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The practice of everyday politics: lifestyle and identity as radical activism

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The practice of everyday politics: lifestyle and identity as radical activism

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THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY POLITICS:

LIFESTYLE AND IDENTITY AS RADICAL ACTIVISM

by

Laura Portwood-Stacer

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Laura Portwood-Stacer
ii
DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to the anarchist activists I write about within it, particularly
the ones who personally shared their time and stories with me.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As anyone who has written a doctoral dissertation can attest, producing one’s first
substantial piece of scholarship is an exceedingly taxing experience. Many people made
it possible for me to get through the process in one piece. First, thank you to my parents
who have always put my education above everything else. Their pride and support has
been absolutely unwavering and I’m so grateful for that. My closest friends in graduate
school have made life worth living during the darkest phases of dissertation writing, and I
will never be able to show them my how much they have meant. Meghan Moran, Evren
Savci, and Inna Arzumanova are my soul mates (and enthusiastic partners in junk food
consumption). Two other close friends, Andrew Burridge and John Cheney-Lippold,
deserve special mention here for their willingness to serve as “informants” from inside
the anarchist world. Andrew forwarded me countless emails and invites to events, and
John gabbed with me about my work over innumerable lunches and beers, introduced me
to tons of helpful people, and never got annoyed that I was trying to research something
he already knew all about. This dissertation exists because of their help. I also want to
thank Jesse Fannan and especially Brad Waskewich for having nothing to do with
academia and for willingly listening to me talk constantly about this project over the past
few years. Zach Norton generously proofread the final draft, a fitting bookend to his
having introduced me to punk rock (and its anarchist associations) over a decade ago.
At USC, I’ve been fortunate to work with outstanding faculty during my
coursework and beyond. For sharing their knowledge and intellectual enthusiasm, thank
you to Marita Sturken, Sarah Gualtieri, Peggy McLaughlin, Randy Lake, and Jack
iv
Halberstam. A special thank you to Manuel Castells and Carla Kaplan, two teachers
who were each extraordinarily supportive of the questions I wanted to ask with my work,
and made me feel like they were questions very worth asking. Thank you also to Sandra
Ball-Rokeach, Ellen Seiter, and Josh Kun, who served on my qualifying exam committee
and provided insightful feedback on my prospectus. I would also like to thank Carrie
Anne Platt, Cara Wallis, Deborah Hanan, Sasha Costanza-Chock, and Travers Scott,
fellow Annenberg doctoral students, for their help along the way. The Annenberg staff,
particularly Anne Marie Campian, Carol Kretzer, Christine Lloreda, Donna McHugh, and
Imre Mesaros, are amazingly supportive of graduate students. Without their often
invisible labor we would be lost. Outside of USC, I want to thank Toby Miller and
Angela McRobbie, who each provided insight and encouragement when this project was
in its very early stages.
On my dissertation committee, thank you to Karen Tongson who provided crucial
perspective from beyond the communication world. Larry Gross is an educator who in
many ways defies description, and a thank you doesn’t seem adequate to express my
gratitude for his presence in my graduate career, in the various capacities of teacher,
scholar, administrator, and committee member. Finally, there are certainly not words to
sufficiently characterize my gratitude and affection for Sarah Banet-Weiser. She has been
an incredible dissertation chair, graduate advisor, and teacher. Her mentorship and
advocacy over the past six years have been invaluable, and her intellect, ambition, and
work ethic are all truly inspirational to me. I consider myself beyond lucky to have been
her student and friend.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract xii

Chapter One: Everyday Politics 1
Chapter Overview 9
Theoretical Frameworks 13
Background on Anarchists 30
Methodology 49

Chapter Two: Anarchist Consumption 65
Practices of Anarchist Consumption 70
Motivations for Anarchist Consumption Practices 90
Effects of Anarchist Consumption Practices 98
Consumption as Distraction 104
Consumption and Community 109

Chapter Three: Anarchist Style 120
Anarchist Stylistic Practices 124
Style as Self-Construction 131
Style as Commodity 133
Style as Distinction 139
Style as Boundary 142
Style as Critique 147
Style as Political Communication 152

Chapter Four: Anarchist Sexuality 158
Anarchist Practices of Sexuality 162
Subcultural Norms of Sexuality 176
Identification as Contestation 187
Strategic Sexuality 196

Chapter Five: Anarchist Identity Politics 204
Anarchism as Identity Category 210
The Productive Power of Anarchist Identity 214
The Exclusionary Power of Anarchist Identity 225
Anarchist Identity and Uneven Social Privilege 228
Conclusion: Ethical Authenticity 241

Chapter Six: Conclusion 245

References 253

Appendices
Appendix One: List of Interviewees 267
Appendix Two: Interview Questions 274
Appendix Three: Information Sheet for Interviewees 276

vii
ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a critical study of the phenomenon of “lifestyle politics.” I
define lifestyle politics as attempts by individuals to enact their political ideologies
through the habitual practices of their everyday lives. In this study, I use ethnographic
methods to explore how contemporary anarchist activists position their personal lifestyles
within strategies of radical political resistance. That is, I examine how individuals who
self-identify as anarchists use this identity, and the everyday cultural practices that go
with it, as tools of political dissent. This study crosses disciplinary boundaries, employing
methods and theories from communication, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies,
and sociology. It draws on previous research in the areas of consumer activism,
subcultures and social movements, embodied performance, queer resistance, and identity
politics. It is heavily informed by Foucaultian theories of power, discourse, and
subjectivity, and is inspired by feminist work on identity and political struggle.
The cultural, political, and economic climate of the contemporary United States
produces a context in which individualized tactics of resistance co-exist with collective
identities and shared desires for social transformation. This dissertation probes this
tension between the individual and the collective, as it is manifested for a particular
political subculture. I explore various core aspects of daily life—practices of
consumption, self-presentation, and sexuality—in order to understand the precise
relationship between the personal and the political for contemporary anarchists in the US.
I describe the political meanings these individuals attribute to their personal practices, as

viii
well as the material outcomes they seek as political activists. I also examine the way
personal identity itself is understood and deployed by anarchists as part of their resistant
political project; that is, how the very category of anarchist is useful (or not) for these
subjects. Based on empirical research, I theorize the relationship between individual
resistance and social activism, emphasizing the centrality of communication and culture
to this relationship.
I show that anarchist practices of lifestyle politics have multiple motivations, not
all of which are commensurable with their material effects. While individual practices of
consumption, self-styling, and sexual expression may often be personally pleasurable and
ethically justifiable, it is unclear that they have the capacity to produce social change on
the scale sought by radical activists. I argue that a theoretical engagement with processes
of communication, representation, and performance is necessary for activists to connect
their individual tactical interventions with their broad political strategies. I also show that
while shared tastes and lifestyles can reinforce feelings of community and solidarity
among radicals, they can simultaneously contribute to pernicious forms of insularity and
cultural homogeneity within social movements. I argue that intra-movement disciplinarity
around lifestyle norms can both produce collective expressions of ethical commitment
and exclude potential political allies. I urge social movement participants to recognize
both the possibilities and limitations presented by lifestyle politics. Ultimately, I make the
case that movement strategy must be informed by reflexive critique, which should
determine in any given situation the degree to which lifestyle-based tactics are
appropriate.

1
CHAPTER ONE
EVERYDAY POLITICS

This project is an extended engagement with the idea that “the personal is
political,” a philosophy popularized by the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s
and ‘70s and adopted as a truism by countless activists since.
1
Though it might be read as
a simple equivalence, there is a lot of meaning encapsulated in this phrase, “the personal
is political.” It means that personal circumstances are never purely private and
idiosyncratic; they are always inflected by broad systems of power. It means that personal
behaviors are always communicative of the actor’s place within those systems; individual
actions exist discursively as well as materially. It means that personal decisions about
how to live have political ramifications; every individual act has the potential to make a
small intervention in systems of power, either to reinforce them or to alter them. And for
those who live by this truism, it means that the personal is politicized; any number of
one’s daily practices are undertaken with a consciousness of their political import and
their potential to bring about a desired political reality.
In this dissertation, I am interested in the everyday practices that individuals
undertake with political resistance in mind. Michel Foucault defines a practice as “a ‘way
of doing things’ oriented toward objectives and regulating itself by means of a sustained
reflection” (Foucault 1997a, 74). In this formulation, a practice is not merely a random

1
According to Sara Evans, the phrase originated with the New Left student resistance
movement of the 1960s, but came to prominence under the aegis of the feminist
movement that followed it (Evans 1979).

2
action; rather it refers to a pattern of behaviors that are informed by reasoned thought and
directed toward conscious goals. Michel DeCerteau, in his The Practice of Everyday Life,
argues for scholarly exploration of practice, of the “ways of operating” and “models of
action” employed by subjects who are dominated within apparatuses of power
(DeCerteau 1984, xiv). Taking as axiomatic Foucault’s precept that where there is power
there is resistance, DeCerteau urges observation and analysis of the forms this resistance
takes. That is what I attempt to do with this project. Like DeCerteau, Foucault, and the
academic cultural studies tradition on which they have had a great influence, I focus on
everyday life as a site of inquiry into the workings of power and ideology. Since the late
1980s, cultural studies research has emphasized the sphere of leisure and consumption
alongside (or above) the sphere of labor and production as a key site for the circulation of
power and the construction of subjectivity and sociality. My study reflects this emphasis,
taking up the concept of “lifestyle” and exploring its relationship to resistant political
subjects and social groups.
In utilizing the concept of lifestyle, I situate this study in close relation to issues of
identity and consumption. Lifestyle is a term used within the discourses of sociology and
marketing to refer to a coherent body of practices adopted by individuals, which may
include “the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and
favoured milieux for encountering others” (Giddens 1991, 81), and is often characterized
by a “distinctive array of values, drives, beliefs, needs, dreams, and special points of
view” (Mitchell 1983, 4). The lifestyle one adopts makes them into a particular kind of
person, thus a lifestyle is in some sense a form of identity. Max Weber, who is attributed

3
with the coining of the term itself, understood lifestyles as “a form of status that derives
from a mastery of expenditure on consumption or leisure time” (Chaney 2001, 82).
Indeed, nearly all definitions of lifestyle agree on the central role of consumption in its
constitution.
For me, the concept of lifestyle is also inseparable from communication, since a
lifestyle, in addition to being a set of material practices, is also fundamentally a
representation of identity within the sociocultural order. Because lifestyle practices are
often visible to others, and certainly always visible to oneself, they are communicative
acts. To maintain a particular lifestyle is to engage in meaning-making, to produce a
coherent assemblage of personal practices that tells a story about who one is. As such,
lifestyle practices are important for what Foucault calls “the cultivation of the self” and
for “giving material form to a particular narrative of identity” as Anthony Giddens would
have it (Foucault 1988; Giddens 1991, 81). Giddens posits that identity is constituted
through narratives of the self, generated by individuals in the stories they tell about
themselves. These narratives need not be literal, verbal descriptions of the self; they may
instead be a consistent set of practices or performances that produce a coherent story of
the self in a more metaphorical sense (Cosslett, Lury, and Summerfield 2000).
The narratives of identity I am concerned with in this project are those which tell
the story of subjects who define themselves by their active resistance to the dominant
social order. I use the term “lifestyle politics” throughout this dissertation to refer to the
phenomenon of individuals consciously manifesting their political values within even the
most mundane routines of everyday life. Indeed, a conscious concern with the political

4
may permeate everyday experience for the subjects I am concerned with in this study.
Lifestyle politics, as I define it, is a Foucaultian practice of self-care, in that it involves
monitoring one’s own behavior and disciplining the self according to a specific ethical
framework. With this project I look at how such self-care is at times understood as
political resistance. Ultimately, I am interested in whether lifestyle-based tactics of
resistance have a place in strategies aimed at radical change in social systems of power,
and what that place might be.
Furthermore, this dissertation is an argument for a complexification of the most
common ways lifestyle politics gets understood and talked about both within activist
movements and in popular culture at large. One thing that is missing from many analyses
of lifestyle politics (especially those offered by practitioners themselves) is an
appropriate recognition of the traversal of scale that must take place for individual
behavior to have an impact on social systems of power. Social movement scholar Barbara
Epstein uses the term “magical politics” to refer to movement participants’ common
presumption that personal experiences and symbolic performances can lead directly to
material social change on a broad scale (Epstein 1991). Along these lines, Wini Breines
observes that participants in radical social movements often feel an overblown sense of
“efficacy”: they are able to transform their own lives, so they get a disproportionate sense
that they can affect the larger society (Breines 1982, xi). Unfortunately, in practice,
political strategies based in personal resistance often fail to transcend the individual, and
may in fact reproduce problematic forms of “possessive individualism” (MacPherson
1962), to the material detriment of transformative political projects.

5
Political power is intrinsically macroscopic, circulating among social institutions
and discourses, whereas personal behavior is intrinsically microscopic, existing in a
delimited time and space. For personal acts of resistance to transcend their specific
location, strategic connections must be made between the individual and the social. I
firmly believe that while the personal may be described as political, the personal must not
be understood to exhaust the political. Personal actions carry political meanings (and may
even have some political ramifications), but the two are neither equivalent nor
interchangeable. To operate as if they are is to miss the complexity that is needed for
understanding social problems, let alone for addressing them through strategic resistance.
Alice Echols’ history of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s shows
that the tenet that the personal is political can at times “encourage a solipsistic
preoccupation with self-transformation” (Echols 1989, 17). In these instances, organizing
around personal experiences of oppression may become conflated with organizing in
one’s own personal interest, with promoting a lifestyle in which one takes pleasure or
ethical satisfaction, whether this involves a radical critique of social problems or not.
Micky McGee (2005) suggests that such “belaboring of the self” occurs when people live
in circumstances that seem beyond their control. Given the array of forces that work
against revolutionary change, members of radical movements may indeed become
disillusioned about the possibility of effecting their broad political goals, and thus
become “caught in a cycle of seeking individual solutions to problems that are social,
economic, and political in origin” (McGee 2005, 177). This individualism ultimately
meshes quite well with the dominant neoliberal order in which social dissatisfaction is

6
assumed as the responsibility of the individual who then registers their dissent
atomistically, and thus fails to pose a serious threat to systemic power relations.
If the aim of lifestyle politics is to resist the dominance of oppressive institutions
in one’s own subjective experience by altering the ways in which one engages with these
institutions, I believe that’s fair and even commendable. But this is lifestyle as self-help,
not as social change. Herbert Marcuse, in his analysis of the countercultural formations
spawned by the New Left movement, points out that while individual revolt is a pre-
condition to social revolution, it is not equivalent to it. He feels that a liberation of the
self is necessary for an alternative society to be envisioned and desired, but that it is not
sufficient to bring that society about (Marcuse 2001a; Kellner 2005). The problem I have
seen is that radical movements often fail to account for the processes by which small-
scale cultural experimentation might effect change beyond the movements themselves.
While participants in these movements may believe that “the revolution [has] more to do
with thinking and living differently, and convincing others to make similar changes, than
with seizing power” (Epstein 1991, 51), the means by which others are to be convinced
tend to be under-theorized by movement strategists. This points to a need for a productive
collaboration between critical communication theory and radical activism. I see this
dissertation as a small step in that direction.
I want to be clear here that I do not intend my use of “lifestyle” as a modifer to
“politics” to connote some degree of intrinsic illegitimacy, as compared to other forms of
activism and expressions of political identity. That is, I do not mean to oppose “lifestyle
politics” to “real politics,” or to make a claim that some forms of activism are always

7
already better than others. Insofar as lifestyle is an important site of meaning-making,
identity construction, and movement sociality, it cannot be discounted as superfluous to
contemporary political projects. I will also not be advocating any particular activist
alternative to lifestyle politics—to do so would be to reach beyond the scope of my
research. My aim here is simply to present an examination and critique of the way
lifestyle is used and understood within the context of a particular political formation.
The formation I focus on in this study is the contemporary American anarchist
movement.
2
I find anarchists to be a particularly useful site for mounting an exploration
of lifestyle politics, since the anarchist milieu is closely associated with a distinctive set
of lifestyle practices as well as a relatively coherent set of political philosophies and goals
(all of which I will discuss shortly). And because the political values with which
anarchists identify depart radically from mainstream politics, their lifestyles are also
dramatically visible against the backdrop of mainstream culture. As I began my research,
I found that, in fact, many anarchists are quite committed to lifestyle politics as a mode of
resistance. As one scholar explains of the contemporary anarchist movement,
At the heart of the new anarchism(s) there lies a concern with developing a whole
new way of being in and acting upon the world. Contemporary revolutionary
anarchism is not merely interested in effecting changes in socioeconomic relations
or dismantling the State, but in developing an entire art of living. (Moore 2004,
55)

2
My use of the term “movement” is not meant to overstate the organizational coherence
of contemporary anarchism. That is, it would be inaccurate to characterize anarchists as
sharing a uniform platform or even concretely defined goals. Later on in this chapter, I
further discuss the issue of terminology in referring to anarchist social formations.

8
Another anarchist activist makes a similar observation: “Anarchists today do not tend to
think of revolution – if they even use the term – as a future event but rather as a present-
day process and a potential dimension of everyday life” (Gordon 2008, 41). The strong
connections between anarchist politics and everyday practice provide a rich ground for
interrogating the theoretical and practical concerns that are central to this study. In The
Practice of Everyday Life, DeCerteau expresses interest in examining the ways in which
individuals actually resist dominant power while they are also subject to it (xiv). In this
vein, I examine specific practices through which anarchists resist—or imagine
themselves as resisting—dominant social forces such as the capitalist market, the liberal
state, and mainstream bourgeois conformity, while still operating largely within and
alongside these institutions.
In presenting the major topics of this dissertation, it is relevant to offer an
explanation of my own personal position with respect to these issues. In her important
cultural studies text, Feminism and Youth Culture, McRobbie discusses academic
research and “the politics of selection” (McRobbie 1991, 18). She argues that feminist
researchers ought to be aware of, and to acknowledge, their reasons for choosing certain
areas of study and how their own personal experiences inform the work. The issues I deal
with in this dissertation are both academic and personal. I must be clear here that I
identify neither as an anarchist nor as an activist. However, my political orientations as
both feminist and queer are central to my self-identity. I am also highly critical of the
social injustices spawned by capitalism and neoliberalism. Like all subjects of “reflexive
modernity” (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994), I am continually faced with the question of

9
how to conduct myself in everyday life. And, because of the primacy of political critique
to my own identity, this ever-present question is always at least implicitly inflected by the
question of what must be done in order to achieve a more just society, and how I
personally can contribute to such a project. Like many others with similar beliefs to my
own, I struggle to determine for myself what would constitute an ethical response to the
reality of systemic oppression, in which I both benefit from and am disadvantaged by
different forms of privilege.
This project has clarified—maybe even intensified—my extreme ambivalence
about individualism, activism, and the intersections between the two. While it’s probable
that I came to this research topic in part as a pursuit of answers about how to live my own
life, I can’t say that I’m closer to knowing my own personal answers to those questions.
At best, this project has taught me—and I hope someday it will teach others—that the
answers are probably always situational, contestable, and infinitely complex. Ultimately,
I hope that a major contribution of this project—for me, for my fellow travelers, for
anarchists, for progressive social movements in general—is to advocate a fundamental
sense of humility about the choices we make, the flexibility to make different choices as
conditions change, and a willingness to be both critical and compassionate toward the
comrades who share a commitment to changing the world for the better.

Chapter overview
In the remainder of this chapter, I expand upon many of the concepts introduced
above, outlining the theoretical frameworks that inform this dissertation. I offer some

10
background information about anarchism, as a political philosophy and as a
contemporary social formation, so that readers have a basic context in which to situate
the observations and analyses I provide in subsequent chapters. I also discuss the
discourse of “lifestyle anarchism” and its significance to anarchist politics. Finally, I
describe the methods I used to collect my data and discuss some of the methodological
concerns which are applicable to my project and my specific sites of inquiry.
In Chapter Two, I consider anarchist consumption practices. I situate anarchists’
consumption habits within cultural conditions in which individual consumer behavior is
positioned as significant for both the construction of identity and the exercise of political
power. I then describe many of the specific consumption practices adopted by anarchists
and the ways in which anarchists themselves imagine these practices to be acts of
political resistance. I go on to provide a critical assessment of consumption as activist
tactic, arguing that, while consumer activism is quite limited as a political strategy aimed
at radical social change, it holds great significance as an activity that performs and
thereby constructs individual and collective anarchist identity.
Chapter Three examines the visual style of anarchists, treating contemporary
American anarchism as a subcultural formation characterized by spectacular modes of
self-presentation. Here I describe the major features of anarchist personal style,
explaining the symbolic functions attributed to these affectations by anarchists
themselves. I use these stylistic practices to interrogate the strategic value of performative
modes of resistance. I show that having a recognizable style is useful both for the
construction of group identity and for intra-group communication among a particular

11
subset of subjects. However, stylistic affectations also become grounds for factionalism
and policing around “authentic” anarchist identity. I also argue that the spectacle of
subcultural style has extremely protracted communicative and persuasive potential
beyond the anarchist milieu, due to the inherent limitations of symbolic representation,
such as the ease with which it is distorted, decontextualized, and co-opted in mainstream
culture.
In Chapter Four, I address the ways that anarchists bring their ideological
commitments into one of the most intimate and fundamental aspects of everyday life:
sexuality. This chapter continues the interrogation of performative resistance begun in
Chapter Three by considering the ways in which intensely personal aspects of sexuality
such as desire, physical intimacy, and self-identification are imbued with political
significance for anarchists. The discursive positioning of sexuality as a site of anarchist
politics means that, like practices of consumption and style, individual practices of
sexuality are taken to be expressive of ethical and ideological commitments. As such,
they too become objects of intra-group policing and judgment. At the same time, these
individual practices are often understood as meaningful acts of resistance in themselves.
Here, again, I question the strategic, macroscopic potential of such tactics, while granting
their microscopic value for the individuals who engage in them.
Chapter Five further considers the construction of anarchist identity in order to
understand the material effects of this discursive construction. I revisit several issues that
are addressed in previous chapters, bringing in Foucaultian theory to examine the
disciplinarity around those lifestyle practices that are thought to constitute “authentic”

12
anarchist identity. I present an argument about the productive power of normativity to
promote ethical practice at both the individual and collective levels, yet I also consider
the ways in which authenticity and taste are used to police and factionalize within radical
social movements, often in ways that marginalize or exclude those lacking in particular
forms of cultural capital. I argue that identity constructions like “anarchist” provide a
useful, though at times problematic, point of orientation for individuals who are
interested in radical social transformation. The constitutive relationship between lifestyle,
identity, and politics at this historical juncture opens up space for new activist formations;
it is my aim here to consider what exactly is enabled, and constrained, within this space.
In my conclusion, I summarize the foregoing chapters and offer final remarks on
the findings of this research. I also speculate on the relevance of this work for academic
studies of lifestyle, identity, and resistance, as well as for radical social movements as
they exist on the ground today. Appendix One is a list of all the interviewees who
participated in this research. I offer basic biographical information for each participant as
well as the format of each interview (in-person, email, or instant message), for the
reader’s reference. Appendix Two is a list of the general questions I used to guide the
interviews. Appendix Three is a reproduction of the information sheet given to
interviewees.

13
Theoretical Frameworks
Lifestyle, identity, and consumption
Earlier, I explained how processes of consumption and identification are bound up
in the concept of lifestyle. The concept of performativity further helps to explain how the
adoption of lifestyle practices works to construct the subject who engages in those
practices. When people appropriate particular symbols, they are made into particular
kinds of people. In this sense, I understand lifestyle practices as analogous to J. L.
Austin’s “speech acts,” which are the basis for Judith Butler’s theory of gender
performativity (Butler 1990). According to Austin, a speech act is a verbal expression
that performs a function simply by being spoken. To borrow Austin’s famous example,
the minister who says “I now pronounce you husband and wife” at a wedding performs
the action of marriage through her very speech. Importantly, each time the minister
performs this speech act, she re-instantiates herself as a person who can legitimately
perform the act of marriage. Butler takes up this idea of the subject continually producing
itself through the repetition of verbal (and non-verbal) acts (Butler 1990). For Butler, the
self is produced through repeated performances of gender-coded acts, which function to
shore up the coherence of social discourses of gender identity that motivate those acts.
Most often, the narratives that individuals perform are characterized by what
Butler calls “cultural norms of intelligibility” to which we must adhere if we are to be
recognized as individuals (Ibid.). DeCerteau has a similar understanding of the power of
identity discourse; he says that people “find in a discourse the means of transforming
themselves into a unit of meaning, into an identity” (DeCerteau 1984, 149). The capacity

14
of discourses to produce identity categories and the subjects who occupy them is also of
central concern to Foucault in his first volume of The History of Sexuality. Foucault
points out that whereas the present dominant understanding of homosexuality is that of an
essential attribute of individuals, this was not always the case. Historically,
homosexuality described sexual practices, not the people who engaged in them. Through
the circulation of discourse about sexuality, particular acts came to form a coherent body
of related practices, a process that Foucault calls the “incorporation of perversions”
(Foucault 1990a, 42). Not only did people who performed these acts come to be
identified as homosexuals, but also their homosexuality came to be thought of as a
fundamental aspect of their personhood. This “specification of individuals” promoted a
social understanding of what it meant to be the sort of person who would engage in
particular practices; thus homosexual identity came to stand for a whole “type of life” and
a “singular nature” evinced by particular individuals (Foucault 1990a, 42).
In this study, I examine individuals for whom an orientation toward anarchist
politics is a fundamental aspect of their personhood. And while it might not be on the
radar of mainstream America, there is a particular “type of life” associated with anarchist
identity, characterized by the various lifestyle practices (or “perversions” to use the
Foucaultian parlance of sexuality), which I will describe in this dissertation. For many,
anarchist practices are not just something they do sporadically or without intention—
participation in the practices of anarchism is an ongoing lifestyle and “specifies” one as
an anarchist individual. The association between anarchist identity and these practices—
the specification of anarchist individuals—is accomplished through repeated performance

15
and the circulation of discourse which establishes the “cultural norms” by which subjects
are “intelligible” as anarchists.
Consciously using one’s lifestyle as a site of political identity formation and
resistance is uniquely possible within contemporary consumer culture. The idea of a
chosen lifestyle only makes sense within modern societies, in which modes of living are
less bound by tradition and more open to individual direction (Giddens 1991). Individuals
are fairly free to align themselves with social groups by means of the goods they
appropriate, the way they style themselves, and the leisure activities in which they choose
to participate. This freedom can in part be traced to economic conditions—since the end
of the second World War, the US has experienced relative affluence and stability.
Conditions of abundance mean that many (though certainly not all) Americans live in a
“post-scarcity” society (Bookchin 1979), in which advances in technology and the wide
availability of resources make it possible for people to create livelihoods for themselves
outside of work. For many, this means there is free time for picking up hobbies and
joining social organizations. For those in the middle class who are able to escape manual
labor and pursue more creative professions, even the “boundaries between work and
leisure [are] thrown into question” (Epstein 1991, 36). Because labor is not necessarily
central as a defining feature of life and identity, it is possible to construct the self around
the practices one chooses to engage in, rather than what one has to do to sustain oneself.
3

3
It should be understood that a great many people in the US (let alone around the world)
do not have the financial means to afford a lot of leisure time, let alone an abundance of
consumable objects and activities to fill it up with. Although an individual’s relationship
to consumption (including the possibility that one may be unable to do very much of it) is

16
The rise of mass media, followed by the proliferation of niche media outlets,
followed by an explosion in digital media, has further served to make an endless array of
lifestyle options available for emulation. This is important because, as David Chaney
explains, a greater diversity of available “symbolic repertoires” means that “users are
more self-consciously aware of alternatives” (Chaney 2001, 83). As a consequence,
actors making cultural choices are necessarily aware that taste could be otherwise.
Every aspect of life becomes a matter of style, or we could call it fashion—to
wear something or to go somewhere is to be aware of the sort of person who
makes that choice and thus the self becomes more clearly an object of cultural
mapping.” (Ibid.)

Some theorists of postmodernity claim that such freedom implies that identities no longer
correspond to coherent narratives since people are constantly shifting in and out of social
groups and cultural affiliations, making choices that don’t fit established narratives or
norms. Paul Sweetman for example asserts that, “Postmodern fashion no longer refers to
anything but itself, and this lack of external referentiality means that everything is
available: we can all wear what we want, with the proviso that what we wear is no longer
indexical of anything other than our participation in the fashion system” (Sweetman
2004, 83). While this may be true to some extent, for some people, I think that overall,
most people aim for a degree of internal consistency among their lifestyle practices. As

clearly of paramount importance for the construction of identity in contemporary society,
it should not be assumed that all people are equally equipped to freely construct their
identities through consumer choices. Furthermore, I think it is a stretch to claim, as some
social theorists do, that “no one is bound permanently to particular circumstances
originating in accidents of birth or fortune” (Leiss et al. 2005, 204). “Accidents of birth”
like race, class, and gender remain strong structuring categories for many people; indeed
I will argue later in this dissertation that such categories often complicate and frustrate
individuals’ capacity and desire to adopt and perform anarchist political identity.

17
Alan Ward puts it, “groups with disciplined purchasing habits are emerging… observing
highly regulated patterns of appropriate consumption” (Ward 2004, 887). The idea of
“appropriateness” is particularly present, I would argue, when the individual in question
is motivated by a specific ethical framework, as many anarchists are. For those who have
a well-defined identity with a well-defined set of values around which personal decisions
can be made, lifestyle choices may be highly disciplined and imbued with great political
significance. Thus while the conditions of contemporary society make choice possible—
mandatory, even—and this may mean that both lifestyles and identities are more freely
constructed, opening up space for alternative, even oppositional, subject positions, I
contend that this freedom does not necessarily cancel out the drive to construct coherent
lifestyles and identities.
Sociological researchers developed the concept of subculture to deal with social
identities constructed around specific lifestyles and tastes. These groups, though they
may be clearly defined and their boundaries stringently policed, are intrinsically fluid. As
Andy Bennett puts it, “so-called youth ‘subcultures’ are prime examples of the unstable
and shifting cultural affiliations which characterize late modern consumer-based
societies” (Bennett 1999, 605). The concept of subcultures has also historically been
associated with social deviance, which was interpreted by Stuart Hall and many of his
colleagues to mean that youth subcultures were expressing political resistance (see the
essays in Hall and Jefferson 2005). Though the value of the concept of subculture as an
analytical tool has been much debated (see Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004), I want to
retain it because I think it is useful for thinking about the way in which anarchists are

18
often unified by conventions of style and taste that symbolize and enact their opposition
to dominant culture and its attendant ideologies. Much like the term “lifestyle,”
“subculture” is sometimes taken to stand for a lesser form of political participation, one
that is limited to superficial and ultimately impotent forms of resistance. Though there are
certainly valid judgments to be made about the level of political engagement to be found
in specific subcultures, I mean to arrive at those judgments through analytical scrutiny.
Thus my use of the term subculture, despite the negative meanings attributed to it by
some, is in no way meant to connote that I approach the anarchists in this study with a
presumption that they are politically unserious. Again, I simply see it as a useful word for
referring to a particular kind of social formation, characterized by alternative tastes and
oppositional political beliefs.

Power, subjectivity, and social movements
In this project, I consider lifestyle practices as more than mere choices, tastes, or
“individualistic expression[s] of identity” (Sweetman 2004, 84). I posit that individual
anarchists’ lifestyle practices can be thought of as tactics that might be coordinated to
further anarchist political strategy. In making an analytical distinction between tactics
and strategy, I am again influenced by Foucault, who distinguishes between localized acts
of resistance and the networks of power in which these acts might be connected and

19
given intention.
4
Foucault calls this relationship the “double conditioning” of strategy and
tactics (Foucault 1990a, 100). The lifestyle practices I describe in this dissertation are all
localized in individual bodies and moments. Yet, given that they are informed by and
aimed at collective political ideologies and goals, they might be thought to constitute
what Foucault calls “technologies of resistance,” or “a body of technical knowledge and
practices, a raft of techniques, which once developed and understood can be applied to
various situations” (Kelly 2009, 45) in which resistance is deemed appropriate.
Furthermore, I am interested in how individuals become subjects of anarchist
strategy, actors for whom it makes sense to engage in resistant lifestyle practices. Again,
Foucault is helpful for thinking about the relationship between oppositional identities and
practices, as well as the individuals who adopt them. Importantly for Foucault,
subjection
5
is not just about following rules which are handed down, or obeying the
powers that be; disciplinary power works by getting the individual to take responsibility
for oneself, to recognize the “right” thing to do, and to feel empowered to do it. And, in
fact, the subject does not just feel empowered to act, the subject is empowered to act,
which is what Foucault means when he says that power is productive. In other words, the
subject is incited to take material action in line with what is dictated by disciplinary
discourses.

4
Intention, in Foucault’s usage, merely indicates the presence of “aims and objectives”
toward which power is directed. Intention does not necessitate the presence of an actor
who consciously determines those aims and objectives (Foucault 1990a, 95).
5
The term is sometimes translated as “subjectivation” or “subjectification.” The multiple
translations speak to the multi-dimensionality of the phenomenon itself: to be a subject is
to have been made a subject, as connoted by “subjectification” and it is also to be subject
to a discourse of power, as connoted by “subjection.”

20
In many of Foucault’s writings on power, he is concerned with the way that
dominant institutions, such as the state, use the empowerment of subjectivity to enlist
individuals in their institutional projects, e.g. the growth of populations, the defending of
territory, etc. (Foucault 1995; 2003). Foucault uses the term “governmentality” to refer to
“the way in which one conducts men” to behave in concert with the interests of a
particular institution. For Foucault, the institution in question was often one of
domination, such as the state. He uses the term “anatamo-politics” to refer to the exercise
of power upon the individual human body; this exercise of power is distinct from
punishment, rather it generally takes the form of self-discipline toward some positive
state of “optimization” and “usefulness” (Foucault 1990a, 139).
I want to take Foucault’s understanding of power, subjectivation, and discipline in
a somewhat different direction, one which I think Foucault himself was concerned with
but which is perhaps under-attended to in interpretations of his work, particularly by
those who feel he offers no solution to the problem of totalizing domination. I am
interested in how certain confluences of disciplinary power work to produce a coherent,
resistant subject, one who consciously and consistently positions themself against
dominant institutions such as the state and conducts their behavior accordingly. This
body is still “docile” (Foucault 1995)—control and discipline are still in play—but to
different ends than the survival and dominance of the state. Instead of governmentality,
we might use the term “movementality”; we still have the governing of the individual
through getting the individual to conduct themself in particular ways, but here the
discursive inducement to self-government is circulated within and by the movement for

21
the interests of the movement, not the state. Especially in this context we can witness the
circulatory nature of power: in the radical movement, there is no sovereign, no prison
guard, no drill sergeant, not even an invisible or imagined one. There are only one’s
ideals and one’s comrades, and it is through them that power flows to the body of the
subject and directs its conduct.
6

The capacity of movement discourses to win allegiance and direct individual
behavior can be illuminated through Stuart Hall’s reading and reworking of both
Foucault’s theory of subjection and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation. According
to Althusser, subjects are recruited as such by ideological discourses. When a person or
an institution or a text addresses an individual as if they are a particular kind of subject,
and that individual responds in kind, that individual has just been constituted as that
subject (Althusser 2006). Whereas Althusser is exclusively concerned with how
dominant ideology produces dominated subjects, and Foucault seems to be concerned
only with the docile bodies produced by state discipline, Hall offers an analysis that can
incorporate the active investment in counter-hegemonic ideologies
7
by resistant subjects.
Hall argues that the “suturing of the subject to a subject-position” is a two-sided process,
involving not only the hailing of the subject by discourse but also the recognition by the

6
I do not wish to claim that this resistant subject is located outside the state’s network of
power, but rather that it has multiple networks of power converging on itself, one of
which is that of the movement. Recognizing this intersection helps to explain why
attempting to achieve a puristic movement subjectivity is a futile pursuit: one will never
be able to fully align with just one disciplinary discourse since one is pulled in different
directions by different discourses.
7
Hall argues that “ideology” need not only refer to the distortions of the ruling class (as
Marx is often interpreted to have used the term), but can also “refer to all organized
forms of social thinking” (Hall 1996a, 27).

22
subject of a shared ideal in common between themself and the content of the discourse
(Hall 1996b, 6, 2). In line with Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as being
built on “the consent of the governed” through the appeal of “common sense,” Hall
believes that identification, solidarity, and allegiance are established on the foundation of
a felt affinity between subject and discourse (Hall 1996a; 1996b). Radical movements
can thus constitute their own hegemonic spheres, in which subjects come to identify
themselves with a particular resistant political ideology such as anarchism. As Jorge
Larrain puts it, “individuals are not necessarily recruited and constituted as subjects
obedient to the ruling class, the same mechanism of interpellation operates when
individuals are recruited by revolutionary ideologies” (Larrain 1996, 49).
Historian Michael Denning argues that the culture of radical movements
constitutes an “alternative hegemony,” through which “political sentiments and opinions
are transformed into ways of living and ways of seeing” (Denning 1997, 63). Just as
within liberal society, the law disciplines subjects in exchange for a position from which
to act and speak as citizens, the disciplinary discourses of the anarchist movement compel
individuals to conform to certain modes of behavior and identification, in exchange for
acceptance as legitimate members of the anarchist community. Now, we could as well
use a term like “invited” in place of “compelled”: not all (or even most) disciplinary
processes are experienced by their subjects as coercive. Foucault uses the term
“consensual disciplines” to refer to these relations of discipline that are not relations of

23
domination (Foucault 1984b, 380). That is, participants in radical “movement cultures”
8

take pleasure in the practices through which they produce themselves as such, rather than
feeling as if their natural desires have been constrained or violated.
The ideologies of resistant movement are circulated through discourse in the form
of cultural texts, be they written, graphic, audio-visual, web-based, etc. which are both
produced and consumed by members and potential members of those resistant
movements. Movement discourses are also circulated via interpersonal communication,
including offhand comments, casual conversations, organized discussions, and formal
remarks offered at movement events. In addition to promoting movement ideologies,
these discourses establish what is accepted as “normal” behavior for individuals within
the movement. For Foucault, normativity is a particular technique of disciplinary power
(Foucault 1990a). Norms differ from laws in that they may not be explicitly stated. They
work by recommending themselves as natural and reflective of a desirable state of affairs.
Within political movements, norms can often be justified on the basis that they are
expedient for the political goals of the movement, though the nature of a norm is that it
may never even require justification. The norms of collective movements set up what
Ross Haenfler calls “behavior expectations,” which members of a group strive to live up
to (Haenfler 2006, 197). By conforming to group norms, individuals win acceptance
within the community. Failing to adhere to norms, however, can bring shame upon the
individual, and even draw explicit rebuke from their peers. If an individual commits a

8
Denning discusses the concept of “movement culture” at length, drawing on the work of
Lawrence Goodwyn who coined the term in his book, The Populist Moment (Denning
1997; Goodwyn 1978).

24
large enough transgression of movement norms, they face social ostracism and may even
be formally banned from participating in political organizing activities. Fear of such
reprisal, both conscious and unconscious, produces a subject who willingly disciplines
themself according to norms of the movement with which they identify.
Foucault uses the term “ethos” to describe an identity performance that conforms
to an established normative discourse. He defines an ethos as “a mode of being for the
subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others. A person’s ethos was
evident in his clothing, appearance, gait, in the calm with which he responded to every
event, and so on” (Foucault 1997b, 286). Elsewhere, Foucault defines ethics as a
relationship one has with oneself, a relationship that “determines how the individual is
supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions” (Foucault 1984a,
352). In other words, it is a set of rules for conduct that one must follow if one is to
embody one’s moral values. Assuming a particular political identity, such as anarchist,
entails the regulation of one’s behavior according to these rules. Foucault also uses the
term “problematization”
9
to refer to the designation of a particular practice as an object of
ethical consideration and perhaps, as a result of such consideration, behavioral
modification (Foucault 1990b).
10

9
The term is also sometimes translated as problemization—literally to make into a
problem or to make problematic, not in the sense of a problem as trouble or danger, but
more like a math problem, something to think through and come to a solution about.
10
In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault notes that moral codes are not absolutes. In fact, he
says, the successful production of an ethical self relies on understanding when and how it
is appropriate to apply the rules of conduct. In the realm of dietetics, for instance,
Foucault observes, “A regimen was not good if it only permitted one to live in one place,
with one type of food, and if it did not allow one to be open to any change. The

25
Now, in the context of his discussion of ethics, Foucault is often seen as
describing the perfection of the self as an end in itself. He does briefly make connections
between the care of the self and civic participation, as when he points out that in ancient
Greco-Roman society, the fashioning of an ethical self established one as fit to govern
others (Foucault 1990b, 76). Although many contemporary practices of self-fashioning
might be understood as what Echols (1989) calls “solipsistic narcissism,” in this project I
am concerned with the ways that certain individuals actually see these practices as
tending toward more exteriorized, politicized goals. For these people, the stated telos of
ethical conduct is not self-perfection or social admiration, but radical social change.

Taste and cultural division
Movement cultures have functions beyond the production of disciplined subjects.
Culture is a tool of “recruitment” in a more literal sense than in Althusser’s usage.
Aesthetically appealing images and leisure activities serve to draw people into
movements, particularly those people who may as yet be unfamiliar with the movement’s

usefulness of a regimen lay precisely in the possibility it gave individuals to face different
situations” (Foucault 1990b, 105). Foucault also points out that there were times when
“exaggerating one’s care of the body” came at the expense of meaningful civic
participation (Ibid., 104). In ancient Greco-Roman society, the purpose of self care was to
make oneself qualified to contribute to the city, not to become preoccupied with self-
perfection. In Foucault’s analysis, “Dietetics was a strategic art in the sense that it ought
to permit one to respond to circumstances in a reasonable, hence useful, manner” (Ibid.,
206). With this dissertation, I speculate that lifestyle politics could be a strategic art as
well—that there are circumstances in which lifestyle practices are “reasonable” forms of
resistance; I also argue that there are other circumstances in which such tactics are
perhaps less “useful.”

26
explicit political project but who are potentially amenable to it. T.V. Reed points out that
because cultural forms can be more vague than explicit ideological points, shared cultural
tastes can serve to smooth out differences between participants in social movements
(Reed 2005, 37). He rests his argument on the idea that people can take their own
meaning from cultural texts and find their own unique ways of connecting to the text and
the community in which it circulates. Reed’s premise here is sound, however, it’s also
true that cultural tastes can divide people in seemingly arbitrary ways. People who may
have otherwise seen each other as political allies may be deterred from working together
on the basis of innocuous differences in lifestyle preferences. Of course, we could pursue
the line of argument that holds that tastes and preferences are never truly innocuous, but
the history of radical social movements in the US does seem to show that stylistic
differences sometimes get blown out of proportion and needlessly close off potential lines
of solidarity.
Because lifestyle practices take on such ethical significance within radical
political movements, these individual habits often become the targets of self-righteous
moralizing and other forms of social policing. The issue of intra-movement policing
brings up another meaning of the term “lifestyle politics,” a meaning which figures
largely in this project. Lifestyle politics can refer to the relations of power that arise
within social movements, around the topic of lifestyle. In this sense, politics refers to the
social power that accrues to individuals based on their performances of lifestyle. I am
also referring to the exercises of power enacted between and within individuals, e.g.
policing the borders of movement membership based on lifestyle habits, self-discipline

27
according to movement norms, etc. In this sense, “lifestyle politics” might be usefully
rephrased as “politicking over lifestyle.” As Epstein recalls of the Old Left and later
radical movements,
It often seemed that a collective sense of the movement’s fragility brought about a
particularly relentless policing of boundaries, and that the movement became a
terrain for the exercise of an authoritarianism very much like what we protested in
the society at large. Especially in the late sixties and early seventies, I became
accustomed to being told by self-designated left and feminist authorities where
the line lay between correct and incorrect ideas and behavior. (Epstein 1991, 5)

Such practices ultimately reinforce the insularity of radical movements,
preventing them from reaching people who may share their political values but find their
cultural affectations unpalatable. It’s worth asking, too, what precisely is accomplished
when such boundaries are maintained.
The feminist liberation movement of the 1970s, for example, illustrates several
instances in which participants ended up policing the boundaries of their movement based
on individuals’ lifestyle practices. Historian Alice Echols documents that, within activist
circles, “one’s hair length, marital status, and sexual preference came to determine
whether one would be deemed radical or not,” (Echols 1989, 18) without respect to one’s
material contribution to the political goals of the movement. Lesbianism proved to be a
particularly divisive issue, as for some feminists, to be “woman-identified” was a mark of
authentic political commitment which was lacking in women who engaged in
heterosexual relations (Radicalesbians 1997). For one radical lesbian group known as The
Furies, “coming out, which they maintained involved breaking the final tie to male
privilege, became a way to separate the serious revolutionaries from the dilettantes and

28
the dabblers” (Echols 1989, 233). This attitude inevitably attenuated many individuals’
commitment to the movement, when they “tired of the moral idealism of the ‘woman-
identified’ real lesbian that implicitly excluded all but a few who could or who wanted to
live up to its demands” (Adam 1995, 146, emphasis in original). Eventually, many
women—lesbian and otherwise—fled the radical feminist movement, either toward more
mainstream, liberal feminist organizations, or toward the burgeoning queer liberation
movement.
Movements that emphasize self-transformation as an activist tactic also
sometimes end up excluding individuals who, for various reasons beyond their control,
are unprepared to fully commit to the movement lifestyle. For example, many New Left
activists experienced conflicts between their identities as radicals and other aspects of
their lives. Activists felt they had to give up “earlier expectations of finishing college,
becoming established in a job, getting married, starting a family, and settling down”
(Klatch 1999, 251). Beyond the psychological disruption of having an identity that
contradicts the values in which one has been raised, radical activism could have material
consequences such as arrest records and school expulsions that could interfere with
maintaining conventional employment or pursuing a career. These consequences loom
largest for those who are least privileged in mainstream society, particularly the poor and
people of color. One of the mechanisms by which people are made to feel excluded from
radical movements is the discourse of authenticity that takes individuals’ level of
faithfulness to established lifestyles as the basis for inclusion and the awarding of social
capital. How closely someone adheres to preferred practices and stylistic expressions is

29
taken as a measure of that person’s “authentic” political identity. Those who are
perceived as failing to prefigure the political goals of the movement within their own
lives may be suspected of being weak in their beliefs and commitment, labeled
hypocrites, or otherwise ostracized (Epstein 1991; Veysey 1973).
Uneven social privilege also throws into question the value some movements
place on separatism from mainstream culture.
11
Separatism has been a major element of
many radical social movements, based on the belief that the oppressed, by sequestering
themselves from the mainstream, would be freer to develop their own culture,
institutions, and identities. Yet, the tactic of separatism has historically failed to account
for the intersectional nature of identity and oppression. Queer feminists of color, in
particular, have found it difficult to feel wholly allied with any one radical movement,
given the homophobia, sexism, and racism to which they were vulnerable no matter
which movement they chose. Where gender, race, sexuality, and even class, are not
explicitly addressed by the movement’s critique, dominant social hierarchies are all too
easily reproduced within the separatist space of the movement. One manifestation of this
is the documented racial homogeneity (i.e. overwhelming whiteness) of non-race-based
separatist movements. Such lack of diversity is self-reinforcing over time, as critiques of
white supremacy and attempts to redress white privilege repeatedly go silenced or
unexamined within the cultural practices of the movement, causing the movement to be
perpetually unwelcoming to people of color. The contemporary anarchist movement has

11
Contemporary anarchism is not necessarily identified as a separatist movement, yet the
distinctiveness of its movement culture, with its overt rejection of many mainstream
lifestyle practices, may result in a de facto separatism.

