremely personal and vulnerable period in our lives.

I think that community is something that we really don’t have a lot of, especially with so many people trying to legislate. us out of existence, and I think that creating spaces where we can come together is just very important.

Mk: That is so awesome about how you use the internet to especially highlight trans joy.

So much media online is about anti trans legislation and hate crimes and everything else that really just a few outspoken bigots do that makes our queer lives that much harder. I remember when I was maybe 11 years old there weren’t tons of accessible ways to get into activism. Like I was part of a nonprofit, but that was around it.

So as a result, I’d spend a lot of time looking at LGBTQ nation and other websites that I thought were all about, the lives of the queer community and how to organize, but really were more about bigoted things that people said on social media or various laws or whatever. But as almost everyone in life knows, one of the many strengths of the youth and teen community Is that not only are we full of trans and queer joy, we’re internet savvy and we’re willing to try new technologies.

Which can really help us build movement, even sometimes on really corporate forms of social media. So knowing that your audience on YouTube might skew pretty young, how do you view your content’s role in youth and teen liberation?

Lola: I think that my channel plays a really important role in normalizing and integrating trans people into society in a larger aspect.

I think that the space I aim to create would pave the way for a lot of trans kids to be able to do the same things in their life. I know that having not a lot of visible role models as a kid really was something that, impacted me personally, and I know that I only really knew one other trans person growing up, and they were treated with such disdain from the community that it was really hard to watch that and not feel afraid.

Mk: I’m so sorry that they had to face that and it means so much that you’re creating these spaces in which trans people can Be ourselves and we can be all ages and we can be anarchist and that’s possible Like I am personally on your discord and it’s one of the safest queer spaces i’ve ever been in

Lola: Oh, I really appreciate that.

i’m tearing up a little bit. It’s something I really strive to do. My trans friend to You was the only person I know. They ended up taking their life several years ago. And a large part of what I do is in, in memoriam to a lot of the people that I know who didn’t make it.

And I think that knowing that I’m doing that for people is one of my greatest joys in life. So I really appreciate you participating in that space and being part of that community. And the fact that you feel safe is really something that makes me feel honored to know.

Mk: It’s so meaningful, and I’m so sorry about your friend.

Trans lives are so precious, and in the statist world, they’re threatened so much. And I am. I also became anarchist after someone I loved started to go through a very hard time. I’m here for you.

Lola: I appreciate you being there. Mental health matters. And, something I really do want to talk about at the end of this interview is just how much my personal life has been impacted by mental health journeys.

And, some things that I would like to share with people about. My struggles and how I’ve been able to find ways to accept my limitations, but still encourage myself to get the support I need and to get what I need out of life, even when I’m not able to do everything that I want to do in the day.

Mk: A dear anarchist friend of mine talks about how all liberatory struggles are about letting ourselves have both voices and needs, how we can have those boundaries, but we can also, want to provide care and want to create radical spaces, and that can be true while we have access needs and because we have access needs.

And I’d say that’s almost specific to neurodivergent anarchists, but also true of all anarchists. Like we can’t just have endless capacity. That’s, some capitalist ideal that none of us can live up to. And it’s so great that you’re talking about this because I think a lot of new organizers feel like they’re failures if they can’t do everything all at once, all the time.

Lola: I agree with that a thousand percent. I want to make sure That people feel like they are not alone when it comes to feeling burned out in a system that is not designed for sustainability. And I think that just framing it in the overall perspective that we work more as humans now than we ever have.

And we also have tools that should be enabling us to work less. It’s something that doesn’t make sense in any rational mindset. And I think that creating this community space has really given me the space that I need to exist authentically and to share skills and to grow as a person and with my business, while I’m trying to figure all of this stuff out.

And it gives me the space away from capitalism to, to look at things in a different perspective. I think it’s incredibly. Difficult to transition. And it’s incredibly difficult to transition out of these capitalistic old. Capitalistic systems and providing people the, this, the encouragement support and resources they need is one of my biggest focus, biggest focuses as an entrepreneur and a business woman.

Mk: This idea of transness as a refusal of capitalism is so meaningful. I as I’ve talked about on this podcast, I got radicalized by the queer movement. And one of the biggest things stuck with me was this idea that the book’s lesbian body is the only body that can’t be commodified under capitalism.

And, that’s why people mistreat books, lesbians. And I think if we update that for today, the trans body is also very much like that, like it’s impossible to define, and that’s what makes it beautiful, but that’s also what places it outside of all hierarchy and control.

Lola: I think men fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t control.

Mk: Very much yeah as do people who buy into the idea of cisgenderism, that our bodies determine our gender rather than maybe our gender determining what embodiment feels right to us.

This is a very weird segue, but on the topic of like your relationship to technology and the content you create online.

When I was doing research for this podcast and talking to folks I found out that some anarchists just straight up will not use platforms like YouTube and discord because there’s this fear that they’re corporate and really Public nature might endanger trans kids. So what would you say to those people about your decision to be public on those platforms?

And what makes you choose to, instead of being on the Fediverse or somewhere explicitly anarchist, to be in a space that might be more hostile?

Lola: So for me I think there are places for security culture, and then there are places for outreach and normalizing our existence. I think that If we only had spaces where we were absolutely 100 percent safe, then there would be no place for people to transition into those spaces to find out about those spaces.

There would be no way for us to grow as a community. So I think, having those spaces that are secure and then having ways to find. Ways to outreach to the community and get people engaged in those safe spaces, I think both have value. I’m also working on starting a matrix server with some people in Atlanta who are trying to create a safe space for people where, you know they know that it is a secure environment and, I think that having both is something that’s very important.

Trans people come from somewhere, and a huge part of my platform is being a public space where people can see that it’s not so bad or scary to transition. And I really encourage people to mind be mindful about what information they share in these spaces. But please understand that Any personal information that you share this is not a safe space in the Discord.

This is a public space just like a mall. You wouldn’t go sharing out your most personal details at the mall. But you can meet people who might share like minded views, and then you can have spaces where you can come together and, have groups that more closely, protect and, create that security culture.

