A
couple of days ago, Saffo Papantonopoulou was invited at Mov Kafeneio by Massqueerraid to talk about her article “Straightness must be destroyed” at Yfanet Squat in Thessaloniki, Northern Greece. The room on Saturday evening was filled with people and the discussion, after the presentation, lasted for hours.
Here is how Saffo would present herself: “I
am a queer, transgender, thirdgender anarchist. My family is
Greek-Egyptian and my mother was a war refugee. I was born in United
States. I write this, based on my own experience of being queer in
the United States. I hope and I believe that these ideas will prove
relevant in a variety of contexts.”
(Excerpt from the article “Straightness must be destroyed” by
Saffo Papantonopoulou, in “Queering Anarchism” – AK Press, 2012, edited by C.B Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon and Abbey Volcano).
ArtemisFree:
l'd
like to start from the title of your essay in the Book “Queering
Anarchism” called "Straightness must be destroyed". It's
quite a provocative title and somebody might misunderstand it and
think of something entirely different. Without reading it you get the
impression that you hate straight people. But that's not the point...
The point is that straightness in itself is a system. Can you explain
this to the people that haven't read the essay?
Saffo:
Sure.
First of all, the title is provocative on purpose. I do want it to be
unsettling. I want it to be unsettling for straight people. When I
was writing it I sort of had a mixed image of who my imagined
audience would be. The point of the whole book was, to be a kind of a
beginner's guide to intersection between queerness and anarchism. So
I imagined a common audience, not a theoretically abstract one. An
audience who are new to queerness, new to anarchism. The point of the
essay unfolded in the process of writing it. Basically I wanted to
get away from all that "oh, some people are gay and some people
are straight, and some people are trans or bisexual" and
everyone has their own sort of self-identification. This is a
neo-liberal approach. "Some people like Coke, and some people
like Pepsi". We rather think about sexuality and gender as some
systems that have a history that's political. We don't just have our
sexualities, we are part of a historical process. Part of the idea
that straightness is a system, is that I
am not talking about identification, I am talking about a larger
system that we need to think about... We have different words for it,
we call it heteronormativity, patriarchy, cis-sexism. These are all
different manifestations of this larger thing. We can call it
straightness, we can call it heteropatriarchy, we can call it
transphobia. All of these things that manifest themselves in
different ways. So, a cis person, who is gay, who is transphobic,
that's also a form of straightness.
ArtemisFree:
Can
you give us an example?
Saffo:
One thing that I talked about is straightness as a regime that tells
us of ways through which we are supposed to relate to our bodies and
our sexualities and genders. One of the things I talked about is the
ways that heterosexual desire is supposed to be performed, the
narratives and expectations about how straight people are supposed to
perform their sexual desire, as something that is tied to capitalism.
So, a straight man wants to be married to his girlfriend. There is
pressure that he should marry her and there is pressure to buy her a
ring, that has diamonds on it, diamonds that are the cause of
slaughtering people in subsaharan Africa. So, this is tied to a
larger regime of consumption. And that's part of straightness as a
system of social relations, the way people are supposed to relate to
each other and to their own bodies.
ArtemisFree:
In
your example, the man does not have the money to buy the ring. So, he
pays with a credit card and he gets into debt for years in order to
pay for that. He is supporting diamond factories and the bank system.
Something that people rarely think of, is the process of getting what
they want. They think of a ring as something that they get from a
shop and put it on their finger. That's the whole process for them,
whereas you see the whole pattern of production and consumption.