30
certainly been critiqued on the grounds that it is a “white movement” (although this
assumption itself must be subject to scrutiny as it is not necessarily universally accurate).
Later in this dissertation I will be examining the way that taste and lifestyle may
contribute to this sense that anarchism is the purview of white activists.

Background on anarchists
In this section, I want to present a bit of background information about
contemporary anarchism so that readers who are unfamiliar with it have some context in
which to situate the fieldwork I undertook and my findings. Anarchists have lately
become fairly visible fixtures on the radical activist scene, and even in mainstream public
consciousness, particularly in the decade since the 1999 protests against the World Trade
Organization in Seattle. Many of the individuals and organizations that fall under the
umbrella of the so-called “global justice movement” identify as anarchist, or are strongly
influenced by anarchist political philosophy. The core philosophy of anarchism holds that
the well-being of humans (and all other living things) is best ensured by a decentralized,
non-hierarchical, radically democratic society. Like other radical political movements,
anarchism is unabashedly utopian—it seeks revolutionary change in existing society in
the pursuit of a more just world. Although it is often misperceived as being synonymous
with chaos or violence, anarchy is essentially an absence of hierarchy; anarchism is the
political philosophy that advocates for this condition across all society. This means that
anarchists often work in solidarity with feminists, anti-racists, socialists,
environmentalists and any number of other radical/progressive movements. It is

31
important to note that anarchism is not antithetical to organization per se, but rather, to
forms of organization that foster authoritarianism, domination, and oppression.
Capitalism tends to be chief among these objectionable organizing forms, but as Joel
Olson further explains, “The political task according to contemporary anarchism is to
attack all forms of oppression, not just a ‘main’ one, because without an attack on
hierarchy itself, other forms of oppression will not necessarily wither away after
capitalism (or patriarchy, or colonialism) is destroyed” (Olson 2009, 37).
Perhaps what distinguishes anarchism most from other contemporary social
movements is anarchist organizers’ dogged resistance to institutionalization and
incorporation into mainstream political structures. Among anarchists there is no
centralized structure, no official governing institutions, no membership cards; there are
only people and groups who identify with the political philosophy of anarchism, as they
understand it. Anarchists aim for a political culture out of which actions and affinity
groups might arise as needed, rather than as directed by a centralized institution (Epstein
1991, 118). Jeffrey Juris describes the anarchist movement as being driven by the
“cultural logic of networking,” meaning it is made up of autonomous entities (individuals
and local groups) which are horizontally connected through information circuits and may
voluntarily come together (physically and/or discursively) to organize around particular
issues and events (Juris 2009, 214). This organizational looseness may cause some to
doubt that contemporary anarchism is even a “movement” at all. The networked nature of
the anarchist movement is important because it adds a collectivist dimension to what
might otherwise degenerate into disconnected and conservative libertarianism. In other

32
words, anarchist individuals and groups do not undertake their activities in isolation and
solely for purposes of self-interest; they are bound together in the consciousness of
shared discourses, affinities, practices, and social bonds. Many anarchists see the
movement’s lack of leaders and formal structure as one of its strengths. In fact, it is this
resistance to official institutionalization that, I would argue, makes culture and the
personal investment by individuals so important to the maintenance of anything we might
call a cohesive anarchist movement.
Activist organizations are important to anarchist lifestyle politics, because they
are spaces in which norms of lifestyle are performed and explicitly discussed. While the
organization may form to carry out some concrete project such as planning a protest or
providing a service to the local community, it also ends up being a place where
participants are exposed to lifestyle practices and learn how to adopt them for themselves.
To offer a typical example, one widespread anarchist organizaion is Food Not Bombs
(FNB). Food Not Bombs is a decentralized network of autonomous groups who acquire
free food (often through dumpstering), cook it in mass quantities, and serve it to homeless
communities and at activist events, usually meeting on a weekly basis to cook and serve.
FNB groups exist all over the US; most major cities and many smaller towns have active
FNB groups. In addition to its official aim of providing food to hungry people on the
streets and at political events, FNB is a social hub and often serves as an entry point for
people who are beginning to get involved with radical activism. As the founders of FNB
observe in their handbook, “The Food Not Bombs table is often a landmark for activists
and street folks looking to connect with the movement in a new city” (Butler and

33
McHenry 2000, 26). Indeed, several interviewees cited FNB as the first activist group
they had joined and their first exposure to anarchist lifestyle practices.
Local anarchist communities frequently set up regularly meeting groups, oriented
toward discussing literature or films about anarchism. Though meetings tend to focus on
theoretical or historical aspects of anarchism, they may also be concerned with anarchist
political strategy, which can encompass lifestyle practices. There are also events
expressly intended for socializing or entertainment; these too serve as spaces of
performance and discursive exchange. In addition to these small-scale local events, there
are also more sporadic occasions on which members of local, regional, and even global
networks come together to work on political projects and to reconsolidate themselves as a
broad community. In some cases, anarchists organize conferences and festivals that make
space for anarchists to socilize and exchange ideas with each other. Consumption often
plays a central role in these kinds of events. Conferences frequently coincide with or are
incorporated into bookfairs, whose ostensible purpose is to create a consumer space for
the purchase of anarchism-related commodities. Of course, the purchase of commodities
is not the sole or even most important activity that goes on at anarchist convergences.
And some convergences position themselves against such activities, for instance the
Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory and Research and Development (BASTARD)
conference explicitly declares itself to be a “commerce-free zone.” But it’s certainly not a
coincidence that BASTARD’s annual conference is always held the same weekend as the
Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. Indeed, it’s significant that the opportunity to buy and sell

34
anarchist commodities serves as the impetus for anarchists to converge in the same
geographic location.
In other cases, an activist project such as a protest at a summit meaning of a
global capitalist organization or a national political party may serve as the impetus for
anarchists to gather together. Juris shows that these counter-summit protests “provide
terrains where identities are expressed through distinct bodily techniques and emotions
are generated through ritual conflict and the lived experience of prefigured utopias” (Juris
2008, 62). Indeed, the circumstances of protest convergences give anarchists the chance
to try out lifestyles they may not yet have experienced or figured out how to implement in
their everyday lives. For example, temporary communal “housing” is usually set up near
the convergence site for the duration of the protest. Here, individuals experience what it
is like to work collectively to meet everyone’s basic food and shelter needs in financially
and environmentally sustainable ways. These spaces also often actively encourage
consensus decision-making and other forms of interpersonal interaction which are
important to anarchists. For those who have never had the opportunity to incorporate such
practices into their everyday lifestyle, these experiences are crucial for demonstrating the
viability of these practices.
As with other subcultural festivals, like tattoo conventions and gay pride parades,
large-scale anarchist events are “spaces in which a sense of identity is shared and
community is celebrated on an annual or semi-annual basis” (DeMello 2000, 41). The
spectacle of dozens or hundreds of people engaged in typical anarchist lifestyle practices
normalizes those practices and reinforces their status as constitutive of anarchist identity

35
and politics. For example, the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair annually features a Bike
Valet where attendees can park their bicycles when they get to the fair. The sight of
hundreds of bicycles parked outside at the fair sends the message that it is normal and
even preferable to get to the fair (and everywhere else) by bike. Similarly, the food on
offer at such events is generally vegan, or at least there will be readily available vegan
options, establishing the normalcy of a vegan diet. The bodies of attendees themselves
also create a striking visual spectacle. Even if one is used to seeing one’s immediate
comrades adorned in the typical anarchist style, the sight of hundreds of similarly styled
individuals all in one place contributes to the sense of a unified anarchist culture that
extends across geographic space as these individuals disperse after the event.
In addition to serving as a stage for the performance and consumption of anarchist
identity and lifestyle, anarchist events often provide a formal space for presentation and
debate about anarchist political strategy. These discussions often include explicit
attention to the tactics of lifestyle politics. Discussions like these are especially important
insofar as they can inform about and normalize practices that might not be visibly
performed the same way as inherently public acts, like bicycling for example. Take, for
another example, the workshops on DIY gynecology which are commonplace at anarchist
events. These workshops offer a practical application of anarcha-feminist principles and
provide a space for women to learn methods of monitoring their own health and treating
common ailments with at-home remedies, sometimes even including hands-on
demonstrations. Particularly in the case of practices related to health care and sexuality,
personal implementation may be intimidating for the uninitiated, due to mainstream

36
norms and taboos. Formal presentations help to make such practices feel familiar and
practicable, thus making them accessible to new adopters.
Contemporary anarchism is also defined by a few general tactical commitments
which guide the specific forms anarchist activist tactics tend to take. I will briefly
describe each of these commitments—direct action, propaganda by the deed, and
prefiguration—and begin to address some of the theoretical and practical problems they
introduce. I think that these related tactical styles are immanently applicable to the
concept of lifestyle politics, since they all assume a strong relationship between the
localized actions of individual anarchists and the generalized strategy of anarchism as a
social movement. What often goes unstated or unrecognized is the degree to which the
relationship between the individual and the social is constituted through processes of
communication. One of the points I will reiterate throughout this dissertation is that
certain inherent limitations of communicative exchange call into question the strategic
advisedness of lifestyle politics.
Direct action refers to tactics in which “an individual or a group uses their own
power and resources to change reality in a desired direction…. Intervening directly in a
situation rather than appealing to an external agent (typically a government) for its
rectification” (Gordon 2008, 17). Direct action seeks to effect material change “on the
ground,” utilizing the power one already has (though it may not be legally endorsed
power, for example, the use of violent force to halt a summit meeting, or cooking and
serving food to the homeless without a permit) instead of asking a bureaucratic institution
for help which may never come. Direct action tactics are often positioned as distinct from

37
electoral campaigns and other forms of civic activism; they are underpinned by a
philosophy that reliance upon dominant institutions to bring about social change
legitimates their dominance and reinforces the relative powerlessness of individuals and
marginal social groups to alter their own circumstances. It is also informed by the
suspicion that those who benefit from power hierarchies are unlikely to make concessions
that significantly threaten their dominance.
Sometimes direct action is intended to have a symbolic function in addition to a
material one, which connects it to another typical anarchist tactic known as “propaganda
by the deed.” Historically, propaganda by the deed referred to violent acts, such as
bombings or assassinations, which were meant to produce a material effect, such as
destroying corporate property or removing a state figure from power (the deed), while
simultaneously creating a highly visible public spectacle which would hopefully inspire
others to take up the anarchist cause (the propaganda). Despite its classical connotations
of violence, the notion of propaganda by the deed is sometimes used by contemporary
anarchists to refer to any act which is visible and potentially inspiring to others, including
lifestyle practices. Interrogating the “propagandistic” potential of lifestyle practices, and
sketching the limits of this potential is one of my projects in this dissertation. As I will
argue, it’s not always clear that anarchist lifestyles fulfill the propagandistic function that
anarchists might wish them to.
In the case of spectacular violence, such tactics were, and continue to be, easily
represented by dominant interests as random acts of destruction by disturbed individuals
or fringe groups, rather than as politically motivated acts of heroism (as the anarchists

38
themselves saw them). As pattrice jones argues, “bombs and other forms of violence,
besides being unethical and counterproductive, perform poorly as propaganda, tending to
be interpreted differently than intended and to turn people against the cause of those who
wield them” (jones 2009, 240). And the interpretation that anarchist tactics are merely
senseless acts of violence are not rhetorically neutral: they tend to work to even further
marginalize anarchist political philosophies, which is the opposite of their intent. We can
see this discursive disconnect repeated with coverage of and reaction to contemporary
anarchists, even where violence is not involved. As Juris points out, “spectacular actions
draw significant media attention, but the coverage is more likely to be disparaging,” than
when protests take more docile forms, such as marches and rallies (Juris 2008, 84). It is
rare that those not involved in the protests are even able to articulate what the protesters
stand for, let alone make the connection between their destructive acts and their political
philosophies. Where lifestyle is approached as propaganda, the connections may be even
harder to decipher.
Another mode of activism often advocated by anarchists is known as
“prefigurative politics.” Wini Breines coined the term in her book Community and
Organization in the New Left, where she describes the aim of prefigurative politics as
having been, “to create and sustain within the lived practice of the movement,
relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society”
(Breines 1982, 6). For anarchists, a commitment to prefiguration means that activist
practices and modes of organizing are meant to illustrate what all society could look like
if anarchy became the prevailing political system. In other words, they are meant to

39
demonstrate to all that “another world is possible”
12
and, more than that, that this other
world is preferable to the current one. Anarchist activist and writer Uri Gordon claims
that “prefigurative politics is strongly attached to anarchist strategical priorities,” because
“the correspondence between vision and praxis is seen … as necessary for achieving
revolutionary goals” (Gordon 2008, 37). It is accepted as a truism that the movement
cannot be successful (however that is defined) unless its operations are consistent with its
ethical principles.
Anarchists see their own ethical practices as intrinsically worthwhile, but these
acts are also valued for their symbolic potential, as implied by the term itself: pre-figure.
Anarchists often seem to put great faith in the communicative power of their personal
acts of resistance. The communicative logic of prefigurative politics rests on implicit
assumptions about the capacity of small-scale actions to work as theatrical spectacles
which publicly represent political ideologies and convince others of their correctness. In
this way, lifestyle practices are seen as rhetorical acts with the capacity to persuade and
inspire others. Indeed, considering that the objection most often leveled at anarchy by
non-anarchists is that it is impractical and utopian (“it would never work in the real
world”), it is quite understandable that individuals and organizations who are successful
in making anarchism “work” on a small scale would see their actions as providing an
effective refutation of this objection. Gordon argues that “it is much easier for people to
engage with the idea that life without bosses or leaders is possible when such a life is

12
The slogan, “another world is possible,” is a rallying cry for the global justice
movement.

40
displayed, if on a limited scale, in actual practice rather than being argued for on paper”
(Gordon 2008, 39). One anarchist I spoke to during my fieldwork presented this view in
similar terms: “I think the only way to make things work is to … show that it’s a viable
model, is to do things that actually work.”
In arguing for prefigurative politics as a more effective tactic than protest
campaigns, Gordon makes the convincing point that “people would be much more
attracted to becoming part of a movement that enriches their own lives in an immediate
way, than they would joining a mass movement in which their desires and needs are
suspended for the sake of advancing the ‘thankless’ work of the revolutionary
organization” (Gordon 2008, 39). However, Gordon seems to assume that most people
would see the activities of the anarchist movement as self-evidently enriching if only they
were exposed to them. This is too much of a leap, one in which individual and social
differences in desire and aesthetic attraction are not fully taken into account.
Being that cultural tastes and consumption habits are heavily conditioned by a
dominant culture which is capitalist, sexist, etc., it’s optimistic to assume that if only
people are exposed to radical alternatives, the scales will fall from their eyes and they
will abandon their mainstream lifestyles. However substantial anarchist critiques of
capitalism may be, it’s undeniable that nearly everyone derives some pleasure from their
participation in capitalist processes. It’s unrealistic to expect people who are not heavily
invested in anarchist revolution to abandon these sources of pleasure, just because
anarchists demonstrate a remarkable capacity to find pleasure elsewhere. Countercultural
lifestyles are, by nature, unlikely to hold mass appeal, unless they can strategically tap

41
into broad cultural values. One of the most insightful points made by the anarchist writers
of a pamphlet called The Coming Insurrection is that, “Revolutionary movements do not
spread by contamination but by resonance” (Invisible Committee 2009, 6, emphasis in
original).
Another problem is that even if most people were to find countercultural lifestyles
attractive, a variety of structural factors can prevent them from adopting the lifestyles for
themselves. This problem extends beyond the issue of personal lifestyles; that is, even if
radical political alternatives might be desirable to many people, they are generally
unequipped to realize those alternatives on a systemic level. Doug Rossinow (1998)
points out in his discussion of the New Left counterculture that the logic of prefigurative
politics assumes that social change is modeled on a marketplace of ideas, in which it’s
thought that, eventually, enough people will see how rewarding alternative lifestyles are
and then adopt them for themselves. This “voluntaristic, libertarian picture of cultural and
political change” (Rossinow 1998, 292) resonates with contemporary neoliberalism, in
which oppressive political and economic structures are obfuscated by a rhetoric of free
choice. This rhetoric in turn perpetuates the myth that, if people don’t exercise their free
choice to live differently or advocate for change, then they must be well served by the
system as it exists.

“Lifestyle anarchism”
As I began to study lifestyle politics within the context of contemporary
anarchism, I discovered that there is an explicit overlap between anarchists’ strategic

42
discourse and the topic of lifestyle. As I quickly learned, the issue of “lifestyle
anarchism” is in fact quite controversial within the anarchist milieu. I want to devote
some space here to summarizing the controversy surrounding lifestyle anarchism, as I
think it gets at some of the arguments and questions that motivated me to take on this
topic of research in the first place. James Purkis and Jonathan Bowen use the term
“lifestyle anarchism” to describe the “living [of] one’s life in accordance to particular
principles” which grow out of anarchist critique (Purkis and Bowen 2004, 8). By this
simple definition, to talk about lifestyle anarchism is to discuss the set of everyday
activities, tastes, and consumption habits enacted by anarchists qua anarchists. Since, as
one interviewee told me, “anarchism is always about how one lives one’s life,” it would
seem that lifestyle anarchism would be a fairly straightforward phenomenon. Yet the
term is actually much more loaded than this. The labels “lifestyle anarchist” and
“lifestylist” are frequently invoked within the anarchist milieu to deride someone who is
perceived to be more interested in cultivating their own personal liberation than in
achieving social transformation. I see strong parallels between the figure of the lifestyle
anarchist and the “individualist anti-consumer” described by Sam Binkley (2008).
According to Binkley, the individualist anti-consumer uses non-consumption habits to
satisfy personal quests for fulfillment and identity construction, as opposed to a more
collectivist subject who might direct their behavior toward more socially conscious goals.
As I will argue in Chapter Two though, there are not always neat divisions between
individualist and collectivist practitioners of lifestyle tactics.

43
One of the severest critics of lifestyle anarchism is Murray Bookchin, author of
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995). Bookchin
believes that radicals ought to take advantage of the failure of state institutions as an
opportunity to promote revolutionary social transformations, but he asserts that instead
they often cope with their dissatisfaction by withdrawing from social action into their
own personal lifestyle practices, which often revolve around consumer choices and
stylistic affectations. Thus he sees lifestylism as a distraction from more effective forms
of political activism, such as “institutionalized” coalitions “of the oppressed in popular
assemblies, councils, and/or confederations” (Bookchin 1995, 10). Criticisms of
lifestylism are generally not an indictment of anarchist lifestyle practices, per se. Rather,
they decry what is seen to be an inappropriate prioritization of individual resistance over
collective action, or what Bookchin calls “the sanctification of the self as a refuge from
the existing social malaise” (Bookchin 1995, 11). Bookchin’s critique mirrors others’
objections to the narcissistic individualism that is taken to be a characteristic feature of
contemporary consumer society (Giddens 1991; Bellah et al. 2008; Lasch 1979).
Currently, lifestyle anarchism is closely associated with CrimethInc. (pronounced
“crime think”), an anonymous collective which publishes books, zines, pamphlets, and
organizes physical convergences as well. In my experience, their publications can be
found wherever anarchist literature is distributed, though their visually striking designs
and high production values set them apart from much of the other fare on offer at
anarchist bookfairs and infoshops. Their edgy, pleasing aesthetics and straight-forward
writing makes these texts accessible and attractive to readers, particularly those who are

44
just becoming interested in anarchist politics and practices. You don’t have to be a
hardcore DIY zine fan to appreciate the design of the products (they wouldn’t look out of
place on the shelves at a corporate chain bookstore). And you don’t have to be well-
versed in political theory to understand the arguments advanced within them, which are
quite radical, if at times a bit simplistic. They’re also relatively easy to obtain—in
addition to being available for sale at every bookfair I’ve attended, they can be ordered
through CrimethInc.’s website or even on Amazon.com.
The essays in CrimethInc.’s book-length publication Days of War, Nights of Love
(2000) argue for “resurrecting anarchism as a personal approach to life” (CrimethInc.
2000, 34), through tactics such as refraining from capitalist modes of labor and
consumption, resisting gender roles and other identity categories, and rejecting
mainstream standards of cleanliness. Another CrimethInc. book, Recipes for Disaster: An
Anarchist Cookbook (2005a), is presented as a kind of instruction manual, and is a
deliberate attempt to collect and pass on knowledge from people’s experience with
anarchist organizing and lifestyle practices, so that individuals new to the scene can learn
from the successes and failures of others. Topics covered (many of which I discuss in this
dissertation) include bicycling, dumpster diving, Food Not Bombs, health care,
independent media, nonmonogamous relationships, shoplifting, and unemployment,
among many others. Other CrimethInc. books offer narrative accounts of individuals who
have adopted anarchist lifestyles. For example, Evasion (Anonymous 2003), originally
distributed by its author in zine form, is a memoir of one anarchist’s experience of
voluntary poverty, unemployment, and cross-country hitchhiking. As the CrimethInc.

45
collective’s preface to the text states, it’s a story of how “we dumpstered, squatted, and
shoplifted our lives back,” from the clutches of mainstream modes of living. Whether the
memoir is factual or not,
13
it serves as inspiration and instruction for how readers might
go about implementing these practices in their own lives.
For most of the CrimethInc. writers, individual experience is really the ideal focal
point of anarchism. CrimethInc.’s emphasis is not so much on building a collective
movement that works toward a rearrangement of social power relations and more on,
“resurrecting anarchism as a personal approach to life” (Ibid., 34). Indeed, CrimethInc.
asserts in its “anarchist primer” (n.d.) that “the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it
is simply a better way to live.” The writers see collective revolutionary activism as futile
because “it’s difficult to imagine a whole different world order” and because none of us
will live to experience a world without hierarchy (CrimethInc. 2000, 39). According to
CrimethInc., “we should, rather, recognize the patterns of submission and domination in
our own lives, and, to the best of our ability, break free of them. We should put the
anarchist ideal—no masters, no slaves—into effect in our daily lives however we can”
(Ibid., 39-40). Later in the same book they argue, “we must seek first and foremost to
alter the contents of our own lives in a revolutionary manner, rather than direct our
struggle towards world-historical changes which we will not live to witness” (Ibid., 118).
To the extent that attitudes like this are understood to be synonymous with
lifestyle politcs, it’s not hard to see why lifestyle anarchism is subject to such severe

13
The “anti-copyright” page disclaims that Evasion is a work of fiction and is thus not
“grounds for prosecution.”

46
criticism. As I conducted my fieldwork, I observed that the CrimethInc. collective was a
recurrent target of criticism on the basis that its publications promote a kind of
individualism that appeals to existing patterns of privilege and distracts from real activist
projects. For example, when I explicitly asked one interviewee what he thought of
CrimethInc., he wryly remarked, “If I were in the FBI, and wanted to funnel alienated
middle class white kids away from being useful to radical movements, I would start
CrimethInc.” For many of the anarchists I spoke with, the CrimethInc. audience (or
“CrimethInc. kids” or “CrimethInc-ers” as they are sometimes called) is taken to be
coextensive with the kind of “lifestyle anarchism” that critics like Bookchin set in
opposition to a putatively more socially conscious anarchist politics.
One of my aims in this dissertation is to complicate the idea of “an unbridgeable
chasm” between lifestyle politics and other forms of political engagement. I think a more
nuanced understanding of lifestyle politics is required in order to adequately assess its
value to projects of social transformation. Certainly, there are some individuals for whom
anarchism is merely a hobby which offers a bohemian escape from mainstream society.
However, I don’t think the dichotomy between the individualist and the collectivist, the
social anarchist and the lifestyle anarchist, is as clear-cut in most cases. Although such
“ideal-typical distinctions” (Binkley 2008, 600) might usefully map onto the positions
marked out by intra-movement debates, they do not always play out on the ground. That
is, for the anarchists I will be concerned with in this dissertation, both the collectivist and
the individualist rationalities can be found at work in their lifestyle practices. It doesn’t
seem to be the case that most anarchists are so thoroughly distracted by their individual

47
lifestyles that they have no room in their heads or time on their schedules to engage in
other forms of activism. It’s unfair to posit an equivalence, as Bookchin does, between
attention to the self and preoccupation with the self to the exclusion of all other forms of
political activism. As I will discuss, most advocates of anarchist lifestyle politics do
imagine their personal activities to have a political impact beyond their own experience.
It is fair to say though that these imagined connections are themselves enabled by
the same neoliberal logic that also ends up foreclosing macro strategies for systemic
change. Neoliberal discourses of individual autonomy promote the idea that we are each
endowed with the agency to choose the best way of life and that the means to realize our
choices are readily available if only we will commit to them. Unfortunately, this sense of
autonomy may obfuscate the fact that in many cases our “choices” are constrained by
conservative economic, political, and cultural networks of power. Much as the discourse
of neoliberalism does, anarchist attitudes about lifestyle politics often overestimate the
power that individuals may have to actively resist many of the social forces that in fact
heavily shape everyday experience.
At the same time, as I will discuss in this dissertation, the case of anarchist
lifestyle politics shows that we are not really restricted to a homogenous set of lifestyle
choices, nor are our choices fully containable by the commodity market. That is, in many
instances, anarchists’ practices and beliefs are qualitatively different from those of most
participants in the hegemonic order. Their activism is distinguishable from the kind of
commodity activism that involves merely choosing the lesser of many evils from among
the options on offer in the marketplace. This goes for not only the literal consumer

48
marketplace, but also the cultural “marketplace of ideas” in which more or less thinly
veiled misogyny, racism, and homophobia are the dominant ideologies for sale. Yet the
individualist logic of neoliberalism is often implicit in anarchists’ efforts to free their
minds and bodies from the grips of repressive forces by choosing a different way.
Though they may not exemplify the “possessive or competitive individualism” of the
thoroughly “integrated” capitalist subject (Marcuse 2001a, 156), lifestyle practices are
still fundamentally individual responses to power, and thus are not adequately equipped
to radically rearrange power relations on a social scale.
I should be clear here that anarchist identities and lifestyles are far from
monolithic. Many personal and social factors play into how each individual integrates
their lifestyle with their anarchist identification and philosophies. As I found in the course
of my fieldwork, anarchist identification and practice is always inflected by, among other
things, age, race, class, gender, citizenship status, employment status, geographic
location, and physical ability. And certainly there are some self-identified anarchists who
don’t place much stock in lifestyle politics, and thus their lifestyles don’t mark them as
anarchists in any obvious way. It’s also crucial to note that there are many different
strands of the anarchist movement, some of which are more represented than others by
my account here. For example, anti-civilization anarchism is in some ways so
ideologically distinct from mainline anarchism, that its adherents and their lifestyle
practices don’t really figure into my analysis (and didn’t figure into my fieldwork for the
most part). At the same time, some of the typical lifestyle practices of anti-civilizationism
are common to other anarchists, and their social and activist circles often overlap with

49
those of other anarchists, so my analysis is not totally inapplicable to them. Ultimately, I
hope that the analytical and theoretical implications of this study prove useful for
understanding all kinds of resistance movements and their adherents, though no study can
fully capture the rich variety of experiences that make up the culture of a movement.

Methodology
In this dissertation I examine how lifestyle politics, as a particular kind of social
force, is manifested in the narrowly defined setting of the contemporary anarchist
movement. Given that contemporary anarchism is a decentralized, non-institutionalized,
and diverse social movement, it comes as no surprise that its culture is impossible to
definitively characterize in any essential or totalizing way. With respect to this, my
method of analysis is similar to Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman’s in their analysis
of Queer Nation, another decentralized radical movement: “We will shuttle between a
dispersed variety of Queer National events, falsely bringing into narrative logic and
collective intentionality what has been a deliberately unsystematized politics” (Berlant
and Freeman 1993, 200). There is no definitive account of the anarchist lifestyle, let
alone a centralized program for how anarchists ought to live. Yet there is a relatively
coherent, if “unsystematized” and at times contradictory, discourse of anarchist lifestyle
politics, which is what I aim to analyze in this study.
For influential ethnographer Clifford Geertz, “the locus of study is not the object
of study” and this is also true of my project (Geertz 1993, 22). While anarchist culture is
the locus of this study, its object is lifestyle politics more broadly defined. Also, the

50
individuals depicted in this study are not meant to be psychological case studies. Rather,
they are meant to serve as representatives of and informants about the discourses and
practices in question. DeCerteau offers a similar caveat in his introduction to The
Practice of Everyday Life: “the question at hand concerns modes of operation or
schemata of action, and not directly the subjects (or persons) who are their authors or
vehicles” (DeCerteau 1984, xi). In my research, I am interested in modes of operation, as
well as the subjects who undertake them, though not so much in individual persons.
This work is not ethnography in the traditional sense. Traditionally, ethnography
has entailed the total emersion of an anthropological researcher in a foreign culture for an
extended period of time. My fieldwork does not conform to such a stringent definition.
My methods might be considered more in line with what George Marcus and Michael
Fisher call “strategic ethnography,” which looks at a particular aspect of a culture—in
this case, the lifestyle politics of anarchists—rather than a holistic study of the entire
culture of the movement (Marcus and Fisher 1999, 132). In the interest of looking at this
particular aspect of anarchist culture, I employed a combination of methods, which
included interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis. All of this fieldwork
was sited in North America, though the globally networked nature of the anarchist
movement means that its members are often geographically mobile and electronically
connected across national and cultural borders. Although all my interviewees were
currently residing in the US and Canada, many had participated in anarchist culture and
political organizing in other locations, such as Latin America, Europe, and Australia, and
no doubt these experiences colored their views of the anarchist movement as it exists in

51
North America. While I would hesitate to generalize any of the specific experiences or
discourses I discuss here to the anarchist movement as it exists beyond North America, I
hope that the analytical tools I use and the theoretical and practical implications of my
work will prove broadly useful across borders, and indeed, for other political movements
besides anarchism.

Fieldwork
I conducted interviews with thirty-eight individuals who self-identified as
anarchists or who claimed an affinity with anarchist politics. I did not purposely recruit
interviewees based on any aspect of their identities other than orientation toward
anarchism. This openness was intentional, based on the fact that when I set out on my
research I did not presume to know precisely how other identity categories would
intersect with people’s identities as anarchists. It was also for this reason that I did not
ask people to explicitly identify their gender, race, ethnic background, or class status.
More often than not this information emerged as relevant to people’s personal
experiences and political orientations, but I was careful to let people share these aspects
of their identity where and how they found them to be germane to the discussion, rather
than demanding that they categorize themselves in particular ways which might be
reductive or presumptuous. Brief descriptions of each interviewee are provided in
Appendix One for the reader’s reference.
I recruited interviewees by a few different methods. Some were already known to
me via social and academic networks; some were people I met at anarchist events or

52
through anarchist internet networks, such as email lists. Several interviewees were
referred to me by acquaintances of theirs who thought they would be willing to
participate. When approaching people to participate, I explained that I was interested in
learning how anarchists see their politics as relating to their everyday lives (I tried not to
use the word “lifestyle,” since, as I discussed above, it is such a loaded term in anarchist
discourse). The format of the interviews varied. When feasible, I conducted the
interviews in person, recording them so that I could transcribe them later. The rest of the
interviews were conducted electronically, either via email or instant messenger. In all
cases, I attempted to make the interviews as open and conversational as possible. When
the interviews were conducted via email, I preferred to send a question or two at a time
and then follow up on the responses before moving on to new topics. Usually this meant
exchanging several emails over the course of a few days. A list of the general questions I
used to guide the interviews can be found in Appendix Two.
I began each interview with a question about where the person first learned about
anarchism, because I felt it was a question that could be definitively answered, rather than
requiring too much introspection or subjective analysis from the interviewee. At times I
purposely asked questions which were not strictly relevant to my research, because I
thought they would put the interviewees at ease, or allow them to perform their anarchist
identities in a way that felt comfortable for them. For example, one of my first
interviewees expressed surprise that I hadn’t asked him more about his organized
activism, as he thought of that as crucial to his political identity as an anarchist. In
subsequent interviews, I generally asked what kind of activism and organizing work the

53
interviewees were involved with, even if I didn’t expect to find this information to be
within the scope of my definition of lifestyle politics. As interviewees became more
comfortable with the conversation, I asked more personal questions. I nearly always
reserved questions about potentially touchy issues—sexuality, ethnicity, personal
appearance—for the end of the interview, or did not ask them at all, if I got the
impression that the interviewee would find them offensive. Although I aimed to make the
interview format feel somewhat conversational, I said relatively little, in order to let the
interviewees follow their own trains of thought and not feel that I was judging them or
foreclosing certain topics or opinions.
If interviewees asked me questions or solicited my opinion, I always answered
sincerely, though I was somewhat guarded so as not to inordinately bias their responses.
Feminist methodologists have weighed in on the issue of sharing one’s own opinions and
experiences with interviewees. For instance, Ann Gray proposes that sharing things about
oneself is a way to establish rapport with interviewees (Gray 2003, 96). Gray also points
out that even sharing one’s ideas about the research project itself might induce
interviewees to offer their own insights and interpretations, which can have value for the
researcher (Gray 2003, 96). Indeed, several interviewees asked me to describe my own
interests and investments in my research topic. Again, I answered sincerely, usually
saying something about my own political identifications as feminist and queer, and that I
wanted to find out how lifestyle and identity categories could be useful for radical
movements. Interviewees usually evinced a positive response and shared their own

54
thoughts. This proved helpful, as I was intensely interested in the interviewees’ own
perception of the discourse of lifestyle politics within the anarchist movement.
In addition to conducting interviews, I attended several anarchist events between
2007 and 2010. These included bookfairs, conferences, organizing meetings, and social
events such as potlucks and parties. For anarchists, events like these are “paradigmatic,”
in that they are key occasions for the performance of the ethos of anarchist movement
culture (Geertz 1993). Often they were public events; otherwise I attended on the
invitation of an interviewee or other contact. Whenever feasible, I made my role as a
researcher known (I’ll discuss this issue more below, when I get into my own position in
relation to my research and its subjects). Attending anarchist events proved to be useful
for observing some specific trends in behavior across time and place, and for
corroborating some of the accounts of reality found in texts and given by interviewees.
Particularly in conference settings, I was also able to observe the way anarchists
talk to each other about lifestyle politics. Indeed, as I discussed above, lifestyle politics is
the explicit subject of much discourse and debate among anarchists themselves. That is,
anarchists don’t just live their politics, they talk about living their politics, incessantly it
seemed at times. Although in one case I was the initiator of such a discussion (I
moderated an open discussion on anarchist lifestyle practices at the 2008 Renewing the
Anarchist Tradition conference), there were countless other instances in which lifestyle
became the topic of conversation with no intervention on my part. In such cases, I
attempted to listen closely and write down the details of the discussion in my field notes
afterward. Though in some ways anarchists’ meta-discourse on lifestyle politics made

55
this study more complicated to get a handle on, it also unavoidably required from me a
depth of analysis that I hope has resulted in a richer project than I initially set out to do. I
also hope my analysis proves to be of value for those many anarchists who are
themselves interested in the topic of lifestyle politics (indeed, this is the small way I see
my project as giving something back to the people who so generously participated).
I supplemented my interview and observational research by immersing myself in
the textual world of the anarchist movement, consuming written material published by
and about anarchists. Often the texts were mentioned to me by interviewees or I picked
them up at anarchist events I attended. I tried to get a sense of the most commonly read
and cited anarchist texts, and read these, alongside contemporary primers of anarchist
theory. This was a means of familiarizing myself with anarchist philosophy and political
theory, so I could be somewhat conversant in the political ideologies that informed many
of the lifestyle choices made by anarchists. Reading these texts, in concert with the
participant observation I undertook, was useful for me to develop what Lanita Jacobs-
Huey calls “communicative competence,” which is “an awareness of cultural rules for
verbal and non-verbal engagement [which] can be essential to negotiating cultural
legitimacy and trust” (Jacobs-Huey 2002, 794).
I also treated contemporary anarchist publications as sources of information about
anarchist lifestyle practices. These were texts in which anarchists self-documented their
own culture for an anarchist audience, representing themselves to themselves. Stephen
Duncombe, in his study of underground zine culture, observes that the shared values of
subcultural scenes are commonly established through the circulation of written

56
documents (Duncombe 2008). This is certainly true of the anarchist scene, where texts
are shared in the form of zines, newsletters, blog posts, links on social networking sites,
and a few major websites that serve as electronic hubs for communication among
anarchists. These media texts often impart information about specific lifestyle practices,
including in some cases detailed instructions for how individuals might implement them.
Beyond simply communicating information about anarchist lifestyles, media texts are
spaces in which authors narrativize their own subjective experiences of anarchist lifestyle
practices. Such narrativizations are, in themselves, performances of identity, which work
both to shore up the self-identity of the authors as well as to provide models for others to
imitate.
Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffee refer to the method of utilizing texts like this
as sources of data as the analysis of “documentary realities” (Atkinson and Coffee 2004).
They caution against using such texts as sources of evidence about material realities.
Although no representation can unproblematically capture reality, I did, to some extent,
take it on faith that the lifestyle practices commonly described by anarchist texts are
actually undertaken in the real world. In many cases, textual accounts were corroborated
by interviewees and my own observations, though, again, these cannot be taken as
unproblematic reflections of reality either. Even if I could rely on the “truth” of written
accounts and interview responses to describe actual practices of lifestyle politics,
experience is not an unproblematic source of historical knowledge. For just this reason,
Joan Scott urges that scholars ought to be interested in understanding how experience is
constituted, how it comes to have the meanings it does for people (Scott 1992).

57
In any case, the fact of the texts’ existence provides evidence about the nature of
anarchist discourse on lifestyle politics, independent of the truth value of the texts’
content. This project is as much about the way people think and talk about lifestyle
politics as it is about how they actually practice it. Kenneth Pike makes a distinction
between the “etic” and “emic” dimensions of observational research (Pike 1967). In
gathering evidence of what anarchists’ everyday practices of politics look like, I was
engaging in etic research. But the bulk of my research falls in the emic category—I used
my fieldwork in order to arrive at an understanding of the meaning lifestyle politics holds
for individuals and the way cultural and subcultural discourses around the topic impact
their subjective experience of lifestyle politics. As Kathleen Blee points out, the way
people narrate their involvement in social movements may not be literal or accurate
accounts, because their stories will be “shaped retrospectively by mainstream cultural
themes as well as by the political, ideological, and even stylistic conventions dominant”
within these groups (Blee 2002, 43). But such accounts are useful in themselves as
instances of the culturally constructed performances of identity with which my project is
concerned. Nestor García Canclini explains,
the anthropologist inquires after what the facts mean for the subjects who
experience them, knowing that the signification (rather than “the truth”) of the
facts does not inhere in them but lies in the process by which subjects construct
and undergo the facts, transform them, and experience the resistance provided by
the real. Anthropologists situate themselves in this intersection between facts and
discourse. (Canclini 2001, 62)

Taking this discursive approach allows me to deal with the problem that people’s
accounts of their behavior are not necessarily reliable as evidence of that behavior. In

58
some cases, I was able to validate interviewee accounts with my own observation of their
behavior. In other cases, my observations seemed to contradict what they had told me
about themselves. However, the fact that particular practices repeatedly came up in the
context of interview discussions about anarchism and lifestyle serves as evidence in itself
of the political significance attributed to those practices, regardless of whether a
particular individual enacted them or not.

Special challenges of researching anarchists
Every research project carries its own unique challenges. Here I want to discuss
some of the issues I faced in working with anarchists as research subjects.
14
The first
issue I had was in even knowing how to identify appropriate sites and individuals. Some
events are clearly labeled as anarchist, and some people are quite happy to label
themselves as anarchists. But others are not. As Juris also found during his fieldwork
with the global justice movement, people within ostensibly anarchist movements are
often reluctant to identify themselves as anarchists, or as having any political identity at
all (Juris 2009, 220). This is due in part to a postmodern sensibility that labels of any kind
are restrictive and should thus be resisted on principle (Graeber 2002). I would argue that
it’s also due to the investment in authenticity that runs rampant in anarchist subculture; an
individual may hesitate to identify themself as an anarchist because they are afraid they

14
See Fernandez, “Anarchism and Participant Observation,” for a much more in-depth
discussion of the ethical dilemmas faced by those undertaking academic research on
anarchists, and written from the perspective of a self-identified anarchist academic
(Fernandez 2009).

59
won’t be able to measure up to someone else’s definition and thus risk reprisal by their
peers in the movement. For example, one interviewee told me that he doesn’t claim the
identity anarchist because,
When you start getting kind of dogmatic about things is when people start calling
you out on contradictions and when things don’t always apply. If you’re gonna
put them in this context, have all these rigid boundaries of what it is, I know I
have contradictory beliefs—I still believe that the state has some purpose—a lot
of anarchists would say that that’s not anarchism. So no, I think as soon as you
start labeling, you start closing things off. And, you know, I think if someone
asked me to define—as you’re doing—my politics, I would say that they’re
anarchist leaning or informed for sure, but I don’t think it’s… it’s a dangerous
thing to label. For me, it’s not practical.

Anarchist identity, as I use it in my research, is a matter of identifying with anarchist
politics—orienting oneself toward beliefs and practices that are seen as anarchist—even
if the individual in question would resist the label. The way I dealt with this issue was
that if I asked someone to participate in an interview, I made it clear that I was asking
them because I thought they either identified as an anarchist or felt a strong affinity with
anarchist politics. My assumption was that if they agreed to do the interview, they felt
that I had characterized their political identity accurately. The specifics of how the
individual identified came out during the interview, with many proudly claiming the label
of anarchist, and a few, like the one above, qualifying their self-identification as fluid or
“anarchist leaning.”
The issue of labels proved sticky not just with regard to personal identity but
when discussing anarchist social formations as well. For example, one of the first people
I interviewed took issue with my referring to anarchism as a “subculture,” due to his
perception that the term has been used by outsiders to misrepresent anarchists in some

60
way. Presumably he was apprehensive about anarchism being dismissed as a youthful
trend or phase, rather than a serious force of resistance. Another later interviewee decried
the fact that anarchism can sometimes seem like a “scene,” used purely for socializing
rather than organized activism. I want to be clear that I myself do not intend to imply that
“subcultures” or “scenes” are in any way less authentic or serious than “movements” or
“communities.” For fieldwork purposes however, I was careful to use the latter words
when speaking to anarchists, so as to avoid creating a false impression that I did not take
them or their political views seriously.
It is indeed difficult to adequately describe anarchists’ social formations using any
one sociological term. In this dissertation, I will utilize several terms, including
movement, subculture, scene, and community. None of these is without its problems, but
I try to be careful to consider the connotations of each in any given instance. Some brief
definitions here will hopefully help the reader to differentiate between the terms as I use
them throughout the work. When I refer to an anarchist “movement” I mean that
anarchists are consciously seeking social change and that they are more or less united in a
collective political project. I use “subculture” to highlight the fact that anarchists are
united in their stylistic practices, as well as their ideological and social marginality in
relation to mainstream culture. When I use the term “community,” I mean to emphasize
anarchists’ social bondedness to each other at an interpersonal level, and their spatial
proximity to each other, either in physical space, or in the virtual space of the electronic
network. By “scene” I mean to refer to the performative dimension of anarchist sociality,

61
the fact that anarchists make their identities and form bonds with each other through
seeing and being seen, both in person and through mediated communication (Irwin 1977).
Another challenge had to do with the fact that radical activists and their
organizations are regularly subject to infiltration and surveillance by law enforcement
personnel, which may make them particularly wary of people claiming to be doing
“research” on their activities. This definitely had an impact on the way I went about
conducting observation and recruiting interviewees. I rarely went into the field wielding a
notebook or camera, only doing so when I sensed it would not look too much out of
place. I also restricted the events at which I engaged in observation to public and
otherwise innocuous activities. So for example, I didn’t conduct observation at planning
meetings for potentially illegal forms of activism. One interviewee told me of another
researcher who had written a dissertation on the anarchist movement in Los Angeles, and
was suspected of being a cop while engaged in his observational research. Within
anarchist scenes, people are rather regularly accused of being infiltrators, cops, and
provacateurs (and the accusations are certainly true in many cases). I was extremely wary
of making people feel that they were subject to repressive surveillance, and of eliciting
retribution should they suspect me of having nefarious purposes for wanting to find out
about their participation in the anarchist movement. For this reason, I relied on two
techniques for approaching people to do interviews. Either they were acquaintances of
people I had already interviewed, and thus they could appeal to their friends for
verification of my identity and the nature of my project. Or I contacted them via the
internet (often after meeting them in person at an event) where they could easily

62
“Google” me and my email address (or in some cases, look at my Facebook page, if that
was the venue in which I contacted them) to be reassured that I was who I said I was.
Although I am not a cop, it’s undeniable that I am an outsider in relation to the
anarchist movement and its culture. As I said earlier, I don’t identify myself as an
anarchist, nor have I ever been active in anarchist organizations. I did not immediately
announce myself as a non-anarchist when attending events or asking for interviews, so it
is possible that I was assumed to be an anarchist; whether that assumption made people
more willing to talk to me or more likely to give certain answers, I do not know.
Sometimes interviewees asked outright if I was an anarchist, or what my politics were. I
always answered truthfully that I identify politically as a queer feminist, and that I
consider myself to be in solidarity with many of the political goals of anarchism (e.g.
critiquing hierarchy, struggling for social justice), though I do not identify as an anarchist
myself. When people asked why I was doing this research, I again answered truthfully
that I was seeking to understand how lifestyle and everyday practices might be useful, or
not, for radical political projects, and that this interest stems from my own investment in
the success of such projects. My overall impression was that the interviewees found these
answers satisfactory and that they contributed to their willingness to participate in the
study.
Though I consider myself a political ally to the people I studied, and represented
myself as such, I could not escape the power differential inherent to the researcher-
researched relationship. Ultimately, as feminist methodologist Judith Stacey points out,
the researcher has the power to interpret, represent, and profit from the information

63
offered by those who are researched (Stacey 1998). In the course of reading texts written
by anarchists, I encountered several critiques of academics who use research on
anarchists to further their own careers without using their work to contribute to the
anarchist movement itself. On one anarchist email list I read regularly, there circulated an
account of an instance where an anarchist-identified academic had presented his book on
anarchist philosophy at an anarchist conference, and was vociferously called out by an
audience member for having published with an academic press rather than with a radical
press. I myself encountered few criticisms or expressions of open hostility on this point
while engaged in fieldwork (though they may arise as I move forward with publishing
this work). Of course, these are concerns for most academics who do research on other
people. But the issue is particularly salient in this context because anarchist political
identity is explicitly defined by its critique of power hierarchies. Thus I was dealing with
people who are keenly aware of and sensitive to such hierarchal relationships (and
perfectly ready to call people out when they think they detect researcher-perpetrated
exploitation).
I have no delusions that my position as an outsider to the anarchist movement
renders my interpretations and critique more objective or expert than if I was a self-
identified anarchist or seasoned participant in anarchist activism. It is my hope that the
people I studied feel served rather than exploited by this work, particularly since my own
political interests are not so divergent from their own. Though I am critical of some
aspects of anarchist lifestyle politics, as are many anarchists themselves, this critique is, I

64
hope, well-founded, and comes from a position of overall support for anarchist
movements rather than opposition to them.