So I think that there’s a value here, but it’s not a space for people to let their guard entirely down due to his public nature.

Mk: That is so meaningful about how really for accessibility to teens, honestly, there need to be a range of spaces. Like most teenagers I know outside of the anarchist movement do not use Signal, or if they do, it’s to text with me.

So having spaces on Discord can be a point of entry, even if someone never wants to organize, to be able to be an anarchist community without drastically changing their tech is necessary. I know that you’re in this space, but the child and its enemies does happen to have a discord server. And I thought about it like that.

Like it isn’t supposed to be the signal group. It’s not a place where folks are talking about anything high risk or illegal or even personally sensitive. But it is a space to build networks of care and connection. And sometimes that’s the only way that teens can have that. So What other organizing do you tend to do, and how does it intersect with your creation of online content?

Lola: I do work at some local food distribution groups, and we really specialize in providing people with food and creating a space where people can meet up and have that community in person during the week. I think that helping each other get what we need to survive is one of the most anarchist things that we can do as people.

And I think that How it intersects with my online community is really in the ways that a lot of promotion and a lot of

There’s a lot of discussion that happens beyond the scenes and giving people a space to do that online when it doesn’t need to be secure is something that definitely the discord exists for. And then, the signal and the matrix groups exist for the more secure things that we do. So I think that.

In the process of attempting to start these events and get them more populated we really need these online platforms to keep everything together and to keep people, connected. in a central place where they can stay organized and informed. I’m in the process of attempting to start a communal combolage event myself on the Beltline.

And I think a big part of my marketing approach and my, I hate to call it marketing, but my advertising, my, my awareness building campaign has been through These online chat groups. And I think that giving people a space where they can organize in a decentralized way is just really important.

Mk: Yeah, that is all so cool. Just going a little bit off script for some of our listeners who like me may not be in the Atlanta area or might have connections, but just be supporting remotely or whatever. Can you define what Combolosh is?

Lola: So Combolosh is a Event that we have every week that is based on in my understanding, and I don’t want to get this wrong, cause this is just what I’ve been told.

But it is based on some Native American traditions of giving freely and trading. It’s basically a market where everyone comes and exchanges goods and services but there’s no money allowed. There’s no. financial exchanges allowed. It’s just going to be people. exchanging their own goods and services and their own sources without common capitalistic interference.

Mk: I I love that takes value and price out of it and just makes it about meeting people’s needs. I I’m giving a talk on the Seriously Wrong Discord server. I’m coming up and I was having a talk on that Discord server with someone really about mutual aid and what it means to practice mutual aid in a space that’s translocal and is a lot online.

And we were saying that usually it tends to get towards fundraisers. You make a go fund me, you make a graphic and it goes on social media and that’s great because often people do have monetary needs, but at the same time, it still makes capitalism the priority when it might be more efficient to just get people that housing or that food or whatever it is that they need in a direct way.

But of course, the struggle with that is that. People tend to struggle with accepting free stuff, and monetary donations tend to feel more doable in a state of society. And anyway, I just think it’s so liberatory that y’all are moving past that.

Lola: I

Mk: think

Lola: that really sorry for interrupting if you were.

Mk: No, I wasn’t. I guess sometimes it sounds like I’m going to talk and I’m not. I am nervous for a kid.

Lola: I understand this deeply. But one thing I really want to focus on as a culture is stopping looking at the symptoms and stop treating the symptoms which is people needing immediate financial help.

Assistance and start treating the sources of these symptoms not having access to housing and food and clothing, adequate clothing and medicine is the big one. I think that these are very much things that we can. Do as a society that we don’t need to rely on the current existing systems that we can really take a lot of our power back as people by learning how to do those things in ways that are sustainable outside of that culture.

And I think that. Having these systems in place where we are growing our own food sustainably and building our own housing sustainably is something that I definitely want to continue to invest a lot of my time in doing.

Mk: Exactly. And even just building up the infrastructure for healthcare. I do a lot of reproductive justice advocacy and fundraising for abortion funds and the like.

I am on social media recently did a fundraiser for the Midwest abortion fund. So that’s cool. But I see so many fundraisers online for people who need help paying for gender affirming care. And I can’t help but think What if every city had a trans health care fund in the same way we have abortion funds now?

How much would that transform mutual aid if we had those networks of care in place already, and people didn’t need to make a GoFundMe every time they had perfectly normal and quotidian health care needs?

Lola: I still, as someone who still, eight years into their transition, has not been able to finish their electrolysis, I’ve done, Thousands of dollars worth of laser and electrolysis and I still have some facial hair and it’s just you know Access to these things would directly improve my life personally, so I can attest to that I think that would be a wonderful thing for a lot of people.

We I’m, sorry that you

Mk: haven’t been able to access that statism is the worst It is

Lola: very unfortunate. I, I don’t have if I can go several days without needing to shave still, but it’s just still frustrating. And, I, for a very long time when I was early in my transition, had no access to those those treatments.

And I think that. It was, it really affected my mental health, and it affected my ability to work, and to feel like I was a part of society and it definitely made me feel othered, and I think that, no one should have to go through that.

Mk: I agree that it is fundamentally alienating to not have our needs met under capitalism and that it can isolate us from community, which is exactly why mutual aid and clear spaces are so necessary.

Were you into anarchy or community organizing or radical media as a kid and teen? And how, if at all, did you tend to organize?

Lola: Yes, I never really believed I could organize anything successfully until recently to be honest I was bullied and ostracized a lot of my life and I did join a couple of groups I’m, sorry No It sucks but yeah, I feel

Mk: If anarchists have one thing in common, it’s that we got bullied in elementary school

Lola: a lot of people You know if you if the system doesn’t serve you find You Ways to try and change it or at least if you don’t succumb to the system you do But yeah, I feel like a lot of people who are Not happy with the way things are get othered, and singled out and treated as different because they’re a threat to the people in charge, and

Mk: Especially because a lot of us are queer and neurodivergent, so bigoted ideas that people may already have can also be weaponized almost as a form of counterinsurgency.

