Self-Defense in Mexico: Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars
Vital reading on the politics of community self-defense. Navarro parses the tactics indigenous people take up to keep each other safe when the state fails. I'm especially interested in his discussion of progressives' discomfort with self-defense, even as they perform concern with what happens in its absence.
The Fight Against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy
On how worker resistance persists even as surveillance grows and organized labor's power recedes. I appreciate Woodcock's refusal of left nostalgia here.
Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
A stunning inquiry into Black girls' resistance to discipline, including the disciplining power of the research encounter. Shange's effort to ‘write in collusion with [her subjects'] ethnographic refusal’ is a model for resistance studies.
Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures
On anti-work and the politics of pleasure. Stallings' push to avoid calling ‘work’ forms of art making that refuse work ethics should make labor scholars think twice about how we might be ‘contributing to the production of more machines’.
Sex Work as Work and Sex Work as Anti-Work
Some of my favorite sex worker theorists on the intersection of anti-work politics and disability. The panel does a beautiful job of holding ‘sex work is work’ in tension with the reality that it is so often also a way to resist work's discipline.
Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture
On the Black Panthers and the politics of self-defense. Bin Wahad argues against liberals' ‘psychological pablum of non-violence’. There won't be freedom without struggle.
A Feminist Theory of Refusal
Honig's theory of refusal asks readers to take seriously even those forms of refusal that ultimately ‘fail’. Even when efforts to refuse don't get the goods, they expand the refuser's, and the reader's, capacity to imagine otherwise.
Minor Apocalypses: Italian Autonomia, Utopia and Women
On feminist politics, Autonomist theory, and the limits of exit as a strategy for doing politics. Boscagli frames political nostalgia as a masculinist project, and future-oriented dreaming as a feminist one.
Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry
A study of digital labor that refuses the tendency to frame surveillance as all encompassing. Jones’ materialist account takes workers at their word when they say that pleasure and constraint both define the cam work day.
We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival
A groundbreaking collection of sex worker writers on the politics of survival. I hope this book travels beyond sex work studies. If it does, it will change how the left thinks about consent under capitalism, community resilience, and what to do about the state.