65
CHAPTER TWO
ANARCHIST CONSUMPTION

I begin my series of chapters on anarchist lifestyle politics with a chapter on
anarchist consumption practices. I wanted to start here, because, as I discussed briefly in
the previous chapter, it’s impossible to tell a story about lifestyle without talking about
consumption. In the contemporary historical context, it is arguably also impossible to tell
a story about politics without talking about consumption. It is absolutely no longer
possible (if it ever was) to separate the public sphere—the space of political
engagement—from the private sphere—the space of personal consumption. Indeed, a
growing body of literature examines consumption as an accepted realm for progressive,
and even radical, political activism (see Binkley and Littler 2008; Leiss et al. 2005;
Littler 2009).
1

I speculate that part of the reason for the enmeshing of radical political
participation and private lifestyle practices is the overall dearth of opportunities for
extreme dissent within the US public political apparatus. Since the Cold War, the
discourse of anti-communism has been largely effective at freezing any kind of leftist
dissent out of mainstream political discussions. Thus it is unsurprising that progressive
and radical sentiments are manifested elsewhere than the “official” political apparatus. In

1
Radical leftists in America in fact have a long history of making connections between
their political ideologies and their consumption practices. See for example, Judy Kaplan
and Lynn Shapiro’s collection of personal accounts of “red diaper babies” (children of
Communist Party activists in the 1930s), which includes many memories of family
consumption practices laden with political significance (Kaplan and Shapiro 1998).

66
fact, it is no coincidence that consumption arguably became a more important site of
civic participation contemporaneously with the delegitimation of communism in the post-
World War II period. Historian Lizabeth Cohen shows that the rise of the “consumer
society” in this period was not a historical accident. Ideologically, mass consumption,
often supported by the system of consumer credit, was overtly positioned against
communism as the best means of achieving an egalitarian, classless society (Cohen 2003,
125). At the start of the Cold War, the American consumer’s ability to make free choices
in a free market was equated with political freedom and set in rhetorical opposition to the
putative lack of freedoms in the Soviet Union. This free market liberalism was the perfect
ideological context for the production of the “purchaser as citizen” who was able to
pursue individual satisfaction and political participation simultaneously (Cohen 2003,
119).
In addition to an economic context that supported individualist political
subjectivity, other structural changes contributed to a “culture of diminishing
collectivism” in the 1940s and ‘50s (Lipsitz 1994),

in contrast to the “laboring of
American culture” (Denning 1997) which had come before. According to George Lipsitz,
the explosion in the popularity of television kept people at home for entertainment, rather
than interacting with others in public. And increasingly, the homes people were staying in
were located at a distance from each other; suburbanization and the lack of mass transit
made people less likely to seek communal leisure activities and in turn to form the social
ties that might support a collective political culture (Lipsitz 1994, 261). Suburbanization
also contributed to the solidification of the nuclear family as the ideal social support

67
system, in place of the labor union (Ibid.). Furthermore, federal policies designed to
encourage home-ownership in the suburbs also ended up encouraging rising mortgage
debt (Ibid.). This accumulation of debt, in addition to the debt accrued through increasing
consumption on credit, put workers with families in a position where they felt much less
secure participating in labor strikes (Ibid.). Finally, Cold War rhetoric articulated
patriotism with capitalism, such that strikes and other forms of political activism were
constructed as un-American and ideologically suspect (Ibid.). These conditions all
worked together to cause the site of activism to shift from spaces of labor to spaces of
leisure. Because radical leftist politics were no longer acceptable or practicable in public,
the home—and by extension individual lifestyle practices—became even more so the
location of radical culture in the US (Mishler 1999).
This shift from labor to leisure as the site of radical political activity was
extensively theorized in the 1960s by Herbert Marcuse, who sought to explain the forms
of activism adopted by the movement known as the New Left and later the student
counterculture. The approach these youth took toward consumption was termed “the
great refusal” by Marcuse. They felt that consumer capitalism was responsible for
spawning a kind of “coercive” conformity in American society, hence they felt a need to
refrain from participation in the consumer capitalist system (Breines 1982, xv). Political
dissent became a “style of life” (Roszak 1969, 26) in which “activists breathed, ate, slept,
and dreamed their beliefs” (Klatch 1999). This thorough integration of politics with
everyday life meant that “countercultural activism became a virtually ceaseless task” for
these radical youth (Rossinow 1998, 248).

68
Certainly, there were activists in this period who attempted to register their
political dissent outside the realm of lifestyle. Militant factions of the New Left, Black
Power, and Gay Liberation movements engaged in modes of protest that were directly
confrontational, at times even spectacularly violent and dangerous. Yet many activists did
attempt to integrate their radical political commitments into a comfortable and
sustainable way of life. For some, this meant turning their efforts toward building local
institutions that would support “alternative” consumption practices, such as food co-
operatives (Cox 1994). Such efforts were seen as means of enacting one’s ethical ideals
without opening oneself up to the intense scrutiny and repression that militant activism
often invited from authority figures. Theodore Roszak, a theorist of the American
counterculture writing in this period, termed this phenomenon the “intelligent
compromise” (Cox 1994, 3).
Though Roszak clearly meant to invoke compromise as a laudable maturing of
youthful exuberance, the term can also be interpreted as an apt way to convey the view
that activists sacrificed the force of their radical critique in exchange for personal
comfort. In other words, they could be seen as having compromised their values by
investing their efforts in projects that were ultimately non-threatening to the hegemonic
systems they had once radically opposed. Craig Cox (1994) asserts that by sacrificing
expressions of radical critique in the name of practicality and mass appeal, these
countercultural institutions were seamlessly incorporated into the dominant commercial
culture where they became one of many competitors in the consumer marketplace. It’s
not that anyone consciously intended to “sell out,” but history shows that the radical

69
discourses of the counterculture were eventually disarticulated from leftist visions of
collective resistance and co-opted by neoliberal ideology in the service of state control
and corporate profit (Binkley 2007).
One of the mechanisms by which such disarticulation and co-optation are thought
to be effected is commodification of the imagery of radical political movements. In this
process, citizens’ desires for social change are appealed to as the basis for the
consumption of commercial products (Klein 1999). There are countless historical (and
contemporary) instances in which corporations have attempted to capitalize on
subcultural practices that were originally intended to have a politically subversive
function. For example, critics of “commodity feminism” argue that when advertisers
align their products with feminism, they reduce a potent political critique into “a stylish
sign” (Goldman, Heath, and Smith 1991, 333). This sign, having been thus “fetishized,”
can be articulated to products and practices which in no way further a feminist political
agenda, and may in fact reinforce certain patriarchal processes, like the sexual
objectification of women. Other recent critics have pointed out that desires for social
change have been collapsed by marketers into desires for personal non-conformity (Frank
and Weiland 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). This latter desire is rather easily satisfied by
the consumption of new and different products, leaving social dissatisfaction unaddressed
and perhaps even forgotten by consumers. Decades ago, Marcuse saw this as one of the
repressive strategies of the capitalist system: people’s aspirations toward personal
freedom and creativity are “translated into administered cultural activities… within the

70
framework of commerce and profit” (Marcuse 2001b, 104), rather than mobilized toward
revolutionary protest.
How then to register radical dissent without succumbing to the hegemony of
neoliberal capitalism? In what follows, I describe the attempts by contemporary
anarchists to productively answer this question through their own unique set of
consumption habits—many of which are in fact practices of non-consumption. Then I
will offer my own critical analysis of anarchists’ use of consumption as political praxis.

Practices of anarchist consumption
In my world (which is young, white, with a middle class background), most
anarchists are vegan or vegetarian, have tattoos and piercings, ride bikes, have a
garden, listen to music that is outside of the mainstream, wear second-hand
clothes and try to follow a DIY ethic. (Samantha, interviewee)

I’m vegan, I ride bikes. I steal stuff, I shoplift a lot. (Gabby, interviewee)

The vast majority of anarchists consider themselves anti-capitalists, generally
espousing a Marxist analysis that identifies capitalism as generative of class hierarchies,
alienation and exploitation, and destruction of the natural environment. Contemporary
anarchists are also clearly influenced by Marxist cultural critics such as Herbert Marcuse
and Theodor Adorno and by Situationists such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem in
their reactions to perceived corporate control. Sometimes they cite such theorists
explicitly, but more often they exhibit a general awareness of critical theory and its

71
oppositional stance toward consumer culture.
2
For mainstream consumers, decision-
making about consumption comes down to selecting between the various products and
services on offer in the marketplace. But for anarchists, consumption itself is a problem,
since, as one anti-consumerist zine puts it, “the act of consumption is the transformation
of natural land and resources into money for corporations and acres of trash in landfills.
(This is not a good thing.)” (koala! n.d., 2). The consumption of commodities is only one
aspect of the capitalist political economic system. Yet it is the aspect which, along with
labor, is experienced most immediately and concretely by individuals in their everyday
lives. Furthermore, the nature of one’s consumption habits are to some extent open to
autonomous decision-making, thus it makes sense consumption would be the arena in
which anarchists would attempt to mount their resistance to capitalism. The anti-
consumerist zine poses the question, “if you are an anti-capitalist, what better way to
protest the economy than withdrawing from it and never using money?” (koala! n.d., 2).
Abstaining from making purchases is seen as a way to reduce one’s participation in an
objectionable system.
I will be using the term “anti-consumption” to refer to anarchist consumption
habits. As I will show, anarchists do consume goods and services, but they often try to do
so in such a way that they don’t support the system of consumer capitalism; that is, they
will find means of obtaining these things without engaging in traditional commercial
exchange. The zine I quoted above offers this advice for anti-consumers: “Before you

2
See for example, the CrimethInc. publication Days of War, Nights of Love, which serves
as an excellent introduction to the ideas of critical theory but intentionally glosses over its
debt to specific theorists and texts.

72
buy anything figure out if you can make it, borrow it, do without, fix the one you already
have or get it for free somehow” (koala! n.d., 11). This serves as a useful typology for the
general forms taken by anarchist consumption practices. In the sub-sections that follow, I
will explain some of these general forms further and offer concrete examples to illustrate
them. It’s important to note at this point that not every individual who identifies with
anarchism engages in all (or any) of the practices I present here. However, all these
practices are understood by anarchists as more or less typical habits of those within their
milieu.

“Do without”
Probably the simplest way in which anarchists withdraw their support from
consumer capitalism is by quantitatively reducing the amount of their consumption. This
often means that once they begin to identify as anarchists they start refusing to consume
things that many Americans consider to be basic features of everyday life. Anarchists
have a centuries-old tradition of assuming “voluntary poverty,” which is the chosen state
of having just enough to meet one’s basic needs (Woodcock 1979, 32). One interviewee,
Josef, described himself as “an anarchist Los Angeles pirate” because he chooses to
forego “luxuries” like having a car and a stable home. For anarchists like Josef, needs are
distinguished from luxuries through a Marxist critical lens that understands most
consumer desires to be the product of false consciousness, induced by corporations in the
interest of promoting rampant material acquisition. The logic of voluntary poverty is that
once individuals become aware that their needs are falsely imposed by marketers, they

73
can willfully decide to do without many consumer products they may have previously
considered necessary. Indeed, some anarchists attempt to completely “drop out” of
commodity consumption, in a kind of wholesale gesture against the capitalist system. As
one zine writer reflected, “I couldn’t really justify buying anything, I couldn’t get behind
any aspect of the corporate death consumer machine so I decided to boycott everything”
(koala! n.d., 4).
Personal hygiene is a notable area in which many anarchists do without products
that mainstream consumers buy as a matter of course. Grant is an interviewee who said
that since becoming involved with anarchism, he no longer felt it necessary to take a
shower every day. For him, this was about “being comfortable with the way your body
naturally exists and not succumbing to pressure from the dominant society.” Mass
marketed soaps, shampoos, and deodorants are all seen as unnecessary chemicals foisted
upon consumers by greedy capitalists. Along with a piece titled “Eight Reasons Why
Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant,” there is a chapter on hygiene in CrimethInc.’s
book Days of War, Nights of Love. The authors of this chapter assert that “western”
standards of cleanliness are rooted in class hierarchies, wherein “those who possessed the
wealth and power required to have the leisure to remain indoors, inactive, scorned the
peasants and travelers whose lifestyles involved getting their hands and bodies dirty”
(CrimethInc. 2000, 121). They go on to argue that “these days, cleanliness is defined
more by corporations selling ‘sanitation products’…. When we accept their definition of
‘cleanliness’ we are accepting their economic domination of our lives” (Ibid., 122-3). The

74
way to subvert these hierarchies, they argue, is to reject hygiene standards in one’s daily
routine.
Diet is another area where anarchists attempt to refuse certain types of
consumption. Veganism—or the non-consumption of animal products—is strongly
associated with contemporary anarchist identity. Vegans refuse to consume meat and
dairy, along with fur, leather, wool, and cosmetics tested on animals. Anarchist vegans
are politically opposed to the human-animal hierarchy in which animals are exploited and
killed for human pleasure or profit. Joel, an interviewee who is vegan, articulated his
veganism as an anarchist practice because he feels that the human-animal hierarchy is
illegitimate, and he sees animal-based industries as legitimating that power dynamic. For
him and many anarchist vegans, diet is not just an expression of sympathy with abused
animals—it is an act of political solidarity with non-human creatures, against an industry
which systematically exploits human power over animals. Many of my interviewees were
vegetarians before they learned about or identified with anarchism, but went vegan when
they became able to connect an anarchist opposition to hierarchy with their previous
distaste for animal slaughter. Sally was one interviewee who explained how veganism is
for her also an explicit protest against ideological manipulation by capitalist interests:
I had become vegetarian for a couple months at a time in high school and that was
very much based on sort of the emotional not wanting to eat animals sense, but
then I don’t think it really stuck until it became a lot more political and about
consumption and about … the kinds of consumption that capitalism encourages
you to have … especially the marketing to think you need to eat so much meat
and need to drink so much milk, that really started bothering me and seeing it as
just creating a need that just isn’t there….

75
Interviewee Branch also explained that anarchist vegans see their diets “as avoiding the
system in terms of the meat industry or the dairy industry, practices of, you know,
modern-day sort of farming and agriculture and things like that.” For Branch,
vegetarianism was a lifestyle practice that had followed his politicization and integration
into an anarchist community. Importantly, anarchist veganism is about resisting the
systemic power relationship between humans and the animals they consume; that is, it
may not have much to do with an actual distaste for the human consumption of animal
products per se. As Josef, who is also vegan, explained, “Yeah, believe me if I had my
own cow, I would make my own cheese! And I’d love it and I’d make it a dharma cow
and it’d have jewelry, but you know, that’s not feasible for me, I live in the city. I don’t
want to contribute to animal slavery.” Anarchists like Josef are against the
industrialization of animal production, which turns capitalism’s exploitative relations
against animals on a mass scale.
Anarchists are especially wary of consumer “needs” that involve environmental
degradation or the waste of natural resources. Of course, this criteria covers almost all
consumption, but a few practices in particular are notable. Flushing the toilet, for
example, is a rather mundane and automatic activity for most people, but is problematic
for anarchists. (Most people would probably not even consider toilet flushing an act of
consumption, but of course it consumes fresh water.) In response to my questions about
everyday things he does “because of his politics,” Josef laughingly volunteered, “I pee
outside because of my politics, not because I’m a freak.” He went on to explain:

76
I’m not gonna waste like a gallon and a half of water that we’re stealing from the
Colorado River just cuz I took a pee, you know like, “if it’s yellow let it mellow,”
you know, don’t flush it. But I mean, you gotta keep some sort of hygiene, but
urine is pretty clean. I mean, water a bush, you know?

The anti-consumerist zine I referenced above also includes a section on water
consumption, in which it admonishes readers, “Don’t flush when you pee! It won’t hurt
you, pee just sits in the toilet, not bothering anyone; it doesn’t warrant the 10 gallons per
flush just to get rid of it” (koala! n.d., 10). The inside of the front cover of the zine is a
sheet of warning labels reading: “DON’T FLUSH! If it’s yellow let it mellow! (or go
outside…fun for you, good for plants!).” Handwritten instructions on the page also urge
readers to photocopy these labels onto sticker paper and post them in bathrooms.
Another consumer item that many people consider a need, but which anarchists
do not, is an automobile. Even in a city like Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis which is
known for its “car culture” and not so much known for the convenience of its public
transit system, most of the anarchists I met did not own an automobile. This was true for
interviewees located in other cities as well. Even if they did have access to a car, they
usually chose to commute to work, school, and other activities by bicycle. As evidence of
the close relationship between bike culture and anarchism, several interviewees said they
got into cycling as a serious mode of transportation around the same time they became
politicized, even if they had ridden bikes recreationally earlier in their lives. As Tina
recalled, “I started riding a bike probably three, three and a half years ago, I think the
whole radicalization happened around that time, so bike riding comes with it you know.”
Branch described the link between anarchism and cycling in this way:

77
an important thing with anarchism is, anything can be done if you set your mind
to it, and you don’t have to sort of conform to typical ways of living, or the
system. And I think a large part of that is driving, and I think a large way to
overcome that is through cycling, and I think it’s a much more effective way [than
driving] to build community and it’s a much more effective way to act
environmentally, ethically.

Although he didn’t believe that cycling exhausts “what anarchism is,” Branch did say that
“if you’re truly trying to understand and practice anarchism I think they just go hand in
hand.” As with veganism, there may be many apolitical reasons to adopt cycling as a
lifestyle, but for many anarchists, riding bikes is a form of consumption-based resistance
against the automobile-centric transportation industry and its influence on mainstream
social norms around personal physical mobility. Some activities, such as performing in
bands or serving food with a Food Not Bombs group may require transporting large and
heavy equipment which cannot be done on a bike. Sometimes several people may share
ownership of an automobile, since there are some (infrequent) circumstances in which
commuting by bicycle may be impossible. This illustrates another means by which
anarchists reduce their commercial consumption, which is sharing commodities among
many people, taking advantage of economies of scale to avoid expending a lot of money
on necessities.
Another example of this is the common anarchist practice of co-habiting together
in large numbers—anywhere from half a dozen to more than twenty people—a practice
known as cooperative housing or collective living. By living together in groups,
anarchists spend less on rent, groceries, utility bills, and other household expenditures
than they would if they lived alone or in small numbers, as is the norm for mainstream

78
middle-class Americans. Anarchist cooperative houses are direct descendents of hippie
communes and earlier experiments with “intentional living.” As might be expected based
on anarchists’ attitudes toward personal hygiene, standards of cleanliness in these group
houses are generally relaxed. Group houses often open themselves up to visiting
travelers, and many host music shows or organizing meetings in the house’s communal
space. Local Food Not Bombs groups often utilize group house kitchens for their food
preparation, before transporting it to the serving location. Like their forerunners in earlier
countercultural movements, anarchist communes are meant to denaturalize the idea that
people are meant to live in small, private family units and to care most for those closely
related to them by blood. Intentional living situations are also attempts to reinvent
members’ own class status and in the process protest the idea of class status altogether
(Rossinow 1998, 249). An interviewee named Revbaker who lived in a cooperative house
(“coop,” or co-op) in Denver offered a concise explanation of the associations he makes
between housing and politics:
I first learned of collective living after visiting a few student coops in Boulder. I
was definitely impressed and heavily influenced by the whole idea. It seemed like
a natural and even necessary embodiment, or manifestation, of radical politics.
Something like, "If you believe that humans can live in different ways from
mainstream society, and in fact can live in ways that are counter to prevailing
societal institutions (nuclear family, competition, over-consumption, coercion,
etc.) then prove it." And so we did, or are at least, we are trying.

For anarchists like Revbaker, collective housing is a means of realizing the anarchist
political commitment to resisting the patterns of consumption encouraged by the
capitalist system.

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“Make it,” “fix the one you already have”
One of the most cherished principles of anarchist lifestyles is “DIY,” which
stands for “do it yourself.” The idea behind DIY is that when possible one should put
one’s own, unalienated labor toward producing the things one needs, rather than putting
money toward practices and industries that exploit workers and natural resources. Also,
knowing how to repair things for oneself keeps one from having to pay others to do it, or
worse, spending money on new things to replace the old. Bicycle commuting could be
seen as an example of DIY, in that it involves using one’s own physical energy to
transport oneself rather than gasoline purchased from a corrupt oil corporation, as an
interviewee named Orlando explained to me. Cyclists also usually become versed in DIY
bike repair, with the aid of specifically anarchist books, zines, and instruction from
comrades. Politicized bike cultures also build institutions that foster DIY practices and
operate under anarchist organizing principles. For example, the Bicycle Kitchen in Los
Angeles is a non-hierarchically organized, volunteer-run workshop that exists to promote
cycling as an alternative to driving, and to provide the means for cyclists to build,
maintain, and repair their own bikes using salvaged parts, rather than further contributing
to capitalist patterns of waste and alienated labor.
The DIY principle can be, and is, applied to almost everything anarchists
consume. For example, growing one’s own food (or even hunting it, as one non-
vegetarian interviewee from rural Vermont does) is a common DIY practice, as is making
and mending one’s own clothing. At the TOW Warehouse, a collective space in
downtown LA, organizers put on regular workshops where participants share knowledge

80
and skills to make things that they would otherwise have to buy from corporations, like
LED bike lights or home-brewed beer. As Tom explained to me, TOW stands for
“Theater of Work” which symbolizes that the space is a place to work and be productive,
but for one’s own benefit and not through selling one’s labor to others who have the
means to exploit it. (The reference to theatricality could be thought, furthermore, to
symbolize a commitment to performing alternatives in a visible way, so as to
communicate a political message.) Josef explained the activities at TOW in less abstract
terms: “that’s another thing we do because we’re anarchists! We brew our own beer now,
cuz, fuck supporting the liquor stores, and you know what, fuck liquor stores.”
There are even some consumer services that most people would not think of as
feasible to do for oneself, but to which many anarchists apply the DIY principle. Take for
example, the practice of DIY gynecology, which focuses on self-examination and
diagnosis and herbal treatments for things like menstrual cramps, yeast infections,
sexually transmitted diseases, and unwanted pregnancies. I attended a workshop on DIY
gynecology at a festival co-organized by Gabby, an interviewee. In this workshop, the
facilitator showed participants how to use a speculum on themselves and what to look for
while doing exams. She also encouraged frank discussion and questions from the
audience, and offered medical advice on topics such as infections, masturbation, and
sexual intercourse. Workshops like this are extremely common—it was my experience
that several of the anarchist bookfairs and conferences I attended featured a session in
this vein. Zines on DIY gynecology are also ubiquitous—in addition to the one I

81
purchased at the workshop, called Hot Pants (Gauthier and Vinebaum 1999), I’ve seen
similar ones at every bookfair I’ve attended.
The political principle behind DIY gynecology is explained by the Hot Pants zine
in its assertion that the practice is an attempt “to help break away from the medical
establishment’s tentacular grip on our bodies and our approaches to health and healing”
(Gauthier and Vinebaum 1999, 1). An interviewee named Minty said that she would
rather rely on herself and her anarcha-feminist friends to take care of her physical and
mental health, because their practices are “holistic and healthy and women-centered” and
she won’t have to deal with a doctor “that will call me crazy anyway and give me fucked
up medicine.” Raychel, another interviewee, makes her own menstrual pads because they
are more comfortable and less environmentally destructive than store-bought pads. DIY
approaches to menstrual products are also a way to avoid supporting “the ‘sanitary
hygiene’ industry” which feeds into the patriarchal taboo on menstruation by treating it as
something that needs to be hidden and sanitized in the first place (Gauthier and
Vinebaum 1999). Like other DIY practices, DIY gynecology is about empowering
oneself rather than handing power over to someone—be it a doctor, a pharmaceutical
company, or a tampon brand—who profits by exploiting others’ needs.

“Borrow it,” “or get it for free somehow”
In some cases, refusal of consumption or making something oneself are not
feasible options. In these instances, anarchists utilize extra-commercial means of
obtaining goods, which allows them to consume without providing financial support to

82
capitalist corporations. One common means of doing so is to share and trade with friends.
For Minty, “consuming” in an anarchist way is about finding alternatives to capitalist
exchange within her own circle of acquaintances. She explained this using a few
examples:
It’s knowing the resources that are already in the network of people that you trust
and using them whether it be DIY gynecology or clothing. Like, a lot of my
friends knit, so when I’m in New York, [it’s] buying their scarves and their hats
and mittens, or doing like a barter versus going to like Urban Outfitters you
know? So knowing what resources are in your group of friends and utilizing that
versus anywhere else.

Minty thus sees her social network as an alternative to capitalist retail establishments. In
this vein, Gabby also finds friends who can provide services she needs, and in turn she
shares her own skills. She mentioned, for instance, that she was taking violin lessons
from a friend and cooking meals for him in exchange. Some anarchists have more
permanently institutionalized the practice of sharing, establishing “free stores” where
people can convene to donate their unwanted belongings to each other.
The idea of relying on the resources of your community is also at work in events
like Really Really Free Markets (RRFMs), which anarchists have organized in several
cities across the US. At RRFMs, people bring things to give away that are still usable but
just not useful to them anymore. The markets are often held in public parks, and look like
a cross between a yard sale and a swap meet, only there is no monetary exchange or even
barter involved. At the one I attended in Los Angeles, folks spread blankets out in a
corner of a municipal park, and put out old clothes, books, and other consumable items
for “shoppers” to take at will. There was also a station set up for people to bring their

83
bikes and get free bike repair lessons. The local Food Not Bombs group provided free
snacks and water. The guiding principle at RRFMs is that things are given away as
“gifts” and anyone can freely take what they want without having to give anything
themselves. The point is not to make money off one’s old possessions—just to find them
a new home as an alternative to throwing them away. And the provision of services like
bike repair instruction is meant to spread knowledge for its own sake. Besides providing
for people’s material needs and wants, RRFMs are meant to function as demonstrations
of the viability of a gift economy as an alternative to the capitalist free market in which
state policies and economic practices favor big business and exploit individuals in the
name of corporate profits. The name of the event itself is a verbal play on the view that
the “free market” does not actually (“really really”) promote freedom for most people,
especially those who must sell their labor in order to earn the living wage that is required
to enable them to consume in fulfillment of their needs.
Outside of structured consumption encounters like Free Stores or RRFMs,
anarchists may also scavenge for discarded goods which are not necessarily intended to
be shared or re-used, but which still hold value. The term for such scavenging is
“dumpster diving” (sometimes abbreviated to “dumpstering”) owing to the fact that
commercial institutions often discard perfectly usable goods in dumpsters, which the
plucky scavenger can climb (dive) into and root through. Dumpster diving has become
something of a refined skill among anarchists, with zines and articles written on the
subject of how to most effectively and efficiently obtain the best refuse. Depending on
the availability of well-stocked dumpsters in one’s area, one may be able to obtain most

84
commodities, including food, for free. In addition to being a practical strategy for finding
food, clothes, appliances, and furniture, anarchists position dumpstering as an act of
protest against the wastefulness of commercial retail practice, in which things that are
cosmetically damaged or just out of fashion are thrown away, though their use value is
intact. Food retailers in particular often discard mass quantities of edible product for
purely cosmetic reasons—the produce is marred, the boxes are crushed, or the expiration
date has recently passed.
Another means by which anarchists may attempt to obtain consumable goods
without monetary expenditure is shoplifting. Obviously, this method poses a certain
amount of risk to the practitioner, as it is a criminal activity within the legal system.
Ideologically, anarchists can justify theft as an act of legitimate property redistribution
within a system that is fundamentally “criminal,” within their own system of ethics. In
other words, because the system of capitalist exchange enables corporations to “steal”
labor and natural resources, there is nothing ethically objectionable in reappropriating the
products they sell for profit. This logic accounts for Gabby explaining to me that she
doesn’t shoplift at “mom and pop” establishments, only big chain stores. Furthermore,
subcultural theorist Stephen Duncombe explains that as a transgression of the law, theft is
a symbolic “refusal to become part of the cycle of ‘responsible’ work and consumption”
(Duncombe 2008, 88).
All of these practices which involve the appropriation of consumer items at no
monetary cost can be encompassed under the umbrella designation of “freeganism.” The
term freegan comes from a combination of the words “free” and “vegan” and

85
traditionally refers to a diet in which animal-based (non-vegan) food products may be
consumed, but only if they can be obtained for free, so as not to contribute to market
demand for animal products. Joel, for example, regularly consumes dairy products if they
will otherwise be discarded. I actually witnessed Joel take a piece of lemon meringue pie
off a vacated table at a restaurant when he saw that the diner had left it untouched and
was told by the server that it would be thrown away. Because he was not paying for the
pie, he did not see himself as financially supporting the producers or distributors of the
eggs and dairy that had gone into making it, thus he did not see himself as contributing to
the economic demand for animal products. Freegans register their critique of consumer
capitalism and its attendant hierarchies, not by abstaining from consumption, but by
abstaining from paying for their consumption. They also see themselves as extracting
material value from the system without putting value back in, thus weakening the system
in a small way. The freegan lifestyle may extend beyond dietary practices to encompass a
holistic orientation toward not making financial contribution to the offenders in the
capitalist system. The anti-consumerism zine I have been quoting from in this chapter is
actually titled Why Freegan?: An Attack on Consumption, and offers a slew of tactics for
resisting consumption in various aspects of everyday life, including diet, transportation,
and hygiene.

Anarchist businesses
Another aspect of anarchist consumption is the patronage of retail establishments
which are explicitly identified as radical businesses. Often these establishments are run

86
by a collective body which self-identifies as anarchist or generally radical. Usually, these
businesses do not exist to turn a profit through the sale of commodities (they may even
have non-profit status with the Internal Revenue Service). Rather, their mission is to
provide consumers with products that are not always readily available in the mainstream
market, such as fair trade coffee, vegan food, and radical literature. Furthermore, they
usually try to put value back into the local radical community by sponsoring activist
efforts. Some anarchist businesses are transient, only setting up shop at events like
bookfairs and festivals. Others have a permanent physical space—often a storefront or
residence—which they also make available for organizing meetings and traveling
presenters. These spaces are sometimes called “infoshops” because they generally keep a
stock of political books and zines for local community members to borrow or purchase.
Joel Olson describes the anarchist infoshop as “a space where people can learn about
radical ideas, where radicals can meet other radicals, and where political work (such as
meetings, public forums, fundraisers, etc.) can get done” (Olson 2009, 40). By way of
illustrating what an anarchist business looks like, I want to describe three paradigmatic
examples.
The Wooden Shoe
3
is an “all volunteer anarchist collective” located in
Philadelphia that sells radical literature, music records, and clothing. It is described on its

3
According to one of the Wooden Shoe’s members: “The collective gets its name from a
symbol of workers control, the sabot. French peasants often resisted early industrial
capitalism by tossing their wooden shoes (they couldn't afford leather) into the gears of a
factory machine, in order to get a break after extremely long hours” (Robinson n.d.).

87
website
4
as “a non-profit space that works to offer ethical choices in what people buy,
eat, drink, and learn.” It is open seven days a week, staffed by volunteers. The
collective’s mission statement summarizes the contributions it attempts to make beyond
being a venue for consumption:
We strive to provide our local community with radical and non-traditional sources
of written, digital, and spoken information. We wish to be an empowering
resource for activism, organizing, art, self-education, dialogue, community-
building, and the anti-capitalist struggle…. We hope to build a space that is part
of a larger social movement that combines our resources with other cooperative
and collective organizations locally and around the world for the purpose of
mutual aid and the creation of a cooperative society.

To these ends, the Wooden Shoe opens its space up at least weekly to a visiting speaker
or other event which aims to inform about radical projects or just to strengthen the local
radical community. Recent events have included book readings, film screenings, panel
discussions, and children’s story hours.
The Wooden Shoe collective cites as an inspiration the collective behind Red
Emma’s,
5
a bookstore and coffeehouse located in Baltimore. Red Emma’s is owned and
managed by its workers, and sells coffee, vegetarian and vegan food, and radical
literature. It is committed to selling fair trade food and coffee, meaning that growers and
producers have been paid a living wage rather than the depressed prices produced by
global “free trade” policies. The collective has also developed its own free software for

4
http://www.woodenshoebooks.com/.
5
Red Emma’s is named for famed American anarchist, Emma Goldman.

88
tracking inventory and handling cash register transactions. On its website
6
, Red Emma’s
answers the question of how an anarchist business can be an anti-capitalist enterprise:
What's radical about running a coffeehouse and bookstore? ….Worker ownership
and control, at least to some extent, subvert the logic of capitalism (based on
domination, hierarchy, and exploitation) and it's for this reason that the Red
Emma's "business model" works the way it does.

The Red Emma’s collective is strongly committed to consensus decision-making, and to
all members having equal power in shaping everyday and long-term decisions. The
collective also has a mission to support the local activist community. It sponsors a
“cooperative events venue,” called 2640, at a nearby church, which hosts dinners, film
screenings, music shows, dances, and other fundraisers for activist projects. It has also
spun off a Free School which offers volunteer-run classes on a range of topics from
community organizing tactics to gardening to “revolutionary” hip-hop dance.
Another anarchist business enterprise, AK Press, is a publishing outfit that prints
and distributes books and other media on topics of interest to radicals. AK’s self-stated
goal is “supplying radical words and images to as many people as possible” (AK Press
n.d.). The press runs a website and print catalog, and is a ubiquitous presence at anarchist
bookfairs; every bookfair I’ve attended has had a large AK Press table with hundreds of
books as well as shirts and other items for sale. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, AK
also runs a warehouse in Oakland that hosts organizing and social events, particularly
near the time of the annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair held in nearby San Francisco.
Like the Wooden Shoe and Red Emma’s, AK is run by a collective of its workers, who

6
http://www.redemmas.org/.

89
democratically decide which titles to carry as well as how to divide the labor of the press.
The collective management structure is, in all these cases, an attempt to resist replicating
the worst practices of capitalist businesses, even while participating in the commodity
marketplace.
AK’s mission illustrates a point made by cultural studies scholar Jeremy Gilbert
in his book Anticapitalism and Culture, which is that commodification is not equivalent
to capitalism (Gilbert 2008, 108). It is theoretically possible to embrace the
communicative potential of commodification without advocating an exploitative system
based on the principle of maximization of capital. Businesses like AK Press are aware
that they are inevitable participants in the capitalist system:
like it or not, capitalism is the only game in town at the moment. The paper that
books are printed on, the building we work in, the packages we send and receive,
the computers we use—all are the result of the exploited labor of the working
class. Until we take power away from private economic tyrannies like
corporations and investment groups, until we’re in control of our creative
energies, almost every good or service we use or provide is administered by
capitalism.” (AK Press n.d.)

However, the collective that runs AK also points out that the press “doesn’t exist to
enrich its members at the expense of consumers” (Ibid.). Instead, they use
commodification as a means of providing what they call “tools for intellectual self-
defense.” As proudly self-proclaimed “propagandists” AK is a business that channels
commercial exchange toward the spread of revolutionary ideas. All of these businesses
arguably use consumption relations as an infrastructure upon which can be overlaid other
processes that are important to anarchism as a political movement, such as the circulation
of discourse, the performance of identity, and the sustenance of community.

90
Motivations for anarchist consumption practices
Having provided a descriptive picture of the forms anarchist consumption
typically takes, I now want to lay out an analysis that sheds light on the intentions or
motivations behind these individual practices of consumption and non-consumption. I am
interested in what people set out to accomplish when they incorporate these practices into
their everyday way of life. Are they trying to resist the domination of others over
themselves? Are they trying to avoid perpetrating domination over others? Are they
trying to subvert broad systems of domination? Of course, the general answer to all three
of these questions is yes. But I think it behooves us to look at how specific practices,
indeed specific instances of any given practice, are implicated in each of these questions.
I believe that the motivations/imagined effects of lifestyle politics can be delineated into
three distinct but interrelated types—personal, ethical, and activist—which correspond to
each of those three questions. After I go into more detail about this typology, I will argue
that oftentimes practitioners of lifestyle politics are laboring under a misapprehension
about the relationship between these three categories. In other words, they operate under
the assumption that a practice that fulfills one purpose also fulfills others, though this
may not be the case. Ultimately, such misapprehensions may pose a barrier to the
cultivation of effective strategies for political transformation.
Personal motivations for anarchist consumption practices have to do with
liberating the self from the hold that capitalism has on one’s own immediate experience.
Take for example Branch’s habit of seeking news and entertainment from independent
media producers. There are self-interested reasons for Branch to get his news from a

91
network like Indymedia,
7
since to him, that is a “much more informative and reliable
form of information, of what’s going on, as opposed to a commercial network, television
news and things like that, where they are influenced by media companies, by
government.” Indymedia allows Branch to liberate himself (at least somewhat) from
dependence on sources of information he sees as untrustworthy.
The anarchist individual also recognizes that capitalist entities will try to exploit,
alienate, and ideologically manipulate them through consumerism and so they try to
thwart these processes by abstaining from commercial consumption as much as possible.
By its very nature, anti-consumption requires less money than mainstream consumerism.
Mainstream consumer culture props up an exploitative labor system by providing
incentives for workers to acquiesce to having surplus value extracted from them for the
profit of their employers. According to Marcuse, capitalism retains its power by
“integrating” consumers, which makes them docile as laborers and keeps them from
developing “revolutionary consciousness” (Marcuse 1972, 14). By rejecting commercial
consumption, anarchists reduce their own incentive to earn money, thus releasing
themselves from the intrinsically exploitative conditions of wage labor.
8
Expressions like
this one from the Why Freegan? zine, “You don’t have to compromise yourself and your
humanity to the evil demon of wage-slavery!” (koala! n.d., 2), though hyperbolic and
rather quaint, are not uncommon in contemporary anarchist discourse. The zine goes on

7
Indymedia is an electronic network in which independent individuals and organizations
can directly upload news stories for public consumption.
8
Most anarchists do hold some kind of job in order to maintain a baseline income, but
they will at least be able to work less than they would if they were trying to earn enough
money to consume at mainstream levels.

92
to say, “Working sucks and if a little scavenging can keep you from needing a job than
[sic] go jump in a dumpster!” (Ibid., 3). Consumption habits like dumpstering are thus
offered as a solution to the problem of the alienation that comes of “working long hours
at a dehumanizing job” (Ibid., 2). Emily, an interviewee, explained one of her reasons for
getting around by bike and public transit, instead of owning her own car:
I also don’t like to work that much which I think is kind of anarchist and if you
don’t have a car, you don’t have to work as much, because you don’t have to pay
for a car. Cars cost a lot of money—I think people don’t realize how much they
cost because I don’t think people sit back and look at it.

Here, Emily demonstrates that she has thought critically about exactly what is involved
participating in a consumption practice most people take for granted. For her, like many
anarchists, owning a car is not an automatic fact of life, it is a choiceful activity which
involves real trade-offs in terms of time and money, which could be spent otherwise.
A conscious rejection of consumerism is also understood by anarchists as a means
of resistance against being personally ideologically manipulated. In other words, they
attempt not to succumb to the “false needs” imposed by dominant consumerist ideology,
and as a result, they see themselves as being able to lead more enjoyable lives. Josef
alluded to the personal benefits that come from actively rejecting the standards of
mainstream culture: “I’m not gonna subscribe to all that shit because it’s just gonna make
me depressed anyway, cuz I don’t look like Cindy Crawford and I wouldn’t want to be
Brad Pitt anyways!” Joel expressed his feeling that “it makes you a more interesting
person” when you “diverge a little bit from the mainstream.” He brought this up in the
context of talking about how being a vegan has forced him to try different kinds of

93
cuisine than he might have had his diet been more mainstream. Sam Binkley’s account of
the individualistic anti-consumerism which emerged in the 1970s is apt here: “new
practices of consumption promise rich personal benefits surpassing those afforded by
traditional commodities: physical and emotional health, radically aestheticized
experiences of daily life and deeper expressions of self identity enacted through
alternative life-projects” (Binkley 2008, 601). In short, personal or individualistic
motivations for consumption/non-consumption seek the betterment of one’s own
situation.
When consumption practices are ethically motivated, they are concerned less with
the effects that capitalism has on the individual consumer themself, and more on the
direct impacts one’s consumption habits have on others. The “others” in these cases may
include animals, the environment, and/or exploited laborers. Ethical consumption
9

practices constitute an attempt to abstain from or minimize one’s participation in the
relations of domination that are present within the capitalist system. Anti-consumption
practices are constructed as ethical in that by reducing one’s demand for goods produced
under objectionable conditions, one reduces one’s complicity with the system that
perpetuates those conditions. To give a basic example, several interviewees said they
made a point of wearing used clothing so as to avoid contributing money to companies
that employ sweatshop labor.

9
I use “ethical consumption” somewhat differently than Jo Littler (2009), who uses the
term to describe practices rather than motivations or effects. According to Littler’s usage,
all the practices described in this chapter would be examples of ethical consumption.

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Veganism too is frequently understood as an ethical practice. Joel explained that
he believes human dominance over animals is unjustifiable; coming to this belief made it
“so easy for me to be vegan,” in his words. The way he put it, veganism was for him less
about an emotional connection to animal suffering and more about an ethical objection to
the ways in which humans attempt to use ideology (about human superiority) to
legitimize an illegitimate exercise of power. Similarly, Josef said, “I’m vegan because I
think that’s what real anarchists should be.” Although he said he respected other people’s
decision not to be vegan, he went on to point out an ethical consistency between
anarchism and certain forms of consumption: “just do whatever the fuck you want, but
don’t be, like, promoting what you’re trying to fight against. Like, if you’re, if you’re an
anarchist but you’re like, gonna go eat at McDonalds, you gotta check yourself right
there, you know?”
The ethicalness of a practice depends on a judgment about the moral correctness
of the activity, e.g. “it is wrong to kill animals,” “it is wrong to employ sweatshop labor,”
“it is right to conserve water.” I want to argue that there is an important analytical
difference between doing something because it is an ethical good in itself, and doing
something in order to put pressure on a system or larger entity to change a pattern of
unethical practice or to support a system which is characterized by ethical practices. This
other type of motivation is what I would call an activist motivation. Whether a practice
has activist motivations or not depends on whether the practitioner is attempting to use
their actions to effect a change in current conditions. For anarchists, activist consumption
often involves attempts to leverage personal finances toward subverting or correcting the

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objectionable aspects of the capitalist system. Jo Littler describes this as “using
purchasing power to sanction goods which have not been produced through exploitative
conditions” (Littler 2009, 7). A book called The Philosophy of Punk (published by AK
Press) expresses this view: “One of the best ways to refuse and resist a destructive
capitalist system is to vote economically, spending dough where you feel it has the least
harmful effect” (O’Hara 1999, 131).
10

As an example of activist consumption, many interviewees said that they try to
buy from local or independent businesses. Matthew, a professor living in a small college
town in Texas, offered his book-buying practices as an instance of this habit:
I prefer to buy books secondhand. When I lived in Chicago and Philadelphia, I
bought as many books as possible this way. If I couldn't get them from a shop I'd
buy them online. Now that I live in a town that doesn't have a single
independently-owned bookstore, I get nearly all my books online. For newer
books, I'll usually try to abuse my academic privileges and ask for review copies
first. Anything to beat the media conglomerates, though obviously the smaller
presses are fine!

Matthew’s habit of avoiding corporate chain stores in order to “beat the media
conglomerates” could be understood as a kind of boycott or consumer strike. His
coinciding habit of patronizing secondhand and independent bookshops could be
undertstood as what Littler calls a “buycott.” Littler explains that a buycott takes up “an
oppositional or ‘anti’ product that is promoted as the alternative to a brand that is being

10
Some more puristic anarchists take exception to this logic, arguing that to vote, either
in an electoral or an economic sense, is to legitimate a situation in which one must choose
the least of many evils. As a writer of the Why Freegan? zine put it, “I don’t vote because
no matter who I vote for, the government always wins and when you ‘vote with your
dollars,’ consumerism always wins, capitalism always wins” (koala! n.d., 4). The only
ideologically supportable course, according to this argument, is to abstain from the
system altogether, i.e. to not vote at all.