And even in the anarchist scene so much affinity group in fighting is driven by oppressive ideas that folks have internalized and not questioned.

Lola: I really feel like when people don’t question their internal biases that’s how we get things like genocide and it’s people who are different that are often the first people who are targeted and, when you can demonize someone and treat them as, As another in any kind of sense, then that’s how we get some of the most brutal atrocities in human history.

And I think, we saw that very directly when Trump was elected, and I think we’re still seeing the after effects of what that looks like as a society.

Mk: Yeah, for sure. Like, When there is a very transphobic and racist person in power, that really makes people feel like they have a license to behave that way, when really something that tends to get lost under statism is that how we treat each other is not a legalistic thing, it’s entirely about how interactions feel and whether we have networks of care, and the, one of the main problems I see with hierarchy is people’s inability to think for themselves about basic kindness.

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.

Lola: No there’s a very real problem with people who are taught to base their moral system on, of what the society around them is doing and not off of rational thought and experiences and for having me. Being present with what feels right to them.

And I think when you’re dealing with a relativistic moral compass, which is based off of the environment around you it is very susceptible to shift in ways that are not what you want and what. And

Mk: that can really make it hard to hold complexity as well because I know so many anarchists, myself included, who care very deeply about Palestinian human rights and would like for status up to end and do a lot of advocacy around humanitarian aid.

And I’ve also known people who maybe started out. genuinely wanting to be pro Palestine and part of that movement, but have instead just fallen into anti Semitic tropes and as a result not done much of anything.

Lola: I think that anytime you are Using hate as a weapon, you are missing the point, which is that we all need to come together and find ways to sustain ourselves under a capitalism system that is failing the vast majority of people.

And if we end up dividing ourselves based on race, ethnicity gender, culture or anything that is not intrinsic or that is not, based on whether or not someone is violent, really my only distinction on whether or not I want someone in my life is, are they okay? Being violent or discriminatory against other people, and I think as long as we can agree to not be violent or discriminatory towards people, then we can all agree to get along, and that we can all agree that this system is not working for us, and that we can find a better alternative.

Mk: Speaking of not being violent or discriminatory, because we got off topic what kind of organizing gigs do you like to do in your teens?

Lola: I did do a lot of organizing with groups like Anonymous and a couple of groups when the Black Lives Matter protests were active in my area, I was very active as a observer and as a street medic.

I did get some training I am a certified street medic Through some programs that they did at the bakery, which was a queer organizing space before COVID happened they’re still active, they’re not using the same facility, and they’re not organizing at nearly the same capacity, but I still, every once in a while will, help them with an art installation or go to an event or, I try and stay involved when I can but mostly when I was a kid I really just tried to find places where I could fit in and eventually I started getting involved in the activism, but it really didn’t start As being an activist, it just started with surrounding myself with people who were.

involved in activism.

Mk: For sure, yeah, and I’m so glad that you’re organizing and creating such beautiful networks of care, and especially that they center, queer and trans art and providing medical care to people. And basically everything that I always think about this would still be deeply necessary in anarchist society.

Like in organizing this way, You’re not only helping people survive capitalism, but you’re prefiguring something that people so desperately need. What would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you when you were younger?

Lola: I think the main things were transportation and food costs. I really didn’t have a plan. a good way of getting to events or getting to the spaces where I was engaged with these activism people, especially with my parents being a little bit more strict at the time. I think that Having spaces where parents could feel safe dropping off their kids, like a lot of the events I’ve seen at the Wielani collotion would have been really nice.

A lot of groups that I met in spaces that were not easily accessible, or where I had to sneak around because they weren’t the most Child friendly, they were, very grungy punk rock and our anarchist kind of environments, which were, they were nice and scenic, but they definitely were not somewhere where it was easy for me to get involved in as a teenager to early adolescence.

Mk: Yeah that can definitely be a big thing with accessibility and it’s tricky because our anarchist spaces are all about helping teens, find autonomy in a world where nuclear family is sadly still a big part of our society. But at the same time, like being able to be somewhat palatable to nuclear families can be a big part of accessibility.

And I’ve been in so many affinity groups that have had this conversation, how do we Undermine family’s authority without necessarily alienating them. On that note what advice would you have for trans kids who want to get into art and media and anarchy?

Lola: I would say just do it.

Start off doing it badly if you need to. Just keep on doing it until you get better. You’re gonna have really bad days. You’re gonna have days where you make mistakes. There will be a thousand reasons for you to quit. All you really need is one good enough reason to do it, and you will be able to make it through.

I also, on the last topic, I would recommend, finding spaces where you can organize in spaces where you have peer community, where you have kids your age, where maybe your parents are more willing to be accepting of that environment because it’s people who are in your age group. I know a lot of times I try to hang out with a lot of people who are older than me because they shared similar values and, maybe work your way there, start off small start organizing groups yourself and then, you can be really surprised on what changes will happen over time.

Mk: Yeah, and there’s this huge duality to that too we need intergenerational spaces, adult friends, mentors, but we also need to be in youth specific spaces. And it really is possible, if your friends share your values, or even are just queer and trans and interested in anarchism, to start an affinity group with your friends.

One of my really close friends from school just started a zine distro with people in their school club. The end. That’s a place to start, and that can make such a positive change, even if it isn’t what might be considered palatable by adult anarchists. It can really make anarchism feel accessible to teens.

And there’s no such thing as being bad at organizing. Just being human and imperfect is the norm, which anarchists of all ages are. So to close us out any shameless plugs for your content?

Lola: No, I really just wanted to touch on one more thing that you’re talking about, I think that, having local groups with local friends is amazing, but I think also you’re finding, conventions, finding, different sports or sciences or other places where you can relate to kids who are into similar activities and find people who may be interested in an affinity group there.

When you get stuck in your immediate vicinity as I did a lot as a kid, it can be very overwhelming and you can feel like there’s no one around you that really understands you. But I promise you, there are so many people. In the greater communities out there, and there are so many people who really will be able to connect with you in a way that doesn’t feel like it has to be forced, and it doesn’t feel like you’re weird or different.

