Anarchists In Love (The Generation Quartet)

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in which Biehl says that ‘women are to this revolution what the proletariat was to Marxist-Leninist revolutions of the past century’ and that although ‘images of Abdullah Ocalan are everywhere’, there is nothing ‘Orwellian’ about this.[5] The Ballad of the False Barman, Dec 1966: Hampstead Theatre Club. Sept 1972: Palace Theatre, Watford. One woman whose contribution to Spanish anarchism is exceptionally well-documented is Federica Montseny (1905–94), the daughter of La Revista Blanca's co-founders and one of its most prominent writers from the age of eighteen. Footnote 24 When the Second Republic (1931–6) replaced Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923–30), female suffrage was granted which made political participation more possible for women. In this context she began writing for Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the CNT, and these connections led her to be chosen from among Spain's leading anarchists for the role of Minister of Health and Social Care in 1936. In her first year in office, she oversaw the legalisation of abortion and contraception, as well as promotion of sex education and research into sexual science. Footnote 25 She and La Revista Blanca had intervened into anarchist debates about gender and sexuality for years prior to these reforms, yet on these matters this anarchist periodical has attracted somewhat less historical attention than others such as Estudios or Iniciales which were more singularly committed to sex-reform content. Interwar medical discourse was grounded in what has since been termed ‘compulsory heterosexuality’: male-female attraction was considered the human default state, so deviation from cisgender externalisation or heterosexual orientation was treated as a correctable social and biological abnormality. Footnote 55 This reductive ‘imaginary logic’ demanded that identification and desire be mutually exclusive, even though this unrealistically implied that there was only one type of masculinity and one type of femininity. Footnote 56 In the interwar period, people were categorised into ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ to protect the former from contamination by the latter. Footnote 57 Gregorio Marañón, whose research dominated interwar sexual science in Spain, pathologized sexual deviance by claiming that biological traits in ‘normal’ humans conditioned the ‘correct’ gendered behaviours for one's sex. Footnote 58 Of course, the existence of intersexuality and more recent advances in gender theory illustrate that ‘sex’ is actually an ideal construction never able to fully materialise no matter how many regulatory norms are put in place by society. Footnote 59 Even though by the late 1920s some research found ‘female’ hormones in the endocrine systems of people with ‘male’ gonads and vice versa (illustrating that ‘sex’ was a continuum), this did little to ease popular concerns about gender inversion or sexual deviance. Footnote 60

His subsequent artistic work ranged from landscape drawings of Winchelsea Beach and Rye countryside to oil portraits of the poet Harry Fainlight and has lately been exhibited in London, Rye and Brighton. A recent series of paintings entitled The Downs reflected the sensuous forms of the landscape of the South Downs where he lived. He was latterly intensely involved in creating paintings which he described as "images of the unknown, paths through conflict, compounds of sex and spirit, mysterious reflections, hints and fading memories which unsettle the darkness." The themes of his recent paintings are: War, Music, and Sex, the interior life of flowers, the sea bed and how do hills form roots. in which Burstein says he saw ‘not a single sign of coercion’ in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. In another article he wrote that a ‘very broad democracy exists in the cooperatives’. Anarchists in Love and Rage (1989-98) pushed the struggle for queer liberation in radical directions. Members actively participated in gay and lesbian marches, developed an anarchist approach to queer politics, and joined ACT UP in fighting for people with AIDS. During his twenties numerous of Colin Spencer's drawings were published in The London Magazine, The Transatlantic Review and Encounter. A series of drawings of writers of our time was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1959. Those he portrayed included John Betjeman, E.M. Forster, C.P.Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, Graham Greene, Alan Ross, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Lehmann, Stevie Smith, V.S.Naipaul, and John Osborne, among others. An oil portrait of E.M. Forster hung for many years in his rooms at King's College Cambridge. On his death Forster left it to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and it is now in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. The Chinese] are extremely moral, in fact puritanical. Crime has, apart from occasional ‘crimes of passion’, practically disappeared. Each street has a committee which settles all disputes, and there are women’s associations that look after the morals of the inhabitants. Theft, which used to be frequent, is now almost unknown. … Food is plentiful & cheap. …This perspective prefigured later developments in queer anarchist theory. The Mary Nardini Gang argues in “Toward the Queerest Insurrection” in 2014 that queer is not simply a sexual identity but rather “the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability […] Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. […] By ‘queer’, we mean ‘social war.’ And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it.” [7] In this view, anarchism is inherently queer because it rejects the “normalcy” of capitalist patriarchy and struggles against all forms of hierarchy and oppression. Spencer spent his period of National Service as a pacifist in the Royal Army Medical Corps until 1952. [1] He subsequently lived in London, Vienna, Athens and on the Greek island of Lesbos. His first novel was published when he was 28. His portrait of E.M. Forster was painted when he was 29. He married twice and had three grandsons and a great-granddaughter. [1] in which Sweezy says that there is no sort of ‘totalitarian dictatorship’ or dogmatic ‘line or ideology’ in Cuba. Spain's anarchist sexual revolution was intimately bound up in the broader history of the interwar period. The Spanish Civil War propelled the anarchists into government where they finally (albeit for a short time) were able to make sex reform a reality, and in this context revolutionary anarchist hubs like Barcelona saw record numbers of ‘free unions’. Footnote 160 Moreover, despite anarchism's firm rejection of state-led eugenic programmes, we cannot entirely detach the interwar Spanish anarchist press from concurrent eugenic movements across Europe and the Americas – regions whose own diverse anarchist movements were in direct communication with that of Spain. Footnote 161 Indeed, further investigation is needed into the involvement of anarchist women in the construction of these interwar transnational networks, as many of those active in Spain had connections and lived experience abroad and it was women's bodily autonomy that constituted the centre of the anarchist sexual revolution. Constance Bantman has outlined several methodological approaches which may be of use here, such as focusing on ‘hubs’ of anarchist networks, ‘informal internationalism’, or the personal networks and intercultural connections of individual anarchists. Footnote 162 For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for the Guardian. His column was particularly concerned with exploring current issues and anxieties about food production and manufacture. In 2001 he was described by Germaine Greer as 'the greatest living food writer'. [7]