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avoided for reasons of wider social purpose…. Effectively, the buycott is a consumer act
that integrates the boycott of one type of brand or good (or consumer ‘striking’), with the
purchase of another” (Littler 2009, 35). Matthew’s patronage of alternative booksellers is
not part of any specific consumer activist campaign. Yet the fact that it is, for him,
connected to his political identification with anarchism means that he can envision his
consumer practices as collective, since many other anarchists are engaged in similar
practices. The fact that such actions are discursively promoted as part of the culture of the
anarchist movement means that they are not really isolated personal acts, but rather what
Michelle Micheletti, in the context of consumer activism, calls “individualized collective
action” (Micheletti 2003, xi). Because anarchist individuals are aware that there are a
whole lot of them adopting similar lifestyles, they can see themselves as contributing to a
project that makes a measurable impact.
Sam Binkley positions the individualist anti-consumer against the collectivist
anti-consumer, arguing for a distinction between those who are pursuing projects of self-
realization and those who approach consumption as a means for realizing the shared
objectives of a social movement (Binkley 2007). Binkley’s work is important in
recognizing that consumption practices are not always already self-interested. His use of
Foucault to understand consumption and lifestyle as “caring practices” is immensely
useful. I want to extend his analysis a step further by showing that there is not always a
neat dichotomy between individualist and collectivist motivations for anti-consumption.
Indeed, in most specific instances of anarchist consumption, more than one type of

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motivation is in play. That is, personal, ethical, and activist motivations often coincide in
a single act.
This is not to disregard the instances in which individuals don’t seem to evince
much interest in the ethical or activist dimensions of their personal choices. I think these
cases are the exception, as I didn’t once encounter a person or publication that discussed
lifestyle purely in terms of individual benefits, to the exclusion of ethical or social issues.
The rhetorical figure of the self-interested “lifestyle anarchist” who is myopically focused
on their own personal liberation is, in my experience, just that—a rhetorical figure which
is invoked to discount lifestyle politics as a whole. Certainly, I believe interviewees like
Grant when he said he knew kids in high school who “quickly and completely embraced
a lifestyle without much reflection,” who didn’t form deep political commitments, and
thus dropped out of anarchism after a while. Matthew also made the claim that many
people “end up getting tired of the life and going back to their parents or to school or
work or whatever.” In contrast, for the anarchists I met, their lifestyle practices were
always motivated by something more than pure self-interest. Although I think people’s
motivations are often more complex than can be easily characterized by any single
type—individual self-interest, or ethical righteousness, or social transformation—I do
want to argue that the material effects of individual consumption practices are
analytically separable and that this separation ought to be maintained.

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Effects of anarchist consumption practices
Why do I think it is important to maintain an analytical separation between these
motivations? If we are interested in evaluating lifestyle practices as political tactics, we
need to know what they are trying to accomplish and whether they are actually
accomplishing these things. In many cases, I think that one motivation may be
legitimately served by an individual’s consumption activity, while other goals may be
less effectively realized. That is, while I think it’s important to recognize that anarchist
consumers may have more than their own self-interest in mind when engaged in
particular lifestyle practices, it is fair to question whether their social justifications for
anti-consumption are actually supported by materical evidence.
As I discussed in Chapter One, one of the most commonly committed fallacies
advanced within anarchist anti-consumption rhetoric is the assumption that just because
an individual action has positive personal outcomes or is ethically defensible, it is
effective as activism. This is an example of what Epstein (1991) calls “magical politics,”
in that there is no necessary connection between individual commitment and the kind of
collective effort which would be a pre-condition for large-scale social change. Littler
explains that advocates of so-called ethical consumption may “place too much emphasis
on the power of the consumer to engineer social change… they replicate, in inverted
fashion, the ideology of the sovereign consumer of free market economics” (Littler 2009,
19). This is to say, there is a powerful mythological, but logically and empirically
unsupportable, belief that “one person can make a difference.”

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The actions of any one individual can never be a holistic challenge to a systemic
problem. The individual is by nature operating at a different scale than are social systems
of power. It is not just that an individual action makes a negligible quantitative difference
to the processes of capitalism (though I’ll get to this idea in a moment). The problem is
that what anarchists are politically opposed to, in theory, is not any specific instance of
domination within capitalism. Rather, as a political ideology, anarchism is opposed to a
distribution of power that allows some entities to regularly perpetrate domination over
others. Ethically, most anarchists are probably not big fans of those specific acts of
domination either, but again, there is a distinction to be made between ethical opposition
and political opposition. One could certainly argue that entire social systems are
unethical, because empirically every individual act that occurs within them can be shown
to be ethically faulty according to whatever ethical framework, but this argument still
basically rests on a micro-scale analysis.
Proponents of lifestyle politics tend to presuppose that significant, even radical,
social change can be brought about by altering the behavior of enough individuals so as
to have an aggregate effect. It’s a similar logic to a conventional consumer strike—if
enough people boycott a company, eventually the company will go out of business or be
forced to change its practices according to the demand of the striking consumers. Taking
this logic to its conclusion, anti-capitalists often profess to believe that capitalism itself
can be subverted in this fashion. As one commenter on an anarchist email list I follow put
it, in a defense of lifestyle anarchism, “if enough people did this, then the system would

100
have a real battle on its hands.” Yes, “if enough people did this…” it would make a
difference, but the operative word there is “if.”
In the absence of systemic support, many individuals may find individual
resistance a practical impossibility. Alyssa was an interviewee who had moved to a small
Canadian town after having lived in Northern California for many years. She explained
that many of the anti-consumption practices she had engaged in while living in Santa
Cruz (a California college town known for its liberal community), such as dumpstering
and participating in a bike collective, were simply not feasible in her new location. So
while she still stuck to a vegan diet and commuted by bicycle, “so many of those things
were available to me in the culture of Santa Cruz, and really aren’t here (the dumpsters
are locked, there are no collective spaces like the Bike Church or Free Radio, etc).”
Jeremy, another interviewee, called it a “flawed idea that one can individualize capitalism
or ‘drop out’ of it.” The fact that completely dropping out of capitalism is in reality a
practical impossibility further attests to this incommensurability between individual
refusal and systemic power. That is, capitalism is so well integrated into every aspect of
life that there is no getting away from it completely, no matter how much the individual
might intend to liberate themself from its hold.
Furthermore, even assuming the possibility of individual resistance, it may not be
the case that there are enough activists out there to have a quantitatively significant
impact on the whole capitalist system, or even one industry or corporation within that
system. In this vein, writer Derrick Jensen (a controversial figure among anarchists who
take differing stances on lifestyle politics) argues that even if ethical consumption

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practices were to be adopted by masses of individuals, their material impact might still be
relatively small. In an essay titled “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does
Not Equal Political Change,” Jensen points out that the environmental damage caused by
individuals is miniscule when compared with that of government and corporate
institutions. Thus exhortations for individuals to minimize their detrimental effect on the
planet through changes in personal consumption have the dual negative consequence of
displacing responsibility, and perhaps inconvenience, onto those who are least equipped
to cope with it, and allowing the worst offenders to go on conducting (unethical) business
as usual.
Littler finds this “responsibilization” of the individual to be a troubling
manifestation of neoliberal ideology that masks and displaces the obligations to society
which ought to be assumed by policy-makers and vast corporate entities (Littler 2009,
95). Speaking in the context of “green consumerism” Littler asserts that “in ‘the new
green order’ individuals are responsibilized into dramatic yet ineffectual actions while
corporations and the state shirk their responsibilities” (Ibid., 114). Jensen takes a similar
view, arguing that “we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection.
Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal
consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance” (Jensen 2009). Emily,
the interviewee, also had qualms about individual practices of non-consumption as a
political tactic:
You hear about sweatshops and you hear about maquiladoras and you know that
all these things are involved in how everything is produced and so the best way to
feel like you’re not a cause of that is to extract yourself from the situation by not

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consuming, but it’s a political move that doesn’t generate power it just generates
people extracting themselves. I think it’s great, I don’t have any problem with it,
but I’m more interested in seeing people organize. If you’re interested in
sweatshops, or in consuming fewer resources, build things that enable people to
know about it or do something about it to change it in their everyday lives.

As Emily insinuates, anarchist practices of refusal may be quite important at a personal,
ethical level yet they may not prove to be very effective tactics for accomplishing the
material goals of the movement.
I would argue that if an individual act is going to qualify as a protest against
systemic, political conditions, it has to be communicated as such. Let’s return to the Why
Freegan? zine, to consider its suggestion that by not buying food at the supermarket,
individuals can register their dissent against an unjust global economy in which
Americans have access to excessive resources while others starve.
[W]e, in America, have so much and so many people all over the world have so
little…. Other folks are literally starving so that we can have fully-stocked shelves
at our supermarkets and health food stores. If this concerns you (as it should) you
can protest the unbalanced distribution in America and the world by sacrificing
some of your privilege and feeding yourself off of the ridiculous excess of food
instead of consuming products from the supermarket shelves we are so unjustly
privileged to have access to. (koala! n.d., 3)

What is left unaddressed in this claim is the long chain between the individual non-
consumer at the supermarket and the powerful players in the global economy who keep
the US consumer economy booming and other countries in crippling debt. It’s hard to see
how an act of “protest” in the form of one person dumpstering for food could be
recognized by (much less make an impact on) the system of global inequality that
provides for American privilege. If one feels bad benefiting from the global capitalist
system, then one’s act of non-participation might be an ethical act, a good faith attempt

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not to personally contribute to the exploitation of other people, but without being
communicated as such to those who actually have any power to do anything about that
exploitation, it is symbolically indistinguishable from any other decision not to consume
a particular product for reasons of taste or simple inability.
To explore another example which prompts us to consider communication and the
incommensurability of personal, ethical, and activist effects of individual consumption
practices, there is some debate among anarchists as to whether shoplifting is an effective
way to symbolically undermine the legitimacy of private property relations and the laws
that protect them. What are the real effects of shoplifting? The immediate personal effect
is that you now have something you need and you didn’t have to spend money on it. In
turn you did not have to sell your alienated labor in order to be able to afford the item.
And you didn’t provide financial support to those who are engaged in unethical practices.
But the store won’t exactly understand that you shoplifted in order to protest their
participation in capitalism, and thus there is little chance that they will alter that
participation in response. If anything, they will just think there is a consumer demand for
the product and order more of it. As Why Freegan? points out, “You are still creating an
empty shelf that must be restocked” (koala! n.d., 8). Absent a clearly defined campaign,
which can discursively connect individuals’ anti-consumption practices and publicly
communicate about them, I think there is little potential for lifestyle to function as
collective action which results in large-scale change. This is not to say that lifestyle
politics are totally ineffectual. It is to say, however, that the effects are limited and not
completely commensurable with the stated motivations anarchists may have for their

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practices. As one interviewee, Miranda, put it, efforts to broadly communicate political
dissent may be more useful than any specific individual performance of dissent:
I think there’s something important about trying to promote these ideas on a
cultural scale or something? Whether or not you’re totally embodying them,
because I feel like you can be a hermit and be an anarchist and then no one’s
going to know about it and no ones going to care and maybe that’s fine, maybe
that’s the point. I don’t know.

Miranda’s ambivalence here is telling about the pervasive ambiguity within anarchist
discourse about what “the point” of lifestyle politics is—is it to liberate oneself, to act
ethically, or to alter systems of domination? Again, this is why I am arguing that tactical
concerns necessitate more analytic precision than presently exists.

Consumption as distraction
Another major criticism of lifestyle politics that circulates within both activist and
academic discourses is that lifestyle concerns deflect effort and attention away from
movement activities that could pose a more serious threat to capitalism and other
oppressive institutions. That is, consumption activities are seen as a distraction from
“real” political action. Contained within assertions to this effect is an implicit assumption
that, in practice, consumption activities displace other forms of activism. Detractors of
anarchist lifestyle politics worry that “lifestylists” are channeling their dissatisfaction
toward activities that are ineffective at achieving radical political goals, or worse,
unconcerned with achieving those goals. In this view, individuals are suspected of letting
personal motivations completely supplant activist ones.

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Along these lines, a recent event in Los Angeles drew the predictable criticism
that it was too oriented toward lifestyle and consumption activities. The event, called an
“Anarchist Café”
11
by its organizers, was declared “a bust” by one anonymous critic who
posted a review to a blog devoted to publicizing and discussing events in the local LA
anarchist scene (Anonymous 2010).
12
In the review, the café attendee criticized the fact
that the event was too focused on “subcultural” aspects of anarchism like vegan nutrition;
they also found it objectionable that there was an admission charge in addition to vendors
selling books and shirts. The reviewer’s damning conclusion: “The Downtown LA
Anarchist Cafe = anarchist (as in vegan, trendy, hipster) identity for SALE. Epic Fail.”
Another anonymous commenter chimed in, saying, “LA Anarchist Café = La Vegan
Market.” Similarly, whenever an anarchist bookfair is held, people both within and
outside of the anarchist milieu are quick to point out that vendors selling literature to
crowds of anarchists is not exactly an overturning of capitalism. For instance, in a Los
Angeles Times article about the 2010 Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair, an attendee at the
event was quoted as saying, “We don’t fight here. We hold book fairs” (Linthicum 2010).
The journalist who authored the article attributed this attendee with the belief that the
“event itself proved the need for revolution” (Ibid.). The underlying assumption here is
that bookfairs and other activities that revolve around consumption are taking away time
and effort that could be devoted to “fighting.”

11
“Anarchist café” is a general term often used to describe events like this one. “Café”
does not refer to a place, like a coffeeshop, but rather to a temporal event, like a salon.
12
The blog is called The LA Anarchist Weekly: A Blog for Greater Los Angeles Area
News Written from an Anarchist Perspective and can be found at
http://laanarchist.blogspot.com/.

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This is a kind of all-or-nothing logic that doesn’t really allow for the reality that
lifestyle politics is not the only form of politics in which people are engaged. When that
LA Times article circulated on an Los Angeles Anarchist email listserv, one person
responded, “lol at ‘People don't fight here. They hold bookfairs.’ some truth to that, we
fight though, just not at bookfairs I guess.” This response reveals that while it may be true
that some people participate in bookfairs to the exclusion of other political activities, one
does not necessarily exclude the other. The people who organize anarchist bookfairs and
cafes may not intend them to substitute for other forms of activism. The main organizer
of the Anarchist Café mentioned above responded to the blogged review with the
comment that, “It was not about bring on a Revolution or lets over throw [sic].” Another
commenter about the event on the LA anarchist listserv argued that the purpose of every
event does not need to be to stage revolution, saying, “These types of events should be
enjoyed as social decompressors, spaces which are provided for, hopefully, activist and
anarchist networking. But they are in no way a substitute or alternative for actual
community organizing & movement building which we are ALL responsible for.”
Comments like these recognize, correctly I think, that practices of lifestyle politics are
meant to serve multiple functions beyond their activist effects, not all of which are aimed
at revolutionary social change.
Some fear that anarchist political critique is actually defused when it is expressed
through individual consumer practices. Of particular concern is the potential for the
reincorporation of anti-capitalists back into the capitalist marketplace as consumers
through commercial appeals to political dissatisfaction. The incorporation of oppositional

107
symbols and their consumers into the marketplace means that they will probably become
implicated in capitalist exploitation at some point in the supply chain. To be sure,
commodification is a material process and, within conditions of mass production, it
usually entails exploitation of people and the environment. Rosemary Hennessey argues
that when commodities become meaningful for identity or politics, this accretion of
meaning only furthers what Karl Marx refers to as the fetishism of the commodity
(Hennessey 1994, Marx 1978). According to arguments like Hennessey’s, capitalism is
deplorably strengthened by this renewed demand for commodities.
Leo was one interviewee who had at one time been enthusiastic about typically
anarchist lifestyle practices like veganism and bicycling, but he had since abandoned
them. When I asked Leo why he had given up many of the typical anarchist consumption
practices, he said that one reason was that, “I guess I thought that maybe the position of
struggle might be somewhere else. That that wasn’t even a struggle?” He also pointed out
that a lot of the lifestyle practices adopted by self-identified radicals, like gardening and
bicycling, might seem appealingly “revolutionary” but that ultimately those choices don’t
radically subvert the state or the capitalist economy. In part, this realization came about
due to the ease with which corporate brands were able to integrate his lifestyle choices
into their profit models. By way of example, Leo voiced his distaste for Whole Foods
consumers and his frustration at seeing, “my desires and my moral position, ethical
position, be so co-opted into a whole other kind of consumer class.” Although he had at
one time felt good about his ethical consumption practices, he stopped feeling so good

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when he realized that he shared many of them with people whose politics and social
position he didn’t share.
That corporations like Whole Foods were able to co-opt Leo’s tastes further
supports my point that there are differences between ethics, personal liberation, and
political “struggle.” Capitalism often demonstrates that certain personal and ethical
orientations may be quite compatible with capitalism, provided corporations are willing
to adapt to “alternative” preferences (and they usually are). Individual practices of
veganism, for example, are not intrinsically incompatible with capitalism, as has been
shown by the burgeoning niche market for vegan food and other consumables. Yet, just
because vegan consumers have been targeted by capitalist corporations doesn’t mean that
the ethical justifications for veganism held by those consumers are eviscerated. Leo was
correct that gardening and biking may not be intrinsically anti-capitalist if capital can find
a way to exploit the demand for them, but there are other benefits to these practices.
Frustration like Leo’s is ostensibly fueled by the fear that commercial co-optation
necessarily implies a draining of oppositional ideological content, and thus causes the
defusion of counter-hegemonic potential. That is, when a taste is catered to, even if that
taste was originally based in ethical commitments, it may only retain a superficial
connection to oppositional values.
The analytical separation I argued for between social, personal, ethical, and
activist effects of consumption practices is important here, because it allows for a critical
assessment of lifestyle politics even in light of corporate co-optation. That is, specific
lifestyle practices can be evaluated on the basis of their various effects and be retained or

109
discarded based on the extent to which they fulfill their intended purpose. To invoke the
defense offered by the organizer of the Anarchist Café, the purpose may not always be to
stage revolution, and every act of consumption ought not be held to this standard.

Consumption and community
I now want to consider one of the more indirect effects of anarchists’ engaging in
certain common consumption practices, which is the production of a coherent anarchist
community. We might think of this as a social effect of lifestyle politics, which exists
alongside personal, ethical, and activist effects. When I say it is an indirect effect, I mean
that it is not necessarily envisioned by anarchists to be the immediate purpose of their
consumption activities, though it can be shown to be an outcome of these activities (this
is why I didn’t include it in my typology of “motivations” for lifestyle politics).
Consumption practices can serve as the context for people to come together, share ideas,
and forge interpersonal bonds. Within the context at hand, individuals’ desire to
participate in anarchist consumption brings them into contact with others, with whom
they can build a social network and even a political movement. Sociological research on
consumption has looked at the formation of “taste cultures” or “cultural classes” among
people who share common consumption habits (Leiss et al. 2005, 240). In many cases, it
may be that such classes are only nominally a community, existing as a united entity
mostly in the minds of marketers attempting to pitch products at them. Yet where
consumption practices are performed publicly, particularly where they take place in

110
“alternative” spaces and subcultural milieux, as they often do for anarchists, they may be
quite meaningful in the establishing of a community of anarchist consumers.
Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption sought to explain how
wealthy Americans established their identities as elites through their visibly sumptuous
consumption habits and leisure activities (Veblen 1994). Although Veblen was concerned
with the role of goods in the communication of economic status, the notion of
conspicuous consumption can also be applied to the practices of contemporary
consumers, who are more likely to define themselves in terms of cultural identity rather
than economic class. This means that, while income levels still structure the
consumption options available to particular individuals, the variety of commodities
available at all price points allow for people to establish any manner of cultural identities
based on the goods they appropriate and the style in which they appropriate them. As
Leiss, et al. explain:
The product has become a totem, a representation of a clan or group that we
recognize by its activities and its members’ shared enjoyment of the product. The
response to consumption seems to be less concerned with the nature of
satisfaction than with its social meaning—the way it integrates the individual into
a consumption tribe. Meaning here focuses on questions such as: “ Who is the
person I become in the process of consumption? Who are the other consumers
like me? What does the product mean in terms of the type of person I am and how
I relate to others?” (Leiss et al. 2005, 200)

Nestor García Canclini observes that commodities are important vectors for the
communication of identity in public life. While goods may fulfill material needs for
individuals, they also carry social meanings, as objects of “collective appropriation,
within relations of solidarity with and distinction from others” (Canclini 2001, 46).

111
Canclini argues that “consumption is good for thinking” insofar as it allows people to see
themselves symbolically reflected in the objects they encounter on a daily basis.
I would argue that for anti-consumers, practices of non-consumption can function
in the same way. Performative refusals of commodities, “within relations of solidarity
with and distinction from others” can similarly communicate identity and instantiate
social relationships. Matthew’s explanation of his decision to throw away his television
set resonates with these ideas. He began by telling me that he hated television and had
thrown his set away around the time of his becoming politicized. He later explained that
he and his fellow activists were influenced by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, as
well as Debord and Vaneigem, and objected to television on the basis that it is a tool of
capitalist control. He went on to note that no one he knew was really afraid that their
television would brainwash them, but for them, “the rejection of TV… was more
symbolic than anything else.” The fact that others were engaged in similar performances
of disgust with the culture industry and its products was crucial for Matthew; he
reflected, “I'd like to chalk it up to deep-seated conviction but in 1999 it was just the hip
thing to do, at least in the anti-globalization movement. In all honesty I was just going
with the flow!”
Often, people are rewarded for “going with the flow” through the conferral of
“cultural capital,” a concept developed by Pierre Bourdieu to refer to the status that
accrues to individuals who possess certain tastes and habits which are valued in a
particular social context. Sarah Thornton’s repurposing of this concept as “subcultural
capital” is usefully applied to those instances in which an individual accrues social status

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in the anarchist milieu based on the extent to which their tastes deviate from the
mainstream and conform to anarchist norms. What distinguishes the normative tastes of
political movements from those of other subcultures is their basis in explicit political
critique. Of course, all subcultures are engaged in struggles for power, and might thus be
thought of as political, but anarchists are somewhat unique in that they quite self-
consciously define their subcultural identity by a collective vision for social change. This
should be clear from the way that most of the practices discussed here are positioned by
their practitioners as expressions of political philosophy. Josef said, “I wouldn’t want to
cipher or hang out with somebody who is like, like really obsessed with the Beyoncé
dance routines so they can impress people at a club, like that to me is kinda lame.” At
first this seems to be a simple taste distinction, but he quickly positioned his tastes in
terms of his political project, elaborating with, “what I’m trying to say is I wouldn’t want
to like surround myself with, you know, people who watch football games and drink
Budweiser and go to strip joints or whatever, who contribute to the violence, you know.”
Importantly, Josef claimed that he doesn’t want to hang out with people who do these
things not just because he happens not to like the activities, but because he sees the
activities as, in themselves, “contributing to the violence” of the capitalist, hierarchal
society to which he positions himself in opposition.
Kate Soper uses the idea of “aesthetic revisioning” to discuss the impact that
politicization can have on individual tastes. The idea is that, as individuals come to
radical political consciousness, their tastes change accordingly. “Persons or objects or
behaviours or practices that were formerly erotically seductive or aesthetically

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compelling yield their enchantment to others that previously held little of those
attractions” (Soper 2008, 580). So, for example, Matthew’s taste for television was
“revisioned” due to his politicization and simultaneous immersion in a subcultural milieu
in which a rejection of mainstream media was the norm. The multiple aspects of
Matthew’s decision to throw away his TV show the complex intersection of politics,
subculture, and taste—the hatred he felt toward television was inextricably bound up with
his rational critique of the culture industry and his tendency to “go with the flow” of the
social movement with which he identified.
A community of consumers—or anti-consumers as the case may be—also makes
it possible for individuals to sustain certain practices that would not be feasible to do in
isolation. Anarchist individuals will depend on others within their anarchist social
networks to enable some of their personal consumption practices. Communal housing
obviously cannot be undertaken by one person; nor can Really Really Free Markets or
Free Stores. Other anarchist consumption practices are greatly facilitated by a network of
informed and skilled people who can share their knowledge and experience with new
adopters. For example, caring for one’s gynecological health with DIY examinations and
remedies is a daunting prospect without the help of people who are qualified to hold
workshops and author pamphlets in which they pass along their expertise. In some cases,
DIY lifestyle practices are only cost-effective if the tools for making and repairing things
oneself can be shared across many individuals. Cycling for instance can require
prohibitive amounts of financial and knowledge capital if attempted by an isolated
individual. In extolling the virtues of having an anarchist community around him,

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interviewee Branch commented that, “when you have a local bicycle workshop it
becomes much cheaper and easier to maintain a bicycle and learn how to keep things
running.” In this capacity, the Bicycle Kitchen in Los Angeles (and collectives like it in
many other cities) is indispensable for those who practice their anarchist politics through
cycling. Where the anarchist lifestyle calls for the consumption of alternative products, a
relatively large number of people with similar needs and preferences is needed to sustain
demand for any given commodity. For example, for fair trade coffee to be a viable
consumer option for any one person depends on there being enough people who demand
it to generate enough revenue to sustain the workers involved in fair trade production.
As my descriptions of the anarchist businesses above allude to, spaces of
consumption also provide venues which facilitate relationship-building and
communication about political projects. A place like a group house or a bike workshop
provides the physical materials necessary for maintaining aspects of anarchist lifestyle,
but it also brings people together and enables them to learn from each other about various
lifestyle practices and how to implement them. Branch said that, for him, one of the most
important aspects of shared housing was that it had given him opportunities to meet
people who taught him about things like bike repair and vegan cooking. The fact that his
group house was seen as an accessible space for community projects and political
organizing meant that there was a “flow of people and information constantly coming
through the house.” Joel had a similar experience with collective housing. In one of his
houses in particular, he remembered “always hav[ing] these people coming in, [who had]
really interesting politics, really interesting experiences, staying there, coming to parties.”

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For Joel’s anarchist community, the social space of the house facilitated interactions and
relationships upon which a political network could be built and sustained.
Indeed, consumption-related lifestyle practices are often a point of entry into the
larger world of radical political movements. Jerome, an interviewee from Philadelphia,
didn’t know much about anarchism until he started shopping for books at The Wooden
Shoe. He told me about how one of his friends had taken him there when he was a
teenager, and he “absolutely loved it.” He explained that it made him feel like there was a
place where people understood his political views and could help him make sense of
them: “I felt like I was home after thinking I was nuts for a long time.” When he had the
opportunity to become a volunteer there, Jerome found himself, “quickly thrown into a
world that was really eye-opening to me. Interacting with customer[s] and staff was
something that put me into an entirely different way of thinking.” He told me that his
experience at “the Shoe” (as he called it) brought him into contact with anarchists for the
first time (apart from seeing them at punk shows) and made him aware that an anarchist
community existed. After a few months, he started identifying as an anarchist himself,
and he still did over a decade later and was still a committed volunteer at the Shoe.
Jerome was already aligned with leftist politics when he got involved with
anarchism through the Shoe. In other instances, consumption may start out as an
apolitical activity, generating community feelings which are later utilized as a foundation
for political organizing. The consumption of punk music, for instance, is a common
factor in many anarchists’ introduction to radical political ideologies and organizing
efforts. Many interviewees explicitly named punk artists and zines as the source of their

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first exposure to anarchist ideas. Several more referred to their participation in punk
scenes as bringing them into contact with individuals whose political beliefs they found
compelling. Listening to records, circulating zines, and attending punk shows are all
consumption activities which may start out as a product of aesthetic preferences and end
up producing political subjectivity and social networks, as consumers communicate and
identify with each other, both remotely and in person, both in “imagined” (Anderson
1991) and in material senses.
Because there are both political and apolitical attractions to cycling, veganism,
and other consumption practices, it may be that people who get drawn into consumption
communities around these practices become exposed to people who do have political
reasons for participating in them. For instance, a collective institution like a café which
makes itself welcoming to its local community regardless of political orientation may
find that people who don’t know anything about worker self-management (a key
component of anarchist businesses) become interested in the political philosophies behind
this organizing principle once they see it in action. Consumption thus enables the
diffusion of anarchist ideals to a broader audience than those who might be predisposed
to seek out radical political discourse.
On the other hand, though, alternative consumer aesthetics may be just as likely to
alienate potential anarchists as to recruit them. For every person who likes punk music,
there are many more who find its harsh aesthetic distasteful. Mainstream consumption
patterns are powerfully sustained by deeply ingrained taste preferences (see Bourdieu
1984), thus the majority of people are unlikely to be attracted to alternative lifestyles

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purely on the basis of their aesthetic appeal. If part of the logic of lifestyle politics is that
it sets an example for others to follow (i.e. it prefigures an alternate way of life), there is a
problem when the example is one that people don’t find compelling for reasons of taste.
Take for instance the Really Really Free Market as a demonstration of the viability of a
gift economy. The idea of picking through a pile of someone else’s discarded items on a
blanket in a public park is just not appealing to many people. Sure, there are ideological
forces that make the idea unappealing, but the mere presence of alternatives does not
necessarily effectively combat those forces. Even if people are aware of the political
motivations behind alternative consumption practices, they may simply not want to
consume like anarchists. To offer an anecdotal illustration, I have a close friend who
dated someone who lived in a co-op that went by the “if it’s yellow let it mellow” rule,
and the entire building constantly smelled of urine. My friend, who was not particularly
invested in the cause of water conservation, simply found this disgusting, rather than
being inspired to replicate the practice or take up the political cause for himself. This
speaks to one of the nagging problems of prefigurative politics—if the conditions
prefigured by radical alternatives are not desirable to observers, their propagandistic
function is null.
Littler makes an important additional point when she says, “sometimes the
celebration of a kind of ‘purity’ of activism can give it a mythic force which, while potent
and generative, can also exclude a wide range of people without particular forms of social
and cultural capital from identifying with it” (Littler 2009, 44). As Bourdieu famously
asserted, “taste unites and separates” (1984, 56, my emphasis). If we are to admit of the

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positive, communitarian aspects of cultural classes, we must also recognize that, as in
other class systems, divisions and hierarchies are involved. Anarchist lifestyle politics
often unfortunately illustrates the darker side of consumption communities and taste
cultures, particularly when it spurs internecine battles amongst individuals whose general
political orientations are similar but who may diverge on specific aesthetic or moral
issues. Grant observed that his fellow anarchists often constructed what he called a
“hierarchy of purchases” in which certain consumption practices were accorded especial
value and used to claim moral superiority over others. For example, he said he knew
“anarchists who would balk at the idea of eating non-vegan food, but they don't hesitate
to fly cross country several times a year.” While these individuals were very invested in
the ethical correctness of their dietary consumption practices, they were not as concerned
with what Grant termed their “conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels.” Grant objected
to this, partly because he felt the valuation of certain personal practices over others would
“fall to pieces when put under any type of scrutiny.” As he put it,
A thirty dollar pair of jeans, a ten dollar pair of jeans, or a free second-hand pair
of jeans? Organic or locally grown potatoes? How could people possibly agree
where to draw these lines? More importantly: why bother? When you come from
an anarchist or anti-capitalist perspective you know that if you trace to the very
root of every single economic transaction you will find either human misery or
ecological devastation if not both.

The impossibility of ethical purity within the capitalist system calls for a certain level of
flexibility around one’s personal practice. Joel explained that he tries not to take a
“puristic” approach to his consumption practices for this reason. As he put it, “everything
has suffering processes involved so I can’t be so black and white about it.”

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Yet, the fact that individual practices are accorded such political significance
within anarchist discourses causes people to be all the more invested in distinguishing
themselves from those who make different choices. The rhetorical construction and
defense of these distinctions often takes a moralistic tone, claiming superiority for certain
lifestyles and shutting down productive discussion about the tactical benefits of specific
consumption practices (see Littler 2009). Again, I renew my argument for analytical
precision and material specificity. Rather than the wholesale embrace or rejection of
political consumption practices, I advocate the strategic appraisal of these practices. This
requires taking a broad view of their potential effects—which range from personal
liberation, ethical righteousness, systemic transformation, and social solidarity—as well
as keeping a vigilant eye on the instrinsic and situational limits to these effects. As we
will see in the chapters to come, issues of communicative potency, taste-based divisions,
and the traversal of scale from the individual to the social prove to be perennially
challenging for practitioners of lifestyle politics.

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CHAPTER THREE
ANARCHIST STYLE

Minty is a young woman in her late twenties. She is cute, with freckles and long
strawberry blonde hair. We are sitting in a coffee shop near my apartment, and she is
showing me her tattoos. Her upper arms are completely covered in colorful ink, but her
forearms are bare. She tells me that that is about to change, that she is going to get them
done on Saturday. She doesn’t have a plan for what she wants the artist to do yet, all she
knows is she wants them marked, “As a way to really make it visible, and, like, there’s
nothing I can do, I don’t wear long sleeves ever…. It’s a way for me to be like ‘fuck you’
to society.”
In this chapter, I examine another set of practices undertaken by self-identified
anarchists as part of their general lifestyle. I use “anarchist style” to refer to those modes
of self-presentation by which anarchists make their bodies into spectacular objects
through which anarchist identity is performed. Whereas consumption practices of the
kind I discussed in the last chapter are often imagined to be instrumental activities that
materially intervene in power relations, the stylistic practices I discuss here function
largely in the symbolic realm. I am absolutely not arguing that symbolic representations
are somehow less real or important than material practices. On the contrary, I will show
that they have significant effects for anarchists, both as individuals and as a collective
social formation. However, these effects can only be understood within the context of
theories of communication and performance. I will also draw on these theories to sketch

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the limits of style as a tactic of resistance, since one of the central aims of this dissertation
is to understand the place of lifestyle within radical political strategy.
Historically, practices of self-styling are embraced by political subcultures less for
what they actually do, and more for what they represent. In other words, the ethical
implications of any particular act of self-styling are fairly minor—whether or not to tattoo
one’s body and adorn oneself in black clothing is not self-evidently a moral question
1
—
yet elements of personal style are often used to symbolize more abstract ethical
commitments held by the wearer, insofar as the style is associated with a coherent
political subculture whose values are well-known. In this chapter I am concerned with the
relationship between the symbolic and the material, thus my analysis here combines
elements of the semiotic and the sociological. I will be concerned with what expressions
of anarchist style mean, but I will also be concerned with what they do. By this I mean
that I will think about how the adoption of a particular set of stylistic practices affects
practitioners as well as observers in a variety of ways. This approach is informed by the
conviction that because meanings are never straight-forward or fixed, either within one
practitioner’s experience or across the experiences of practitioners and observers, it
would be inadequate to formulate an explanation of “why” anarchists style themselves
the way they do and leave it at that. Considering why is important, but it doesn’t tell the
complete story of what exactly is going on when style becomes endowed with political
meaning. In the interest of telling a more complete story, I offer analyses of what

1
Certain religious prohibitions/incitements on dress and body modification
notwithstanding. It has not been my observation that concerns of this nature figure much
into anarchist style practices.

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anarchist style “does” in several different capacities, considering the performance of
personal style as, variously, a tool of self-construction, a consumable commodity, a
means of cultural distinction, a marking of social boundaries, a critique of hegemony, and
a medium of political communication.
In attending to the stylistic practices of anarchists, I draw heavily on a body of
literature known as subculture studies. Though this literature is heterogeneous, I am most
influenced here by the work of British cultural studies scholars such as Dick Hebdige,
John Clarke, and Stuart Hall, whose writings on youth culture in the late 1970s and early
1980s provide a rich set of ideas for understanding the stylistic expression of social non-
conformity and quasi-political dissent. Their research is concerned with the ways in
which marginal communities maintain themselves through shared tastes and stylistic
conventions. These scholars describe marginal social groups as engaging in an “activity
of stylization” (J. Clarke et al. 2005, 54) in which they appropriate objects and imbue
them with collective meaning, such that subcultural styles “produce an organized group-
identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive way of “being-in-the-world”
(Ibid.). In many cases, subculture research focused on what Hebdige (1981) termed
“spectacular subcultures,” those groups whose cultivation of a distinctive visual style
marked them as radically distant from the mainstream. Members of these groups made
their bodies into visual spectacles, demanding to be looked at and interpreted by
observers, both within and outside of the group. In Hebdige’s case, he was particularly
interested in the meaning of working-class, white, male punk style; his observations and
insights are especially helpful for my work because of the overlap between the images of

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punks and so-called lifestyle anarchists. As interviewee Pritha observed, “I think there is
a perception of a general anarchist culture which is based on white, punk culture. It’s
again part of the lifestyle anarchism—black clothes, circle A tattoos, etc.”
In the following section, I further describe some of the stylistic conventions
associated with contemporary American anarchists. As in the other chapters of this
dissertation, it is necessary to say that not every person who identifies as an anarchist, nor
even every person I interviewed, engages in each (or any) of the practices I mention here.
By the same token, some of the practices mentioned are adopted by people other than
anarchists. What is relevant here is that, for the individuals who adopt them, these
stylistic practices are associated with, motivated by, and partially constitutive of their
identities as anarchists, though the interviewees varied in how strongly they
acknowledged this. For instance, one interviewee, Miles, pointed out that he doesn’t
embrace a particular aesthetic because of his anarchism, but he did acknowledge that it’s
probably not a coincidence that his style fits in with that of others who identify as
anarchists.
There are certainly patterns to the likelihood that a self-identified anarchist will
cultivate a particular image: factors such as gender, class, race, and age may impact an
individual’s desire and capacity to present themself in particular ways. Indeed, it should
not go unsaid here that many of the practices I describe in the next section are most
strongly associated with young, white, male anarchists. It is thus a fraught thing to
present anarchist style as I do, for in doing so I inevitably participate in a privileging of a
particular expression of anarchist style as “the” anarchist style. However, to pretend that

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there is not a privileged version of anarchist style would be to misrepresent the real
power dynamics at work within anarchist subculture. Particularly in my sections on “style
as distinction” and “style as boundary” I attempt to give due attention to the ways in
which the existence of a particular version of anarchist style can work to marginalize and
exclude particular kinds of people (with the most pernicious effect being the re-centering
of the white male youth as the privileged subject of anarchist politics). I also do not wish
for this chapter to imply that anarchism as a subculture, movement, or ideology is
essentially defined by stylistic practices; I am merely interested in teasing out the
relationships that exist between style and anarchist identity and strategy.

Anarchist stylistic practices
The most straight-forward practice of anarchist stylization is the adorning of one’s
body with traditional symbols of the anarchist movement on clothing, patches, pins,
stickers, and even tattoos. The circle-A insignia (featuring a capital letter “A” inscribed
within a circle, with the points of the letter often transgressing the bounds of the circle
itself) is probably the most recognizable anarchist symbol, but many others are used. The
colors black and red in combination carry anarchist connotations, owing to the color
scheme of a flag used by anarcho-syndicalists in early 20
th
century Europe (the flag is
bisected diagonally, with each half colored red and black, respectively). A modified
version of this flag in the shape of a star may be worn as a button or used as a t-shirt or
patch emblem. The images of famous historical anarchists, such as Emma Goldman or
Sacco and Vanzetti, are often emblazoned across shirts and tote bags. One interviewee,

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Aisha, commented that she tries to make her “politics more visible” through subtle
symbols, such as an International Workers of the World (a labor union associated with
anarchist politics) patch she wears on her backpack. During my fieldwork, I observed
individuals wearing hooded sweatshirts bearing the names and insignias of other
anarchist organizations, such as AK Press (the anarchist publishing collective discussed
in Chapter Two), whose logos reference historical anarchist imagery, such as the red and
black flag. There’s often an element of DIY involved too, as individuals creatively
embellish their own garments with ink, buttons, and patches that depict anarchist
symbols.
The incorporation of these explicit signifiers of anarchism into one’s personal
style can become so routine as to be taken for granted. Mark was one interviewee who
didn’t immediately “look like” an anarchist; he had a slim frame and buzzed blonde hair
he sometimes covered with a baseball cap. I had seen him on several occasions, and his
clothes were always unassuming, just t-shirts and jeans. Thus when I asked Mark if it was
important to him to look like an anarchist, I was not surprised that he answered no. A few
minutes later, though, he revised his answer: “I’m being a little dishonest I suppose, I
used to wear like my red and black star like every day like a little button or whatever on
my hat … I got political t-shirts and shit like that, a whole collection I suppose.” Thus he
did find subtle though direct ways to make his anarchist identity visible through overt
anarchist symbols.
Anarchists are also known for the prevalence of black in their wardrobes.
Matthew explained that when he began to identify as an anarchist, he habitually wore

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“the 'generic Midwestern anarchist suit,' which is a black hooded sweatshirt, black pants,
black combat boots, a black shirt of some kind (usually a tee), a black bandana tied
around the neck, and a black hat with a home-made haircut.” My own visual observation
at anarchist events confirms that black is the most prominently worn color, with many
individuals dressing solely in black items. I have found three reasons for this preference
for black clothing. The first is symbolic: the plain black flag is a symbol of the historical
European anarchist movement, hence adorning oneself in black is a way of wrapping
oneself in the flag of anarchism, so to speak. The second is a combination of symbolism
and material practicality that is tied to protest techniques employed by some anarchists.
Anarchists at protest events sometimes form what is called a “black bloc,” in which a
large group of individuals collectively attempts to inflict damage on corporate or
government property, sabotage a political event, or physically confront law enforcement
personnel. Because these activities are generally illegal, the participants attempt to dress
similarly so as to frustrate identification of individuals by the police. This is also the
reason why bandanas and facemasks are a common element of anarchist style—they can
be pulled up to cover the face in case anonymity is desired.
2
Of course, anarchists don’t
tend to be engaged in violent, illegal altercations on an everyday basis. Yet dressing as if
one is ready for such an event is a way of indicating a kind of militant preparedness to
fight when the need arises. The symbolism is all the more powerful when one’s

2
In the Southwestern US at least, the bandana also carries connotations of solidarity with
Latin American political causes, such as the indigenous, revolutionary Zapatista
movement based in Mexico. Zapatista-made bandanas, among other garments, are
sometimes sold at anarchist events to raise funds for that movement.

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subcultural peers are all dressed similarly on a daily basis, with the conscious or
unconscious message being, “together, we’ll be ready for the revolution when it comes.”
The other reason why anarchists prefer black clothing has to do with anarchist
attitudes toward consumption discussed in the previous chapter. Black clothes do not
show stains easily, meaning they do not have to be replaced as often as light-colored
garments. This allows the wearer to reduce overall consumption of clothing in the long
term. They also require less frequent washing in order to look “presentable” (though
clearly presentable is a relative term when we’re talking about subcultures), which is
convenient if one is transient or wishes to conserve the money and water involved in
doing laundry. I should point out here that having one’s clothing look or actually be clean
is hardly a top concern for many anarchists. In fact, there may be a kind of cache
associated with wearing obviously dirty clothes, insofar as it is a material expression of
one’s refusal of consumption as well as “bourgeois” standards of cleanliness. In fact,
Matthew expressed his feeling that, among his anarchist peers, “all the clothes had to be
very faded and dirty and gross.”
Anarchists’ consumption habits when it comes to hygiene practices and products
have an obvious impact on the content of their self-presentation. Greasy, matted hair,
sometimes in the form of dreadlocks, may be an indicator of infrequent bathing. What’s
more, anarchist spaces often smell strongly of body odor—further evidence of the
occupants’ rejection of soaps, deodorants, and chemical perfumes. In an essay on what he
calls “radical men’s fashion,” anarchist blogger Adam Tinnell asserts, “Deodorant is for

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losers and compulsive washing a thing of the past. Always wear your hygiene as a part
of your look, if it calls for dirt, then bring it on…” (Tinnell 2008).
Anti-consumption practices influence other aspects of anarchist style as well.
Clothing may be tattered or patched many times over, rather than replaced right away.
The fact that clothes are sometimes thrifted or dumpstered may also account for their
poor condition. The prevalence of veganism means that leather is not generally worn,
while certain fashion brands that provide alternatives to leather products are
commonplace. The intersection of anarchism and bicycling culture results in certain
stylistic quirks, such as short or rolled-up pants (so they won’t get caught in the bike
chain), and the staple accessories of the messenger bag and water bottle. Though these
obviously serve practical functions, they also end up being stylistic markers of one’s
involvement in anarchist subculture. The DIY ethos pervades aspects of anarchist style;
recall for example Matthew’s mention of having a “home haircut” as part of so-called
“anarchist suit.” Clothing, too, may be handmade or hand-embellished in such a way as
to highlight its non-commercial origins.
DIY tattooing and piercing is even practiced; I met two women at a bookfair who
had done their forearm tattoos themselves using sewing machine needles and ink pens.
Permanent body modification (whether DIY or professionally done) is very common
among anarchists. This includes tattoos, facial and body piercings, and oversized plugs
which require the stretching of pierced holes in the earlobes or face. The placement of
such modifications is particularly important, as they are often put in spots that remain
visible at all times, regardless of what clothing is being worn. Recall my description of

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Minty at the beginning of this chapter—she wanted to extend her tattoos to her lower
arms so that they would never be covered by clothing. Minty didn’t ever want to be
mistaken for “normal”; she wanted to permanently designate herself as someone who
opposes dominant power. Hence her assertion that she saw her tattoos as a “‘fuck you’ to
society.”
Indeed, a common thread among all the forms of self-presentation associated with
anarchist subculture is that they are all designed to enact the “communication of a
significant difference” between anarchists and mainstream culture. This is, as Hebdige
explains, the “‘point’ behind the style of all spectacular subcultures” (Hebdige 1981,
102). At times this takes the form of overt representations of anarchism, which, because
of its status as a political bogeyman, is in itself a marker of deviance (the fact that the
circle-A insignia is a ubiquitous graffiti tag speaks to its being synonymous in the public
imagination with notions of destruction and illegality). Simply by marking themselves
with recognizable anarchist symbols, individuals express their dissidence from the
cultural and political mainstream. These symbols become “stigmata” which “warn the
‘straight’ world in advance of a sinister presence” (Hebdige 1981, 3).
But most often, anarchist style is more oblique in its “communication of
difference,” as is shown many of in the examples above. Anarchism is inevitably defined
in relation to dominant political ideologies; specifically, it is defined by both insiders and
outsiders as oppositional to dominant ideology. Hence, the performance of stylistic
difference from the mainstream is homologous with the underlying ideological
differences espoused by anarchists, though it may not literally depict the content of those

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differences. Take Miles’ appearance for example. Miles is a philosophy professor in his
late-thirties. When I met him at an anarchist conference, he was dressed entirely in black.
His head was shaved bald, and he had a long goatee, which he groomed into two braids
secured with colored rubber bands. Although there was nothing specifically anarchist
about his style (there were no circle-As in sight), his dramatic appearance marked him as
standing outside the mainstream. When I later asked him in an email interview if his style
of self-presentation was an expression of his politics, he was hesitant to draw a direct
connection:
If I were to boil down the relationship, it would be one of form not content. That
is, it is not that my undying commitment to wearing black (with a smattering of
white from time to time) is something I think is anarchist, nor is my ridiculous
hair, etc. They are simply an aesthetic, one that I find engaging/attractive.