It’ll just feel like you’re people. And. If you don’t have that where you’re at I just want to encourage you to keep looking because there’s nothing wrong with you.

Mk: And you’re so right about balancing those local and translocal spaces, or not balancing, just finding what feels good to you.

What I’m in the queer spash back tendency for a lot of my organizing, and one thing I love about it is the idea that local spaces really only work because translocal spaces do. People organize together in part because they meet online, or they meet at regional convergences, and if you are a teenage organizer and there aren’t people in your locality, there are still communities of care for you, such as Lola’s Discord.

So would you like to share any of your links?

Lola: Yes, shameless flags. My YouTube is youtube. com slash Lola Eichler. Although I’m probably going to be changing it to Lola Bloom soon when my legal name change officially goes through. And then my instagram is instagram. com slash rainbowbloom420.

That one’s going to stay the same. My discord link will be posted in the description for the interview, because it’s a bunch of numbers. But my Patreon is patreon. com slash Lola Bloom, and I hope to see y’all there. Thank you

Mk: so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. If anyone wants to learn more, please look us up wherever you get podcasts, or go to thechildanditsenemies.

noteblogs. org to check out past episodes and join our discord I’m MK Zariel, this has been Lola Bloom.

Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And You’ve been there at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for you that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create weird, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Sariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog, Debate Me, Bro, and a trans liberationist organizer in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is author and organizer Vicky Osterweil.

Vicky: Hi hi everybody. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Vicky. My pronouns are she and her. Just so folks, get a sense of me, I do a lot of organizing around trans healthcare and trans health access at the moment, particularly around access to estrogen and HRT.

And getting that to people for free. I’ve also done in the past and ongoingly a lot of work on abolition, policing prisons and housing justice here in Philadelphia, a so called Philadelphia where I operate at it. And we’re doing a lot of work with unhoused people out here which has been a big part of the movement over the last six or seven I also write books and essays.

I have a blog called All Cats Are Beautiful and I spend most of my days doing data entry for a lot of authors.

Mk: That is all so cool about your organizing. Trans health and liberating our queer bodies is so necessary for youth liberation, especially given that systematically teens are deprived of our bodily autonomy and often really struggle to access trans healthcare, so the work that you do to make it accessible is so meaningful.

When we scheduled this interview, you shared with me that you are working on a book about childhood and ownership and also Disney. Can you share a bit more about this project?

Vicky: Yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah the book is called The Extended Universe. And it just, I just got edits back on the manuscript now.

So I’m in the very final sort of push for writing of it. It sets out to show how the two questions, why are all superhero movies the same? And why did Disney lobby the Biden administration to keep them from sharing the coronavirus vaccine with the third world? Why did those questions have the same answer?

And that answer is intellectual property protection. So what I argue in the book is that Disney in particular has innovated the use and management of IP franchise and just corporate and corporate image management in general to become the world’s largest entertainment monopoly, which they’ve been for almost a decade now.

And in the process As I’m sure everyone who’s listening knows, I don’t know, they’ve completely transformed the kind of like TV shows, movies, games, and like culture and music that we enjoy. And the book doesn’t focus exclusively on this with childhood. But obviously like when you talk about Disney, you’re talking about, you it’s innately connected to childhood and media targeted at children particularly.

And I think Disney Corporation has really colonized the American and even the global image of childhood, like the movies and the TV shows and the theme parks and the products, like they’ve become associated so deeply with the concept of childhood magic and wonder but that image of childhood that’s put forth by Disney is structured around like a really patriarchal and reactionary concept of childhood innocence, like Disney movies and it’s the magic kingdom.

They’re always talking about magic. But that magic is always like sparkly fairy dust and like giggling animals, not, death metal and blood sacrifice and which is insurrection. The magic they’re talking about is always sweet is always, the stuff that was like parody and power, right?

So Tiffany offers products to children that commodify control and define play and imagination. And obviously they’re hardly alone in this. Lots of companies do this. This is how capitalism controls. Smart. One of the ways culture under capitalism controls children but none of them have done it so well and so consistently or on such a global scale as Disney, right?

I think, like, when you say Disney, people think child. Even though at this point, Disney also means, right? Fox it means Marvel. It means, all these different things that are very much not Marvel’s kind of games. Anyway, getting off topic, the more specific to Disney I think than some of these other companies that sell products to children is the way that Disney has defined childhood itself.

It markets like a particular idea of childhood to adults. And it sells it back to them, and it sells it to them as children, then sells it to them as adults again. Excuse me. Like the Disney theme parks, the cruises, the conventions, the like, IRL experiences, the ice skating shows. All of this stuff are just as often designed around getting adults to relive their childhoods.

Which, of course, they can only do by buying Disney products or taking place in Disney experiences. One example of this is in Disneyland. The 1st theme park that Disney built you come in, done this thing called Main Street USA for folks who’ve been there. It’s like an old, it’s an old timey vision of a 19th turn of the century, small American town and the architects and the designers actually.

made all of the second stories of the buildings at five eighths scale. So everything’s a little smaller on the second floor, which creates a forced perspective so that you feel, even if you’re a six foot tall adult, like you’re like lower to the ground. And it’s very subtle, but I can’t notice it.

But it like has this effect of producing nostalgia in both adults and wondering children. So like Disney, that’s a really good example or simple example of Disney, the way Disney. Maintains really intense control over their images, right over their products and their characters.

So they stay consistent over time. That, Donald Duck, Donald Duck has been around. Mickey Mouse has been around for a century, right? Officially a century this year. I’m like, so how do you keep that fresh while also keeping it consistent and also changing?

To meet market demands, right? So they, one of the ways they do this is by being really litigious. They do a lot of copyright lawsuits. They do a lot of control of intellectual property through the law. Through the government and through the state, basically.

Mk: This idea that childhood innocence can be weaponized is so resonant.

