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.