Yet he went on to admit that it was not a coincidence that his personal attraction to this
aesthetic ends up aligning him with others who would politically identify in similar ways.
Although he didn’t necessarily see his style as a direct representation of
anarchism, he did see it as political because it flies in the face of what mainstream society
expects him to look like, particularly as a philosophy professor at a prestigious college.
This is a striking illustration of Hebdige’s point that subcultural style “challeng[es] at a
symbolic level the ‘inevitability,’ the ‘naturalness’ of class and gender stereotypes”
(Hebdige 1981, 89). For analytical purposes, the significance of anarchist style is less in
its specific content, and more in its marked non-conformity with dominant aesthetic
standards. As Minty put it, while expounding on her decision to cover her arms in tattoos,

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“How does this really say anything about me? It really doesn’t, but I guess it does,
because not everybody does it.”
In the remainder of this chapter, I want to think about what anarchist style does.
What strategic functions do anarchists imagine are served by their distinctive modes of
self-presentation? In what ways do stylistic tactics fail to achieve their desired effects?
What can the effects of anarchist style politics tell us about lifestyle politics in general?

Style as self-construction
The use of style as a means of performing identity is self-evident in modern
societies. In cultures where sartorial options can be freely chosen from among many
alternatives, the way an individual styles themself is a communicative act about who that
person is. Theorists of performance and autobiography explain that such acts of
communication about identity are in fact constitutive of identity. That is, by producing a
narrative of the self through style and other visible performances, a subject makes oneself
into the type of person whose identity can be narrativized thus. Anarchist modes of self-
presentation operate on two levels of representation. First, they may physically enact
particular lifestyle habits, which may be taken as evidence of ethical commitments. So
for example, being dirty is physical evidence that among other things, one does not hold a
job that requires a certain level of cleanliness, one does not wish to expend one’s personal
financial resources on hygiene products, and/or one is ideologically opposed to a
marketing system that creates false needs where cleanliness and hygiene are concerned.
Second, they tap into shared discourses of social identity in which observers associate

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symbols with particular identity categories. Here, it doesn’t matter so much whether the
style corresponds in any material way to an ethical practice, just that it is widely
understood as standing for “anarchism.” Tinnell, the anarchist blogger, argues that,
“While these [anarchist] fashion choices are often portrayed as based on necessity, more
often than not, they are nothing more than a desire to fit in and feel part of a subculture”
(Tinnell 2009). In this way, style is used by subcultures as a “registering of group
identity” which “both consolidates the group from a loosely-focused to a tightly-bounded
entity: and sets the group off, distinctively, from other similar and dissimilar groups” (J.
Clarke et al. 2005, 56). These displays of group identity are useful for individuals in that
they constitute “a kind of performative act, the creation of a fictional self” who is defined
by membership in the group (Gelder 2007, 5). This fiction of the self can then be “read”
by others and used to evaluate ideological similarities and points of political solidarity.
Of the punk look adopted by many anarchists, interviewee Orlando remarked, “if you
want to meet more people who think like you—looking like that is a way to do it.”
The constitution of political identity through stylistic performance can be both
blessing and curse for a movement. On the one hand, it is democratizing, opening up the
group to anyone who wants to identify with it, which allows for a diversity of
membership. On the other hand it can drain style of its value as an index of ethical and
political commitment. In other words, the way someone looks may be an unreliable
indicator of the way they think. When just anyone can adopt the markers of a subculture,
the markers may eventually lose their semiotic linkage to that subculture and its political
ideologies, as the poseurs become indistinguishable from the “real.” Indeed, if a

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subcultural style is adopted by too many people, or even “the masses,” it is rendered void
of any symbolic value as an expression of oppositional ideology. The cultural diffusion of
radical lifestyles, by proliferating the arenas of visibility and consumption, enables the
disarticulation of symbolic gestures from their oppositional meanings. This in turn results
in a bifurcation of anarchist identity—there are those who identify with anarchist politics
and those who identify with anarchist subcultural style, and there is little necessary
correspondence between the two. The communicative utility of an individual’s
distinctively anarchist mode of self-presentation is thereby greatly reduced.

Style as commodity
Once a subcultural style is drained of its value as a representation of political
dissent, the style can quite easily be co-opted for purposes inimical to the movement that
spawned it. Images and styles of rebellion are in fact often fetishized in the mainstream
for their “edge” and other aesthetic characteristics. This is an issue that has consistently
plagued radical movements in consumer society. Radical black activists of the 1960s, for
example, saw their stylistic innovations—such as the afro hairstyle and the raised fist
gesture—appropriated by marketing campaigns targeted at mainstream black audiences
(often by white-owned companies) (Van Deburg 1992). Feminist politics as well have
been enlisted in the marketing of commercial products. The critique of “commodity
feminism” mounted by many feminists has less to do with the diffusion of feminism
entailed in commercialization (most would be happy to see feminist values taken up in
mainstream culture) and more with the way the stylistic markers of feminism are

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generally decoupled from feminism’s political content. In the worst cases, images of
“female empowerment” are used to mask or reinforce social relations in which women
are systematically disempowered (Goldman, Heath, and Smith 1991).
In her discussion of “commodity lesbianism” (the process by which images of
lesbians are taken up as edgy fashions and sold to straight consumers), Danae Clark
makes the point that, “Because style is a cultural construction, it is easily appropriated,
reconstructed and divested of its original political or subcultural signification. Style as
resistance becomes commodifiable as chic when it leaves the political realm and enters
the fashion world” (Clark 1991, 193). Commercial entities have an interest in decoupling
resistant style from resistant projects—the consumer base for the aesthetic forms of a
movement is always far larger than the base of strict adherents to its oppositional
ideologies. Thus commodification generally involves a conscious effort to drain away the
political ideas that are signified by movement symbols while retaining the surface image.
The consequence is that commercial entities profit through the exploitation of groups
whose voices continue to be unheard while their images are circulated at will. Insult is
added to injury when the voice that is silenced is one that is explicitly ideologically
opposed to the capitalist system itself.
Indeed, as anti-capitalists, anarchists find it particularly offensive that commercial
entities might profit off of consumers’ aesthetic attraction to anarchism, thus integrating
anarchist lifestyles into the capitalist system so as to strengthen the system itself. The
style and symbology of anarchism are frequently used to appeal to youth consumers who
may have a vague attraction to the rebelliousness it signifies, though they may not be

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familiar with the deeper ideological content of anarchist philosophy. Symbolic aspects of
anarchist style have been co-opted by entities who do not necessarily share the core
values of anarchism. Imagine, for example, circle-A t-shirts produced in a sweatshop and
sold by a multinational corporation in a store that pays its workers minimum wage and
prohibits unionization. Another example of this is when punk bands, with ostensibly
revolutionary beliefs and aesthetics, are profitably marketed as quasi-mainstream musical
acts on major corporate record labels. CrimethInc. succinctly expresses the dismay felt by
anarchists when such processes occur: “Our rage against the machine is sold for the
benefit of the machine! We’re fucked!” (CrimethInc. 2000, 159).
3
This process is akin to
what John Clarke (2005) calls the “defusion of style.” Like a bomb squad disarming an
incendiary device, aestheticization—often accompanied by commodification—is seen to
render political resistance unthreatening to its targets. It does so by tricking consumers
into believing—or exploiting their existing belief—that the symbolic expression of
dissatisfaction is equivalent to or directly causal of the material subversion of the forces
they oppose. Resistance thus gets enacted through forms of consumption which are in
fact profitable for those forces (or their corporate allies).
In her work on the relationship between subcultures and youth consumption,
Sarah Thornton describes the “aestheticization of politics” as:
a strategy by which political issues are enlisted in order to give youthful leisure
activities that extra punch, that added je ne seis quoi, a sense of independence,
even danger. In the process of coming to grips with the existential and social

3
This is a not-so-subtle reference to the hard rock band Rage Against the Machine,
whose songs are known for their radical political content, but who achieved commercial
success after releasing an album on the Sony record label in the early 1990s.

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circumstances of their lives, youth appropriate the ‘political’ as a way of making
their culture more meaningful. As such this is not evidence of the politicization of
youth as much as testimony to the aestheticization of politics. (Thornton 1996,
167)

Thornton’s interpretation of this process seems quite cynical, with its assumption that
youth who consume in this way are not somehow politicized (either before their
consumer activities or through them). Yet her implicit fear, and it is one shared by many
radicals, is that real political dissatisfaction might be channeled toward the mere
expression of that dissatisfaction through stylistic affectations and away from forms of
dissent which directly subvert oppressive systems. Here, defusion is accomplished
through distraction. Stylistic forms of dissent are an example of what some critics have
called “magical resolutions,” because they “do not mount their solutions on the real
terrain where the contradictions themselves arise, and… thus fail to pose an alternative,
potentially counter-hegemonic solution” (J. Clarke 2005, 189).
Indeed, there is a wariness among critics of lifestyle anarchism that anarchists will
become so invested in the aesthetics of radical politics that they neglect other, more
material projects. In this scenario, style serves as a fetish, a distraction from the real
politics of anarchism. The logic underlying the “style as distraction” position is that if
style was not a concern, anarchists would have more time and attention to devote to more
worthwhile undertakings. But this assumes that the reasons individuals adopt anarchist
style are equivalent to the reasons that they participate in other forms of anarchist
politics, and therefore one is an equal substitute for the other. It also assumes that
“attention” is a quantifiable and exclusive resource, that if one pays attention to one

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thing, one is taking attention away from something else. It is fair to say that there are
some anarchists who get caught up in interpersonal drama over issues of style (see
section on style as distinction below), and it is reasonable to think that such drama takes
up time and energy that might be better spent elsewhere. However, it’s speculative to
assume that were style not an issue for anarchists, they would spend all their newly-found
free time engaged in “serious” struggle.
The arguments against the aestheticization of politics also often fail to account for
the real ways in which aesthetics can be useful to radical movements. Commercial co-
optation certainly works to diffuse anarchist styles and practices beyond a bounded
subcultural milieu. Although conventional wisdom among anti-capitalists has it that once
a political subculture is integrated into the commercial market, it necessarily loses its
subversive power, we might also see something positive in popular culture’s capacity to
facilitate a certain kind of democratic accessibility to counter-hegemonic political
discourses. The commercial distribution of punk rock, for example, is responsible for
many youths’ introduction to anarchist philosophy and culture. Indeed, several
interviewees said they had first been exposed to anarchism through punk music. If some
of those bands had not “sold out” it’s unlikely their radical political views would have
reached many of their fans. Here, I think we can observe a symbiotic relationship
between aestheticization and politicization, rather than assuming, as Thornton does, that
one necessarily precludes the other. It’s not clear that there is always a straightforward
relationship between commercial co-optation and the mainstreaming of political
messages. For the people I interviewed, their interest and involvement in anarchism

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ended up extending beyond just listening to punk music or wearing circle-A patches.
Even if more deeply engaged people like these interviewees are the minority among
consumers of “anarchist” merchandise, it’s not the case that commercial exposure
necessarily forecloses political activism in other forms. As Jeremy Gilbert argues in his
book on Anticapitalism and Culture, while capitalism may try to exploit the creative
products of bohemian subcultures, even anti-capitalist ones, it cannot fully control those
products or the way they are used by consumers (Gilbert 2008, 109).
The key, as far as political strategy goes, is to interrogate where co-optation
actually has the effect of depoliticizing anarchist culture, and where it’s simply a
broadening of the audience or consumer base, and by extension, potential participants in
the movement. Gilbert argues that in fact the most meaningful social contribution that
radical movements can make is to find acceptance for their ideas and practices among
people who would not necessarily identify with the movements themselves (Gilbert
2008). From this point of view, the ideal outcome of co-optation would be that ethical
lifestyle practices get collectivized and established to the extent that they become
adoptable by people and movements who think of themselves as more mainstream.
While it’s true that for some anarchists, the risk of co-optation is enough to render
lifestyle politics untenable as part of anarchist strategy, others are less resigned. As one
participant in an online debate over lifestyle anarchism remarked, “it's been said that
capitalism can co-opt lifestyles etc…. so what, we just stick with the shit they offer us in
the first place? i'd rather run the risk of being eventually co-opted than starting at the
place the capitalists want me to start.” It seems clear that what is needed is ongoing

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critique to assess the material effects of any particular instance of co-optation. Since it
would seem that co-optation is never wholly preventable, perhaps the best strategy is to
embrace the diffusion of anarchist lifestyle practices, provided that they do not become
unrecognizable as being informed by the ethical content of anarchism. Yet such a
strategy may ultimately mean being reconciled to the fact that the practitioners may
become unrecognizable as anarchists.

Style as distinction
It is impossible to talk about aesthetics without considering issues of taste.
Although in everyday usage taste stands for a set of arbitrary aesthetic preferences,
scholars of culture and power have convincingly theorized that taste is never politically
innocent. In other words, individual tastes are always conditioned by social structures
which are often inflected by relations of power, hierarchy, and domination. Furthermore,
because individual tastes serve to communicate social identity (as discussed above) they
inevitably position the individual within social hierarchies. In the words of Pierre
Bourdieu: “taste classifies” (1984, 6). According to Bourdieu, aesthetic preferences—or
“manifested tastes”—are converted into a form of capital—“cultural capital”—that is
used to establish and secure the subject’s position in society (Ibid., 56). There is a kind of
mystification at work here; because the cultivation of taste is usually a slow process that
happens over years of immersion in a particular “habitus,” aesthetic preferences are often
experienced as natural desires. By extension, the differential levels of social power that

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accrue to those with different tastes are perceived as a natural hierarchy rather than a
constructed one.
What are the implications of these propositions for anarchist subculture? As other
scholars have shown, power dynamics over taste are found within subcultures. David
Chaney explains that lifestyles “are ways in which members of a group can display their
privileges, or, more actively, use their mastery of symbolic capital to control access to
desirable status” (Chaney 2001, 82). Thornton introduces the concept of “subcultural
capital” to refer to the way in which people are rewarded for specific tastes within a
specific subcultural milieu. As with regular cultural capital, these rewards come in the
form of social acceptance, respect, and admiration from one’s peers. And, should
particular tastes not be in evidence, the result can be non-recognition, chastisement, or
even ostracism from the group. Even political subcultures which are philosophically
opposed to hierarchy are not immune to such dynamics.
Whereas Bourdieu’s cultural capital is mostly the product of education and
upbringing and has currency within a dominant or mainstream social milieu, Thornton’s
subcultural capital is developed through immersion in subcultural lifestyle and is valuable
as distinction only within the relevant subcultural milieu, for it is only within the
subculture that particular tastes are coded as valuable. Dirtiness, for instance, is unlikely
to bring status to an individual in mainstream society, whereas among one’s anarchist
peers it can serve as valuable proof of one’s ideological commitment. Often, the tastes
coded as most valuable within anarchist subculture are in direct contradiction to
mainstream norms. Joel described the importance, among some of his anarchist

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acquaintances, of not looking like someone who “fit in” with mainstream culture. For
instance, the wearing of a button-down shirt, with its white-collar professional
connotations, was a no-no. He also joked that he couldn’t be a member of Food Not
Bombs because he didn’t own a black hooded sweatshirt. The direct opposition between
mainstream tastes and anarchist tastes maps onto anarchism’s radical opposition to
mainstream ideologies. Just as anarchism is defined by its extreme critique of the
dominant political system, so anarchist tastes are defined by their extreme divergence
from dominant cultural norms.
Because anarchism entails a set of values or ethics, the subcultural tastes
associated with anarchism take on ethical significance. Even where a direct relationship
cannot be drawn—is there truly an significant ethical difference between wearing a ratty
hooded sweatshirt and wearing a clean button-down shirt?—adherence to stylistic
conventions stands in, symbolically, for adherence to ethical standards. As Chaney puts
it, in a broader discussion of lifestyles as ethical signifiers, the “sensibilities expressed in
taste are increasingly imbued with moral … seriousness. It becomes accepted that one’s
tastes are responsibilities by which the person will be judged by others” (Chaney 2001,
82). Within anarchist subculture, this assumed relationship between ethics and style
provides ideological justification for the reproduction of hierarchies based on taste. In
other words, anarchists may feel justified in judging others based on their appearances,
because appearance is thought to signify internally held values, which may be
legitimately judged on the basis of their ethical validity.

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Although it is understandable how such judgments are justifiable to the people
who make them, the history of recent social movements offers many cautionary tales
about the power of such taste hierarchies to breed conflict, which may threaten cohesion
within the movement and ultimately drive some individuals out of it.
4
Furthermore, taste
judgments work to marginalize the uninitiated who may not have had the benefit of
moving in anarchist circles—i.e. have not been long immersed in an anarchist subcultural
habitus. For those who are not determined enough to stick it out and make it beyond the
learning curve, their desire to stay with the movement may be short-lived. Revbaker, an
interviewee who had been involved with anarchism in Denver for several years,
described his initial feelings that the scene there was “closed off” and “cliquey.” It’s not
hard to imagine that many people who are interested in working on anarchist political
projects get scared off by such feelings early on and simply go away. Thus judgments
around taste work, almost invisibly, to maintain the insularity and homogeneity of the
subculture. This is hardly desirable for a political movement that is ostensibly devoted to
broad social change, though it may work to defend somewhat against the “diffusion of
style” discussed above.

Style as boundary
Even while some anarchists end up maintaining social boundaries through taste
judgments, many anarchists struggle with the problem of how to live in opposition to

4
See for example Alice Echols’ (1989) history of the radical feminist movement for
extensive documentation of intra-movement conflicts over style and taste.

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dominant cultural patterns without alienating and foreclosing solidarity with people who
may not understand or approve of anarchist lifestyles. Particularly because of the
associations with violent protest activities, many anarchists prefer not to risk alienating
outsiders with an appearance that would evoke those associations. As Juris observes, “the
same factors that generate affective solidarity among militants may also complicate
efforts to recruit more broadly” (Juris 2008, 87). The sense of cohesiveness offered by
subcultural styles, texts, and institutions may hamper the movement’s potential impact
beyond its existing subcultural milieux.
In the realm of personal style, some anarchists are ambivalent about constructing
or highlighting differences between themselves and non-anarchists. Some interviewees
expressed their commitment to doing political work with people who do not identify as
anarchists. In their view, the adoption of a subcultural style of self-presentation could be
counterproductive in that it could alienate people they were interested in reaching and
partnering with. Rilla was an interviewee in her late twenties who had spent many years
doing what she described as “community oriented or labor oriented anarchist work.” She
had been involved in founding a community center in Los Angeles and running radical
programs for local youth. Rilla had never cultivated a particularly distinctively anarchist
appearance; she found this to be useful when recruiting youth to get involved in her
programs. As she put it,
Actually it would be almost to our disadvantage to look in a particularly marked
way. If I’m gonna go out and do work in high schools, I want the teachers to, like,
want me to come into their classroom, or the parents of these kids to trust me with
their kids. So it’s not that I changed the way I look, but it actually is to my
advantage if I look somewhat unremarkable.

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Rilla’s brother Mark, also an anarchist and also involved in community and labor
activism, expressed a similar view, saying that he wanted to “be approachable” to non-
anarchists. Although the reader will recall that Mark confessed to owning several
political t-shirts, he was clear on the point that, for him, “it’s important to look like a
fuckin’ regular guy.” He felt that, “You don’t have to look a certain way or listen to a
certain kind of music to be an anarchist, it just means you fuckin’ believe in a world
without boxes or borders, you know, without fucking, uh, exploitation or oppression….”
He hoped to demonstrate through his actions and appearance that anarchism is “not
something so hocus pocus.” Mark’s view was that by looking like a “regular guy” and
simply “living by [his] principles,” he could more readily win political allies.
As I alluded to in the introduction to this chapter, the stylistic boundaries around
anarchist subculture are not random. They often map onto other social boundaries such as
gender and race, hence the oft-stated perception that the anarchist movement is largely
populated by white males. While I think it’s important to challenge the assumption that
most anarchists are white and male, it is quite clear that most anarchists who are
recognizable as such through their stylistic self-presentation are male and white. This is
an important point that I want to emphasize. It is not necessarily the case that women and
people of color are less likely to identify as anarchists (although there may be logical
reasons for this to be the case, see Chapter Five). What is evident is that, for various
reasons, women and people of color are less likely to style themselves in a way that is
immediately recognizable as associated with anarchist subculture.

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Angela McRobbie, a contemporary of Hebdige and others who did subculture
work at Birmingham, asserts that the style that defines a subculture is often the style of its
male members (McRobbie 1991, 24). This is certainly borne out in contemporary
anarchist subculture (and is perhaps unfortunately replicated in parts of this chapter—
though I am now trying to account for this fact). My own observations of the LA
anarchist scene in particular support McRobbie’s assertion. At many of the events I
attended in Los Angeles, the men tended to dress similarly and in typical anarchist
fashion, whereas the women tended to dress and style themselves in more mainstream
ways. This was not a universal rule, but it was enough of a trend to be readily noticeable.
One reason for this is that women may feel more internalized pressure than men to live
up to mainstream beauty standards, and thus might be reluctant to reject conventional
hygiene practices or to adopt what one interviewee described as anarchists’ “aggressive”
style of dress and body adornment. In many respects, anarchist style contradicts
hegemonic disciplinary practices of femininity (Bartky 1990) much more strongly than it
bucks dominant standards of masculinity. For some women, this is a point of attraction to
anarchist subcultural style. Yet for others, the style may conflict too sharply with their
pre-existing gender identities.
Racial factors can further complicate an individual’s desire and capacity to adopt
subcultural modes of self-presentation. Aisha was an Afghan immigrant living in San
Jose, whom I interviewed via email. She observed that some of the activists in her area
“wore their anarchism on their sleeves—sometimes literally” in the form of “buttons,
shirts, visible tattoos and … other symbols from a particular subculture.” While she

146
admired the political work they were doing, she felt alienated from them because of their
style. Part of the reason for this was that she relied on a retail job at an electronics store
for her income, so her appearance had to be somewhat mainstream if she wanted to keep
her job. She also added, “my family also did not have a green card and our immigration
status was up in the air. Especially after 9/11. So as a first generation immigrant I had
some general fears about how people, the man, would perceive me.”
Like Aisha, other women of color I interviewed had concerns about the scrutiny
their appearance as anarchists might draw from authority figures. Alma was also an
immigrant to the US, from Mexico. She expressed to me that she had been afraid her long
dreadlocks would arouse suspicion of her radical activities among the officials who
interviewed her during her process of obtaining US citizenship. Gabby, a Filipina-
American, mentioned that she attempted to look “less crusty” when engaged in
shoplifting, so as not to draw more attention than she would already receive as a person
of color. Each of these interviewees’ experiences speaks to the surveillance faced by
women of color in our society. It is understandable that, as individuals who are already
very vulnerable to scrutiny and repression, they would be hesitant to draw even more
negative attention to themselves through stylistic association with a radical political
movement. When one’s body is always already a spectacle in the dominant culture, as it
is for women and people of color, the prospect of inviting further looks may lack a
certain appeal. One of the unfortunate consequences of this reality is that the reluctance
of women and people of color to adopt recognizable stylistic practices may translate into

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their marginalization—and certainly their relatively low visibility—within anarchist
subcultural scenes.
Although I think it extremely unlikely that any anarchists intend for their scene to
be an unwelcoming place for women and people of color, it is clearly the case that
anarchist scenes are often unwelcoming, and the maintaining of stylistic boundaries is a
contributing factor. Some anarchists feel strongly that this must change. A few
interviewees distanced themselves from anarchist style for this reason. Pritha, for
instance, was careful to tell me that she avoids wearing black. Helena too, remarked, “I
like not conforming to people's expectations of what an anarchist looks like.” Adam
Tinnell’s blog, which I have quoted from above, is devoted to contesting norms of
anarchist style, particularly where they work to discipline expressions of gender identity
within anarchist scenes. He argues: “With such a diverse politic as anarchism, being
interpreted and enacted in thousands of different cultures around the world, not to
mention the contributions of anarcha-feminism and queer anarchism, it’s
totally unacceptable to let one or two subcultures dominate the look and the feel of this
movement” (Tinnell 2009).

Style as critique
As I have just shown, there are merits to looking like a “regular” person and
perfectly understandable reasons why a person would not want to mark themself in
disruptive ways. And yet, there are those, like Minty, who see the symbolic “fuck you to
society” as a worthwhile political act. In light of this, can we understand style as more

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than mere representation? That is, can the stylistic “communication of a significant
difference” constitute, in itself, a material threat to dominant power?
At a strictly individual level, deviance from mainstream stylistic standards is a
material expression of resistance to normative power. A desire for autonomy from
mainstream norms is a major reason offered by anarchists to explain their aesthetic
practices. Miles, for example, said, “I feel like I am making aesthetic and/or
consumption-based choices strictly following my own desires/interests.” He explained
that his practices are not necessarily “those requested/expected/demanded by the
mainstreams.” Thus Miles makes an implicit distinction between his own choices and
those of others whose tastes are determined by something other than their own
autonomous will. Like other anarchists, Miles values the power of the individual to resist
dominant, disciplining forces; as he said, “thus, in that sense, I am enacting at least some
tangential element of my politics.”
I would argue that, in itself, an act of stylistic resistance affirms the extant
incapacity of disciplinary forces to totally control the will of the individual. That is, by
the very fact of an individual’s not following the norm, we can see that the norm lacks the
power to dictate that individual’s behavior (see Foucault 1990). It is important to
recognize that this act of resistance does not win new autonomy for the resisting subject;
it testifies to an autonomy that already existed (assuming of course that a resistant act is
autonomous at all). It also does not materially subvert an existing relation of power
between a hegemonic force and other subjects. It also does nothing to subvert a relation
of power that exists on a level other than style. I think the fact that stylistic resistance is

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sometimes described in terms of “insubordination” (see Hebdige 1997) is telling.
Colloquially, insubordination refers to an act of talking back to someone in a position of
authority. In real life, such acts rarely result in a shift in power between the authority
figure and the insubordinate. If anything, the acts may bring punishment upon the
insubordinate, so as to reassert the superior power of the authority. The same goes for
stylistic insubordination; by bucking mainstream norms, anarchists often invite
punishment in the form of social scrutiny and even police surveillance. Resistance may
thus result in a reinforcement of hegemonic power, rather than a disruption of it.
Consider Minty’s forearm tattoos once again. They visibly demonstrate the fact
that mainstream social norms were impotent to dictate her behavior, or else she could not
even have made the choice to get the tattoos. Minty was quite conscious of the social
forces which would still be at work on her after getting her tattoos, such as the
withholding of certain forms of employment based on her appearance. This
consciousness in fact informed her decision to get the tattoos; she saw them as “a really
great way to, like, communicate I’m not joining your world, you know?” Yet, though her
tattoos symbolized a hostility (i.e. a “fuck you”) toward the social norms which would
lead others to judge her employability based on such a thing, it’s unclear that she is able
to do more than offer an angry gesture in response to that judgment. The fact of her
getting the tattoos does not change the fact that she will probably become less
employable as a result. It does not then challenge the systemic disciplinary power of
conformity, which works precisely through such mechanisms as employment standards.
Minty’s refusal to conform does not deprive hegemonic forces of the power to proscribe

150
her social opportunities based on that refusal. Though her tattoos communicate to her
anarchist peers and others that she is committed to living a different kind of life, this is,
again, merely a representation of difference and not a material alteration to existing
power relations.
Hebdige argues that the power of spectacular subcultures lies in their ability to
“contradict the myth of consensus,” by showing that not everyone subscribes to the
dominant definitions of the world and that it is possible to resist the forces of social
conformity (Hebdige 1981, 18). According to Antonio Gramsci, by whom Hebdige is
greatly inspired, in order to win support, hegemonic discourses of power must present
themselves as simply reflecting a reality that pre-existed them. Hebdige understands
spectacular subcultures as counter-hegemonic because they expose social norms as
constructed rather than natural. Furthermore, because hegemony is maintained by
convincing everyone that a “silent majority” has consented to the present system, highly
visible forms of dissent falsify the putatively democratic legitimacy which upholds that
system, in the case of liberal societies at least.
It’s worth asking at this point which hegemonic forces anarchists imagine their
stylistic rebellion to be a disruption of. Where a subculture’s concern is with stylistic
conformity, then contradicting a myth of consensus around fashion norms is a significant
act of resistance. But anarchists are not primarily concerned with style—their political
issues run much deeper. As Miles acknowledged, his stylistic practices are only
“tangentially” an enactment of his anarchist politics. I hold that where style is not the sole
site of oppression, it cannot be the sole means of liberation. Anarchists are concerned

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with many expressions of power, not just those associated with stylistic conformity. Thus
resistance in the form of stylistic non-conformity is entirely inadequate to address the
breadth of social problems that anarchists concern themselves with. As John Clarke and
others argue, style cannot alter political structure. Though they may symbolize a deeper
commitment to political resistance, acts of stylistic resistance “‘solve’ but in an
imaginary way, problems which at the concrete level remain unresolved” (J. Clarke et al.
2005, 48). Yes, Minty and Miles show us that they have been able to liberate their bodies
from certain repressive standards of mainstream society, but the freedom to have tattoos
and odd hairstyles is certainly not an end goal for either of them.
What then do anarchists imagine is at stake politically when they adopt
spectacularly non-conformist modes of self-presentation? I think, whether all anarchists
are conscious of it or not, the point is to inspire collective resistance at a deeper level than
that of personal style. The strategic question for anarchists is whether style, as a
representative form of communication, is up to such a task. There is no guaranteed
connection between demonstrating that no total consensus exists and winning people over
to alternative political systems. It seems that something must happen after the act of
symbolic resistance for it to be anything but an isolated, superficial performance. Thus,
insofar as stylistic critique is a communicative act, we cannot end our strategic analysis
with the producer of the message—we must attend to its consumption.

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Style as political communication
Can style function as a rhetorical tool, which can be used to win support for
projects of social change? In other words, does subcultural style, as a communicative
performance, have the capacity to persuade outsiders as to the correctness of the
subculture’s underlying political philosophy? I will argue that there are significant factors
which work against such communicative potential, as far as anarchist style is concerned.
This is not to argue absolutely that subcultural style has no value—as I hope I have
demonstrated above, it serves other purposes than this. Yet, in the case of anarchists, it’s
rarely made very clear how, precisely, individual performances are supposed to win
approval and emulation from the public at large. In my observation, there is a real under-
theorization within the anarchist movement about how communication is to effect
strategic material change at any level—individual or social. That is, beyond hazy ideas of
providing a positive example through one’s modeling of anarchist lifestyle practices, it is
unclear how the communication of anarchist politics through performance functions to
win supporters, let alone to mobilize collective action. Gordon (2008), for example,
offers claims about the importance of prefigurative politics (see Chapter One) to anarchist
strategy, but fails to offer a substantial explanation of how prefiguration functions as
effective propaganda for the anarchist movement. Here I want to offer a few critiques to
consider when assessing symbolic lifestyle practices as effective political tactics.
First, advocates of stylistic-dissent-as-prefigurative-politics seem to operate with
a rudimentary theory of communication that assumes symmetry of meaning in message
production and consumption. The fact that most anarchist lifestyle practices are based in

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extensively theorized critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, and other systems of domination
is undercut by the fact that those who are not well-versed in these critiques, or in the
stylistic forms through which anarchists represent them, will be unlikely to make the
connections. As Juris points out in his study of theatrical anarchist activism, “although
the meaning of specific actions may be evident to activists, they are often difficult to
interpret for an outside audience” (Juris 2008, 89). Sally acknowledged that people
outside of the anarchist subculture can be unaware of the beliefs that underlie, for
example, a freegan anarchist’s choice to wear old, “grungy” clothes out of a desire not to
contribute to the harmful cycle of consumption and waste. Sally bemoaned the fact that
outsiders are likely to view these anarchists as “hipsters” whose style of dress is a mere
“image,” rather than a material manifestation of their beliefs. This misinterpretation
precludes any possibility that observers might be persuaded by the performance to adopt
their own critical stance toward consumer culture.
Another problem is that the aesthetic characteristics of a particular style may just
as likely disgust observers as appeal to them, particularly where they violate established
social taboos. David Laing, drawing on theories of avant-garde art, discusses this with
respect to punk, pointing out that there may be a difficulty in communicating social
criticism through radical aesthetic forms. Because the aesthetic expression is found to be
distasteful, “The resistance of the audience to the music or other art-work makes it
impossible for any meaning to be registered. The viewer or listener turns off” (Laing
1997, 414). This rings true with responses to anarchist style. One commenter on a New
York Times blog article about anarchists’ efforts to create visual spectacle at protest

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events said, “The costumes of some participants just confirm that their efforts are as
meaningless as their message. Mardi Gras ended a few weeks ago.”
5
A freakish
appearance is likely to inspire confusion, dismissal, or distaste, rather than interest or
acceptance. This is not to say that anarchists have some responsibility not to disgust
people, but it should be no surprise if, having been disgusted, people are not very
amenable to the underlying message. It’s easy to make the claim that people who “turn
off” when confronted with radical style are willful victims of false consciousness, happy
to go about their business duped by mainstream cultural norms and “refus[ing] to face up
to the truth about their lives” in the words of Theodor Adorno (Laing 1997, 414).
Whether or not false consciousness is an adequate explanation for peoples’ negative
reaction to anarchist style practices, the fact remains that taste gets in the way of a
positive reception to anarchist ideology.
The difficulty outsiders have in correctly interpreting the intended meaning of
anarchist practices is further compounded by the “systematic distortion” (Hall 2006, 170)
of radical messages within mainstream culture. As Stuart Hall argues, the production and
reception of messages occur within larger discursive contexts, which influence the
meanings made on either end of the communicative exchange. Unfortunately for
anarchists, the intended meaning of any given lifestyle practice may be obscured by
dominant discursive frameworks which position alternative lifestyles as unserious,
immature, apolitical, or even dangerous. As Herbert Marcuse (1972) observed of the

5
The blog post and its comments can be accessed at
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/protesters-fail-to-bring-down-global-
capitalism-with-costumes-puppets.

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1960s’ radical counterculture, it can be hard to protest “the Establishment” and be taken
seriously since the establishment is by definition mature—the politics of the
establishment come off as realistic because they are the ideology of the existing reality.
In Marcuse’s analysis, “the quality of clownishness and childishness easily appears to
adhere to authentic acts of protest in situations where the radical opposition is isolated
and outrageously weak while the Enemy is almost everywhere and outrageously strong”
(Marcuse 1972, 51). By this logic, any symbolic act of protest against the status quo is at
a disadvantage to be received positively, precisely because it contradicts the ideological
basis of the discursive framework within which the vast majority of people will interpret
that act of resistance. Indeed, another commenter on the New York Times blog described
the anarchists as, “a bunch of 20-something children that think they understand the world,
parading around so that all can see how wonderfully liberal they are. What we need are
answers and solutions, not drama.”
Marcuse also suggests that lifestyle practices that deviate from the mainstream
may alienate those who (correctly) read them as a criticism of their own mainstream
cultural mores. Whether anarchists intend to or not, they may give the impression that
their rejection of norms is done to demonstrate their intellectual superiority to the masses
who aren’t sophisticated enough to have developed a political critique of mainstream
popular culture. Douglas Holt discusses this idea using the term “ideational difficulty,”
meaning that people may fetishize subcultural, ascetic lifestyles precisely because most
people find them difficult to understand, access, and adopt (Holt 2000). Here, mainstream
lifestyles and popular culture are rejected not so much for their detrimental political

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effects, but moreso on the basis that they are mainstream and popular.
6
This is hardly
likely to endear anarchists to those people who feel strongly attached to their mainstream,
popular cultural tastes. Although anarchists might hope that their lifestyles will inspire
people to question their own conformity and repression at the hands of mainstream
culture, it’s just as possible that people may become defensive and reactionary toward
anarchist subculture.
The challenge for anarchists is to produce a message through which people can
accept a critique of mainstream culture without feeling that they themselves are being
accused of willfully unethical behavior—or perhaps worse, unconsciously stupid
behavior—through their adherence to some of its practices. According to Marcuse, there
is a “need for an effective communication of the indictment of the established reality and
of the goals of liberation” (Marcuse 1972, 79, emphasis in original). The problems of
communication experienced by anarchists indicate that it may be important to go beyond
stylistic performance in order to provide a discursive context in which people can situate
lifestyle practices as ethically motivated acts, and thus understand and perhaps empathize
with why they are politically valuable.
In all of this analysis I have perhaps neglected one of the most obvious and basic
reasons why people adopt any lifestyle practice: pleasure. In the case of anarchist style,
the transgression of mainstream stylistic norms may be experienced as a source of
pleasure in itself, aside from whatever ideological and strategic implications are surely

6
Foucault pointed out a similar mechanism at work in ancient Greece: one of the reasons
individuals were incited to police their sexual practices was in order to differentiate
themselves from “the throngs” (Foucault 199b, 40).

157
involved. As Miles put it, his style is “about celebrating and enjoying the margins and the
fringe—to find meaning and pleasure in that which is otherwise marginalized…. I would
be lying if I didn't mention the great pleasure of doing this.” As someone who
understands first-hand the pleasures of transgressive self-presentation and the way such
performances can feel like a fundamental part of one’s self-identity and way of being in
the world, I have no wish to condemn individual anarchists’ use of style in this way.
However, I feel it is analytically and strategically necessary to distinguish between style
as an individual source of pleasure and self-definition, and style as a collective tactic of
political resistance.
The question for individual anarchists is ultimately what they hope to achieve
through stylistic performance. For the reasons presented above, I believe style is of
limited instrumental value to the social goals of radical movements. Again, this is not to
discount its usefulness in promoting a strong sense of collective identity, but, as I have
shown, even this function is complex and inherently problematic. I think, as with any
political tactic, style can and should be deployed strategically. Clearly, context is crucial
in evaluating the viability and effects of any specific act of lifestyle politics, including the
practices of self-presentation considered here.

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CHAPTER FOUR
ANARCHIST SEXUALITY

In the previous chapter, I examined how anarchist political identity is expressed
through visual performances involving the manipulation of personal appearance. In
Chapter Two, I examined how consumption choices are also enlisted in the production
and communication of political identity. Consumption practices (and stylistic practices to
a lesser extent) are understood as material enactments of ethical commitments, in
addition to their symbolic functions. Practices of consumption and personal style are both
quite self-evidently the product of conscious decision-making, though of course they may
be influenced by deeply ingrained (and often invisible or masked) ideologies. In other
words, it is fairly easy to understand how the practices discussed in the previous two
chapters can be discursively positioned by anarchists as sites of activist praxis. When an
aspect of everyday life is relatively open to individual choice, an individual can rather
obviously be held responsible (by themself and others) for the specific choice made. This
means that the degree to which one is ethically committed to one’s political ideals may be
judged by one’s personal activities; in turn one’s authenticity as a particular kind of
resistant subject (e.g. an anarchist) may be read off one’s lifestyle habits.
In this chapter, I turn to a different aspect of everyday life that holds political
significance for anarchists: that of personal sexuality. I present this study of anarchist
sexuality for several reasons. First, it provides an interesting counter-
point/extension/complexification of the analyses I applied to other kinds of lifestyle

159
practices. Like the others, it is an obvious example of the individual body being made
into a site of resistance. Yet it’s far less straightforward to assert that sexual practices are
choiceful in the way that purchasing decisions are. At the same time, it’s not as if
sexuality exists in an isolated sphere which can be easily separated from politics, ethics,
and ideology. Indeed, as I will show in this chapter, sexuality is often highly politically
charged for those who identify as anarchists. Sexual “preferences” are problematized—or
subjected to self-reflection and ethical scrutiny (Foucault 1990b, 10)—much as are other
aspects of lifestyle. Personal sexuality is thus not beyond disciplinarity, judgment, and
even policing. While consumption and style are certainly basic features of everyday life,
sexuality is generally experienced as a fundamental component of identity—sexual
practices define identity in ways that consumption or personal style might not generally
be understood to. But by considering sexuality alongside those other lifestyle practices, I
hope to cast the practices discussed in the previous chapters in the light generated by my
analysis in this chapter. In other words, I want to take seriously the idea that consumption
and self-presentation may be similarly fundamental aspects of identity within
contemporary cultural conditions. The anarchist experience of sexuality which I will
present in this chapter will, I hope, highlight the comparability (though not total
commensurability) of all these aspects of lifestyle.
I also want to look at sexuality because it brings my research on lifestyle politics
into conversation with other theoretical work on the use of performative practices for
projects of political resistance and intervention. Queer theory and queer studies are often
concerned with the issue of performance and its capacity to subvert hegemonic discourses

160
and forces. Specifically, queer work puts the performance of sexuality at the center of its
analysis, both because of the analytic possibilities this offers and because of sexuality’s
patent centrality to social life. This recognition of sexuality’s social importance has itself
been a recuperative project in the face of a hegemonic liberal discourse that would
represent issues of sexuality as somehow extraneous to political subjectivity (just as,
historically, gender and race have been ideologically obscured as salient to issues of
citizenship, democratic participation, and social inclusion). At the same time as
mainstream liberalism obscures the relevance of sexuality, radical leftist discourses also
have an unfortunate history of marginalizing sexual politics. Confronting this history is
relevant to my own work, since I am seeking a more refined analysis of the relationship
between lifestyle and politics than that which simply dismisses issues of lifestyle as
superfluous.
A further reason for my engagement with the topic of sexuality, and in particular
with the specific expressions of counter-hegemonic sexuality embraced by anarchists, is
that, among all the other lifestyle practices I consider in this dissertation, these are
probably closest to home for me personally. Although I do not position my own
sexuality within the context of anarchist political identity (since I do not identify as an
anarchist), I do consider my own personal sexual practices to be (at least partially)
informed by my political commitments as a queer feminist. As it turned out, I found
many commonalities between my own practices and those of the people I studied, and
also between our explanations—both personal and political—for our engagement in
them. My investment in coming to a greater understanding of the way these practices

161
relate to political identity and activism is thus a very personal investment, in addition to
being an academic one.
The expressions of anarchist sexuality I focus on here—polyamory, self-
identification as queer, and (later on in the chapter) consensuality—are those I find most
analytically useful for thinking about everyday practice as political activism. This means
that I am not attempting to provide an exhaustive description of everything sexual that
anarchists do. And once again, I must reiterate that not all anarchists embrace each of the
practices I discuss.
1
However, each of the practices is discursively positioned, and
understood by many of the individuals I met, as an expression of anarchist politics within
the realm of sexuality. After describing these practices and explaining why they are
important to anarchists, I use the rest of this chapter to develop a critical analysis of
sexuality as political praxis. As in previous chapters, I consider the discursive and
material relationships between individual activities, subcultural norms, and social
transformation. Also picking up on themes I explored in previous chapters, I will argue
that there is an important analytical distinction to be made between the material and
representational effects of personal sexual practice. Based on this distinction, I argue that
some normative standards may be worth enforcing within the movement, whereas others
are best left open to situational discretion. I also argue that, for those practices whose

1
There is even some contention over the fact that sexuality even is a regular site of
anarchist praxis (see Heckert 2004). To me this fact is beyond question, though I will of
course grant that anarchist praxis looks different in different places, and particular
lifestyle practices will seem more or less prominent to particular observers.

162
transformative potential is based more on communicative than material intervention,
questions of visibility, audience, and discursive framing are crucial.

Anarchist practices of sexuality
Polyamory
At the 2010 Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair, I picked up a pamphlet titled
Complicated Relationships: Conversations on Polyamory and Anarchy (Ardent Press
2008). The back cover of this publication asserts that “Anarchists have always challenged
whatever seemed rigid and assumed in daily life within an authoritarian system, and
relationships have certainly been up for debate.” As described in the pamphlet, one of the
“rigid and assumed” aspects of daily life debated by anarchists is participation in
institutionalized monogamy. A critique of monogamy has been advanced by anarchist
theorists and activists as far back as Emma Goldman and Volatrine de Cleyre, two of the
key figures in the development of American anarchism in the late nineteenth century.
Both women wrote essays and gave public lectures on the political aspects of love and
sexuality, setting a trend that continues among contemporary anarchists who concern
themselves with these issues.
2

The practice of “free love” (as Goldman and her contemporaries called it) or
“polyamory” (the term most commonly used by anarchists today) describes a romantic or
sexual relationship in which partners have an open and conscious agreement not to be

2
For a concise and forceful summary of Goldman’s position (which is surprisingly still
relevant to contemporary cultural conditions, despite its being written over a century
ago), see her essay “Marriage and Love” (1969).

163
exclusive. In other words, sex and romantic attachments are permissible outside the
couple. It may even be that the individuals involved do not think of themselves as a
couple at all, but are involved in a triad or other larger group.
3
In some cases, a couple
may be “primary partners” with each other, but sleep with other individuals who are
known as “secondary” partners. In other cases, an individual may have sex with several
people without considering themself to be in a committed relationship with any of them.
As the Complicated Relationships pamphlet explains, polyamorists are “people who
expect to get their intimacy and sexual needs met by many people, who have lives more
independent of their partners, both temporally and spatially” (Ardent Press 2008, 5). In
short, having a sexual or romantic relationship with one person does not preclude
maintaining on-going sexual and romantic relationships with others. An essential element
of polyamory is the awareness and consent of all involved. Polyamorists are very clear on
the point that polyamory is not cheating or infidelity or adultery, which would imply
deception and violation of the terms of an exclusive partnership. This is why polyamory
is sometimes also referred to as “ethical non-monogamy.”
The critique of monogamy remains prominent in contemporary anarchist
discourse, as evidenced for example by the recent publication and distribution of the
Complicated Relationships pamphlet. Consider also that there is a chapter on how to
maintain non-monogamous relationships in CrimethInc.’s book, Recipes for Disaster: An
Anarchist Cookbook, which is an instruction manual of sorts for many of the most

3
For a typology of various polyamorous relationship structures involving more than two
people, see the alt.polyamory FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/polyamory/faq/.