That’s so often hence the target question. You’re a youth whose innocence supposedly depends on our assimilated straightness. And to be forced into the concept of childhood, rather than simply being a person who happens to have a certain chronological age, is to never have the freedom to exist outside the heteropatriarchy of innocence.

If you’ve ever read Lee Edelman’s No Future, this political construct of the child is often directly at odds with the lived experiences and needs of people who are actually chronologically children. Because this is this figure that is used to uphold straightness, and oh, think of the children, don’t be gay, when in fact most of the children are gay.

Yay. On that note how would you say that linear time and imposed development tie into capitalism and the way childhood is commodified?

Vicky: Oh man, that’s such a good question. That’s a great question. I think, yeah, In all the ways, but but I guess I’ll start by going with Disney and try to move a little more broad.

I think that one of the ways that like Disney does this is by having offerings for like lots of different age groups. And so they have different products targeted specifically for like toddlers, kids, preteens, teenagers, like adults. But then within adults, it’s like new parents, old parents, like people who were into Disney as kids and are now Disney adults, grandparents.

They’re one of the corporations that’s best. Having a super wide diversity of products that people age into and age out of, right? And that, and like wherever you are, Disney’s there to catch you and sell you something expensive. A great example of this are the live action remakes. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of these.

There’s no reason you would have unless you I don’t know unless you had a curiosity about them, but they’ve been coming out over the last 10 years and they allow parents who grew up on cartoons in the 90s to bring kids they’re raising to the theater to watch their favorite movies.

For example, they’ve been remaking Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid was, like, last year, move on. It’s not very well or widely known, even among terrible film nerds like myself, but The Lion King remake, which was released in 2019. Was the 7th most successful film in history when it came out.

It earned 2 billion dollars. Now, like other films like that, we’re talking like, The Avengers trilogy, or the new Avatar. Those are movies that you’ve heard of, you’ve heard discourse about, but People didn’t really talk about The Lion King, maybe. But it just quietly went on to be one of the most successful films of all time.

This is because Disney plays a really effective game of Sort of generational capture. That builds on that linear time question, right? They get you when you’re a kid through aggressive marketing, and through like general cultural dominance. Then they get you again when you’re nostalgic for childhood like in your teens or 20s.

And then again when you raise children of your own. At this point, we have four or five generations of people who grew up with Disney movies, Disney TV shows, and with Disney World as the best possible vacation destination anywhere. And increasingly, that’s not just in the US, right? It hasn’t been for decades the whole world is full of people for whom Mickey Mouse and Disney means childhood.

That’s so incredibly valuable. And in order for that to work, they have to do a lot of nostalgia, right? They have to use nostalgia as a selling point. And nostalgia, obviously, requires you to yearn for going back to this chronological time you can’t return to, right? It’s very much built on this, the conflicted feelings and the sadness and the melancholy of like the way that we experience time.

And so for sales to get, to keep expanding they need to get people nostalgic earlier and earlier. You and a lot of your audience I know are like, like early teens, like if you think about the Toy Story franchise, right? The whole plot, and those are from the 90s, these are ancient movies now the first ones, but the whole plot is about Andy, rather than Simplisty who’s the kid.

He gets too old for his toys, right? And he like abandons them and then he looks back nostalgically at them and they have these lives of their own. They have to prove that they’re still valuable to him. Disney movies are so often about journeying for the past that they’re about that even when the protagonists are still children chronologically, and I think this isn’t just purely like Disney’s invention. I think it’s an experience I remember. I think it’s an experience many of us have. across our teenage years. Like one fact, one part of being a teenager, like for me, it was realizing that I wasn’t a little kid anymore, that I didn’t have that sort of, I had a different level of awareness of what was around me.

And that could be melancholy. But I think like Disney commodifies accelerates and romanticizes this precise nostalgia, the better to keep people locked in his fans for their entire lives. So in terms of this question of this timeline this linearity, they want to keep childhood as a sort of concept preserved in a past.

That you can never reach, that you’re always moving further and further away from. And the only way you can re engage with it is by a Disney product, right? And I think that this is what culture and capitalism does at large. And they do that with, high school movies or for older folks stuff about college.

Oh, those were the good old days, best days of my life. There’s this constant refrain about reaching backwards for a youth that when you’re present in it, you’re not allowed to experience. And then as soon as you leave it, you’re told that you can never have it back. You can never have those good feelings back.

And then, they take that real yearning, that I think is real, that there’s some genuine yearning there, and they really cheapen it by making it associated forever with Princess Elsa, or Nemo the fish,

Mk: I think in the anarchist scene, we often really critique statists for being into an idealized future that we sacrifice our lives and our queerness for.

But you’re so right that an idealized past can be just as harmful. Because while statists are often like, oh, if we are in the closet, usually in the present, then our future will be idealized in whatever way. But it always is. There’s this desire to go back to 50s gender roles or whatever, really harmful stuff that was in the past that worked for usually a few white cis people yet is romanticized.

And honestly, atemporality works so much in both directions. Thank you for bringing that up. And the nostalgia for childhood as a construct, especially. seems to center this idealization of being cared for by a nuclear family, and not only does that erase all the other forms of care that ideally exist in our lives, but erases every queer person with maybe adult privilege who does have experiences of anti child ageism and might not be at all nostalgic for that.

In fact there’s this undertone of age drama that exists in almost all of the nostalgia that Disney pushes. On that topic how does this all intersect with gender and queerness and transness? Because even among the more generalized progressive crowd rather than anarchists, the biggest critique of Disney is that it’s anti feminist and it pushes very retrograde gender roles.

And I wonder how you feel that’s involved in its commodification of childhood.

Vicky: Yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, to speak to the gender stuff I think we’ll take a detour sort of via obviously nostalgia has been really powerful recently with Make America Great Again, right? MAGA, this sort of nostalgia has become a really potent fascist force in a way that I think if you were really MK to to dichotomize with the kind of reactionary left, Looking forward and a sort of far right looking backward and how similar those are as statist, a statist ideals, both of which obliterate the concept.