Saffo:
It's
interesting too, because we can think about this as a kind of
vulnerability on the part of the straight man. Straight masculinity,
even though it presents itself as hyper-powerful, that performance of
power places this burden of vulnerability on the straight man. You
are not a real man if you don't buy a diamond ring. You know where
this comes from? This comes from the history of the marketing of
diamond companies, like DeBeers. I am not super familiar with the
whole industry, but we can look at this as the process, how
masculinity is produced. Another example that I am using, is
something that I imagine is common in Greece but definitely not in
United States. There are a lot of these young anarchists, teenage
boys, who perform this kind of super maschismo, through their
anarchism, and they think it's cool to throw Molotov cocktails at
cops. The fact that there is this very gendered pressure to do so, is
something that in the United States is used by the police as a form
of entrapment. There are cases of undercover police that pose as
older anarchists that put pressure on the young to do so. This
performance of masculinity, which I tie back to a larger institution
of straightness. So basically the idea of patriarchy, transphobia,
heteronormativity, are all part of this larger institution that is
tied to capitalism.
ArtemisFree:
So,
what about queerness?
Saffo:
It's
interesting to use queerness as the one obvious thing that I don't
take up much in the essay. I sort of posit queerness as the
antithesis to this. I don't have a clear picture about what queer is,
or what queer isn't. I know that, at least in the United States and
from what I understand in Greece, too, it's this very much like a
fraught thing, like, here is a cis gender man, who is mostly
straight, but who also sometimes kisses boys, and that comes off as
queer. I guess the kind of idea of queerness that I am positing is,
that queerness is a political struggle against straightness. If you
contribute to dismantling straightness as an institution, then you
are part of this queer struggle. But if you are a trans woman, then
you don't experience queerness the same way as a bisexual cis man.
So... What about queerness? (laughs)
ArtemisFree:
I
know you cannot include everything in a definition, but I am sure
that at least you can give us something to think about!
Saffo:
I
intentionally didn't try to give a clear definition of queerness. I
worry about being too invested in the term queerness. I worry about
being too politically invested in words. One thing I see a lot of, in
the United States, is younger, cis gender, white feminists, who are
very, very, very into calling themselves feminists. And my reaction
is, I don't know if you have this expression in Greek, but in English
we say: "show, don't tell". Show me, don't tell me. Don't
tell me that you are a feminist, show me that you are a feminist.
Show me an action, like, what are you doing about patriarchy. I feel
the same way about “queer”. Show me what are you doing to make
the world a less straight space. What are you doing to combat
patriarchy, and heterosexism, and heteronormativity, what are you
doing to combat, the globalization of gayness, which is also a
problem.
ArtemisFree:
Why
don't you give us an example of such actions?
Saffo:
I
wish I had an answer. There is this question that I have about the
politics of visibility, this idea that we need to make spaces queer,
we need to perform queerness in public spaces that aren't vey queer.
I think that can be part of it.
ArtemisFree:
Let's
see it like this. In Greece, there are demonstrations, events, in
public, like kiss-offs, there are places like Mov Kafeneio, queer
community spaces, Pride events, to a certain extent. It's something
that you see in art, in universities, in academic works, you see it
in a number of ways. What's more interesting is how communities work
and what they can offer to people. Do you have experiences like this
that you'd like to share? Example: how queer communities work and
what do they add to this struggle?
Saffo:
Community
is definitely a word that I struggle with. Sometimes I am not really
sure what it means, like I can't tell you what the difference is
between a community and a clique. I have lived in New York for two
years now, and there are so many queer people there, but I do not
feel a very strong sense of community. I feel there are interspersed
people, who go to the same parties, and go to the same shows, but
again I don't necessarily find that to be what my vision of
liberation would look like. This is something that I struggle with.
Like a lot of people, I think. I have more questions/ideas/critiques
than answers to these problems. What does a community look like?
ArtemisFree:
The
few weeks that you spent here, you've been to events, to Mov
Kafeneio, for example...