164
common practices taken up within anarchist subculture (other chapters initiate readers in
the arts of dumpster diving, bicycle collectives, and shoplifting). Furthermore, polyamory
often came up during my interviews. When prompted by me to talk about their dating
practices, interviewees commonly brought up polyamory, taking it as a given element of
anarchist lifestyle politics, whether or not they practiced it themselves. That is, they
found it salient to specify whether they were or were not polyamorous without me
explicitly asking for this information.
Importantly, non-monogamy is often approached as an identity or orientation,
rather than a straightforward description of actual sexual practice. Polyamory can be
“used as a descriptive term by people who are open to more than one relationship even if
they are not currently involved in more than one” (Ardent Press 2008, 8). Thus a
relationship may be characterized as polyamorous even if, in practice, the individuals
never have sex outside the partnership. In these cases, the understanding and intent of the
partners is that sex outside the partnership is permitted. For example, interviewee Joel’s
relationship with his long-term partner was for a time technically monogamous in
practice, insofar as neither of them had sex outside the relationship. But, he said, “we
always identified ourselves as open because it was like, we understand that that’s a good
thing to do.” By the same token, an individual may identify as polyamorous even if they
are not currently involved in any sexual relationship. As the “Nonmonogamous
Relationships” chapter of CrimethInc.’s Recipes for Disaster puts it, “there’s nothing that
says you have to go to bed with more than one person at a time to be non-monogamous”
(CrimethInc. 2005a, 404). The identity “polyamorist” indicates an individual’s stable

165
preference or need or ideological commitment to become involved only in polyamorous
relationships.
What does polyamory have to do with anarchism? Certainly not all polyamorists
are anarchists, nor do most non-anarchist practitioners of polyamory see the practice as
being political. However, as I mentioned above, there is a long-standing affinity between
anarchism and the rejection of compulsory monogamy. Goldman opposed monogamy
because she felt it mirrored the relation of private property within capitalism: in
monogamous relationships, people are “possessed” by their partners, to the exclusion of
all others (Goldman 1977, 73). Thus monogamy treats the individual’s body, love, and
sexual intimacy as if they are exclusive economic goods, whose exchange values are
depleted or negated when they are accessible to multiple partners. Gayle Rubin, in an
article called “The Traffic in Women,” (the title of which is borrowed from a Goldman
essay), points out that the cultural injunction to monogamy is a side effect of the capitalist
division of gendered labor, in which men and women are trained for different types of
work and are thus dependent on each other and encouraged to form paired bonds (Rubin
1997). Furthermore, the critique of monogamy is also often informed by a feminist
analysis that recognizes the ways in which monogamy has historically shored up
arrangements in which men exercise ownership or control over female bodies (who may
effectively be treated as sexual chattel, hence the “traffic in women” referenced by
Goldman and later Rubin). To reject monogamy, therefore, is to challenge the legitimacy
of patriarchy, capitalism, and the state.

166
Many contemporary anarchists espouse a critique of monogamy which
encompasses all these factors. For example, an interviewee named Grant, a twenty-
something man who lives in Washington, D.C., articulated the connections he sees
between his practice of polyamory and his commitment to an anarchist society:
I think polyamory for me has to do with anarchism being more than just a non-
state solution to state capitalism, but a complete assessment of all forms of
hierarchy…. it has personally helped me address aspects of my patriarchal
socialization. It's a tangible way to express that I really don't feel ownership over
my partners, and it contributes to a level of openness and honesty you often don't
find in monogamous relationships. Additionally it helps me avoid codependent
relationships which I think contributes to one of the great successes of capitalism,
namely dividing people from each other.

If monogamy is seen to support capitalism and patriarchy, then state-sanctioned marriage
is perceived even more negatively by anarchists, since it further institutionalizes
hierarchical relationships and reinforces the power of the state to boot. Interviewee Josef
stated the case emphatically: “I think, like, being married and all that is, like, that’s just a
whole ‘nother prescribed, uh, uh, subscription to patriarchy and it’s bullshit, it’s like
property management, and I don’t, I don’t believe in that, you know?” Grant also
expressed frustration that “the ultimate individual goal in a capitalist society is to find a
husband or wife and sequester yourselves off from the rest of society in a toxic family
unit,” offering this as one of the reasons he practices polyamory.
The anarchist response to the contemporary gay marriage debate further
illustrates the anarchist position on marriage in general. A zine put out by queer anarchist
network Bash Back! argues that, “For queers to appeal for marriage is to desire
assimilation into a heteronormative conception of sexuality, gender, and relationships,

167
things which the state should have no business regulating or legislating in the first place”
(BAMF! Productionz 2009). The Bash Back! zine goes on to say that, “State recognition
in the form of oppressive institutions such as marriage and militarism are not steps
toward liberation but rather towards heteronormative assimilation” (Ibid.). Elsewhere,
anarchist essayist Ruthann Robson asserts, “For anarchists, the issue of homosexual
marriage is akin to the issue of conscripting women. No, homosexuals should not “be
allowed” to marry, but then neither should heterosexuals…. Sorry, but ‘living together
contracts’ are also impolitic” (Robson 1996, 325). To offer an example from my own
personal experience, I made a comment during the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition
conference about my ambivalence about Prop 8 (California’s 2008 anti-gay marriage
ballot initiative). I was met with nods of approval on the point that fighting for gay
marriage played into a liberal, statist agenda. Conversely, when I expressed regret that I
had not done more to support the movement to prevent the proposition’s passing, I was
met with blank stares. I interpreted these reactions as consonant with anarchists’ general
reluctance to validate state legislation of any kind through electoral participation.
In theory, anarchists’ opposition to institutionalized monogamy is less about
advocating for particular sexual desires (for multiple partners, say) than it is about a
radical commitment to people’s freedom to determine the nature of their own sexual
practice, without coercion by the market or the state. Within the discourse of polyamory,
“free love” expresses the idea that sexual activity should not be constrained by repressive
social conventions, particularly not when those conventions are simply an ideological
product of capitalist and patriarchal conditions. Proponents of free love argue that sexual

168
partnering ought to be undertaken only in pursuit of mutual pleasure, not as a means of
attaining power (either social or interpersonal power). Polyamorists often advocate the
ideal that sexual practice should express one’s true or natural desires rather than those
which have been imposed by repressive ideological systems. As a participant in one
discussion of non-monogamy put it
[people] are most often too willing to adjust their lives to some idealized way of
living that they think is right but that isn’t how they really feel. Conforming to
what is socially imposed. People are so confused and have never had a chance to
grow up in a normal environment. Normal in the sense of not being restricted and
having to go through all the authoritarian institutions of sexuality. They don’t
have the opportunity to freely relate to other people and freely be sexual. (Ardent
Press 2008, 3)

The practice of free love is supposed to create a social environment in which people can
learn to cultivate sexual relationships free of coercive, hegemonic values.
Some of the anarchists I spoke with alluded to the fact that monogamy didn’t feel
right or just “didn’t work” for them at a personal level. Minty, for example, said she has
“never been monogamous” because “it’s not in my blood.” Importantly, though, Minty
did not necessarily use “blood” to invoke a naturalizing defense of polyamory—she
followed up her comment by acknowledging that her reasons for not being monogamous
are “both personal and political.” This is where anarchist polyamorists depart somewhat
from the most advocates of polyamory. While many defenses of polyamory make
recourse to evolutionary arguments about the nature of human sexuality, anarchists
understand the ideological dimensions of sexual experience and explicitly recognize their
sexuality as a medium through which to struggle against oppressive, hegemonic forces.

169
In this, polyamory is constructed similarly to other anarchist lifestyle practices, as a way
of unsettling one of the many social and cultural norms “we might be taking for granted”
(Ardent Press 2008, 6) due to our interpellation within ideological discourses. The project
of destabilizing cultural norms of sexuality is what aligns polyamory with queer critique,
a discourse whose relationship to anarchism I will now discuss.

Queer self-identification
Institutionalized monogamy is just one dimension of hegemonic sexuality which
anarchists oppose. Janet R. Jakobsen (1998), following Lauren Berlant and Michael
Warner (1998), points out that state- and market-sanctioned marriage is one of a
“network of norms” that works to privilege heterosexuality (Jakobsen 1998, 518). As
opponents of social hierarchy of all kinds, anarchists are against this social privileging of
heterosexuality. This brings them into alliance with the queer political project, which is
committed to radically critiquing and subverting the hegemony of heterosexuality. Queer
theorists have coined the term “heteronormativity” to describe the normative order in
which individuals are interpellated and often coerced into conformity with practices
which maintain that order (e.g. monogamous partnering). Thus queer activists take their
political project to be the radical destabilization of heteronormativity. As Michael Warner
explains, “Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an
indescribably wide range of social institutions, and is embedded in the most standard
accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration or equal status but at
challenging those institutions and accounts” (Warner 1993, xiii). Anarchist sexuality,

170
insofar as it can be thought of as a coherent type of sexuality at all, is itself usefully
understood as a kind of queerness, since it shares a commitment to challenging a wide
range of normative institutions.
The discursive articulation of anarchist politics and queer sexuality is probably
owed in large part to the work of activist groups which identify themselves explicitly as
both anarchist and queer, an identification sometimes contracted to “anarcha-queer.” The
group Gay Shame, for example, advances a radical alternative to the liberal discourse of
gay rights and gay pride, suggesting that queer sexuality is best nurtured not by
assimilation to mainstream culture or the winning of privileges through consumerism and
statist campaigns, but by direct actions that aim at more autonomy and a better quality of
life for queer people (Sycamore 2008). Since the inception of Gay Shame in 1998, other
anarcha-queer actions, organizations, and publications have emerged with similar
missions and tactics. A recent example is Bash Back!, which formed in 2007 in
preparation for protests at the 2008 mainstream political party conventions in the US, and
has spawned the formation of active local chapters across the country as well as a
recurring Radical Queer Conference. A zine about Bash Back! states, “We oppose
heteronormativity, assimilation, capitalism, the state, and all other oppressions,” and
defines queer as “a threat to authority and hierarchy everywhere” (BAMF! Productionz).
There are many other organizations, zines, blogs, and message boards that advance
similar viewpoints.
4

4
See for example the websites for Radical Homosexual Agenda
(radicalhomosexualagenda.org), and Black and Pink (blackandpink.org), and posts and

171
As one anarchist blog puts it,
Queer-anarchism is a happy marriage of two philosophies that break down
barriers in pursuit of freedom and liberation. As both anarchist-communists and as
individuals oppressed by larger heteronormative culture we believe that coming
outside of sexual and gender binaries is inherently political. (Anarchist Federation
2009).

We can see queer sexuality as a democratic or libertarian kind of sexuality, one in which
the individual’s autonomy is valued above all other factors, including social mores.
Interviewee Miles’ experience with his female partner offers an example of the
valorization of the transgression of repressive social binaries: “what was best about our
relationship was just how non-gendered it was. Not that we shared each others clothes
and called each other ‘ze / hir’
5
or anything, but just that it wasn't caught up in what
seemed to be the same patterns and habits of the world at large in our practices of
heterosexuality.” Though the hegemonic discourse of sexual identity would categorize
Miles and his partner as having a “straight” relationship, they experienced it as something
other than this, since straightness would imply conformity with dominant patterns of
heterosexual relating, which Miles did not feel they were in conformity with.
6

forum discussions of queer anarchism on more general anarchist sites like Infoshop
(infoshop.org), Anarkismo (anarkismo.net), and Anarchist News (anarchistnews.org).
5
“Ze” and “hir” are non-gendered singular third-person subject and object pronouns.
They have been put into use by queer/trans activists as a remedy for the lack of non-
gendered singular third-person pronouns in the English language.
6
As I hope is clear, I use “straight” as a synonym for “heteronormative” versus
“heterosexual.” To some extent this means that straight also describes homonormative
identities, though of course any form of homosexuality is relatively “less” hegemonic or
straight by virtue of its not being heterosexual. The point is that when I say straight, I
don’t mean to specify heterosexuality or homosexuality, just relative conformity to
heteronormativity.

172
A key way that the discursive and political alliance between anarchism and queer
is manifested is through the tendency for self-identified anarchists to also personally
identify as/with/in affinity with queer sexuality. The use of the term queer to describe
one’s sexual identity is for many a means of resisting the way that sexuality has, for
ideological reasons, been parceled out into discrete categories which are assumed to be
fixed and essential characteristics of individuals. To illustrate the way that queer
identification troubles the dominant assumption of a straightforward and determinate
relationship between the gender of one’s partners and one’s sexual identity, consider my
experience with two interviewees in particular. Both Alyssa and Minty told me that they
identified as queer. Both also refrained from providing a definitive designation of the
gender identity of their sexual partners, though the opportunity to do so presented itself
during our interviews. In Alyssa’s case, she implied that she was sexually attracted to
women and explicitly referred to one former lover using a feminine pronoun and name.
Based only on our interview, a logical assumption might have been that Alyssa’s sexual
activity was confined to other women. However, the lover Alyssa mentioned by name is a
somewhat well-known writer and activist, thus it was easy for me to learn later on that
this person identifies as a transwoman.
7
Furthermore, many months after our interview, I
happened upon a web profile of an ostensibly male-identified anarchist which included a
reference to his live-in partner, who was none other than Alyssa. In Minty’s case, her
response when I asked if and how her sexual identity was related to her anarchism was:

7
This person’s identity as trans does not of course mean that she is not a woman, but it is
significant that she openly identifies as a transwoman, i.e. she does not attempt to pass as
a cisgendered person.

173
“my gender identity as queer is not a recent development. i knew from a very young age
that i loved womyn and [this] is very tied to my sense of self.”
8
Other than this statement,
she did not provide any direct information about her sexual identity, though she did at
several other times throughout the interview mention former partners and lovers.
Interestingly, she always used gender-neutral pronouns to refer to these individuals. In
the English language, the use of gendered pronouns is so common that to refrain from
indicating the gender of one’s romantic partners in conversation seems to reflect an
assiduous effort not to convey this information. Whether Minty intended to conceal
information about the gender of her lovers during our interview specifically, or whether
this a common speech pattern for her, it seems safe to assume that it reflects a conscious
attempt on her part to keep her sexuality indeterminate, either to me or in general. Further
complicating her statement that she “loved womyn,” I later ran into Minty at an anarchist
event she helped organize, where she was publicly kissing and holding hands with
someone who visually presented as a man (though not knowing this individual
personally, I do not know if they self-identify as such).
I offer these anecdotes about Alyssa and Minty to illustrate that there is no simple
way to characterize their sexual identifications, nor did either woman attempt to offer me
a straightforward representation of their erotic desires through their assumed identity

8
I’m not sure how to interpret Minty’s slippage from sexual identity (which was how I
framed my question) to “gender identity.” Although gender and sexuality are clearly
related, I am unsure whether to interpret Minty’s statement about “loving womyn” as
more about her identification as a woman or about her erotic attraction to women.
Unfortunately, after I received this response (in an email follow-up to our in-person
interview), Minty got too busy with work to continue exchanging emails, and so I was
unable to clarify her answer.

174
categories. The closest either came to labeling their sexual identity was to use the term
queer, which no doubt they understood to be an inherently indeterminate category. That
they identified as queer actually told me very little about the nature of their romantic
partnerships. Indeed, their ambiguous identity performances enact the idea(l) that sexual
identification is not a simple representation of desire or activity. This is in keeping with
the queer project of troubling fixed and determinate identity labels.
I do want to stipulate here that queer, for all its erotic indeterminacy, is not
politically indeterminate for the anarchists who identify themselves with it. Queer may be
an “anti-identity” as far as sexuality is concerned (and even that is debatable) but it is
most certainly a coherent, if not fixed or essentialist, political identity. By this I mean that
queer definitely refers to a specific and well-defined political project, and thus there is
little question that anarchists, by identifying themselves as queer, wish to ally themselves
with that project. Alyssa, for example, was clear about the fact that her queerness is a
political orientation in addition to being a sexual identification:
I've identified as queer on and off since high school, or maybe junior high,
depending on whether you track queerness alongside desire/sex with women. But
I think that I began to think of myself as queer in a more settled way maybe ten
years ago, and that is definitely political—not just about desire and who I have
sex with but also about an orientation against capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Many anarchists are explicit on the point that they identify themselves as queer for self-
consciously political reasons.
Alyssa’s insinuation that queerness doesn’t necessarily track with her homosexual
desires and practices is particularly important for thinking about the relationship between
practice and identity. One anarchist essayist poses a similar distinction between practice

175
and identity, “Being bisexual does not mean that we [anarchists] engage in sexual
relations with everyone; it just means that we recognize the potential to so engage”
(Robson 1996, 325).
9
Anarchist sexuality in this respect is not about having sex with
particular kinds of people, but rather entails an openness to the queer notions that erotic
desire is and ought to be fluid, and that sexual identity ought to reflect and allow for that
fluidity. For example, when asked to talk about her sexual identity, Tina responded, “I
identify as no preference. Um, I think I lean towards, like, um, heterosexual, like,
relationships because that’s what I’ve been primarily involved with, but I don’t like to
identify as straight. I find it oppressive.” Indeed, the majority of interviewees indicated
that they had been mostly involved in heterosexual romantic relationships. Yet even those
who were mostly or exclusively involved in heterosexual activity showed a reluctance to
completely identify themselves as heterosexual people.
Recall that a similar dynamic of disidentification often plays out in relation to
monogamy. Even those anarchists who are currently monogamous voice support for the
idea of polyamory or have practiced polyamory in the past. Rilla, for example, was an
interviewee who said that she always “ends up being monogamous” though she
understood the political motivations behind polyamory: “If I think about it critically, I
could see why people advocate it [polyamory], you know? It sounds good but I just, I
tend to always end up in monogamous relationships with men.” I think Rilla’s language

9
The way the author uses the term “bisexual” in this particular essay is closer to the way
I have defined queer here. The use of “bisexual” is unfortunately confusing; it is clear
that the author does not mean to indicate that each and every anarchist is sexually
attracted to both men and women, which is what bisexuality is generally is taken to
signify.

176
here is important. By describing her habit of having monogamous relationships with men
as something she “just ends up doing,” she does not imply that monogamy (or
heterosexuality for that matter) is any more natural or justifiable than polyamory. She
puts herself at a critical distance from hegemonic sexual normativity. Similarly, Leo
expressed support—and even longing—for polyamory, but admitted that in practice he
tends to be monogamous: “I wish I was polyamorous. I wish I could psychologically
cope with polyamory [laughs] but, um, I probably couldn’t, so instead I’m a very
reluctant monogamist.” The anarchist understanding of queer identity and the anarchist
understanding of polyamory are similar, in that both are not so much about practices as
about ethical orientations.

Subcultural norms of sexuality
Before considering the broader political implications of these sexual practices, I
want to hold my analysis for a moment at the subcultural level, to consider the effects of
normative lifestyle discourses on individuals within the anarchist subculture. One
interviewee, Emily, listed sexual practices among the things anarchists used to pass
judgments of each other (though she did say that sexual practices were less of a factor
than consumption habits and aesthetic tastes). By articulating authentic anarchist identity
with non-hegemonic sexualities, the subcultural discourses of sexuality circulated by
anarchists work to discipline self-identified anarchists into adopting particular practices
as a means of demonstrating the authenticity of their commitment to anarchist politics.

177
One effect of this construction of authentic anarchist identity is the experience of
internal dissonance and unease when felt personal desires conflict with subcultural
norms. For example, Joel observed that individuals who attempted to practice polyamory
were ashamed when they found themselves experiencing feelings of possessiveness or
jealousy, as if these emotional reactions jeopardized their identities as “good” anarchists.
The CrimethInc. essay on non-monogamous relationships also posits that, “it’s probably
just as common for lovers in a non-monogamous relationship to feel insecure about their
longing for monogamy, or at least some of the reassurances it professes to offer, as it is
for them to feel ashamed of their desires for others” (CrimethInc. 2005a, 398). An
interviewee named Orlando said that he had seen his friends get “stressed out” about their
own desires, putting pressure on themselves to be in open relationships, even though they
did not personally find the arrangement pleasurable. Leo made a similar observation, that
people (himself included) feel pressure to practice polyamory because it is seen as
ideologically preferable to monogamy:
Ideologically, I thought it was fine, but I was really trying to force the ideology on
my reality…. Some people want to be polyamorous but they just can’t cope with
it, like [on] their own psychological level. But you can tell they suffer at it and
they’re making everybody else suffer, and … like, some people don’t want it, but
yet they’re taking that position.

Anarchist scenes evidently have the potential to reproduce the dominant culture’s “lack
of a concept of benign sexual variation,” in Rubin’s terminology (1984, 282), only in the
opposite direction to mainstream society. That is, among anarchists, straight identity and
monogamy are positioned as morally inferior to queerness and polyamory.

178
This “hierarchical valuation of sexualities”—to borrow another phrase from
Rubin (1984)—is used as a mechanism of discipline within anarchist communities.
Unfortunately, the disciplinary effects of subcultural norms may reproduce patterns of
domination for which anarchist sexuality was supposed to be a remedy. For example,
some women feel quite strongly that the anarchist emphasis on polyamory ends up
reproducing sexual domination and exploitation of women within the anarchist scene. In
an essay titled “Polyamory on the Left: Liberatory or Predatory?” one anarchist woman
expresses her belief that “having multiple partners at any given time is not liberating for
women,” that “being open to the fuck, as all polyamorous women are supposed to be, is
men’s definition of liberated female sexuality” (Kreutzer 2004). In Kimberley Kreutzer’s
view, the normalization of polyamory does not reflect the sexual desires of most anarchist
women, but is rather a means of rendering them “sexual chattel to be passed back and
forth between brothers in arms” (Ibid.). One interviewee, Melissa, seemed to share this
view, when she argued to me that polyamory has nothing to do with feminist politics, that
it is merely a justification that anarchist guys use to get away with cheating on their
partners.
It is tempting to hope that within contemporary conditions, individuals would
have the wherewithal and autonomy to refrain from sexual arrangements they don’t find
personally pleasurable or liberating. Yet subcultural norms can be powerful sources of
discipline, particularly when questions of political authenticity and commitment are at
stake. Kreutzer argues for instance that women who do not prefer to be in polyamorous
relationships are disciplined into submission by the equation of authentic anarchist

179
identity with polyamorous sexuality. That is, if women express a personal desire not to be
polyamorous, they are perceived as unserious in their commitment to anarchist politics.
The disciplinary power of authenticity comes into stark focus when women actively
refuse polyamory: “When we decide we aren’t polyamorous, given the male defined
terms and standards, we are called ‘old-fashioned’ a term that by leftist standards is
degrading and humiliating” (Kreutzer 2004). In order to avoid such marginalization
women may adopt polyamory even though they do not desire it themselves: “Because of
the views towards non-polyamorous relationships I have seen many unwilling women
sleep with other men in order to prove that they are not ‘old-fashioned,’ but that they are
in fact new, ‘liberated’ women” (Ibid.). In the eyes of those who see polyamory as an
expression of male privilege, using the practice of polyamory as a gauge of anarchist
authenticity risks disproportionately marginalizing women, or even disciplining their
sexual behavior in ways that seem to mirror traditional patterns of gendered domination.
This is obviously a problematic aspect of the hierarchical valuation of polyamory within
anarchist discourse.
This is not a new dynamic within political movements that have supported the
subversion of mainstream sexual mores. In Emma Goldman’s autobiography she
describes an encounter with a supporter of free love who attempts to seduce her, and her
subsequent frustration when she discovers that he is merely a married man looking to
engage in “clandestine affairs” (Goldman 1977, 197). Scholars of the hippie
counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s have documented the ways in which
critiques of sexual moralism were used within the subculture to facilitate men’s

180
unrestricted access to women’s bodies. Picking up on this issue, Beth Bailey (2002)
argues that while images of liberated sexuality were initially used by the counterculture
to symbolize a rejection of mainstream repression and conformity, such images stopped
being so revolutionary once they began to mirror misogynist fantasies and commonplace
marketing techniques. Bailey observes that ultimately, “what were formerly markers of
opposition now signaled revolutionary intent less than they demonstrated belonging in a
vast and powerful peer culture” (Ibid., 322).
Kreutzer makes an explicit link between this history and contemporary political
subcultures: “The recent rise of polyamory as the preferred lifestyle in the radical
leftist/anarchist circles parallels the ‘sexual revolution’ of the late 1960s. In both
instances, the supposed sexual freedom for women has not been done for our benefit, but
for the benefit of men.” It would be probably be overly cynical to assume that male
proponents of sexual liberation have long been engaged in a coordinated campaign to
reassert patriarchal social dynamics within radical movements. However, it seems
reasonable to think that, by movements failing to adequately understand and address the
ways that resistant practices may reproduce hegemonic privileges, on the whole these
practices may benefit individual men more frequently than they benefit individual
women. The consequence is that systemic hierarchies are reinforced rather than
subverted.
Even if we set aside the issue of whether subcultural norms have the effect of
replicating mainstream hierarchies, the fact that they instantiate any kind of hierarchy is
unsettling for many anarchists. From a practical perspective, the institution of any kind of

181
moral hierarchy around sexual practices can spawn drama which may prove detrimental
to a unified atmosphere within the movement. Take for example the conflict over lesbian
separatism that occurred within the American radical feminist movement of the 1970s. At
this time, feminists who identified as lesbian separatists advanced the view that
individual women needed to live as much of their lives as possible apart from the
dominant subjects of patriarchy, i.e. men. A key aspect of this separatism was abstention
from sexual relations with men. For these feminists, lesbianism or “woman-
identifiedness” was a political lifestyle choice as much as it was an expression of erotic
desire. Because lesbianism had political as well as sexual significance, it became a
criterion for judging an individual’s commitment to the feminist movement. According to
Alice Echols’ historical work on the radical feminist movement, coming out as a lesbian
was treated by some groups as “a way to separate the serious revolutionaries from the
dilettantes and the dabblers” (Echols 1989, 233). Aspects of lifestyle such as “hair length,
marital status, and sexual preference came to determine whether one would be deemed
radical or not” (Ibid, 18). Standards like this proved to be a problem for the movement
when individual women whose erotic desire for men conflicted with this construction of
authentic feminist political identity. This attitude inevitably attenuated many individuals’
commitment to the movement, when they “tired of the moral idealism of the ‘woman-
identified’ real lesbian that implicitly excluded all but a few who could or who wanted to
live up to its demands” (Adam 1995, 146, emphasis in original).
Whether or not all anarchists are aware of historical precedents like this one, some
claim to be opposed to subcultural normativity on principle. The CrimethInc. essay on

182
non-monogamous relationships points out a tendency for some polyamorists to be
“insistent or even confrontational” about the correctness of polyamory as a political
practice, yet it asserts the importance of not “making others feel they must live up to
some standard around you” (CrimethInc. 2005a, 399). The essay also asserts that, “It is
important that we avoid developing a competitive culture of non-monogamy, in which
people must feel shame for wanting anything ‘bourgeois’ or ‘traditional’” (CrimethInc.
2005a, 398). The solution for these writers is to do away with normative standards
altogether: “Everything, every desire and need, has to be respected, or else this is no
revolution after all, just the establishing of a different norm” (CrimethInc 2005a, 398).
But clearly, not “every desire and need” ought to be respected—what of the patriarchally-
perpetuated desire by some men to assert sexual dominance over women?
The problem with a puristic anti-normativity position is that it risks reproducing
the neoliberal model of free choice that treats individual acts as pure expressions of
personal agency, even though systemic power relations are always at work in structuring
those acts. To invoke this discourse is both to dismiss the real obstacles that work against
the adoption of counter-hegemonic identifications and practices and to excuse people
when their choices happen to replicate traditional oppressive relationships. That is, the
likely effect of a movement purporting to reject norms altogether is the invisible
conservation of dominant norms within and beyond that movement. Philosophically, it
might make sense to oppose the way that norms, both mainstream and subcultural,
constrain personal autonomy. Yet, unless anarchism is to stand for a kind of moral
relativism, standards of ethical authenticity, and the dynamics of disciplinarity they

183
generate, are politically defensible. Insofar as contemporary anarchists advocate social
transformation, they may find it useful to commit to some normative content within their
political project.

Consensuality as anarchist practice
To illustrate this point, I want to look at another sexual practice that is strongly
associated with contemporary anarchism—that of consent-seeking. One CrimethInc.
article asserts that “the first and most important matter in bed (or the stairwell of the
parking deck, or wherever you are) is the question of consent” (CrimethInc. 2005a, 474).
Just as anarchist organizations are often actively structured to facilitate decision-making
by consensus, the seeking of consent is advocated as a prerequisite for sexual activity
between individuals. A document disseminated by organizers of the 2009 G20 protests in
Pittsburg in advance of the summit provides one example of anarchists’ attempts to
define sexual consensuality:
Consent is actively and voluntarily expressed agreement…. The following do not
qualify as consent: silence, passivity, and coerced acquiescence. Body
movements, non-verbal responses such as moans, or the appearance of physical
arousal do not, necessarily, constitute consent. Further, if someone is intoxicated,
they may not be in a position to give you consent. Consent is required each and
every time there is sexual activity, regardless of the parties’ relationship, prior
sexual history, or current activity.
10

Discussions of consensuality and its importance to anarchists can be found in many other
places as well. The Slingshot Collective is a publishing entity that puts out a popular

10
The document, authored by the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project Sexual Assault
Group, is titled “Consent Guidelines for G-20 Resistance Spaces and Housing” and can
be found at http://resistg20.org/policies.

184
radical-themed calendar/organizer each year. Several of its annual editions have included
an article entitled “Will You Go Down on Me?” in which they extol the virtues of open
communication between sexual partners as a means to non-coercive sexual exploration.
The guidelines for the 2009 Bash Back! Convergence included points on “practicing
active consent,” such as, “Always ask for explicit verbal consent before engaging or
touching someone” (BAMF! Productionz

2009). At the 2008 BASTARD (Berkeley
Anarchist Students of Theory and Research & Development) Conference, I attended a
panel discussion on the links between anarchism and BDSM
11
, in which all of the
presenters cited the central role of consensuality for proponents of both anarchist and
BDSM. Practitioners of BDSM understand consensuality to be crucial—the willing
consent of all parties involved ensures that the fantasy of coercion remains physically and
emotionally safe for the participants. Certainly, not all sex between anarchists is based on
the fantasmatic eroticization of power differentials, but the fact that this discussion
posited the condition of consent as the common link between anarchism and BDSM is
telling.
The ethical basis for this position within anarchist philosophy is that consent-
seeking is understood as a way to consciously counteract dynamics of domination and
hierarchy that may manifest themselves in personal interactions. An anonymous
contributor to the magazine Rolling Thunder puts it this way, “Non-hierarchical,

11
BDSM is an umbrella acronym that designates sexual encounters involving dynamics
of bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, slave/master relations, and
masochism. The erotic appeal of these encounters is founded upon the participants’ role-
playing with uneven power dynamics.

185
consensual relationships are the substance of anarchy, and we need to prioritize seeking
and promoting consent in all our interactions” (CrimethInc. 2005b, 41). The distributors
of the “Sexual Consent Guidelines” document quoted above similarly argued that “Doing
personal work to consistently seek consent and respect the times when it is not given
helps to combat rape culture, and informed consent, sexual and otherwise, is necessary in
the building of strong, healthy anti-authoritarian communities.” As the distribution of this
document attests, there has been a marked effort to make anarchist convergences into
spaces where people feel safe from sexual assault at the hands of comrades.
The method of “calling people out” is commonly used to address instances of
sexual assault or harassment when they happen within the movement. To call someone
out is to point out, often publicly, that an individual is not living up to community
standards, which are usually rooted in anarchist ethics. Sometimes the term is phrased as
“calling someone out on their shit,” meaning the person has a consistent issue of ethical
failure that they are perceived as needing to work through in order to have integrity as an
anarchist. Within anarchist scenes, people get called out on any number of lifestyle
behaviors, such as not consistently maintaining a vegan diet. The purpose of calling
someone out on their shit is ostensibly to motivate them to alter their behavior so that it is
more aligned with ethical standards. It may also be to communicate to others in the scene
that this individual’s anarchist credentials are not to be trusted. For example, in light of
the fact that some anarchist men may use the discourse of polyamory to justify dishonesty
and infidelity to their female partners, Joel informed me that “guys who are players under
the auspices of anarchism are called out really quickly.” Those who egregiously violate

186
anarchist ethical standards, for instance by perpetrating sexual assault on a comrade, may
even be banned from participation in organizations and events, effectively stripping them
of their social identities as members of the anarchist movement.
I think that the issue of consensuality can shed light on the productivity of
disciplinarity around ethical commitments within anarchist subculture, given its status
among nearly everyone as an absolute ethical good.
12
A “hierarchical valuation of
sexualities” might not look so bad when it works to promote certain ways of doing things
within the everyday context of the subculture. Yet, there is an analytical difference
between the practice of consent-seeking on the one hand, and the practices of polyamory
or queer self-identification on the other. To seek consent is to literally enact a social
relationship in which the individual recognizes another as horizontally positioned in
relation to oneself and treats the other accordingly. The act carries ethical value in itself.
In contrast, to identify oneself or one’s relationship as queer or polyamorous is not to
enact a particular power arrangement. For one thing, these identities don’t necessarily
correspond to a given material reality, and even if they did, there is nothing intrinsically
immoral (within the values system of most anarchists) about an individual’s tendency to
have sex with a particular gender of person versus another, or with one person versus
many people. Thus, as a political practice, identification as queer or polyamorous is an
expression or representation of dissent against a macrosocial system of power in which
some types of subjects are able to dominate others by virtue of their subject positions. To

12
Even staunch sex radicals such as Rubin insist that “the absence of coercion” ought to
be a universal criterion for judging the moral acceptability of sexual practices (Rubin
1984).

187
have erotic desires which are heterosexual or monogamous is not an ethical lapse in
itself. Yet we can see that identifying in such a way as to potentially imply one’s support
for the hegemony of heterosexuality and monogamy is politically unpalatable to some
individuals. Recall Tina’s claim that I quoted above: “I don’t like to identify as straight. I
find it oppressive.”

Identification as contestation
I want to further clarify here what is at stake for individuals who “don’t like to
identify as straight” or as monogamous. Anarchists position their very self-identification
as a site of contestation against hegemonic (or “straight”) constructions of sexuality. For
anarchists, like many other sex radicals, to adopt the label of queer is not to foreclose
heterosexual practices, but rather to symbolically disavow the social coercion involved in
enforcing what Adrienne Rich (1980) calls “compulsory heterosexuality.” What is at
issue here is less an objection to heterosexual desire and more an objection to
heteronormativity, or the idea that sex between so-called opposite sex partners is normal,
natural, and correct (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548).
13
Ideally, as Annette Schlichter
explains, “the object of the critique is neither heterosexual desire nor the subject desiring
another gender but the sociocultural system, which inscribes a heterosexual identity as a
hegemonic position” (Schlichter 2004, 546). Similarly, the anarchist critique of

13
In this same vein, queer anarchists also oppose the phenomenon of “homonormativity,”
a term used by radical queers to critique homosexual identities and relationships that
conform to heterosexual ideas of normalcy, e.g. gender dichotomous, monogamous,
legally sanctioned, etc. (see Sycamore 2008; Warner 1999).

188
monogamy is usually in theory a critique of compulsory monogamy, rather than a critique
of any particular couple’s actual practice of sexual exclusivity.
We have to recognize multiple scales of operation here: whereas normativity is
intrinsically macrosocial, personal behaviors are intrinsically microsocial. As Schlichter
helpfully observes, “queer theory distinguishes between a cultural system that produces
and regulates sexual identities, on the one hand, and heterosexuality as the hegemonic
identity position arising from this system, on the other” (Schlichter 2004, 546).
Unfortunately, proponents of a kind of micro sexual resistance politics often fail to make
this distinction; on one side, straight subjects are held accountable for the perpetuation of
an oppressive cultural system (which they cannot, as individuals, reasonably be held
responsible for); on the other side, queer subjects are attributed the capacity to resist or
subvert an entire system by their performance of a non-hegemonic identity position.
While there is convincing theoretical and empirical support for the ways that macrosocial
phenomena like norms have microlevel effects through their work on individual subjects,
the opposite operation is less well supported. In other words, while norms have
identifiable effects on individual bodies, individual bodies are less clearly shown to be
able to make a material impact on social norms.
In spite of this lacuna of evidence, somewhat grandiose claims for assumed
effects of individual actions on the social order are often made. To take one illustrative
example from the queer liberation movement, a leaflet distributed by “Anonymous
Queers” espousing militant queer politics asserts that “every time we fuck, we win.”
(Anonymous Queers 1999, 589). It’s true that by engaging in queer sex, individuals

189
succeed in doing something that bigots don’t want them to do. But does the act of queer
sex undermine the power of those who would prohibit it? If anything, it exposes the
bigots’ already existing lack of power to completely control queer sexuality. It is unclear
how precisely the exposure contributes to the project of winning more power for queers
in society. Diana Fuss is worth quoting at length on this point:
While I do believe that living as a gay or lesbian person in a post-industrial
heterosexist society has certain political effects (whether I wish my sexuality to be
so politically invested or not), I also believe that simply being gay or lesbian is
not sufficient to constitute political activism. A severe reduction of the political to
the personal leads to a telescoping of goals, a limiting of revolutionary activity to
the project of self-discovery and personal transformation. ‘The personal is
political’ re-privatizes social experience, to the degree that one can be engaged in
political praxis without ever leaving the confines of the bedroom. Sexual desire
itself becomes invested with macropolitical significance. The personal, I am
arguing, is not political, in any literal or equivalent fashion. (Fuss 1989, 101)

Following Fuss, I argue that personal acts may have political significance, in the sense
that they carry political meaning, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure their efficacy in
radically subverting systems of domination. Yet Cheryl Clarke can make a claim that,
“No matter how a woman lives out her lesbianism—in the closet, in the state legislature,
in the bedroom—she has rebelled against becoming the slave master’s concubine” (C.
Clarke 1999, 565). The facticity of the rebellious act is not in question, and it may well
have very positive and liberating effects in the experience of that one woman. However,
Clarke never explains how such personal rebellions might contribute to a radical political
strategy, particularly if they take place in the proverbial closet, and thus lack even
communicative and performative potential. There is no necessary relationship between

190
gestures that are imagined to represent a desire for subversion (e.g. calling oneself
queer), and actual subversion of a network of power, (e.g. heteronormativity).
Judith Butler’s body of work on performativity and subversion is another venue in
which personal acts of transgression are attributed with the power to disrupt systems of
domination. Butler’s theoretical explication of “gender insubordination” (1997) has been
taken up by those who see personal refusals to conform to hegemonic norms as a means
of detracting from the hegemony of those norms. In Gramscian terms, by refusing to
consent to being governed by gender norms, insubordinate subjects weaken the overall
force of these norms. In this vein, it might be thought that anarchist sexual practices make
trouble for the hegemonic sexual order. Again though, it is unclear to many readers of
Butler in what precise capacity “speech and gesture” are able to intervene in the material
realities generated by power differentials (Nussbaum 1999). It can be argued, along
Martha Nussbaum’s lines, that to merely identify as one thing versus another is a
superficial gesture that does little to undercut the material privileges that will still accrue
to the disidentifier as a result of their actual participation in heterosexual sexual
arrangements, and by the same token, be denied to the oppressed due to their non-
participation.
Many of the privileges of normative sexual identity are discursive and
unquantifiable, such as pervasive cultural validation and familial acceptance of one’s
romantic partners. Thus these privileges cannot simply be renounced on an individual
basis, discarded along with the hetero identity label. To be fair, anarcha-queers do tend to
renounce many elements of the “network of norms” that comprise the “complex field” of

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operations which upholds heterosexuality as a privileged social position (Jakobsen 1998),
state-recognized marriage being a major example. But even here, we have to be critical
about the idea that an individual’s personal rejection of marriage matters for the
dismantling of heteronormative hegemony. As Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman
point out,
Butler’s metropolitan polymorphous solution to the politics of spectacle
recognizes local, urban, consumer-oriented spaces as crucial sites of political
transformation; but her imagined ‘gender performances’ never link the politics of
repeated contact between individual and visible bodies to collective forms of
political affect or agency. (Berlant and Freeman 1993, 219-20)

In order to see an individual act of “trouble-making” as something other than a trivial
gesture, we have to return to the idea of performance as a theatrical act. Within the logic
of performance, there is an actor and an audience, and that which is performed attains its
social force through its effect on that audience. Within this logic, resistant sexuality must
in some way be a public performance (even if the public in question is very small);
individual transgressions do not, in themselves, subvert relations of oppression. (This is
why closeted queerness does not even have the potential to generate social change, no
matter how much it is experienced as rebellious by the individual queer subject.) I would
argue that anarchist scenes, as subcultural spaces in which activism and socializing are
inseparable, do provide a sort of sphere of publicity in which counter-hegemonic
sexuality may be performed for others. Furthermore, subcultures in which particular
performances are contextualized within a discourse of politicized sexuality just might
offer the kind of link between individual performances and collective affect and agency
that Berlant and Freeman call for. Resistant sexual practices are positioned by anarchists,

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not as random choices, but as recognizable expressions of anarchist politics. As certain
practices are consistently valued and promoted within anarchist scenes and discourses,
they take on a collective character.
Take the way sexuality is performed within the anarchist community in
Washington, DC, for example. According to interviewees such as Joel and Gabby (and
several others who had lived there), both polyamory and queer identification were part of
normal sexuality for DC anarchists. Such normalization had come about as the ground-
breaking performances of certain visible individuals were taken up by others within the
scene. Joel observed, “What happened is that, cuz, it enters the sexual vocabulary of
people I think, it enters the sexual vocabulary through someone else, like someone has
the idea, ‘oh we could have open relationships, let’s think about this.’” Joel went on to
talk about one well-known and well-liked couple in the DC anarchist community who
had an open relationship, which he felt paved the way for others to try out the practice.
As he put it, “A lot of people fell into that, ‘if they can do it maybe we can do it.’” As
more people “fall into” the practice of polyamory, it becomes all the more visible and
even commonplace within the social spaces of the scene.
Anarchists in DC tend to live together in communal housing arrangements, and
their group houses become gathering places for members of the local anarchist
community (as well as visiting travelers). People thus have opportunities to witness
others’ lifestyle practices that might otherwise remain sequestered in private domestic
spaces. Even the most intimate expressions of sexuality are on display for others to
observe and emulate—everyone can see (and hear) how many and what kinds of people

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someone is bringing home on a regular basis, and who disappears with whom into whose
bedroom. In a culture where sexuality—especially alternative, resistant forms of
sexuality—is often encouraged to remain hidden, semi-public alternative spaces create
the feeling that it is perfectly acceptable—even normal—to be openly queer,
polyamorous, etc. In this kind of community setting, the promise offered by one
CrimethInc. essay, “Look around and you’ll see that there are alternatives…. to the
traditional ways of making love and being sexual that mainstream culture offers us,”
actually rings true (CrimethInc. 2000, 203). Once counter-hegemonic sexuality becomes
a subcultural norm, the performances have transcended individual bodies (though of
course they may remain marginal in relation to the larger social order).
It was interesting to find during my fieldwork that certain practices are
normalized more so in some settings than in others. Polyamory, for example, was matter-
of-factly accepted as a normal relationship structure by interviewees from Washington,
DC. Interviewees from other places demonstrated an awareness of polyamory as a typical
anarchist lifestyle practice, but were less likely to have practiced it themselves; for them
it was not so important as a marker of their anarchist identity. Gabby had spent several
years in the anarchist scene in DC but was living in Los Angeles, where she had grown
up, at the time of our interview. She explained that in DC, polyamory is “the main
relationship type that everybody’s in” and the refusal of monogamy is taken for granted,
whereas in LA, Gabby felt that she was more likely to be met with opposition if she
proposed having an open relationship with a potential partner. Gabby speculated that one
reason for this was the stronger tendency toward “machoness” among men in the LA

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anarchist scene. This difference between the two subcultural environments points to one
of the important factors in the capacity for performative resistance to be effective: a
resistant performance must resonate (at least somewhat) with existing discursive, cultural,
and personal values, or it will not even make sense as “a good thing to do” (to invoke
Joel’s understanding of polyamory from above). It also highlights that while sexuality,
like other lifestyle practices, may be an individual practice, it is not a solitary one—it
relies on the understanding and cooperation of others. A collective commitment to
counter-hegemonic expressions of sexuality is thus crucial for sustaining even individual
practices of resistance.
Miles’ experience with his partner is testament to this. Miles was initially
optimistic about his ability to have a marriage that preserved the radical, non-
heteronormative nature of his relationship with his partner. In an email exchange with
me, he described his disappointment at finding this optimism to be unfounded:
When I got married I was relatively young, and even though I “never believed” in
marriage, I thought it was such a trivial thing that I could participate in the
institution without it having any effect on me or our relationship. I have learned
the power of these structures in how they shape your world and how others deal
with you (and you with them), and don't like it. This so-called intimate
relationship has become an interest of others (and, of course, the state). I guess I
used to think that you could turn these things against themselves from the inside
and it didn't make any difference if you had the right attitude. I don't believe that
now…. So the ‘marriage experiment’ is a failure, from my point of view, but now,
as I contemplate what it would mean to move to another stage, I realize how
caught up I am in the state (I have to ask permission from others to change my
relationship), as well as the inertia of not only our relationship, but the ‘tradition’
of marriage and all the cultural baggage that brings.

Miles did express to me that he does not really feel himself to be a part of an active
anarchist community. It is tempting to speculate that if he and his wife had in fact been

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surrounded by others who re-imagined intimate relationships in the same way Miles
would like to (had they lived in collective houses in DC for example), they would have
been able to sustain a more “radical” partnership, even as a married couple. Merely
understanding that there are other anarchists out there who share his attitudes toward
marriage was clearly not enough to protect Miles and his wife from the material effects
imposed on them by the institution itself and the “cultural baggage” that goes along with
it.
In addition to cultural pressures, the structural incentives to monogamy and
marriage thrown up by the state and the capitalist economy are significant enough that
they may outweigh even strong desires to resist such practices in one’s own life. Even
assuming one has the support of an alternative subculture, the pressure exerted by
dominant ideologies and structures still works against the adoption of resistant lifestyles.
Heteronormativity is deeply entrenched in mainstream culture, and particularly for those
individuals who do not experience a felt, erotic desire for non-heterosexual sex, there
may seem to be little material incentive for renouncing the privilege of heterosexual
identity, though they may see the symbolic political value of doing so. Take as
illustration the exchange I had with Miranda about her and her husband’s practice of
monogamy:
Me: Are you guys monogamous? Do you believe in monogamy?