I think that’s really great. But, I think if if you talk to like liberals now, a lot of people are laughing because Ron DeSantis or whatever have been saying that Disney is so woke. It’s like turning kids trans, or whatever. And The Daily Wire has been getting in on that, like the Daily Wire has been on this really anti Disney crusade because they’re trying to sell their own children’s TV product, which is so dark and horrifying, imagine Ben Shapiro programming for children anyway, or I mean for anyone, in fact, making any content of any kind but those parents getting rid of Disney Plus to get them the Daily Wire for kids, ugh but anyway it’s pretty clear that much like Daily Wire is in direct competition with Disney, like DeSantis He started the fight with Disney when they refused to enforce his Don’t Say Gay Bill in exactly the way he wanted.

But even that’s a bit of a smokescreen because Disney actually has incredible, like basically sovereign power over a 50 square mile section of central Florida around Orlando called the Reedy Creek District. They have an incredible amount of power around. People have heard of Celebration Florida, which is like the little town that Disney runs, their company town.

They have a lot of like literal state power in Florida. And obviously a petty fascist like Ron DeSantis. So picking a fight with Disney for him, it doesn’t really have to do with the movies, which are themselves like, quite reactionary because he wants control of Florida. And it’s quite ironic, actually, obviously, and hilarious, because Disney is one of the most consistently queerphobic culture producers in America.

If you go back to the very, very beginning, like to the 20s like when, so in the 20s, during the silent era of film, this is like really early there were these huge scandals, there were these huge sex scandals like Fatty Arbuckle is the most famous, but these big silent stars would get caught having wild orgies, and there was a sort of morality crisis, and that morality crisis was very connected to the fact that a lot of that Studio heads and actors were Jewish, right?

There’s also anti Semitism. And so Walt Disney, like from the twenties. He was held up as a moral good. Whenever Hollywood faced sex scandals he was making these upstanding moral goyish products. They were free of sex and violence. He was incredibly homophobic himself. And he exercised like really strict control over his employees sexual expression.

And in his studio women and men worked in fully separated gender and. Always salary segregated areas. So that’s like the very beginning of Disney. Up through the present, all the cartoons up through the 2000s, even the 2010s, you have a lot of very clearly queer coded villains, right?

In the movies, queers are a threat. They’re a menace. And today they’re a little less actively queerphobic. But that’s mostly because queerphobia just doesn’t sell as well anymore. Not because Disney has learned their lesson. Because Disney remains, even if they’re not actively queerphobic, they remain a family company.

They’re all about family. As we know, the traditional nuclear family structure, the one that Disney always markets and encourages, as you’re pointing to, Emkin it’s built around the total power of parents over children. The total objectification and political domination of the kids. And this is also true in schools, right?

Which is another place where Disney has a really big economic interest. They have a foothold through marketing. They’ve been running education programming in American schools since the 50s. TV, obviously, is huge. And like families families are where the vast majority of gendered and queerphobic violence occurs in society.

As one of the most pro family ideological organizations in the whole world that would be more than enough to be like, Disney is clearly action oriented in gender, right? But they also have this long tradition of supporting traditional gender roles. This more direct sort of transphobia and gender essentialism.

Most famously through the Disney princesses, right? Where they’re highly divided in marketing between boys and girls. Nowadays Disney also owns Marvel, it owns Fox, it owns Star Wars so they often also actively resist queer representation in the biggest film franchises in the world.

There was some drama around, cutting out any queer content from the Star Wars movies back in the 2010s although, in my opinion, and Marvel has no gay characters whatsoever despite, 80 films at this point but in my opinion, this, that has as much to do with global film markets and avoiding queerphobic censorship regimes internationally.

Like there’s a big push on a lot of markets, especially China. You can’t have gay representation, so since so much of box office is now made abroad, that makes a big part of it too, but it actually segues really nicely. It’s really comfortable for Disney to have these sort of traditional, conservative, sex phobic, Protestant values in the movies, it’s really easy for them to adapt that to the modern era, where other companies, like for example, Sony Pictures, who had a long run of doing films for adults, really struggled with the current era, because They want to make more adults for specific things.

God it’s bleak. I thought this would be a more fun project, but it’s anyway, Walt Disney and the corporation he founded they’ve been defining what it means to be a little boy and a little girl in America and across the world for almost a century. I think in many ways, the sexual politics of America are like reflected, shaped and refined by Disney and its image of childhood.

More perhaps than any other single cultural force. And

Mk: then maybe the church, obviously. the discourse due to their straightness and assimilation and lack of culture, et cetera. So as a child, even though I wasn’t super exposed to Disney, I still recall never seeing queer representation in any book or any work of media outside this idea that gay people were to be pitied and depressed.

And this was by no fault of my family. It was really due to an anti queer media scene, especially for youth, and this erasure can lead to so much internalized hate because we get our values and our identities from media. On a personal note, how would you say you experienced this dynamic as a kid and teen?

Vicky: Yeah I’m it always makes me sad to, to learn that I’m going because even though obviously I studied so hard to get it. I was like, deeply closet as a kid. And I was, I came up, I came, I was a teenager in the mid 2000s when it was a really dark and reactionary time, like post 9 11, and like gay was the most common insult people used.

And I was in a liberal town, like a liberal area, so we knew that was bad, but we still used it. And there was still some sort of, freedom feeling in even using that. Obviously I grew up in the closet and as a result, experiencing a lot of that violence without recognizing I was experiencing it.

But the legacy of Disney can be pretty complicated when it’s done. Cause they form such important images in our youth. They have a really heavy and important psychic role. I know that I loved Jasmine, who’s like the princess from Aladdin. And I had a doll of her and I fantasized about being her.

But I was like really ashamed of it, and I hid it, and I eventually hid it even from myself, because I was also like, I was a trans lesbian, so I also was like, attracted to her, and I couldn’t tell what was going on, and I just assumed I was really confused, and eventually I just repressed all that memory.

As you might know Ursula in the Little Mermaid was based on the drag queen Form of Divine. And Ursula had a strange sort of pull and attraction for a lot of queer folks, even if she was the villain who was, nobly defeated at the end. And I know for a lot of transmasc folks Mulan was a real root experience with her journey of becoming a real man.