Saffo:
In
the two weeks I've been in Thessaloniki I would say I've felt a
closer sense of community among people here than in the two years
that I've lived in New York. Which says something, considering that
there are more openly queer people in New York than here. New York is
such a big city. There is this sort of economy of scale that happens,
where, in a place such as Thessaloniki, that is big enough for it to
be a sizable number of queer people, that's still small enough, for
it to be a small community. There is this sort of double-edged sword,
where, it seems that to a certain extent people stick together. Even
if someone is not necessarily your favourite person in the world, you
say, there are not that many of us, we have to stick together - we
also know each other and we hang out in the same places. There is
this sense of jealousy that happens, among people, they would say, oh
my God, why would you go from a place like New York, to Thessaloniki?
The bigger it gets, the people feel the privilege of being selective,
about what kind of people they hang out with. It's a double edged
sword. There are communities in New York, but they are very hard to
get into. You have to really work to be accepted in a community, you
have to know the right people, it really takes a long time to build
trust. Which is part of the ebb and flow of the city. People have the
luxury to be selective about who they interact with. Which can also
make it into a very, very lonely place. A very difficult place. I see
it as part of the larger flow of capitalism, in places like New York
city. Whereas Thessaloniki is sort of mixed capitalist, obviously,
there is still this microcosm. And I see this a lot of times in
smaller places. In queer communities, in smaller places, people can
stick together. There is a sort of alliance with radical queer people
in big cities. Because at other times, the struggle in big cities is
among queer people. A political struggle between different queer
people. And there is often a sense that people have, in smaller
places, that you actually have the privilege of being able to
alienate yourself from other queer people in bigger cities. Whereas
in smaller places queer people that I know say "we have to stick
together". I am not sure if that answers the question.
ArtemisFree:
My
next question is, what would your ideal queer community be like? What
do you dream about, when you dream about a queer community?
Saffo:
I
guess I do dream about a queer community, but I also ask myself, what
an ideal world would be like. And then it's about more realistic
goals, and what you are realistically going to accomplish within your
life-time. My ideal world would be a world without capitalism, and
without neo-liberalism, and without straightness and a world where
there wouldn't be a thing such as a queer community, because
queerness itself would become redundant. I want the abolition of
queerness, because I want the abolition of straightness. Without
straightness there wouldn't be its antithesis, queerness.
ArtemisFree:
Give
us an example, of how you get from point A, to point B. How you get
from a capitalist society to a society that is more fair.
Saffo:
I
wish I had an answer to that.
ArtemisFree:
I
am sure you have ideas.
Saffo:
I
have a lot of contradictory ideas. I didn't want to answer your
question about queer communities, because I don't think we are
necessarily going to abolish capitalism anytime soon. The question
is, how we get there, what do we do in the meantime, to survive. And
that, I don't know. I think that through queer forms of solidarity,
people find the ways to express their needs, to be able to help each
other out, to deal with their own internal conflicts, within the
community. And that's really important. I think that it's important
to do it in a way that is not insular. On one hand, there is this
separatist move, that wants to be away from straight people, because
it's hard being around straight people. Straight people can be
fucking horrible. And I get that. And I don't like really being
around straight people, but I also think that, finding a way to
create a queer community that also allows in a sense the abolition of
straightness by creating the kind of space and the kind of outreach
and the kind of politics that will allow straight people to question
their sexuality and gender is important. Because as marginalized
group that's isolating, if we have our own isolated community over
here, what does that do for the queer kid who's born into her
straight family that feels like she's the only lesbian in the history
of the world? Which is something that a lot of us have experienced.
Every time a queer kid is born, they have to re-invent the wheel and
search out and possibly find that queer community. And in the process
they have to leave everything. They have to leave their home, they
have to leave so many of their friends. I don't think that's
sustainable as a long-term vision of what I want the universe to
be. So, some sort of outreach, some sort of way that makes queerness,
something that is accessible to people, is important, but I don't
know how you do that.
ArtemisFree:
Well,
I see an effort, from volunteers that work towards this goal,
organizing talks, and seminars, and they offer an open discussion on
this topic, about what it means to be queer, or what queer people
want when they fight for equal rights... I get the feeling that these
actions have a very limited audience. They don't reach the wider
audience that queer people want to reach. And sometimes I even get
the feeling that queer communities don't care about this. They feel
perfectly happy in their queer neighbourhoods, with their queer
families, in the free spaces that they have, and they enjoy that. And
they don't want to make a difference. They don't care about reaching
out to straight people and have them see this difference.
