“Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force”
The right to free physiological change and modification of sex upon demand.
The right to free dress and adornment.
That all modes of human sexual self-expression deserve protection of the law and social sanction.
Every child’s right to develop in a non-sexist, non-possessive atmosphere, which is the responsibility of all people to create.
That a free educational system present the entire range of human sexuality, without advocating any one form or style … that sexist rules and sex-determined skills not be fostered by the schools.
That language be modified so that no gender takes priority.
That the judicial system be run by the people through people’s courts and that all people be tried by members of their peer group.
That gays be represented in all governmental and community institutions.
That organized religions be condemned for aiding in the genocide of gay people, and enjoined from teaching hatred and superstition.
That psychiatry and psychology be enjoined from advocating a preference for any form of sexuality, and the enforcement of that preference by shock treatment, brainwashing, imprisonment, etc.
The abolition of the nuclear family because it perpetuates the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality.
The immediate release of and reparations for gay political prisoners from prisons and mental institutions; the support of gay political prisoners by all other political prisoners.
That gays determine the destiny of their own communities.
That all people share equally the labor and products of society, regardless of sex or sexual orientation.
That technology be used to liberate all peoples of the world from drudgery.
The full participation and support of gays in the Peoples’ Revolutionary Army.
Finally, the end of domination of one person by another.
Gay Power to Gay People
All Power to the People
Seize the Time
— “Statement of Demands from the Male Representatives of National Gay Liberation,” Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention of the Black Panther Party, Philadelphia, PA, September 4-7, 1970, as printed inLiberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panthers and Their Legacy (2001), ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas.
The amount of people who like say something like “this is a matter of LIFE AND DEATH… go vote!!!” Completely sincerely and w no inner critical awareness is just like too much for me
Like, I just can not get my head to properly recreate the mindset of someone who thinks that it is at the point where it has become a struggle between life and death, liberty and totalitarianism, things-being-fine and actual genocide, and to then reach the conclusion that the call to action is to go somewhere and vote a few months from now, and that anything beyond that is too much, too extreme. And tbh that’s probably for the best
“The gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so.”
— Lin Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”, in A Guide to Poetics Journal : Writing the Expanded Field (via antigonick)
countervisuality 