In order to save her father and her village. Although if you watch Mulan now there’s some real problems. It’s real the orientalism is horrible but even if, I wouldn’t recommend watching the original Mulan cartoon now for those reasons, I find it very hard to watch. It doesn’t cancel out the effects it has had for queer, for trans masks, for queer inspiration.

And I think that’s what’s interesting about culture and about movies. It’s not just to attack them and call them reactionary, although they certainly are. And that, that shapes how many people respond to it. But I think what’s interesting about culture is that, especially movies and popular culture, it’s made by so many people at once.

And it’s used by so many people at once. It’s enjoyed by so many people. that it doesn’t ultimately have perfect ideological control. People use culture how they want to. And so I think it’s like really important to learn how to criticize and see the ideological stuff and the reactionary stuff in order to figure out what kind of art and creativity we would rather see in the world to get in touch with our desires more directly.

And I think for me, Like that means that being honest, both about the reactionary stuff, right? Being honest about it being like, Mulan’s kind of messed up, but also to so recognize when stuff moves us, when we enjoy it. Like when I, I loved Aladdin, like I talk about that in the book, like openly, I think it’s important too, that we shouldn’t try and be like perfect, perfect revolutionaries who weren’t moved by this stuff.

We’re made by it too. And it builds our self experiences in our community. And we basically We just need to use we just need to use that self knowledge that we can steal, that we’re stealing, basically. We’re stealing it from Disney, right? They don’t want to give that to us queers. They want to give it to good boys and girls who are going to buy their products, and get their parents to buy their products, and become parents to buy their products in the future.

But we can steal that knowledge, that desire from Disney and use it and share it to build a better cultural world outside of and against Hollywood product and Hollywood.

Mk: That experience of finding some level of queer belonging in highly problematic media seems so common in our community. I absolutely had that experience with Mulan as a child, as did so many transmasculine people I know.

Because no one sees what might be termed female masculinity or bookishness in media outside of that. Which is mostly because lesbian culture gets erased, and so does transness. But, yeah. And, yeah. I was also drawn to masculine presenting historical figures and those involved in social justice movements.

And it is very trans to only be offered an idealized past or future as a way to understand our transness, and thus to have to find belonging in that. Even though there is an assumption there that everyone self discovers in this time bound and statist way. Art, were you into organizing as a teen, and did you like to write or engage with theory then, and how did the media you were exposed to shape that?

Vicky: Oh, yeah. I was really grateful for this question. I’m really grateful for this question because thinking about it, I actually did do some organizing as a teen, but because it was, because I was sort Whatever closet and because things were weird, I didn’t really think of it as that.

And also because in the 2000s, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. I guess I worked with a group to get our school to stop using sweatshops for uniforms and athletic gear. And I think we actually won on that one. And that was the echoes of the alter globalization movement.

I did a protest against the standardized testing regime that they introduced at the time. And a little before that stuff I went to demonstrations against the Iraq war. 2003, 2004, when I was like really a little teen I guess I don’t know, I was younger at that point, but at the time I was like, I was writing a lot of I was writing a lot of fiction I wanted to write novels but I like, so I wasn’t writing theory or engaging with theory in my book.

But I read a lot. I read all the time. I played a lot of video games. So I engaged with a lot of like different stuff, but again, it was mostly fiction, but I discovered I had a real taste for like historical fiction and for history books. So I would read a lot of history books. Like I read a, I remember reading like a doorstop history of modern China, which I probably forgot all of.

But like when I was 13, so I really like history. But I think I didn’t really discover radical politics, like really I’m certainly nothing like anarchists until I started getting into punk and the punk scene which I did late, like I did it when I was 18.

So I think that was when I started really encountering.

Mk: Love this so much for you. First of all, I think Yeah, the same special interest, because starting when I was 13, I did that with critical theory I spent an entire summer just reading the completed works of Emma Goldman, which is maybe why I’m gay.

Yeah but the resistance to the injustices of compulsory education is so important, especially this dehumanization of being gay. tested and thus expected to spit out information on command rather than learning it organically by hyperfixating queerly and it brings me so much joy to hear about queer and trans teens doing that work.

So what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you when you were younger?

Vicky: Yeah, I think when I was young, there just weren’t, there just weren’t that many of them. The 2000s was like, as I already said, a real low point for social movement in the US. There was like a really intense right wing shift after 9 11.

And so radical politics was really confined to small subcultures as a result. And because I wasn’t really participating in those subcultures I didn’t always have access to those politics. I remember being very frustrated when I radicalized and started calling myself an anarchist that the only real organizing spaces that opened to me were like socialist parties, like the ISO, which was big on like the, on college campuses at the time.

They were like a trust based organization. We’re since it’s solved, but so I guess I would just say I wish more of them had existed. Oh, sorry. This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember I went to an ISO meeting, like, when I was a freshman in college, and I remember the 1st half of that meeting.

And then this is like 2006 2007. The first half of that meeting, they talk about they’re talking about how the revolution is like imminent. And the second half of that meeting, they’re talking about how best to sell newspapers. And I was like I’m never going back in there again. That is wildly difficult, different from how I’m looking at the world,

Mk: that sounds like every ML group.

Vicky: Yeah. I wouldn’t know. It was the last, first and last time I went to any of their meetings. But anyway, I like, I guess I just wish more of them had existed, and I wish, I think another thing I wish I had known was that I didn’t have to wait for someone else to do it.

That I could just start them wherever I was. So I think if folks are like, Thinking about getting moving the thing is to look for changes in your immediate life or in your community that would happen and that would make things better and then get together with friends or like people who share that idea and try to fix it.

And I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten less and less interested in query answering. My stuff has gotten more simple. I obviously write it now and I think I read it a lot, but I think in a way, we don’t need a perfect solution, we don’t need a total critique.