From early on Colin Spencer's creative instincts were applied to food and cookery, and in 1978 his book Gourmet Cooking for Vegetarians was published. That was followed through the 80s and 90s by a series of other cookery books, totalling 18 in all. Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School – Empty Hands History on Marxist Reading Group: Introductory Syllabus Lessons from the History of Chinese Anarchism – The Polar Blast on Lessons from the History of Chinese AnarchismTellingly, these "intellectual sons" of Goldman justified their challenge to her "parental" authority by referring to "generational succession" based on the principle of social revolution. Having followed their spiritual mentor Kropotkin's endeavor to promote evolution "in the desirable direction through revolutionary action," these young male Chinese anarchists claimed that their antilove reasoning was consistent with the scientific, rational method of anarchism in the process of social evolution. 64 In particular, they saw it as their duty to surpass their predecessors on the path of maximizing individual liberty while promoting social solidarity. Lu Jianbo, for one, announced: "I think it is our responsibility as young people burdened less by social conventions" to step forward and further away from their precursors. 65 They also treated their antilove theory as a token of philosophical creativity following the principle of social evolution: as Lu claimed, "the new generation excels the old"; proposing the antilove theory, thus, "was by no means showing off for the theory's sake or disrespectful of former sages" such as Goldman, Lu emphasized. 66 Furthermore, as rebels against familial patriarchy—the main target of May Fourth cultural iconoclasm—the antilove anarchists did not refrain from challenging the discursive authority of Goldman, their "spiritual mother." Colin Spencer had huge fun working alongside Katharine Whitehorn to illustrate her column in the national Sunday newspaper, The Observer, with satirical drawings delineating the public's interpretation of fashion trends. He was commissioned by the Royal Opera House to draw their idiosyncratic opera audience for their members' Magazine. He has completed oil portraits for a wide range of private customers and collectors, including Carl Winter, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Lady Rawlinson; Diana Hopkinson; Michael Davidson; and Canon Frederic Hood of Pusey House, Oxford. His work resides in a wide range of private collections amongst those of Melvyn Bragg, Germaine Greer, Derek Grainger, Bob Swash, Diana Athill, Prue Leith and the late Mary Renault and Sir Huw Wheldon. Whether or not ACT UP strictly conformed to anarchist theory and practice was beside the point; AIDS activists took whatever opportunity they could to respond to an existential crisis. It may be useful to lay out an anarchist critique of state-centered AIDS activism, but to apply a “pure” anarchist standard to ACT UP verged on a dogmatic prioritization of anarchist politics over the lives of people with AIDS.