Saffo:
Yes,
I agree.
ArtemisFree:
Is
this something that you see happening?
Saffo:
Yes,
yes, I definitely agree. I think this is a larger question for
political movements across the board, not just queer movements. One
thing I noticed, talking with people here in Greece, about the
anarchist movement, is that it is this ritual back and forth, now we
throw Molotov cocktails to the cops, then we go back to the
University, or we have marches, or we have discussions, and in the
U.S., it is, we have a protest, or we have rallies, we have
petitions, and in general this feels like, ok, we are trying the same
tactics over and over again, and it's not getting us anywhere, and I
am talking about U.S. now. In U.S., in the 50s and the 60s it was
revolutionary to have a picket outside, and it was "oh my God".
Now, nobody cares. You can go and have your march. We had over 1
million people, protesting the war in Iraq in 2003. And it was the
biggest protest ever, in the history of the world and the war still
happened. The same happens with queer politics, the same with
anarchism. I want to break up the pattern but I don't know the
answer, about what is going to break this pattern.
ArtemisFree:
I
am going to give you an example. I was participating in a discussion
regarding the organization of the Pride march in Thessaloniki for the
first time. And as you know, we have a very conservative Archbishop
in this town. So there were two kinds of opinions regarding church,
during the discussion. One of them was, who cares about church, they
suck, we can't change them anyway. And there was another opinion,
saying, we shouldn't be very provocative, because they will use this
and talk negatively about us to the people. And not a single person
said, why don't we start a discussion with the Church. They speak
about queer people as if they never met them. So, let us meet, and
have a real discussion, and explain to them what the fuck we are
talking about. I thought of that, but I did not mention it, because I
was sure, that if I said anything like that, they would think that I
am crazy, because it was so out of the norm. People find a definition
for things, and themselves, and they stick to it. And they don't want
to change that.
Saffo:
I
wouldn't want to talk to them, personally. I like that idea. I
wouldn't feel comfortable to be the one speaking to them. I think the
idea makes sense. You have to be creative in your tactics. One thing
that I see a lot in United States, across all different points of the
political spectrum... is an equation of tactics and ideology. You
know, you have a political ideology and you have tactics, and they
are supposed to be a toolkit for your political goals. A lot of times
people equate anarchism with throwing Molotov cocktails and breaking
windows, and this is both between liberals and conservatives. What,
you are an anarchist? That's what you do, you smash windows.
Sometimes a discussion can be useful. Sometimes throwing Molotovs can
be useful. And sometimes signing a petition can be useful. And having
a discussion with the church can be useful. I think that part of the
problem (I don't know if this is happening in Greece, I am talking
about the United States) is, people equating tactics with ideology.
We have this particular ideology, we are going to use this particular
tactic. I feel the same way about non-violence, for instance. What
we call a non-violent protest, civil disobedience, non - violent
forms of direct action. These are tactics and I don't really agree
with turning non-violence into an ideology as opposed to a tactic.
That's a similar problem. In terms of talking to the church, yeah,
that's something we haven't tried. You do it, maybe it has
results, maybe it doesn't, and then afterwards you meet with your
group, and you discuss, what are the advantages of this tactic, what
are the disadvantages, did it work, did it not, what were our goals,
did we accomplish things? I think we should use an empirical
approach. Try different things, and experiment, to get the results
that you want, and if it doesn't, try something different. If you
come up with the formula that can abolish capitalism, let me know!
But I think we need to experiment more with tactics in general.
People get too comfortable with the things they already know.
ArtemisFree:
Thank
you so much for this interview!
This interview happened on June 27, 2013, in Thessaloniki, Greece.