Oh, it can be really fun to try and make one, we just we can just, we just get started. And most of the learning that we do comes in the process of getting started. And in the process of moving. That’s how we learn and develop tactics and strategies and features.

Mk: I so agree with that.

I think Starting with the community’s needs can be really valuable. And in my experience, also just starting with what actions feel intrinsically meaningful, like really either approach works, but what’s so important is to move away from debates about theory and debates about, what age people can start organizing at, that’s a big one, and start by legitimately organizing.

Like I’ve been in so many affinity groups where like the age limit has been a conversation and it’s like, what if we. We rejected linear time and then we did something. On this topic what would you have for, what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to get more into critical theory and anarchy?

Vicky: Yeah so one thing that I think is really important that I think people don’t have a lot of space for these days is that you don’t have to understand everything to enjoy a text or to have it radicalize you. One of the books that radicalized me was Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

He’s like a French, ultra left Marxist from 68. He was part of a situationist who were anarchist, anarcho communist group from the 60s, sort of art and organizing group. I read his book at 18 and like a huge amount of it made very little sense to me at the time. Like huge sections of it are critiques of the way that the official communist party in France is behaving in the 60s.

I didn’t know anything, like I didn’t understand any of that. Not to mention there’s like a lot of like intense metaphysics, I didn’t get it. But I but reading it. Just gave me this energy and this inspiration that like, I couldn’t deny. And that led me to find other stuff that I understood more.

And now when I revisit that book. There’s lots that I still don’t understand exactly perfectly, but it’s very different than it was then but I still can get that feeling from it. Similarly a book I tell people that I love all the time which is like a famously difficult book, is Anti Oedipus by two French radical French psychoanalysts from the 70s Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

And that book is like really poetic and I love it. And it’s about how, it’s about Using schizophrenia and madness to think against Freud and Marx, and develop like a revolutionary anti fascism. At least that’s what I think it’s about, because I say it’s one of my favorite books, it’s really important to me, and I never understand it.

I read it, and I’m like, wow, this is so cool, and I feel like I understand this exactly, and I don’t know. And that’s a really important experience for me. I think that that experience of poetics and confusion and curiosity and pleasure is so much more important than accessibility.

I don’t think you have to get hung up on if things are difficult or if they aren’t clicking for you. I know when I was a kid, I thought it was really hard. Even into my twenties and thirties, like even, for a long time, I thought if I started a book, I had to finish it, but there’s nothing wrong with putting a book or a work down.

If it’s not working for you, you can always come back to it. You can always come back later or read a summary from someone else or listen to a podcast about it. But there’s also nothing wrong with wrestling and struggling with a difficult text. If you don’t understand it fully, but you’re, you want to keep going.

That’s also great. I think we get just really hung up on things being accessible or clear. And that can be really valuable, but we can also get a lot of enjoyment and pleasure and education out of things that are intimidating or confusing. Which I think is what so much of art is, right?

Especially abstract or conceptual art or poetry. A lot of that is confusing, but that said, the stuff that I think now when I think back on what really taught me about the world, I actually think it’s novels and movies more than theory. I think the theory is cool, and, but novels and movies and videos, games, like whatever it is you’re into, there is no one right way to learn about the world.

We can always do well by paying attention to our world and paying attention to our desire and our pleasure. What do you enjoy? Instead of asking yourself, what should I read? Ask yourself, what do I like? What am I curious about? Trust yourself. That’s the biggest thing in teaching yourself and learning in a liberatory way.

Trust yourself or your friends, obviously, but trust yourself that you can distinguish between what works for you and what doesn’t. And don’t get too hung up trying to follow particular methods or ideas or ideologies. And yeah, and if some fucking rando, sorry, I don’t know if we can cast you on here, but it’s all good.

Okay. If some rando tells you like you’re too young or you’re too inexperienced for a book or a piece of like art or culture, tell them to stuff it, like it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as too young for something in terms of like cultural experience. That the person who is experiencing it can’t recognize themselves, right?

Someone can certainly look at something and go, Oh, I don’t get this. I’ve had that experience. Oh, maybe this will make more sense to me later, but right now I don’t understand this. That’s a totally valid experience. But no one could ever tell me what that was. Like, for me, horror movies, were really great.

Like when I was like a little kid, I love like slashers. It was really violent, but like I experienced like adult American modernist novels. It’s really impossible to read. And I have to be older. I don’t get this at all. And that’s not, that’s backwards, right? In school, you’re supposed to read those novels, but you’re not supposed to watch horror movies.

So I think yourself at the time, that was just me just being a weirdo, but you know yourself and you know yourself better. By exploring your own path, your own curiosity. And if you can do that with friends, it’s even better. But but I often did it on my own. And it was still incredibly fun.

Mk: This idea of learning about anarchy through art and fiction is so awesome. I really got radicalized towards queer anarchism, not by theory, but by being in theater spaces that gave me the experience of queer collective care. And before I became an anarchist, when I was like 12, I was very into the queer core movement and historical gay liberation, and I would read issues of the Gay Liberation French Magazine for fun, and that And that stuff, while not explicitly anarchist, in fact there were some very problematic ML tendencies there, really laid the groundwork for what does it mean to have a queer liberationist movement, and what can a queer apollo pic be, and you have to start somewhere with theory.

And there are infinite ways to express and learn about and love queer anarchy, just like there are infinite genders. So on that note, any shameless plugs?

Vicky: That was really well put. I completely agree. There’s no right way to get there. We all have to find our paths and push together. But yeah, I do have some shameless plugs.

That’s it. I wrote a book called In Defense of Looting, which came out in 2020. You can find it free on the Anarchist Library or loads of other places on the internet. Or you can buy it online. If you’ve got a friend, or if you’ve got some extra money, just want to read it. If you want to read more regular stuff from me, I have a blog called All Cats Are Beautiful.

It’s on ghost. io, which is like a blogging website. And yeah, keep an eye out for the Extended Universe, which is the book about Disney, which will be out next year with Hangar.

Mk: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on Disney and your youth liberation journey. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Vicky Asmuriel, and you’re listening to The Child and its Enemies.