Miranda: Do I believe in it or are we?

Me: Either, both.

Miranda: Um, I don’t believe in it, but yes we are [laughs].

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Me: Does he [your husband] believe in it, is that why you are?
Miranda: I don’t think so…. yeah, theoretically we’re anarchists who don’t
believe in monogamy, but practically we’re married because he has health
insurance on his job.

The fact that Miranda insists on a distinction between whether she “believes in”
monogamy and whether she “is” monogamous, as well as the reason she gave for being
married (health benefits), epitomizes the disconnect between political ideals and what
may be practically feasible for individuals to do in their personal lives. Contestatory
identification with polyamory may not make sense as a tactic of resistance when basic
concerns like health care are involved. Both Miles’ and Miranda’s experiences illustrate
the point that radical, systemic change may be a prerequisite to individuals’ even having
the capacity to choose alternative lifestyles. Of course, heterosexism, stateism,
capitalism, exploitative sexual power dynamics, etc., do not go away for anarchists
simply because they try not to engage with them in their own personal practices.
However, the production of a strong subculture in which individuals share commitments
to avoid pernicious forms of sexuality can certainly foster different and more appealing
experiences of sexuality for those individuals than can be found in mainstream culture.
As alternatives become normalized in anarchist communities, new kinds of desires,
relationships, and even selves are produced.

Strategic sexuality
Resistant sexual practices are not solely undertaken for the direct personal benefit
of the practitioners. Like other politicized lifestyle practices, polyamory and queer self-

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identification are also often imagined to have activist effects (to return to an analytic
category I introduced in Chapter Two). What then might be the broader social
ramifications of these individual or even collective subcultural performances of resistance
in the form of queer, polyamorous identity? By assuming an identification that positions
them as non-straight and non-monogamous—by disidentifying with normative
sexuality—these individuals are enacting resistance to the process of normalization, or
“distribution around a statistically imagined norm” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 557).
Statistically imagined norms are often used in normative projects—that is, the supposed
fact of something’s occurring most often in a society is advanced as justification for that
thing’s dominance and privilege over other things (Jakobsen 1998, 518). By proliferating
instances that deviate from the norm, disidentifiers might imagine that they can effect a
statistical shift such that the norm moves to the left of where it once was. The logic is, the
fewer people publicly identify as straight, the less “normal” straightness will be, and
ultimately, the less normative power the ideology of straightness will have.
This is similar to the logic behind the construction, within gay liberation
discourses, of “coming out” as a political act. Publicly acknowledging—or “outing”—
one’s non-normative sexual identity, has been a central tactic of queer activism. It is
thought that “declaring one’s deviant, transgressive erotic autobiography is a political act
brimming with the potential to subvert repression and to facilitate the exploration of
sexual practices and beings” (Wilson 1999, 109). In the case of queer identification of the
kind performed by anarchists, what is happening is less the airing of an erotic
autobiography and more the refusal to allow a straight biography to go assumed or

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unquestioned, even if, empirically, the events of one’s sexual life could more or less fit
within a straight narrative.
The displacement of non-conformity away from actual, physical sexual activity
and onto symbolic representations of sexuality, i.e. identity labels, rather ingeniously
sidesteps debates about whether sexual desire is biological or cultural, rational or
instinctual, choiceful or determined, politically innocent or politically valent. Within the
anarchist discourse of queer identification, at issue is not what kind of people one has sex
with, but rather whether, by specifying that information through one’s identification, one
participates in a system that awards or withdraws social power based on this information.
While people can perhaps not be held ethically accountable for what they desire (if we
assume that desires are somehow below the level of consciousness, that they are
“governed by some internal necessity” (Fuss 1989, 2)), people can, it would seem, be
held accountable for whether they discursively position their desires as aligned with a
privileged sexual subjectivity.
Yet, whether or not an individual can be held ethically accountable for their
public identity is perhaps beside the point. The mere presence of queer people does not
qualitatively subvert the dominance of heteronormativity, though it may offer an
alternative that quantitatively chips away at the numerical dominance of straightness by
attracting away adherents. Furthermore, simply exposing people to alternatives will not
be enough to attract them to a counter-hegemonic position. Some ideological realignment
must take place for formerly privileged practices to be displaced by more liberated forms
of sexuality. Such realignment depends, at least in part, on the circulation of rhetorically

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effective arguments in defense of these more liberated forms. Within the anarchist
subcultural milieu, this may be a realistic proposition given the subculture’s discursive
infrastructure; ideas are rather easily spread to very receptive audiences via electronic and
print media as well as conferences and other physical meetings. Yet, beyond the limits of
the subculture—i.e. in the realm of broad social transformation—resistant sexuality
befalls the same trouble as all other forms of lifestyle politics. It is simply invisible or,
more to the point, illegible as a political intervention. In fact, individual transgressions
may serve to restabilize the very normalcy of the norms they transgress, if they are read
as mere whims or worse, as pathological deviance.
What is needed is a discursive context in which alternatives can be made to
resonate with other values. This may have been partially achieved within anarchist
subculture, in which anarchist political philosophy has been articulated to queer
sexuality, in ways described above. But can broader social transformation really be
generated by anarchists’ personal practices of sexual resistance? While it seems clear that
individual practices of sexuality can contribute to the subversion of mainstream norms
within the subcultural space of the anarchist movement, it is less clear that these acts have
an impact on anyone not already operating within the anarchist political framework. For
those who are heavily invested in heterosexuality, monogamy, and marriage, the
knowledge that there are people out there who are not so invested will do little to unsettle
their own personal investments. For people who don’t share the ideological commitments
upon which anarchist practices of sexuality are based, these practices may well lack
appeal, and in fact may just as easily disgust and alienate as attract and inspire.

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This is one reason why some anarchists feel it is strategically ill-advised to be too
insistent on non-conformist performances of sexuality. Melissa for example voiced
frustration with anarchists being insensitive to the fact that working-class communities of
color may not be comfortable with the forms of sexuality practiced by anarchists. She
thought that openly embracing queerness and polyamory had foreclosed potential
relationships of solidarity and had posed an unnecessary obstacle to collaboration
between anarchists and non-anarchists in urban St. Louis, where she had been an activist.
Melissa’s perception of the dynamics in St. Louis may indeed be accurate. However, it
seems problematic to assume that inner-city people of color are predisposed to be
alienated by counter-hegemonic sexual practices. Indeed, although I cannot make
statistical generalizations from my interview pool, I observed no obvious correlation
between interviewees’ sexual practices and their class statuses or racial identities. That is,
interviewees who identified as middle-class and/or white did not strike me as any more or
less likely to practice or support polyamory and queer self-identification than other
interviewees. Of course, the one thing all my interviewees had in common, across their
various class and racial identities, was their identification with anarchism. So, setting
aside Melissa’s potentially problematic assumptions about class and race determining
attitudes about sexuality, she is onto an important point, which is that people who are not
operating with a baseline openness to non-dominant sexualities may be best
communicated with in other ways than embodied performances of sexual resistance.
In line with this, many interviewees mentioned the importance of “meeting people
where they’re at,” meaning they saw the value of accepting and working with people who

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do not (yet) share their goals, values, identities, and lifestyles. The willingness to meet
people where they’re at is at times a strategic effort to forge alliances in recognition of
the cultural differences that may account for differing attitudes toward sexuality. For
example, Mark reflected that he often encounters homophobia among the working-class
laborers he tries to do organizing work with. For him, this highlighted the importance of
cultivating strong personal relationships based on points of political solidarity, so that he
could feel comfortable challenging comments and attitudes he finds offensive. For Mark,
it was important not to alienate people he is trying to do political work with, but it was
also important to him that he not “let shit fly” when he felt it was inappropriate.
It’s worth noting that it may have only been possible for Mark to keep this kind of
attitude because of his own identity and position of privilege vis a vis hegemonic
sexuality—had he identified as queer, and visibly presented himself as such, he may have
found it much more difficult even to establish productive personal relationships in the
face of vocal homophobia. Mark is able to make a strategic choice about how he
communicates about his anti-hierarchical politics, based on his own subject position and
relationship to the people he is talking to. It may not be a choice that is available to all
other anarchists, nor may it be a viable tactic for promoting anti-hierarchical values in all
situations, but it has its utility in this particular context. Given my above argument that
whether Mark personally identifies as queer or not is not directly material to the project
of subverting the social privileging of straightness, I think we can find value in the way
he exploits his position of privilege in order to facilitate dialogue with people who would
likely be unreceptive to queer political performances. Importantly, tactics like Mark’s can

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co-exist with embodied performances by those anarchists for whom queerness and
polyamory are felt needs and not solely representations of political dissent.
A catchphrase among organizers of large-scale protests is “diversity of tactics.”
When anarchist organizers use this phrase, they are stating that they recognize the
legitimacy of a range of modes of resistance, from whimsical theatrics, to combative
confrontation with police, to violent destruction of property. Each bloc involved in the
protest is accorded the autonomy to freely decide which tactics it will employ. This
decision can take into account the social positionality of the protesters. For instance, there
are often individuals who identify as “unarrestable” due to factors like not possessing the
requisite documentation for their presence in the US or having to support young children.
Unarrestables may thus try to refrain from tactics that involve illegal activities. Tactical
decisions can also be tailored to the desired outcome of the action. For instance,
protesters may consider whether their aim is to win public support for a cause, to forge
unity among themselves, or to have an immediate material effect on an unjust situation,
each of which is a valid reason for action but each of which might call for a different
tactical approach.
I think the case of anarchist sexuality shows that the diversity of tactics principle
can be productively applied to lifestyle politics as well. What this principle requires, in
any case, is a fundamental commitment to reflexive critique. That is, activists must be
constantly vigilant about considering the ramifications—both intended and unintended,
both direct and indirect—of any given instance of a practice. For example, if one is
considering one’s own practice of polyamory, one has to ask whether it satisfies one’s

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personal desires and needs, whether it loosens the grip of capitalism and patriarchy on
one’s own personal experience, whether it communicates an indictment of capitalism and
patriarchy to others, whether it demonstrates to others that polyamory is a viable
alternative to monogamy, etc., etc. And one has to ask these questions in any given
situation, with the understanding that the answers will change depending on who is
involved, where they are, and who is watching.

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CHAPTER FIVE
ANARCHIST IDENTITY POLITICS

In the previous three chapters, I have examined specific practices of anarchist
lifestyle politics. For the most part, these discussions have assumed subjects acting in the
name of a coherent political identity. In this chapter, I want to dig deeper into the very
idea of anarchist identity. My previous chapter, on sexuality, argued that self-
identification is itself a political practice, which as such can be analyzed in similar
fashion to other everyday activities which are of concern in this study of lifestyle politics.
This chapter will look at anarchist identification: how anarchists experience, think about,
and talk about their identification with anarchism. I open anarchist identification up to
critical assessment, to questions of meaning, effects, and strategy, much as I have done
for other aspects of lifestyle politics throughout this dissertation. I ask, what do people
mean when they say they are anarchists? Why do they choose to identify themselves in
this way? How does anarchist identity function as a disciplinary discourse? What kinds of
subjects and behaviors does it produce and foreclose?
In considering this practice of political identity, I am unavoidably treading into
the territory of “identity politics,” a path much traveled by cultural scholars and activists.
The concept of identity politics was introduced into social movement discourse in the
early 1970s by a group of black feminists known as the Combahee River Collective.
Their “Black Feminist Statement” expressed the idea that people who identify with a
particular social category are best positioned to undertake political action on behalf of

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that category. Although the Collective was clear on the point that they did not mean to
endorse an essentialist understanding of identity in which social identities are either
natural or fixed, identity politics has at times been taken up in ways that seem to assume a
direct and immutable relationship between social identity and political commitments. As
Diana Fuss puts it, in such cases, “the link between identity and politics is causally and
teleologically defined; for practitioners of identity politics, identity necessarily
determines a particular kind of politics” (Fuss 1989, 99). One of the major problems with
this understanding of the relationship between identity and politics is a presumption that
identification with an oppressed social group inevitably produces an oppositional political
subjectivity. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty concisely asserts, “I do challenge the notion ‘I
am, therefore I resist!’ That is, I challenge the idea that simply being a woman, or being
poor or black or Latino, is sufficient ground to assume a politicized oppositional identity”
(Mohanty 2003, 77). Clearly, not all women are feminists in the sense of having a
developed critique of and strategic orientation against patriarchy. By the same token, not
everyone who struggles against patriarchy identifies as a woman. Is woman a useful
identity category for feminist politics then? This question has occupied feminist theorists
for decades; I won’t attempt here to address the many positions that have been taken on
it. There is no question that history has shown that identities make effective symbols for
movements to rally around and draw strength from. The kind of question I am actually
more interested in probing here is whether feminist is a useful identity category for
feminist politics. That is, I am less interested in the relationship between female identity
and feminism, for example, and more interested in examining “feminist” as an identity in

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itself. In this scenario, feminism is a discourse that invites investment by the individual,
and it is this political identification that then becomes a defining aspect of the self and a
motivator for political action. It is this feminist self’s subsequent contribution to the
critique and subversion of patriarchy that matters.
In constructing this picture of political identity, I am extending Chandra
Mohanty’s discussion of the “politics of struggle” (Mohanty 2003). In the politics of
struggle, individuals unite with others on the basis of common ideologies and goals,
without making claims to any essential traits or even shared experiences. In political
struggle, individuals may find an epistemic and emotional “home,” which Mohanty
explains is
home, not as a comfortable, stable, inherited, and familiar space but instead as an
imaginative, politically charged space in which the familiarity and sense of
affection and commitment lay in shared collective analysis of social injustice, as
well as a vision of radical transformation. (Ibid., 128)

In many instances, queer theory and activism epitomizes this kind of politics. Queer
theory posits that identities are fluid and that experiences of subjectivity cannot be
adequately captured by fixed, binary categories, such as heterosexual and homosexual
(Sedgwick 1990). As a political project, queer seeks to disrupt disciplinary discourses
that would construct and enforce the fixity of identity, as well as the social dominance of
straight sexuality over other expressions of sexuality which are constructed as deviant. As
such, Steven Seidman explains, “queers are not united by any unitary identity but only by
their opposition to disciplining, normalizing social forces” (Seidman 1993, 133). I do
think that Seidman overstates the case somewhat when he says that queers are not united

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in a common identity, though he is correct in observing that queers depart from the kind
of common identity that is promoted in the model of identity politics elaborated by the
Combahee River Collective. I would argue that queers’ shared “opposition to
disciplining, normalizing forces” itself constitutes a kind of unitary identity which can
mobilize political action. “Unitary” must be understood quite loosely here; in keeping
with its theoretical underpinnings, what “queer” signifies to those who identify with it is
itself variable and open to contestation (Duggan 2004).
This picture of identity-based resistance has resonance beyond the politics of
sexuality. Manuel Castells provides documentation of several movements in which
individuals unite around shared values and self-identifications to become “collective
agents of social transformation” (Castells 2003, 70). Many of these movements, such as
the “green movement,” are not identity movements in the traditional sense of
representing a pre-existing sociological community; rather they are comprised of people
who come together and mobilize action around a shared identification with a particular
political project. Movements of this sort embody a “politics of articulation,” where
community is seen as contested, negotiated, and always in process (Hall 1993, 137; Reed
2005, 127). I think one of the promising things about a political identity like anarchist is
that there is no mystification of the fact that anarchist identity is thoroughly constructed,
rather than somehow immutably tied to a given social position. It is self-evident that
anarchism is, at its core, a political discourse which makes no claim to speak for
particular kinds of people. Anarchist scholar Murray Bookchin celebrates the fact that
anarchists may form an “ethical community” rather than a “sociological community”

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(Gemie 1994). In other words they are explicitly united on the basis of shared ideas and
goals instead of a pre-existing shared condition such as geographical location, class
status, gender, or ethnicity (Curran 2006; Williams 2007). In the case of those who share
an anarchist political identity, they are not fighting on behalf of anarchists, but rather
struggling to achieve anarchy as a social reality for all. In practice, anarchist movements
may only speak for and to particular kinds of persons—an issue I will discuss in more
detail below—but this is not essential to anarchism. On the contrary, it seems anarchism
has all the potential in the world to be a politics of articulation, where the anarchist
community and its projects are continually contested and negotiated. An interviewee
named Branch finds anarchism appealing for just this reason:
it’s a constant learning process that you develop over time, your living conditions
change, your understanding of the world changes, and so for me I see anarchism
as, like, an ongoing thing that grows with me and my understanding of it grows
and my conception of how it should operate or what it means changes and grows.

According to Stuart Hall, the absence of definitive claims about the content of
identities is what may characterize effective political movements in postmodern society.
Hall offers the notion of “arbitrary closure” to describe the way in which social groups
temporarily accept particular meanings as defining themselves and motivating political
actions (Hall 1996b). Because meaning is open to endless shift and contestation,
individuals’ self-definitions of identity and politics are contingent and “necessarily
fictional” (Ibid.). Yet this does not make identity meaningless as an organizing discourse
for politics. As Hall says,
it is possible to think about the nature of new political identities which isn’t
founded on the notion of some absolute integral self and which clearly can’t arise

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from some fully closed narrative of the self, a politics which accepts the ‘no
necessary or essential correspondence’ of anything with anything. (Ibid., 18)

Contemporary anarchism would seem to be a site where we could talk about political
identity without having to accept a “necessary or essential correspondence” of social
position with ethical orientation. As evidenced by the discussions of various lifestyle
practices in previous chapters, it’s clear that those who identify with anarchism use this
identity as an orienting framework for their everyday practice. At the same time, I
propose that because it is so clearly a discursive construction, anarchism is open to the
kind of fluidity and situational adaptability which are necessary for political movements
to respond to specific tactical considerations, as well as overarching cultural conditions.
Despite this promise, there is no denying that anarchism, insofar as it is taken up
as a category of identity, is intrinsically limiting in ways that anti-identitarians find
troublesome. I will be discussing some of the limitations of anarchist identity in this
chapter. But I will also argue that limitations are not intrinsically bad. Indeed, limitations,
as material expressions of power, are as productive as they are constraining. In the words
of Steven Seidman, “As disciplining forces, identities are not only self-limiting and
productive of hierarchies but are enabling or productive of social collectivities, moral
bonds, and political agency” (Seidman 1993, 134). Disciplinary power is that which
motivates subjects to think and act in particular ways, tending toward a particular end
result (Foucault 1990a), a result that may in fact be strategically advantageous for a
radical political project. Keeping this in mind, I attempt with this chapter to use accounts
of anarchist identity, as expressed to me in personal interviews and as elaborated in the

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writings of contemporary anarchists, to draw grounded conclusions about what Castells
(2003) has inspirationally called the “power of identity.”

Anarchism as identity category
The issue of whether and how to identify oneself as an anarchist is one that is
grappled with by many individuals within the movement. Individuals may also manifest a
hesitancy to define anarchism (or the nature of their affinity with it) in any final way.
This position is reflective of the anti-essentialist critique of identity politics that came to
prominence in radical social movements starting in the 1980s. Some also follow the
radical poststructuralist line that identities are intrinsically normative and thus to be
rejected altogether.
1
In this view, even to identify as an anarchist is to contradict anarchist
philosophy. As anarchist anthropologist David Graeber succinctly puts it, “there are some
who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that
they are sometimes reluctant to call themselves ‘anarchists’ for that very reason”
(Graeber 2002). One interviewee, Tom, expressed his belief that “all categories of
identification … are kind of silly,” but he also conceded, “I will identify as an anarchist if
it’s necessary for certain means.” Tom was similar to many of the other individuals I
interviewed, in that the degree to which they claimed and performed anarchist identity
depended on the context in which they found themselves at any particular moment.
Several other interviewees remarked that they would identify as an anarchist or not

1
See Heckert (2004) for a brief introduction to the poststructuralist critique of identity
politics, from an anarchist perspective.

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depending on whom they were talking with. For example, Pritha said that she calls
herself an anarchist, but that she is less likely to do so when working with activists of
color, like herself, who have historically felt unwelcome in the anarchist movement
(more on this issue below). Joel, too, said that in situations where he felt the term
anarchist was likely to be misunderstood, it would be disadvantageous to identify himself
that way. He said that he had observed people in his activist communities turning away
from calling themselves anarchists because it can be seen as “affronting” or “combative”
even to identify in this way.
Indeed, several interviewees expressed wariness about the potential for their
identification as anarchists to alienate potential allies. Especially because anarchist
philosophy is commonly mischaracterized and misunderstood, there is a danger that the
label could turn people away before they even had a chance to establish common political
ground. Mark explained that when he was younger and less experienced with political
organizing he had been “a lot more quick to … let people know,‘hey, I’m an anarchist,’”
but he had since changed his approach:
I don’t find myself jumping to let them know that I’m an anarchist like right off
the bat…. I think more [so] I try to … develop relationships, like have a practice,
principles, and politics, and then at a point that it might be relevant, talk to people
in specific terms about anarchism. But it’s not like a first priority for me as far as
organizing is concerned.

Alma also related that, in her experience with community organizations which were not
explicitly anarchist-identified, “there was a fear of calling yourself an anarchist because
then you would be alienated or sort of laughed at or something.”

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Anarchist activist and writer Uri Gordon observes that “an explicit reference to
anarchism might be seen as exclusive, one which does not admit many of the individuals
and movements that activists cooperate with and with whom they have solidarity”
(Gordon 2008, 40). Jamie Heckert also points out that when people identify as anarchists,
this unavoidably constructs a dualism between themselves and those who do not identify
this way. For Heckert, this dualism is a needless “construction of boundaries around an
anarchist identity [which] excludes people based on their status, rather than their
(potential) political views” (Heckert 2004, 114). He does not like the idea that people
may choose not to work together based on whether they identify as anarchists, rather than
on the compatibility of their political projects. I see this issue as analogous to my earlier
discussion of taste proving to be as divisive as it is uniting. Identity labels, like taste
preferences, are representations that people use in making judgments about the ethical
and political commitments of others; whether someone identifies as an anarchist is
thought to indicate something material about their political views. In this way, identity
assumedly does tell you something about the compatibility of your political projects—it
is not merely an empty signifier of “status.”
The inevitable incompleteness of representation is what makes assumptions like
this problematic—whether the assumptions pertain to taste or identity or both. That is,
there is always an inherent slippage between a representation and its intended material
content. For one thing, different people may define the same identity label in different
ways, thus it is not always accurate to judge someone’s commitments based on the label
they use for themselves. People may not even know themselves exactly what political

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philosophies they mean by the term “anarchist,” let alone what others mean when they
use it. This separation between anarchist as identity label and anarchist as political
philosophy is vexing for some. Sally was hesitant to identify herself as an anarchist
because she didn’t “know what in particular [she]’d be advocating” by categorizing
herself that way. Alyssa observed that the looseness of the identity means that there are
“various sorts of people” whom she would recognize as anarchists but whose political
theories and practices she doesn’t particularly like. As Emily put it, “There’s probably so
many people out there who identify as anarchists that I couldn’t even have any hope of
identifying [with]; that’s the joy and the curse of anarchism….” As a result of these
issues, there is a feeling among some anarchists that anarchism has limited value as a
political identity category.
Many of the anarchists I spoke with acknowledged these issues but still said they
found utility in retaining the label. Minty offered a defense for the usefulness of identity
to convey ethical orientations: “that’s kind of like the funny thing about identity
categories, they really don’t capture who you are but right now they kind of are the only
language that we have to speak to, like, our beliefs.” I theorize that in fact, identity labels
may be particularly important in contexts where one’s beliefs are radically incompatible
with one’s material situation. In other words, the structural conditions of capitalist, statist,
patriarchal culture work to prohibit the complete enactment of anarchist values, as much
as one might wish to “live like a real anarchist” (to invoke a phrase used by Orlando, an
interviewee). If you are simply unable to materially perform your anarchist beliefs, it may
become all the more important to use symbolic representations—like identity labels—to

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communicate those beliefs. As Tina, another interviewee, said, “I like it when people call
themselves anarchist.” She explained that she felt this way because she believed that if
someone explicitly identified as an anarchist, she could trust them “not to pull, like,
authoritarian, like, shit…. I feel like I don’t have to have my guard up for someone’s
say[ing] things that are probably ignorant or authoritarian which happens a lot.” Thus for
Tina, the identity label indicates that an individual is subject to the ethical discipline of
anarchism in such a way as to make them more worthy of her trust.

The productive power of anarchist identity
Joel said that his identity as an anarchist indicates the principles he espouses and
the practices he would like to embrace. So while Joel often explicitly identifies himself as
an anarchist, he thinks of anarchism as something to be aspired to through his daily
activity, rather than a fixed characteristic of himself or other individuals. Josef also
thought of anarchism as providing direction for his behavior and even thoughts:
As an anarchist I struggle for a better, uh, self. It’s like I want my thoughts to be
golden, I want my thoughts to be pure, like free of hate, full of love, you know,
that as an anarchist … I don’t want to think patriarchy, I don’t wanna think
racism, I don’t wanna think consumer[ism], you know, I wanna live autonomy.

Josef’s use of the word “struggle” is telling: conscious effort is involved in keeping one’s
self and behavior in line with anarchist norms—or “checking” oneself, to put it in Josef’s
terms. Recall Josef’s directive (previously quoted in Chapter Two): “just do whatever the
fuck you want, but don’t be, like, promoting what you’re trying to fight against. Like, if
you’re, if you’re an anarchist but you’re like, gonna go eat at McDonalds, you gotta

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check yourself right there, you know?” The production of normative behavior occurs
through labor on the part of the subject; Foucault calls this labor the “care of the self,”
which is “a sort of work, an activity; it implies attention, knowledge, technique”
(Foucault 1984a, 360). Anarchism, as a property of self-identity, is thus not merely an
“unfocused attitude,” (Foucault 1988) a mere belief in various anarchist ideologies. An
anarchist is something someone is, and as such, identifying as an anarchist involves
“caring for the self” in specific ways in order to produce it as an anarchist self.
Foucault argues that we shouldn’t just look at the content of discourses, we have
to look at their “economy”—how they work, why they are used, what effects they have
(Foucault 1990a, 68). Both identity and lifestyle have been understood as narrative
structures that organize and guide individual behavior. Giddens asserts that people feel
compelled to “keep a particular narrative going” with their everyday practices and this is
what constructs their coherent identities (Giddens 1991, 54). Where lifestyle practices are
enlisted in constructing this narrative, they thus are regulated by the individual’s desire to
preserve a coherent identity narrative. As Giddens defines it, a lifestyle is “a more or less
integrated set of practices which an individual embraces, not only because such practices
fulfill utilitarian needs, but because they give material form to a particular narrative of
self-identity” (Giddens 1991, 81). In other words, when an individual adopts a set of
lifestyle practices, they don’t just decide “how to act but who to be” (Ibid.). In a striking
example of this, interviewee Emily told me that when she was younger and imagined the
“kind of person that [she] wanted to be,” she “kind of figured that the kind of person
[she] wanted to be would be a vegetarian.” As she put it, “I guess I just sort of figured it

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went along with the lifestyle so I actually just started telling everybody that I was a
vegetarian.” Although Emily didn’t yet identify as an anarchist at this time in her life, she
was already shaping her lifestyle in such a way that it ended up being compatible with a
typical narrative of anarchist self-identity. Not only did she adopt vegetarianism, but she
also chose to avoid driving a car and embraced a non-conformist style of self-
presentation. When she became acquainted with an anarchist community during college,
it was a smooth transition to fit in with that scene based on the lifestyle narrative she had
already constructed for herself.
It is not merely that certain selves or thoughts or lifestyle practices are common or
typical among anarchists—rather they are understood as normal for anarchists. To say
that something is normal is to imply normativity, a shared understanding that a practice is
not simply randomly adopted by a collection of people, but that it is a proper thing for
anarchists to do. For Foucault, to be subject to power is precisely to take personal
responsibility for one’s own conduct; subjection is recognizing the ethically correct thing
to do and attempting to do it (Foucault 1990b, 92). Josef’s struggle for “a better self,” one
which resists patriarchy, racism, and consumerism, is a prime example of the power of
normative discourse to bring ethical practices and subjects into being. As Foucault states,
“[P]ractices of the self … are … not something invented by the individual himself. They
are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by
his culture, his society, and his social group” (Foucault 1997b, 291). This reiterates the
point that lifestyles are neither random nor uninflected by relations by power.

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The “imposition” of anarchist lifestyle practices on individuals may not have the
character of domination, in which one group forces another to follow its rules. That is,
there is no “sovereign” anarchist who forces all anarchist-identified individuals to adhere
to agreed upon modes of living. It’s not even the case that there is an official “anarchist
party” which can formally award or revoke membership to individuals on the basis of
their personal behavior. Usually, conformity to norms is experienced by subjects as
aesthetic or ethical choices which are freely made. Yet there is definitely power at work
on the bodies of anarchist subjects, if we define power, as Foucault does, as the capacity
to get subjects to think and act in ways other than they might have done. Foucault uses
the term “arts of existence” to refer to
those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves
rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in
their singular being, and to make their lives into an oeuvre that carries certain
aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (Foucault 1990b, 10-11)

Again, this resonates with Josef’s desire to become “golden” in his practice of anarchism.

Lifestyle and “accountable community”
The labor of self-care is both an individual and a collective process. Its focus may
be the construction of a particular kind of self, but it always involves others who serve as
witnesses, interlocutors, and supporters. Anarchist is not just an individual identity; it is
also a collective identity—there are anarchist communities, scenes, and some might even
say, a movement. These collective social structures are crucial for individuals who are
attempting to craft anarchist selves and lifestyles. The social spaces of the anarchist

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movement provide the stages for dramatizations of anarchist identity. Furthermore, they
are not just spaces where one performs for others, but also where one learns the
performance from others.
Emily felt that the anarchist scene was a place that welcomed her and made it
possible for her to sustain her identity and lifestyle in communion with others:
I think that a lot of the anarchist cultures that exist are almost like support
cultures. They’re great social networks, they’re great for feeling like you have a
place in the world and it can help to alleviate some of that kind of pain that comes
with being an anarchist, and frustration.

Branch articulated a similar feeling:
it’s always like anything, it’s harder when you’re on your own; as soon as you
start finding like-minded people or a community it becomes a support base…. and
mak[es] it feel maybe like a bit more of a norm when you’re surrounded by a
culture that says it’s not the norm—that’s always incredibly helpful.

Branch’s and Emily’s comments speak to the particular importance of community
support within movements whose ideals and practices are marginal within society at
large. Opportunities for collective enactment of anarchist lifestyles are especially
important for the production of radical subcultural identities because of the lack of
narrative resources available in mainstream popular culture. That is, if one doesn’t have
immediate access to other anarchists, one is unlikely to encounter much validation for
one’s lifestyle choices.
Matthew, in describing the “anarchist suit” he wore at one time (see Chapter
Three), said “All the clothes had to be very faded and dirty and gross and vaguely
militaristic.” His wording here is crucial—it was not that his aesthetic style just happened
to match a uniform look adopted by others in his milieu—his feeling was that his clothing

219
had to conform to a particular style. Joel used a similar turn of phrase in describing the
pressure he felt to look a certain way among members of his local Food Not Bombs
group in Washington, DC. As he put it, “you always had to kind of signify yourself in a
way that was appropriate… you had to kind of follow the norms.” He went on to explain,
“you couldn’t fit in [with the mainstream]—you couldn’t wear like a button shirt. Not
that you couldn’t, but people didn’t.” His final comment is important; people didn’t
necessarily feel prohibited from dressing in certain ways, but the outcome of the social
norms was that they didn’t dress in those ways.
Though it may not always be experienced as an imposition of force or control—
individuals may well feel as if they are making autonomous choices in how to behave—it
is the case that the way lifestyle gets communicated about within the anarchist movement
works to produce the regular patterns of behavior outlined in previous chapters. Aaron
speaks of this in terms of “accountable community,” saying that living and organizing
closely with other anarchists works to bolster one’s adherence to shared lifestyle
practices:
you literally live with other people who call themselves anarchists, who have a
similar frugal punk-y lifestyle, and you put a lot of time into creative projects, and
into discussions about what it means to live out your politics, etc. You're in close
proximity, and if anybody suddenly stops being vegan it's a big deal. And I think
the same is true as far as political identity. It's easier to maintain a very abstract
identity like "anarchist" when you have other people to orient yourself around,
other compass points.

In Aaron’s experience, it’s not just a matter of having other people present “to orient
yourself around” although this is part of it. It’s also about people actively holding others
in their community “accountable,” expecting one’s peers to answer for their personal

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practices, even in such matters as diet. One anarchist will often tell another when they
witness them do or say something that they deem to be inconsistent with anarchist ethical
principles; this is known colloquially as “calling someone out” (I also discussed this
phenomenon in Chapter Four). The ostensible purpose of this is to raise consciousness
among one’s fellow anarchists and to encourage each other to stay committed to their
shared political project. Revbaker, in describing his experience with the anarchist scene
in Denver, said that, “Political correctness was followed to a T. If you dared express any
characteristics of 'dominant' culture through actions or words, it would be quickly pointed
out.”
Even seemingly innocuous settings such as potlucks or workshops can bring up
occasions on which individuals are called upon, either implicitly or explicitly, to account
for their identities and practices. I attended more than one event in which everyone in
attendance was asked to introduce themself and more or less offer an account of what
anarchism meant to them.
2
Instances such as this are clear incitements to do what Judith
Butler (2005) calls “giving an account of oneself.” For Butler, when one gives an
account of oneself, one accomplishes three things: 1) one relates the content of one’s life
to another person; 2) one makes oneself into the kind of person who would give that
account; and 3) one establishes a relationship between oneself and the others to whom
one gives the account. This relationship is one of power, in which the one giving the
account feels bound to do so in the face of the other’s expectation.

2
Such occasions might be thought to function rather like what Foucault (1990a)
describes as the incitement to speak about sex, in that they generate opportunities to
rationalize and police people’s identifications and behaviors.

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Furthermore, to be held accountable for one’s identity and one’s actions is to be
subject to power, not just in giving the account, but also in constructing a life which can
be accounted for within the normative discourse of one’s community. When one is held
accountable by one’s community, one is constantly faced with a choice between 1)
behaving in such a way that one’s actions go unquestioned because they conform to
social norms; or 2) deviating from social norms and then either a) offering a justification
that somehow preserves the legitimacy of one’s claim to identification with the social
group in question; or b) facing reprimands or even exclusion from the group. In each of
these scenarios, one’s behavior is shaped by and responded to in terms of norms which
are external to the individual themself.
As I discussed in Chapter Two, there are various dimensions of anarchists’
motivation for engaging in this kind of labor of the self. These include personal, ethical,
activist, and social motivations. I want to claim here that the production of a legible
narrative of personal identity may be an end in itself as well. Butler (1990; 2004; 2005)
argues that individual identity is produced through the repetition of practices that are
legible as representing a cultural identity. Thus identity is constituted through
representation of the self to others who will understand the representation and respond to
it appropriately, thereby legitimating it as that individual’s authentic identity. Butler
maintains that in failing to make oneself legible according to normative discourses, one
risks subjective annihilation. Now, to fail to make oneself legible according to the
normative discourses of anarchism will hardly invalidate one’s entire subjecthood (in the
way that, say, failing to legibly perform a normative gender identity might); it may even

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mean that one is more validated within mainstream culture. But if one is invested in one’s
identity as an anarchist, the psychic and social consequences of failing to be accepted as
such could be great. In order to avoid such trauma, individuals labor to produce a lifestyle
which will be read as conforming to the norms of the anarchist community. By getting
called out oneself, or even just witnessing others get called out, individuals learn which
lifestyle practices are accepted as authentically anarchist and which are likely to call into
question one’s identification as an anarchist.

Authenticity
The notion of authenticity is often marshaled as the premise upon which
anarchists actively call each other to account for their lifestyle practices. At times it
seems to matter less what the practices are and what political outcome they may have,
than it does that those practices are equated with “real” anarchism. That is, while people
could be called out because their actions can be shown to have a detrimental impact upon
others, it seems authenticity becomes a shorthand or placeholder for such objections. To
put it another way, instead of the call-out taking the form of “you did X and it impacted
someone else badly, therefore I find it unethical and wish you wouldn’t do X anymore”
it’s often phrased as “you shouldn’t do X because that’s not what real anarchists do.”
Insofar as the target of such speech is invested in being recognized as a real anarchist,
such statements have the power to direct their behavior toward a particular set of
practices.

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Interviewees also invoked the notion of authenticity when explaining their own
practices to me. For example, Josef bluntly told me, “I’m vegan because I think that’s
what real anarchists should be, you know.” Orlando was another interviewee who had
adopted many lifestyle practices that might be identifiable as anarchist—he biked
everywhere, only wore second-hand clothing, and lived in a group house with other
activists. He acknowledged to me that it was difficult, if not impossible, to live wholly
according to anarchist principles, but that he was trying to become an “actual” anarchist
despite the obstacles.
I also heard the inverse of statements like this—individuals apologetically saying
that because they drive a car or eat dairy, for example, that they aren’t really anarchists.
Emily said, “I gotta admit, I’m a bad anarchist. I watch a lot of TV.” I then asked her,
“does that make you a bad anarchist, to watch TV?” She explained, “It does, it makes me
a perfectly impure anarchist to be as addicted to television as I am.” When I asked if
people called her out on her taste for television, she said, “People look a little weird when
I say how much TV I watch.” I don’t think Emily genuinely believed that she was a bad
anarchist; she was just extremely conscious of the fact that she could be perceived as
such by others in her milieu. Emily explained it in the following terms:
I think anarchists, there is sort of like… there’s a judgment about how you live
your lifestyle, like what you consume, how you consume, how you interact with
media, what your, you know, to a much lesser extent what your
sexual practices are, what kind of music you listen to.

Similarly, when Revbaker talked about the enforcement of political correctness within the
anarchist scene, he observed that the movement could seem “closed off, cliquey,

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dogmatic or even elitist—at least it was to a wide-eyed, naive and socially awkward 19
year old” like himself. Mark, too, noticed what he called a “sectarian attitude” amongst
anarchists he’d tried to organize with, “like this notion of, like, what we’re trying to do is
the authentic [anarchism] and what other anarchists are doing is like a waste of time or
something.”
Although Mark was speaking in terms of organizing tactics, this attitude can also
extend to lifestyle “tactics” as well. Alyssa perceived that some of the anarchists she
knew in Santa Cruz held the attitude that they were “better than other people” due to their
adoption of certain lifestyle habits, such as, “being vegan/being freegan; living in the
woods; having a ‘purer’ form of anarchism than anyone with a job; riding bikes.” In the
context of “ethical consumption,” Jo Littler describes such purism as being characterized
by “sanctimonious righteousness” (Littler 2009, 14). Drawing on the work of Wendy
Brown (2005), Littler asserts that self-righteous moralism ends up shutting down
productive debate over ethical goods, rather than bringing people together for political
projects. Such dynamics are cause for concern for some anarchists, who are frustrated by
what they perceive to be “an arms race to the bottom of who can be more radical, and
who can ‘out’ other ‘anarchists’ as not really living up to their principles” (Marcoco
2008).
It is important to point out here that sectarian divisions are not seen as arbitrary or
petty by those who attempt to enforce them. On the contrary, they are understood as real
and meaningful differences in political philosophy and goals. This is why sectarian
divisions are generally positioned as having moral justifications, or as being about

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political “correctness.” What is most interesting is the implicit assumption that these
political and moral differences rather straightforwardly correspond to lifestyle
differences. An attribution made in passing by a participant in a discussion session at the
Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference I attended was quite telling on this point—
she was posing a question to a roomful of people about how they, as anarchists, could
productively work with “people who don’t share our values.” Fascinatingly, she used the
term “SUV drivers” as shorthand to stand for the people who don’t share anarchists’
values. The implication was that driving an SUV is antithetical to anarchist ethics and
detrimental to anarchist projects, and thus this speaker assumed a shared perception that
anyone who drives an SUV does not hold anarchist values.
Judgments like this are common, and they bring up complex issues. For one, they
presume a relationship between values and lifestyle that doesn’t always exist. Another
participant in the discussion pressed this point, responding to the first comment with the
question of whether SUV drivers do not “share our values” or do they just “live a lifestyle
that we don’t think of as expressing our values?” Along these lines, an anarchist blog post
argues that anarchists ought to, “take revolution seriously and realize that people who
take to the streets are our allies, even if they wear nike shoes, eat meat, and drive SUVs”
(Marcoco 2008). Certainly people may share political philosophies while their personal
ethics play out differently in their tastes and lifestyles. Yet it’s clear that this truth is
forgotten or glossed over in many constructions of anarchist identity.

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The exclusionary power of anarchist identity
The judgment of people’s political commitments based on their expressed tastes
can have real consequences for who is welcomed in the movement and who is actively
excluded. Rilla recalled the experience of a woman she had met while doing labor
organizing in Los Angeles, who came from a wealthy family and dressed “preppy” (“she
actually tied her sweater around her shoulders and stuff”) but became politicized through
her work with the labor union. When the woman moved to Philadelphia, Rilla put her in
contact with some anarchists she knew there, but when the woman tried to attend one of
their organizing meetings, they “wouldn’t let her in and said that they thought she was
like a cop or something. The group wouldn’t let her join and turned her away at the
door.” The preppy woman’s taste and appearance signaled that she didn’t truly belong,
and thus that she must have had an ulterior, inauthentic motive for wanting to get
involved in anarchist organizing.
Although the way someone is dressed may seem like a superficial basis for
assessing their legitimacy, it can be a giveaway that someone doesn’t even know enough
about the scene to realize that they will mark themselves as not belonging by dressing in
particular ways. Dressing “like an anarchist,” with all the subtle stylistic cues that might
involve, can communicate that one has spent a significant enough amount of time in the
scene to cultivate what Pierre Bourdieu calls “competence” through “slow
familiarization” and thus has proven their commitment to its political project through this
sustained involvement (Bourdieu 1984, 66). Given that radical organizations are regularly
targeted and infiltrated by law enforcement personnel, it’s not entirely irrational to be

227
suspicious of those who don’t signal their belonging through the common signifiers of
anarchist identity.
Of course, it is possible that someone could be in solidarity with anarchist politics
and have valuable contributions to make without being aware of or wanting to adopt
particular tastes of the anarchist subculture. Matthew, via email, related his experience of
trying to get involved with anarchist organizing in Philadelphia while he was attending
graduate school there: “The Philly anarchists were suspicious of me because I was a
graduate student at Penn. They said I was ‘bourgeois.’ One said I could ‘work with them’
but that I couldn't ‘BE one of them’ (!!).” Even though he had spent several years in the
anarchist scene in Chicago and could presumably establish his credibility as an
experienced political organizer, his choice (and ability) to pursue graduate education at a
prestigious private university jeopardized his perceived legitimacy as a true anarchist.
Minty also said that she had gotten “shit” from some anarchists about her job at a non-
profit organization, which often involves her working with state agencies and on electoral
campaigns. She said that people had called her a “professional activist,” and a “tool” of
the system for doing paid work of this nature. Anarchists often position themselves in
opposition to “liberals,” “reformists,” and other political orientations which are seen as
less radical. To partake in lifestyle practices—like going to graduate school or holding a
job in the non-profit sector—which are seen as “bourgeois” may signify (accurately or
not) that a person’s beliefs more closely align them with such undesirables than with
authentic anarchists.

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Being that lifestyle practices, especially consumption habits, are widely perceived
as being open to personal choice, a perception aided by the mythologies of neoliberalism,
it may seem quite logical to take people’s lifestyles as indicative of the subcultural scenes
with which they associate, and by extension, with the political and ethical frameworks
within which they operate. That is, to some extent the woman who made the comment
about SUV drivers was not completely out of line; in my observation, anarchists do not
tend to drive SUVs. Yet, as Ben Carrington and Brian Wilson point out in their study of
contemporary subculture,
Not everybody is ‘free to choose’ their neo-tribal identities in the same way, and
those very ‘choices’ are often determined in a complex way by forms of social
capital in the first instance, which in turn reveal patterns that can be traced back to
broader (structurally conditioned) identities. (Carrington and Wilson 2004, 70)

Littler also points out that, “sometimes the celebration of a kind of ‘purity’ of activism
can give it a mythic force which, while potent and generative, can also exclude a wide
range of people without particular forms of social and cultural capital from identifying
with it” (Littler 2009, 44). In Bourdieu’s (1984) landmark study of lifestyle and taste, he
showed that distinction tends to break down along lines of class status and educational
background: the most cultural capital accrues to those from affluent backgrounds and
who have had advanced education. Thus social privilege begets further social privilege
and hierarchical social divisions are reinforced.

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Anarchist identity and uneven social privilege
A similar process may be at work within the anarchist subculture, in which
individuals with certain forms of privilege are best equipped to conform to some
anarchist norms. Emily observed: “you’re not necessarily inclusive of all communities if
you’re this strict on what your affectations are.” Though she admitted to sharing many
typical anarchist “affectations” such as being vegetarian and not owning a car, Emily felt
that anarchism was ultimately limited by strictness about lifestyle practices. As she
reflected,
it limits anarchism and what is considered legitimate within some anarchist
circles, to this one mold of being like a hippie vegan… most people in society
aren’t necessarily like that and I don’t think its like the best means of, like,
attracting people that aren’t already in that kind of subculture you know…. I think
a lot of ways anarchists present themselves is not necessarily positive in terms of
having a diverse anarchism, and I think a lot of the lifestyle constraints are sort of,
can be kind of exclusionary.

Like all forms of disciplinarity, anarchist norms are repressive as well as productive, and
may be particularly so at different times for different people. Unfortunately, those
practices which are most recognized as authentic or legitimate expressions of anarchist
identity may also be most accessible to those coming from the most privileged social
positions. In other words, the lines of exclusion around anarchist identity often in fact
mirror mainstream patterns of social division and domination. Many critics of lifestyle
anarchism assert that the accessibility and appeal of some anarchist lifestyle practices is
disproportionately skewed toward young, white, middle-class males. This is problematic
not only because it compounds hegemonic processes of oppression, but also because it
ends up cultivating homogeneity within the anarchist movement, which limits the scope

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of both its analysis and its reach. Worse still, interviewees like Aaron felt that anarchist
identity could be problematic in that people may “hide behind” the label in order to avoid
the “stickier work” of actively confronting their own role in perpetuating systems of
oppression, such as sexism, racism, and classism. An intersectional analysis that
considers anarchist lifestyle practices in light of other categories of identity such as age,
gender, ethnicity, and class can help to assess the regular, yet uneven, ways in which the
normativity of anarchist subcultures exerts its disciplinary force on different kinds of
subjects.
As with many other subcultures, age is a central factor affecting the nature of
individuals’ participation in anarchist lifestyles practices. Many of the older (over age 30)
people I interviewed had at one time engaged in the typical anarchist lifestyle practices
but had since abandoned them. One reason for this is simple burn-out—years of living
under certain conditions can take their physical and emotional toll. Lifestyles
characterized by extreme precarity, like squatting, traveling, dumpstering, and
shoplifting, may prove unsustainable in the long term, particularly when more stable
options are available. Also, the tightness of anarchist communities, which may involve
living in close-quarters in group houses, and sometimes distancing oneself from one’s
non-anarchist family and community, can take an emotional toll after years of living that
way. Rilla said that when she lived in an anarchist group house, she felt pressured to
spend all her time with her housemates and ultimately felt like they resented her spending
time alone or with her family who lived nearby. Eventually she decided it would be easier
to live on her own. The departure of older people from the scene ends up being self-

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reinforcing. Although Jeremy cited several reasons why he had distanced himself from
anarchist communities, based on carefully considered ideological and strategic concerns,
he also added, “it often feels creepy being the only person over 30 in the room.” Josef
echoed this sentiment, saying that he stopped going to punk shows “when I felt like I was
way too old to be hanging out at gigs, messing around with a bunch of underage
drinkers.” Although in Josef’s case this didn’t translate into him being less involved with
anarchist political organizing, it did distance him from that aspect of the subculture.
The marginalization of women within both activist movements and subcultural
scenes is nothing new. Although feminist research on subcultures has shown that they
may at times offer “escape from the demands of traditional sex roles,” (McRobbie 1991,
26) it’s also the case that hegemonic patterns of sexism are all too often reproduced
within social movements, even those with an ostensible commitment to anti-oppression
politics. Several interviewees expressed frustration with what Minty called the “fucked
up misogynist ideas and practices” that result in women feeling silenced within anarchist
scenes. “Manarchism” is a term used within anarchist circles to identify the tendency for
some individuals and scenes to make women feel marginalized or excluded. Pritha
explained it to me this way:
I guess what I meant by “manarchist” (and the context in which we use it here in
DC) is men who claim to have radical politics but when it comes to interpersonal
relationships, are often patriarchal and heavily assert their male privilege. You
know when you’re in a meeting for an anarchist org[anization], and there’s that
one guy who dominates the conversation, never lets anyone (much less a woman)
get her say nor does he listen—he’s a manarchist. Full of dude-liness that he
never bothered to unpack though he thought he did.

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Tina was an interviewee I became acquainted with after seeing her speak publicly about
the persistence of such behavior within the movement. She spoke out forcefully against
the disempowerment of women at anarchist events and in anarchist organizations. During
our interview, I asked her to expand on her public comments. She explained that while
she’d never experienced physical assault from a “trusted comrade,” she had felt silenced
by “male voices dominating in the activist scene,” and witnessed other women
experiencing the same thing. Tina noted that women feel hesitant to speak at meetings or
to take on leadership roles in the movement because they are insecure about “sound[ing]
smart enough” or being accepted as a “really true anarchist.” This speaks to the way
anarchist identity and authenticity are used to discipline individuals in ways that
reproduce patriarchal power relations, whether this is intentional or not.
The attitudes of male comrades may also discourage women from taking up other
activities associated with anarchist lifestyles. Sally, an experienced cyclist, expressed
frustration with male friends who assumed that she wouldn’t know how to repair her bike
or that she would be uncomfortable riding on busy streets. Though she herself had never
let this frustration deter her from cycling, she wondered if it had affected other women in
the scene. The demands of family may also disproportionately affect the capacities of
women and older people to devote time to anarchist projects and leisure activities. During
a discussion at an anarcha-feminist picnic I attended, one woman said that it was hard for
her to get away from home to attend social gatherings like that unless her husband was
available to watch their child.

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Anarcha-feminists have struggled to bring these gendered dynamics to the
attention of their comrades, and indeed many organizations have tried to actively address
conditions which marginalize women in the scene. For example, the Bicycle Kitchen in
Los Angeles has devoted one evening a week to a woman/trans-only night in its
workshop, in order to provide an environment where women won’t feel intimidated to
learn about bike repair. By helping women to build skills and gain confidence in this
setting, the Bike Kitchen may alleviate some of the apprehension women feel about
getting involved in the often male-dominated anarcho-cyclist community. Anarcha-LA,
an anarcha-feminist organization that Tina, Minty, and other interviewees were involved
with, has made it a priority to create a welcoming atmosphere for people with children in
the southern California anarchist community. For example, they spearheaded an effort to
organize free childcare at the Southern California Anarchist Conference in order to
facilitate parents’ participation in conference sessions.
Unfortunately, these kinds of efforts by organizations can only go so far toward
changing the social dynamics of the subculture. With regard to the childcare issue, Emily
commented that, while people in the anarchist scene in Phoenix were quite accepting of
parents being involved, the social heart of the scene was the parties that occurred after
organizing meetings. Because people really got to know each other and form bonds at
these late-night parties where drinking and drug use were common, parents could be
unintentionally excluded from building collegial relationships. Without proactive,
structural efforts to make the movement welcoming and attractive to people who may not

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be able to seamlessly reconcile their lifestyles with those of most anarchists, such people
will be effectively excluded, though that may not be anyone’s intention.
Just as anarcha-feminists have made critiques of male privilege within anarchist
scenes, anarchist people of color (APOC) have voiced frustration with white anarchists’
perpetuation of systemic racism and ethnocentricity. As an article written by two APOC
asserts, “There is this idea that once someone pronounces themselves ‘anti-racist’ then
they assume that they are an ally of people without their privileges, immune from
critique. Even if they take criticism in a positive guilt-free manner, they too often neglect
to see that they are part of a whole racist system” (Masuta and Hickey 2008). One
concern often raised is white anarchists’ seeming ignorance of and subsequent disregard
for issues that disproportionately affect people of color. For example, several typical
anarchist practices put their practitioners in the position of drawing police scrutiny and
possibly harassment. Given the established pattern of police violence against and over-
criminalization of people of color in the US, these individuals have more to lose by
adopting even mildly rebellious practices than do their white counterparts. Shoplifting,
for example, may be much more easily adopted as a lifestyle practice when one isn’t
automatically targeted by security staff, a daily occurrence for people of color. A zine
called Shoplifting: The art and the science recognizes this limitation:
Another downfall of shoplifting is that it is more accessible to people depending
upon race and other factors. White people may be automatically considered less
suspicious…. Because you shoplift, or can shoplift, doesn’t mean you are radder
or a better anti-capitalist than the rest of us. It may just mean you have privileges
which play into everything you do including stealing.

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Recall also Aisha’s comments in Chapter Three, that, being a Middle Eastern immigrant
shortly after September 11, 2001, she was worried about her style of self-presentation
standing out too much from the mainstream or marking her as a radical activist. By not
marking herself in typical anarchist fashion, she could be perceived as being less
committed or authentic than other activists who didn’t face the same issues she did
because of her race and citizenship status.
People of color who are potentially interested in anarchism may also be deterred
by the perception that the movement is a white scene, and thus the perception may
become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Minty, who identifies as white but whose job involves
doing organizing work with a lot of people of color, struggles with trying to reach out to
different communities so that “you’re not just having the same white kids come to your
events.” Though it is probably not ever the intention of event organizers to exclude non-
white participants, racial homogeneity in the scene can be self-perpetuating. For example,
Minty said that she invited her co-workers to the Really Really Free Market she helped
organize, and that “they came out and it was like all white kids [laughs] and they were
like ‘ummmm,’ so they stayed for like 5 minutes and left, you know….”
The lack of connection people of color feel with certain “subcultural” aspects of
anarchism is also frequently cited as the reason for the putative whiteness of the anarchist
movement. As one APOC writer summarizes, “Many people of color in the U.S. today do
not wish to be associated with what has become the stereotypical white North American
anarchist movement that is less about community and more about creating a lifestyle out
of anarchism” (Stepp 2008). Another APOC echoes the concern, saying, “a significant

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part of the problem lies in the subcultural lifestyle of many anarchists, including myself”
(Nomous 2007). This writer, going by the pseudonym Otto Nomous (sounds like
“autonomous”), asserts that the association between anarchism and “‘punk’ or other
‘alternative’ persuasions” is alienating rather than inviting for most people. He points out
the fact that,
the general tendencies of most white/punk anarchists tend to be to settle for the
symbolic, and fail to support the real struggles of people to change the world
precisely because they have a choice as opposed to people who have to struggle
for their livelihood.

Rilla observed that associations between anarchism and subcultures which are
overwhelmingly white, like punk, have produced what she described as a “racialized
understanding of what anarchism has meant.”
Rilla made a very interesting point that people of color in LA often had political
commitments that were perceived, and might even be experienced by the individuals
themselves, as extraneous to their subcultural tastes, with the result that they were not
identified by others as “lifestyle anarchists” in the same way that white kids with the
same tastes might be. As she put it,
Here in LA most of the [anarchist] scene is not white in the first place, so I think
there’s just a lot of influences in terms of Mexican anarchism and… just, like,
that, kind of, legacy is different, and I think the population is different. So I think
a lot of people, maybe, even if they’re involved in some of the music scene or
whatever, there’s a distancing. And partly I think it’s because there’s also this
sense that even if someone is involved with punk, but if your parents are
immigrants, maybe you’re also invested in immigrant rights, there’s a sense of
different types of investments.

To give one example that illustrates Rilla’s point, Josef traced his politicization to two
different sources—the punk scene on one hand, and his experience of oppression as an

237
immigrant from Nicaragua on the other. If one were looking at Josef with the assumption
that punk is a white thing, it would be easy to attribute his anarchist identity and lifestyle
to his ethnic background, and thus to perpetuate the assumption one began with. Such
assumptions too easily reproduce certain strands of conventional wisdom about
subcultural tastes, and as such are unlikely to be interrogated very seriously. Rilla shared
the story of a person who had done dissertation research on the LA anarchist scene, and
whose conclusions were actually quite upsetting to Rilla and to Alma (both had
participated in his research):
when I was talking about the other guy’s dissertation, I think that was a big part
that came under contention like [Alma] had kind of argued with him as like, he
sort of makes this division where white equates with anarchist, but that doesn’t
play out in LA at all, and so he conveniently forgets all these other people and just
focuses on two white anarchists. But it’s sort of playing off of this stereotype that
actually doesn’t play out in the lived experience that we have in LA, but it’s easy
to make those claims just because of the kind of like, preconceptions people have
about what anarchist organizing is, to make that claim, it might kind of go
unquestioned.

Such cautionary tales, as well as the simple fact that I interviewed and observed many
people of color who identified as anarchists and adopted the typical subcultural anarchist
lifestyle practices that are sometimes dismissed as “white” (such as veganism, for
example), makes me wary of making any universal claims about the way taste
distinctions play out along racial lines.
The intersection of class identity and anarchist lifestyle practices is similarly
complex. Certain markers of anarchist authenticity, such as traveling to global summit
protests, cultivating knowledge of anarchist theory, or even having enough leisure time to
participate in political organizing, would seem to be the purview of those who have

238
middle-class resources, or what Bourdieu calls “the bourgeois experience of the world”
(Bourdieu 1984, 54). Minty pointed out that those who criticized her job as a
“professional activist” were often students or people who otherwise had the luxury of not
having to work full-time. Also, adopting confrontational forms of self-presentation or
openly adopting non-mainstream sexual identities could prove to be an untenable risk for
those whose employers and co-workers are less than tolerant of these lifestyle choices.
Some critics even assert that consumption-based activism is itself an expression
of class privilege. Aaron Schutz asserts, for example, that,
Lifestyle activism assumes that you have the resources to make lifestyle choices.
You need money to be able to buy a Prius instead of a “beater” car. You need
money to eat organic every day. You need leisure time to maintain a compost pile
that you don't really need. Lifestyle activism is an expression of privilege. It
represents the capacity to spend time and resources doing things that don't
actually matter in any direct way for you or your family in service of your own
identity construction. If you work two jobs to keep food on the table and a roof
over your head, you just don't have time for this. (Schutz 2009b)

From this perspective, certain anarchist lifestyles might look like “asceticism of the
privileged,” to borrow from Bourdieu (who was himself borrowing from Marx)
(Bourdieu 1984, 256). If indeed middle-class anarchists use their alternative tastes to
assert superiority over an imagined working-class mainstream, then anarchist authenticity
would seem to be a less than admirable means of preserving taste hierarchies under the
guise of anti-capitalist ideology. Yet, while it’s true that some so-called anti-consumption
lifestyles may actually require a fair amount of capital, anarchist anti-consumption habits
are not particularly vulnerable to this critique. For one thing, most of them are explicitly
developed around making do with less money. And they are aimed at providing for real

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personal needs—transportation, clothing, food—that could hardly be identified
exclusively with middle-classness.
The crux of arguments like Schutz’s often comes down to an observation that
many of the people who “choose” anti-consumption lifestyles could afford to live
differently if they made a different choice. Unfortunately, this tends to be the entire basis
upon which anti-consumerist practices are criticized, rather than being judged upon their
own material merits. Littler (2009) too seems to object to practices of downward mobility
for the very reason that they are chosen by their practitioners, rather than imposed upon
them. That downward mobility on the part of the privileged is a choice is a fair
observation, but it’s unconvincing as an argument against making that choice. A society
characterized by class hierarchies is objectionable in itself, but it’s difficult to see how
individuals who attempt to traverse class divisions (even if these attempts are ultimately
unsuccessful) are any more objectionable than those who comfortably embrace their
positions of economic privilege.
I suspect that what makes people uneasy about choiceful downward mobility is
the possibility that it is done because of a romanticization or fetishization of poverty that
ignores the real struggles faced by poor people. One anonymous critique—titled
“Rethinking Crimethinc” and circulated on various anarchist message boards—quotes a
particularly disturbing sentiment found on a CrimethInc. book jacket: “Poverty,
unemployment, homelessness—if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right!” The
writer of the critique goes on to explain why statements like this are offensive:

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Condescending, privileged, middle class crap. The only people who could think
that poverty is in any way fun are wealthy kids playing at being poor for a few
years, the daily reality of poverty, unemployment and homelessness for the
average person is very serious and something anarchists should always organize
against rather than mock.

If one’s experience of poverty happens in the context of a romanticized, “intentional
living” situation, it could be argued that the privilege one carries into that situation causes
one to be less vulnerable to the harmful effects of poverty. Having this privilege is not
immoral in itself, but if it blinds one to the systemic injustices that disadvantage others
who don’t have one’s privileges, then one’s personal downward mobility will be difficult
to connect to broader social struggles. As Marcuse argues, retreating from mainstream
culture may be a necessary step in the development of an alternative consciousness. But
he also cautions that such a retreat may also have the ill effect of reducing one’s
motivation to combat the objectionable parts of mainstream culture, since one might feel
that one is both immune to them and innocent of perpetuating them (Marcuse 2001a).
Though the effects of oppression and privilege may be temporarily relieved or obscured
through individual refusal, systems of oppression and privilege are not dismantled by
such tactics.
It’s a similar issue to the male anarchist who believes that by claiming an alliance
with feminism he is relieved of the obligation to examine his own participation in
oppressive relationships with women. When tactics become fetishized, i.e. reified as
markers of authenticity, they can easily become decoupled from the strategic intent they
were meant to have. Resistant acts come to be valued for their status as resistant, rather
than for their demonstrable effects. If people see the adoption of counter-hegemonic

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identity labels as sufficient to actually counter hegemony, they may end up reproducing
oppressive power dynamics, in deed if not in word. In all these cases, it’s not the
identification with an oppositional or marginal identity that is harmful—it’s the failure to
thoroughly articulate the politicized signifier with the political signified, the aesthetic
ideal with the ethical discipline it has the potential to inspire.

Conclusion: ethical authenticity
Lifestyle activism has been criticized on the basis that it is more about identity
than effective social change (Schutz 2009a). Yet while critics like Schutz use this point to
support the argument that lifestyle politics is mere “self-delusion,” I want to take a
slightly more charitable stance. Just because the motivations behind lifestyle politics
might be traced to a desire for subcultural authenticity, this doesn’t mean that lifestyle
politics is therefore irredeemably self-centered. On the contrary, I argue that this dynamic
could be exploited strategically by social movement activists in order to produce
collective practice that goes beyond personal liberation and symbolic expression. Though
calling people out for the supposed inauthenticity of their identifications or lifestyles can
quickly devolve into moralism, name-calling, and sectarianism, and at times might
reinforce mainstream boundaries and privileges, it doesn’t have to. That is, I think the
disciplinarity promoted by anarchist “call out culture,” if invoked with a wariness of its
potential to reify patterns of domination as well as a critical eye toward the material
limitations of lifestyle activism, can be a way to coordinate personal willingness to
engage in the labor of self-care into the collective promotion of ethical goods.

242
Notions of “authentic” anarchist identity are defensible, I think, when authenticity
is defined less by conformity to a given subcultural aesthetic and more by consistency
with the ethical standards of a movement and responsiveness to the material needs posed
by the specific situation. The construct of anarchist authenticity is not so much the
problem then, rather the problem is in how it is defined and judged. While it can be the
basis for arbitrary and exclusionary divisions, it can also be a powerful means of holding
anarchists accountable to the political goals of their movement.
When I asked him what he thinks makes someone an anarchist, Jeremy offered
the view that, “We do ourselves a favor by jettisoning questions of what something is in
favor of questions of what something does; what effects it produces. What makes
someone an anarchist? I'm not entirely sure I care, to tell you the truth.” Yet when I asked
Jeremy if he calls himself an anarchist, he replied, “Absolutely.” Clearly, in spite of his
very articulate critique of political identity, Jeremy still understands that categories can
be useful. Samantha, too, said that she doesn’t know “if a person's political identification
is important enough in my mind for me to spend time thinking about it,” and then said
that she does call herself an anarchist. Interestingly, no sooner did Tina express her
propensity to trust self-identified anarchists, than she also asserted that “all that really
matters” is that people are doing activist work, whether or not they “need the title or care
for the title” of anarchist.
To return to the discussion of identity politics with which I began this chapter, an
embrace of anarchism as an identity and as a movement need not entail rigidity. It is not
that there is no essence to anarchist identity, just that it is a nominal rather than a natural

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essence. In other words, anarchists all have something in common (or else the term
anarchist would be utterly empty), but what that is is neither fixed for all time nor
controlled by a centralized or dominant entity. A political identity constituted through
everyday practice is inherently contingent; it is repetitively reconstituted through
performance. The fact that it must be continually performed leaves room for the evolution
of the performance as anarchist politics are discursively struggled over and thus
transformed and tailored to specific times and locations. Political identities like
anarchism can be seen as signs, which carry meaningful content but are still open to
“play,” as Judith Butler (1993) would have it. According to Butler, identity signs can be
deployed for the purposes of collective struggle, but the signifiers and signifieds of those
identities do not have to remain fixed for all time (Butler 1997).
I posit that anarchist identity may be thought of as essentially defined by an
ethical praxis that is so clearly discursively constructed and context-dependent as to be
open to contestation, transformation, and local adaptation. If anarchists explicitly commit
themselves to flexibility and the value of idiosyncratic personal expression (and I think
many of them do), this commitment is all the more conducive to a local specificity that
effectively responds to the needs—and takes advantage of the resources—of the situation
at hand. An anarchist lifestyle may look different in different places and times, but
anarchists of all stripes can unite and support each other’s projects based on their shared
identification with the ideals of anarchism. What is ultimately needed is a critical
commitment to authenticity, not the authenticity of style, which tends toward an
internecine preoccupation with purity and status, but an authenticity of ethics, in which

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tactics are evaluated in each instance for their compatibility with movement values and
for their specific material effects.
It is perhaps no coincidence that anarchist Murray Bookchin, the most vitriolic
opponent of lifestyle politics, was also quite dismissive of Foucaultian theories of power
and resistance (Bookchin 1995). Whereas Bookchin saw Foucault as advocating only
disconnected acts of insurrection, and indeed saw lifestyle anarchism as a strategically
untenable expression of this philosophy, I read both Foucault and lifestyle politics
differently. Foucault’s understanding of power as decentralized and discursive need not
preclude intentionality, cohesion, or the strategic mobilization of individual action. In
presenting anarchist lifestyle politics as having the potential to be a kind of disciplined
ethics, I hope I have usefully amended Bookchin’s characterization of lifestyle anarchism
as that in which “the sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and
the intuitive supplant the consistent, purposive, organized, and rational” (Bookchin 1995,
51). Although Bookchin presumes that movements must be “programmatic” in order to
be effective (Ibid., 19), I think that a more flexible approach, characterized by what
Jeremy Gilbert calls a “strategic orientation,” might work just as well or better (Gilbert
2008, 228). I would argue that, in fact, a political movement sustained in part through
lifestyle is an important component of the type of “new politics” that Bookchin himself
calls for, one which “can give to people a sense of direction that allows for security and
ethical meaning” (Bookchin 1995, 59).

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CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSION

“Cops and Anarchists Clash at G-20” reads the Time headline of September 25,
2009 (Levine 2009). The Group of 20 meeting held recently in Pittsburgh attracted
thousands of peaceful protesters from among organized labor, Iraq war veterans, and
environmental groups, along with a healthy contingent of anarchist activists from around
the country. Predictably, the mainstream news coverage of the protests tended to focus on
security preparations and the ensuing violence between law enforcement and non-
permitted anarchist marchers. But a few days later, a less expected story emerged.
Wired Magazine’s website reported that one anarchist, Elliot Madison, had been
arrested in his Pittsburgh hotel room for listening to public police transmissions on a
radio scanner and then using Twitter to communicate police movements to protesters on
the street. A few days later, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Madison’s
home, seizing “evidence” that he had violated a federal law which prohibits aiding people
who are participating in a riot. According to Wired, among the items agents were
authorized to seize were “black masks and clothing,” books of anarchist political theory,
and DVDs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Madison appealed the right of law enforcement
to examine these items, but a US district court judge denied the appeal (Singel 2009a;
Singel 2009b).
What is most interesting about this story is the utter mundanity of both the initial
offense and some of the items that were deemed fit to serve as incriminating evidence. It

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seems that, as much as anything else, Madison’s lifestyle and identity as an anarchist will
be on trial, should his case move forward. His active embrace of politics in his personal
life has made his personal life an especial interest of political institutions. In a way, the
approach taken by law enforcement in this case demonstrates a lucid understanding of the
way anarchism is mostly practiced today—in the space of everyday life, in the use of a
ubiquitous social networking site, in the donning of particular types of clothing, and in
the purchase and reading of books (that the Buffy DVDs were deemed suspicious remains
a puzzler). Though one can certainly protest that identifying as or living like an anarchist
does not (or at least ought not) constitute a crime, the government has a record of
prosecution and conviction on just these grounds.
1
But where the state does seek to
repress anarchist ideas and other forms of radical dissent, it does well to look for it in the
mundane details of everyday life.
While anarchists are often outraged at such persecution, they also sometimes take
delight in the absurdity of official panic over their more innocuous activities. One
individual who was approached by the FBI to be a paid informant shared a personal
account of the encounter, which made the rounds of activist websites:
They wanted me to crash vegan potluck parties and get into the inner circle of
terrorists because supposedly terrorists are trusting and I'm "trusting, easy going,
funny," and a bunch of other flattery. Every time they said "vegan potluck" I
chuckled, but their faces showed they weren't kidding. They said "vegan potluck"

1
Most famously, the 1927 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for armed
robbery and murder largely hinged on the prosecution’s characterization of the men as
anarchist sympathizers. Both were convicted and executed.

247
half a dozen times. They really feared vegans and their violent conspiracies to
blow up buildings in protest to the republican national convention.
2

Sure, some anarchists might talk of blowing up buildings in protest. But for most, a vegan
potluck is not a terrorist planning meeting. It’s an end in itself: an occasion for eating
well, seeing friends, and building community. In the “Call to Action” put out by the
Pittsburg G-20 Resistance Project, organizers announced the plan for the first day of
activities:
Community picnics, where long-time residents, short-time residents, and the
early-bird protesters can share a meal and talk about the better world that they
want to live in. The G-20 tries to present itself as leaders getting together, but
whenever they meet it seems to cost millions and involve police hitting people
over the head with batons. Let's show them how a real civil gathering works: good
people, good food, good times.
3

And for the most part, these are the kinds of things anarchists get up to. Though
they may idealize revolution and the resulting utopian society free from government,
capitalism, and all forms of hierarchy, they are mostly concerned with the here and now.
It’s not that they are apolitical, but their politics is mostly to be found in the practices of
everyday life, not in the waging of armed revolt. They work in their communities, they
build friendships and romances with each other, they sometimes wear black clothing,
they hold vegan potlucks. Although anarchists have not (yet?) figured out how to use
lifestyle to bring about their revolution, the centrality of lifestyle to anarchist identity and
politics makes this movement a useful case for thinking about the role lifestyle might
have to play in projects of social transformation.

2
Quoted from “FBI seeks informants in the Twin Cities” which can be found at
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080512120907228.
3
The “Call to Action” document can be found at http://resistg20.org/call-to-action.

248
In this dissertation, I have tried to elaborate an understanding of lifestyle practices
as political tactics, which have the potential to be effectively codified into a coherent, yet
decentralized, radical strategy. Tactics are fundamentally provisional; they are tools, to be
wielded strategically when they can be effective, and modified or even left on the shelf
when they cannot. Activist and scholar of the anarchist movement Jeffrey Juris warns that
there is danger in “mistaking a specific tool for a goal” (Juris 2008, 91). Juris is writing
here about spectacular protest actions organized by anarchists, but his point is well taken
beyond this context. In his own study of everyday politics, historian Robin Kelley urges
social movement critics to look at the limits and effects of any political action, in order to
assess its ultimate value to a larger project (Kelley 1996, 230). As should be clear by
now, the phenomenon of lifestyle politics in the anarchist movement bears out Kelley’s
observation that “certain forms of resistance create their own limits” (Ibid., 231). And, as
he goes on to say, they are “limits that can be understood only in specific historical and
spatial context” (Ibid.). In each chapter of this dissertation, I have explored various limits
of lifestyle-based forms of resistance within the specific context in which contemporary
anarchists find themselves.
In Chapter Two, I used anarchists’ consumption patterns to explore the multiple
motivations behind practices of lifestyle politics and to question the potential material
effects of such tactics. I showed that political lifestyle practices may be motivated by
personal, ethical, and activist concerns, and I argued for analytical precision in
distinguishing amongst these motivations. I asserted that, while personal and ethical
justifications for engaging in particular acts of consumption are somewhat reasonable,

249
individual consumption habits are severely limited as a means of bringing about social
change. I showed that consumption practices are important for the development of
community within social movements; this effect is not always consciously sought by
anarchist consumers, but it is nonetheless an outcome of their shared consumption
patterns. I also discussed how the flip-side of this community building function is the
cultivation of insularity, as consumer tastes are used to reinforce social distinctions
between insiders and outsiders of the movement.
In Chapter Three, I considered anarchists’ modes of stylistic self-presentation in
order to examine the relationship between embodied performance and political activism. I
explained how personal style is used as a tool in the construction and communication of
political identity. I focused particularly on how stylistic difference is employed by
anarchists to represent their ideological dissent from the mainstream; again the idea of
lifestyle as a vehicle of social distinction came up. I argued that spectacular subcultural
style is limited in its potential to effectively communicate about political alternatives,
since it relies on mainstream audiences having the discursive framework necessary to
interpret the philosophical beliefs underlying anarchists’ stylistic expressions.
In Chapter Four, I examined anarchists’ sexuality as an aspect of lifestyle which,
like the others discussed in this dissertation, is both deeply personal and intensely
political. I showed that anarchists use sexual practices and identifications to both enact
and represent their political beliefs. I discussed the way that particular expressions of
sexuality are normalized and even privileged within resistant subcultures. This illustrated
that discourses of lifestyle politics work to produce disciplined practice on the part of

250
individuals who identify with social movements. I argued that such disciplinarity may be
mobilized strategically to produce positive material outcomes, but also that there are
circumstances in which performance-based tactics of resistance are problematic. For this
reason, I advocated a “diversity of tactics” approach to lifestyle politics.
In Chapter Five, I explored issues of identity and subjectivity with respect to
anarchist lifestyle politics. I talked about concerns expressed by anarchists about
identifying as such, as well as some of the theoretical implications of anarchist identity
politics. I showed how the discourse of anarchist identity produces particular kinds of
subjects and practices, paying particular attention to the ways that ideas of accountability
and authenticity generate disciplinary power that circulates among self-identified
anarchists. I revisited the issue of distinction, showing how lifestyle habits work to
exclude certain subjects from the category of anarchist identity. I ultimately argued for an
“authenticity of ethics,” in which the productive disciplinarity of anarchist identity is
retained, while its more problematic effects are scrutinized and militated against.
What I think underlies all of the arguments in this dissertation is a call for
strategic thinking, which requires analytic precision, attention to situational factors, and
tactical flexibility. In his book, Anticapitalism and Culture, Gilbert posits “an important
axiom for both cultural studies and radical politics,” which is that, “those conceptual
resources which are most useful for analyzing power relationships in culture should also
be of potential use in orienting political action, and vice versa” (Gilbert 2008, 135).
Indeed, I see my work here as one response to Gilbert’s call for a renewed dialogue
between cultural studies and progressive politics. As Gilbert says, the dialogue is bi-

251
directional. Movements like the one I have examined here have as much to offer cultural
theory as cultural theory has to offer them. According to Mark Kelly’s reading of
Foucault, “critique is necessary to determine whether a given tactic is truly resistant or
not” (Kelly 2009, 131). Attempting such critique is the role Foucault envisions for the
activist-intellectual:
Perhaps philosophy can still play a role on the side of counter-power… on
condition that philosophy stop thinking of itself either as pedagogy, or as
legislation, and that it gives itself the task of analyzing, of elucidating, of making
visible, and thus of intensifying the struggles that unfold around power, the
strategies of the adversaries inside power relations, the tactics utilized, the sites of
resistance….
4

Activist Joshua Stephens calls for the same. Reflecting upon his experience in the
anarchist movement over the past decade, Stephens expresses disappointment that
prescriptive statements about political strategy are rarely accompanied by empirical
assessment and revision of the tactics involved:
If these prescriptions have been so passionately and emphatically agreed upon
with such tenure, we ought to have at least a few things to say about how well
they've road-tested. Evaluations? Insights? Geographic variability?
Flaws/failures? Innovations? (Stephens 2009)

It is my hope that this dissertation offers something meaningful in this vein, by applying
cultural studies scholarship to a contemporary activist movement. Through evidence from
this movement, I have tried to show that various practices of lifestyle politics cannot be
judged a priori as either “good” or “bad” for social movements, but that they accomplish
particular things in particular contexts. I problematize practices and discourses of

4
From Foucault’s Dits et Ecrits II, translated and quoted by Mark Kelly (2008, 129).

252
anarchist lifestyle politics, not to discount lifestyle politics, but to figure out how it can be
more effectively integrated into radical social movement strategy.
Although reports of capitalism’s death are generally greatly exaggerated, critics of
capitalism are certainly finding more of an audience within the current economic crisis.
Indeed, some of the anarchist lifestyle practices presented here are starting to make sense
to more and more people as responses to the dire economic climate. For many, they even
make sense as responses to the literal climate—veganism, for instance, has been widely
touted as a solution to the crisis of global warming. As financial institutions fail and state
governments prove themselves unwilling to fulfill the tasks of providing services and
protecting civil rights, anarchist modes of direct action and autonomous, collective self-
sustainability look like attractive alternatives. Even institutions like monogamy, marriage,
and heterosexuality are finding their legitimacy vociferously questioned in popular
discourse (even if they, like capitalist ideology, largely maintain their cultural and legal
hegemony). The problem for those who adopt alternative lifestyles will be one that
anarchists have been struggling with all along, how to make these personal practices
political in a productive, indeed radically transformative way.

253
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267
APPENDIX ONE
LIST OF INTERVIEWEES

Because of the large number of interviewees quoted in this dissertation, readers
may find it helpful to have a very brief biography of each individual. In each entry I have
attempted to provide information on the person’s age (or estimated age), place of
residence, organizing activities, and occupation at the time of the interview. I have also
included the mode of interview (in person, email, or instant messenger), the date(s) on
which the interview took place, and how I became acquainted with the interviewee.
Interviewees are listed alphabetically by pseudonym.

I interviewed Aaron (25) via instant messenger on July 18 through September 23,
2008. I got in touch with him through another interviewee (see Joel below), with whom
he had attended college and done activism in Washington, DC, where he lives. He is a
member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. It was Aaron who encouraged me to
submit a presentation proposal to IAS’s Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference
(RAT).
I interviewed Alyssa (early 30s) via instant messenger and email on October 10
through November 1, 2008. I was given her name by another interviewee (see Alma
below), who had known her as a graduate student in Santa Cruz. She is a college
philosophy professor at a small university in Ontario, Canada, and is involved in anti-war
organizing.

268
I interviewed Alma (late 20s) in person on August 15, 2008. I met her at a
speaking event put on by her anarchist collective. She is active in organizing anarchist
groups and events in LA. She is a graduate student in Latino studies, and has also worked
as a teacher in LA public schools and in her parents’ convenience store.
I interviewed Branch (28) in person on June 12, 2008. I met him in a seminar
class at my university in LA, where he is a graduate student in geography. He is involved
in border activism and immigrant aid near the US-Mexico border. Branch became a close
personal friend and interlocutor of mine as I did this research.
I interviewed Carla (early 20s) via email on September 1 through October 21,
2008. I got in touch with her through Alma. She is a college student in Texas.
I interviewed Dana (mid 20s) via email on September 22, 2008. I got in touch
with her through Joel, who was a friend of hers during college in Washington, DC. She
was currently living in New York City where she was attending graduate school for
economics, but was about to enter the Peace Corps in Ghana. I estimate that she was in
her mid-twenties at the time of our interview.
I interviewed Dave (late 20s) via email on December 15, 2008. I met him at RAT.
He lives on a farm in Vermont and is active with local food politics.
I interviewed Emily (28) in person on June 7, 2008. She contacted me through a
social networking website, and I later asked her to participate in my research. She is a
graduate student of public policy in LA, and is involved with prison solidarity and
immigration activism.

269
I interviewed Gabby (25) in person on March 5, 2009. I got in touch with her
through Joel, whom she had known while living in DC. She grew up in East Los Angeles,
and was currently residing there again, seeking work as a journalist. She is involved with
organizing feminist cultural festivals.
I interviewed Grant (mid 20s) via email on November 11 through 26, 2008. I met
him at RAT. He lives in DC and has been involved in political punk and hardcore culture.
I interviewed Helena (29) via email on September 14, 2008. I got in touch with
her through Joel, who was a friend of hers during college in DC. I later met her in person
at RAT. She is pursuing graduate school in dance in Texas, and works with Left Turn, a
magazine on global justice struggles.
I interviewed Jack (mid 20s) via email on November 18, 2008. I met him at RAT.
He lives in Philadelphia where he is involved in neighborhood organizing, but he had
also lived and done activism in DC.
I interviewed Jeremy (30) via email on July 16 through 23, 2008 . I got in touch
with him through Joel, who had done activist work with him in DC. I later met him in
person at RAT. He co-founded a worker self-managed dog-walking collective in DC and
was on the board of the IAS.
I interviewed Jerome (26) via email on November 11 through 14, 2008. I met him
at RAT. He lives in Philadelphia. He does labor activism and volunteers at Wooden Shoe
Books, an anarchist collective bookstore.
I interviewed Jill (21) via email on November 22, 2008. I met her at RAT. She
lives in Vermont, and had done animal rights activism in Ontario, Canada.

270
I interviewed Joel (25) in person on April 13, 2008. He is a close personal friend
of mine and a fellow student in my communication doctoral program in LA. He was a
key informant throughout the research process, and often served as an interlocutor for me
as I developed my own personal observations of anarchist lifestyle politics. He was active
in the anarchist community of DC, where he attended college. Outside of graduate school
he works as a web journalist and is involved in housing rights activism.
I interviewed Jonathan (mid 20s) via email on November 11 through 24, 2008. I
met him at RAT. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he attends graduate school for
philosophy and is involved in environmental activism.
I interviewed Josef (28) in person on February 8, 2009. I met him through another
interviewee (see Tina below). He lives in LA and is active with Food Not Bombs. He is
also a graduate student who studies ecologically sustainable housing.
I interviewed Leo (32) in person on March 4, 2009. I met him at a picnic put on
by Anarcha-LA, an anarchist feminist organization in LA. He works as a medical lab
technician and is active in organizing local anarchist events.
I interviewed Mark (mid 20s) in person on October 7, 2008. I met him through
another interviewee (see Rilla below). He works as a bike messenger and does labor
organizing in LA.
I interviewed Matthew (early 30s) via email on September 29 through October 5,
2008. I later met him in person at RAT. He is a college philosophy professor in Texas. He
writes and organizes conferences on anarchist politics.

271
I interviewed Melissa (early 30s) in person on February 14, 2009. I got in touch
with her through Branch. She is a novelist and social work graduate student in LA.
I interviewed Miles (mid 30s) via email on November 11 through December 15,
2008. I met him at RAT. He lives in Vermont, where he is a college philosophy
professor.
I interviewed Minty (28) in person and via email on February 23, 2009. I got in
touch with her through Branch. She works in LA for a non-profit organization that
networks community organizations across the country. She is also involved in local
anarcha-feminist organizing.
I interviewed Miranda (41) in person on February 18, 2009. I met her at a
speaking event at the Los Angeles Eco-Village. She is an artist and community activist in
LA, and also teaches college art classes.
I interviewed Orlando (23) in person on September 29, 2008. I was put in contact
with him through a fellow student at my university. He is a recent college graduate and
lives in LA.
I interviewed Pritha (mid 20s) via email on September 15, 2008. I got in touch
with her through Joel. She lives in DC, where she works for a local labor organization.
Her activist work centers on issues confronting people of color.
I interviewed Raychel (21) in person on March 6, 2009. I met her at a picnic put
on by Anarcha-LA. She is a college student in Orange County, and is involved in
feminist and animal rights organizing.

272
I interviewed Revbaker (25) via email on November 11 through December 17,
2008. He lives in Denver where he is a graduate student in political science and is
involved in local food and environmental activism.
I interviewed Rilla (29) in person on August 14, 2008. I met her through a mutual
friend. She is a graduate student in English and has been involved with activism around
labor and immigrant rights.
I interviewed Aisha (mid 20s) via email on September 29 through October 7,
2008. She emigrated with her family to the US from Afghanistan. I got in touch with her
through Alma. She lives in San Jose.
I interviewed Rosario (18) in person on July 18, 2009. I met her at a speaking
event in LA, where she grew up, though she lives and attends college in DC. She is
involved with anti-war activism and Students for a Democratic Society.
I interviewed Sally (19) in person on January 26, 2009. I met her through LA
Food Not Bombs. She is a college student and is involved in campus activism.
I interviewed Samantha (24) via email on September 23, 2008. I met her through
a mutual friend. She works in the labor movement, and does activism around queer and
feminist issues.
I interviewed Shane (29) via email on January 27, 2009. I met her at RAT. She
makes documentary films and lives in Montreal.
I interviewed Tina (23) in person on January 18, 2009. I saw her speak at the first
Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair and contacted her via Facebook to participate in my

273
research. She is a college student and tutor in Southern California, and is involved in LA
Food Not Bombs.
I interviewed Tom (27) in person on February 15 and 17, 2009. I met him through
LA Food Not Bombs. He is a music teacher and artist.
I interviewed Winona (late 20s) via instant messenger on October 3, 2008. I got in
touch with her through Alma. She is a labor organizer in San Francisco.

274
APPENDIX TWO

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Where did you first learn about anarchism?

2. What do you think makes someone an anarchist?

3. Do you call yourself an anarchist?

4. Do you feel there is a general anarchist community or culture? What would you say
characterizes it?

5. Do you feel that you’re part of a local anarchist community? How would you describe
it? How did you get involved with it?

6. What, if any, kinds of activism do you do?

7. What, if anything, do you do for income?

8. What do you do for fun?

9. Where do you generally hang out in your free time?

10. What, if any, kinds of media do you like? TV? Films? Music? Magazines? Websites?
What do you like about the stuff you’re into?

11. How do you get around (e.g. bike, bus, car, etc.)?

12. How would you describe your dietary practices? Are you vegetarian or vegan?

13. What’s your living situation like? Do you live in collective housing?

14. How would you describe your appearance or personal style?

15. How would you describe your dating/sexual practices?

16. Do you see any relationship between anarchism and your ethnicity? Do any issues
come up around that for you?

17. Is there anything else you want me to know? Or questions you think I should have
asked?

275

18. Do you have any questions for me?

276
APPENDIX THREE

INFORMATION SHEET FOR INTERVIEWEES

Because this research involved human subjects, approval was required from my
university’s Internal Review Board. Due to the sometimes sensitive nature of
participation in anarchist political activities, it was important to me that I not ask
participants to sign agreements or provide their real names. (As it turned out, very few
participants seemed at all concerned about preserving their anonymity.) I received IRB
approval to obtain only verbal consent from interviewees, on the condition I provide them
with an information sheet describing the study. What follows is the information I
presented to interviewees at the beginning of the interview.

University of Southern California

Anarchist Identity and Everyday Practices

You are asked to participate in a research study conducted by Laura Portwood-Stacer,
M.A., from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern
California. The results of the study will contribute to Ms. Portwood-Stacer’s doctoral
dissertation. You were selected as a possible participant in this study because you have an
interest in anarchist politics and culture. You must be at least 18 years of age to
participate. A total of 50 subjects who identify with anarchism will be selected to
participate. Your participation is voluntary. Please take as much time as you need to read
the information sheet. You may also decide to discuss it with your family or friends. You
will be given a copy of this form.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
I am asking you to take part in a research study because I am trying to learn more about
how people who identify with anarchism live out this identity in their everyday lives.

Your responses to the interview questions will constitute consent to participate in this
research project.

277
PROCEDURES
You will be asked to respond to several interview questions about your interest in
anarchism and your everyday practices. (For example, you may be asked, “Where did
you first learn about anarchism?” or, “Have you adopted specific dietary practices, such
as veganism, due to your interest in anarchism?”) With your permission, the interview
will be audio recorded. The interview may last up to two hours. You may be asked to
participate in follow-up interviews. The interviews can take place in a location of your
choosing.

POTENTIAL RISKS AND DISCOMFORTS
There are no anticipated risks to your participation, although you may be inconvenienced
from taking time out of your day to complete the interview. Any questions that make you
uncomfortable can be skipped and not answered.

POTENTIAL BENEFITS TO SUBJECTS AND/OR TO SOCIETY
You may not directly benefit from your participation in this research study. This research
aims to better understand what makes political movements rewarding for their
participants and effective at bringing about social change, thus there is a potential benefit
of this knowledge for the anarchist movement itself.

PAYMENT/COMPENSATION FOR PARTICIPATION
You will not receive any payment for your participation in this research study

CONFIDENTIALITY
Your real name and any other identifying information will not be collected by the
researcher. The recordings and transcripts of your interview responses will be labeled
with pseudonyms (fake names). This data may be shared with faculty members of the
researcher’s doctoral dissertation committee, but will be identified only with
pseudonyms. When the results of the research are published or discussed in conferences,
only pseudonyms will be used in connection with your responses.

You have the right to review the recordings and transcripts of your responses at any time;
however, you will need to remember the pseudonym given to you. The data will be stored
indefinitely by the researcher, who may use it for future studies. You will not be
contacted for future studies should your responses be used.

PARTICIPATION AND WITHDRAWAL
You can choose whether to be in this study or not. If you volunteer to be in this study,
you may withdraw at any time without consequences of any kind. You may also refuse to
answer any questions you don’t want to answer and still remain in the study.

278
RIGHTS OF RESEARCH SUBJECTS
You may withdraw your consent at any time and discontinue participation without
penalty. You are not waiving any legal claims, rights or remedies because of your
participation in this research study. If you have any questions about your rights as a
study subject or you would like to speak with someone independent of the research team
to obtain answers to questions about the research, or in the event the research staff can
not be reached, please contact the University Park IRB, Office of the Vice Provost for
Research Advancement, Stonier Hall, Room 224a, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1146, (213)
821-5272 or upirb@usc.edu.

IDENTIFICATION OF INVESTIGATORS
If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please feel free to contact Laura
Portwood-Stacer at portwood@usc.edu or 213-200-0511, or faculty advisor Sarah Banet-
Weiser at sbanet@usc.edu or 213-740-4088.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation is a critical study of the phenomenon of “lifestyle politics.” I define lifestyle politics as attempts by individuals to enact their political ideologies through the habitual practices of their everyday lives. In this study, I use ethnographic methods to explore how contemporary anarchist activists position their personal lifestyles within strategies of radical political resistance. That is, I examine how individuals who self-identify as anarchists use this identity, and the everyday cultural practices that go with it, as tools of political dissent. This study crosses disciplinary boundaries, employing methods and theories from communication, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology. It draws on previous research in the areas of consumer activism, subcultures and social movements, embodied performance, queer resistance, and identity politics. It is heavily informed by Foucaultian theories of power, discourse, and subjectivity, and is inspired by feminist work on identity and political struggle.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Portwood-Stacer, Laura (author)

Core Title The practice of everyday politics: lifestyle and identity as radical activism

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 06/16/2010

Defense Date 12/16/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anarchists,consumption,culture,identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,sexuality,subculture

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Gross, Larry (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email culturetrouble@gmail.com,portwood@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3136

Unique identifier UC1484923

Identifier etd-PortwoodStacer-3737 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-360770 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3136 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PortwoodStacer-3737.pdf

Dmrecord 360770

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Portwood-Stacer, Laura

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu