Episode 23 - Dean Spade on How We Act When Things Get Really Hard

In this episode, Caroline and I respond to a letter from a listener who is trying to navigate a tricky relationship. It is a relationship with a lot of fuzziness, moving from romantic and sexual to friends. There are also attempts at real conversation, though they aren’t always clear, producing a difficult dynamic to understand and find bearings. They know they need to end it—or at least take space from it—but they also are tied into the queer anarchist community in a small town that centers around this person’s house. As they say, they are trying to put the ghost back in its grave, because all of their attempts at clarity and space get lost in confusing communication and signals. This letter really brings up dynamics that are probably familiar to you all: the relationship where one person chases and the other person distances (then flips), the feeling that the end of the relationship will damage your relationships with other people, and of course deep personal connection and history that is hard to let go of, even if it is clearly part of the past. The listener seems to know what they want (they work it out in the letter pretty clearly), but all of these ties and ghosts keep them bound. Caroline and I try to discuss the dynamics from many angles, perhaps not coming to a simple solution, but hopefully giving a helpful perspective for all of our listeners who may be caught in similar situations. I do want to note that when I was listening back to the conversation, there are points where I am not sure I gave enough space to relationality. In other words, I give credence to many of those relationship truisms about centering yourself in a breakup, but feeling yourself can’t really be done without others. You can choose whom to share yourself with, but we are made up of all of these relationships and depend upon them to see and understand ourselves. To check out more of my work head over to CAW Journal, the writer-worker collective I started with carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. You can subscribe for free to get access to our newsletter, podcasts, advice column, and zine/sticker library. If you pay for a membership, you get access to all of our projects, including writing workshops, book clubs, movie nights, and a thriving Discord community.  The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Check out Channel Zero for more shows including interviews, analysis, news, reportbacks, stories, and more.

Today I’m sharing a conversation I had with one of my favorites, Dean Spade, about his recent book Love in a Fucked Up World out with Algonquin Books. Dean has been an inspiration for a long time with his commitments to abolition, anti-Zionism, and trans liberation, among other things. His previous book, Mutual Aid, came at a perfect moment when people were getting together in response to COVID-19 and the George Floyd Uprising. This new book has also appeared right when we need it, when we feel worn down and scared, and need to find better ways to connect with each other. His thinking here lines up very closely with the things that concern me, namely thinking beyond politics and anarchism as relationships, building bottom up. Dean starts from the idea that all of our movements and struggle are based on our relationships, and if we can’t get those right, how can we expect to work together to end this world and build another. Love in a Fucked Up World finally gives us a self-help book for queer anarchists: it contains so much insight matched with practical suggestions to help guide you through your own stories and the ones you project on others that get in the way of real connection. It really moved me in moments and gelled certain ways to understand myself in relation to others. Our conversation goes into nitty gritty relationship issues and zooms out to the ways these affect our collective work. We talk about how anarchists and leftists deprioritize and avoid doing this internal and interpersonal work, only to find that all of the problems appear in every place you go. It is so important to talk explicitly about our social needs and how our collective work fits into them. We can’t separate politics and love. Meetings are social spaces and our search for political direction is completely enmeshed in our search for intimate connection. But I’ll let Dean tell you more about this—he wrote the book on it. First, I want to announce the official launch of CAW, the writer worker collective that I belong to along with carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. It is a subscriber based platform where we will share all of our projects, a discord server, and offerings like writing workshops, book clubs, movie nights, as well as a zine and sticker library. If you sign up for free you get access to our weekly newsletter, our advice column, our podcasts, and the zines and stickers. If you subscribe to a paid membership, you have full access to everything. We have various subscription tiers, but everyone who subscribes has the same access. Please go over to https://www.cawshinythings.com to check out what we are doing there, and join if you want! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which brings together important shows with news, analysis, reportbacks, and culture. Check it out at https://www.channelzeronetwork.com (Note: I incorrectly say thechannelzeronetwork.com. There is no THE in the URL!)

Today I’m re-releasing a conversation I recorded for the Final Straw Radio with Joshua Clover in 2021. Our conversation focuses around his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot, in part within the context of the George Floyd rebellion. I wanted to present this conversation in memoriam of Joshua, who we learned last week had died. As many of the testimonials you can find online, Joshua was a great friend and comrade to a wide range of people. He is remembered not just as a poet and an academic thinker, but also as someone ready to throw down in the streets. I didn’t know him really beyond his work and this conversation, but I appreciated the depth of his thinking and his willingness to go into it with me. I am rereleasing this episode in its entirety as it was originally released by The Final Straw Radio. I wanted to do so in order to suggest anyone who has not listened to the show to check it out further. This is an essential long-running anarchist podcast that presents conversations with people involved in many different struggles, a necessary tool for us to figure out how to form international solidarities. It also engages with anarchist writing and culture. It’s a unique wide-ranging breadth of subjects. They gave me a chance to dig into wideranging and complex conversations with writers and people on the ground.I highly recommend checking them out, and digging into their past episodes. They also produce transcript zines of many of their conversations. You can find them on all the podcasting platforms or at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.com Both the Final Straw and the Breakup theory are part of the anarchist network of podcasts Channel Zero. This is another resource for so much great anarchist work. To find more conversations like these, plus totally different approaches, go to channelzeronetwork.com I’ve been away for awhile, but I have new shows to release, and plan to start posting again regularly. As of May 12, I will be moving all of my writing to my new collaborative project CAW, an online journal of autonomous writing. This is a writers collective formed by me, carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. It will be a subscription based service to help support us in devoting more time to our work. In addition to articles, essays, and interviews, we have an advice column and a free library of zines and stickers. Check us out and subscribe at cawshinythings.com.

In today’s episode, Caroline and I respond to a listener’s letter about breaking up with their psychoanalyst after five years. Right now, there is such an emphasis on therapy as a means to address trauma, as well as to adjust to the terror of the current conditions in the world. There is also a whole industry of self-help that coincides with shaming of people by individualizing their faults and failures. We may all need therapy to a certain extent—but when do we end it? Breaking up with a therapist is a kind of practice breakup: it’s a controlled environment where you can exercise your own determination and decision and face the consequences practically and emotionally. As the listener details in their letter, ending things comes with a large dose of ambivalence, and we tend to reason our way through it with pros and cons, or assigning blame and guilt. However, as the breakup theory tries to suggest, we can breakup for no other reason than it is what we feel is right in the moment. Caroline and I have a far reaching discussion about all of these ideas and many others, ultimately as a way to support the listener in their decision and their already well thought out process of marking this ending. But this conversation should be helpful to any listener, in or out of therapy, as another approach to encountering our feelings about the end and our own attempts at power and control.   If you haven’t already, please go over to cawshinythings.com and sign up to read the works that Vicky, me, and the amazing carla joy bergman and dani burlison are sharing there. Things have been incredibly difficult for me (and everyone), but I am coming back to regular recording and writing, so stay tuned. My column there is called “she’s not there.” But all of us are posting our articles, essays, writing prompts, and recordings—there is plenty for you to sink your teeth into. And I will be also offering other projects along with my collaborators.  The online journal is currently open to subscribers but will pivot soon to a paid subscription service. Check it out and help spread the word.   As always, if you want to submit a question, scenario, or problem for us to discuss from an anarchist/autonomous and queer perspective of ending things, you can write us at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories or call us at (917) 526-6548. We love to hear from you!   And if you like this podcast, please share with your friends, rate us, and follow us where it is you receive pods.   The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN will help you discover a library of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com  

On today’s episode, I have a conversation with Vicky Osterweil, a fellow member of our new writing collective, CAW, and the author of the indispensable history and provocation, In Defense of Looting, and a forthcoming book on intellectual property and Disney, called The Extended Universe. We decided to have this conversation in the opening month of the Trump administration to game out some possible scenarios as we observe the administration demolishing the constitutional and administrative state, against all the establishment assurances the the institutions can withstand any attack. Though our conversation does engage the fear and threat of the situation, we also discuss openings for us to take bold action that uses this moment of (bad) revolution to expand our collective power. Vicky is one of my favorite people to talk with. She has a brilliant analytical mind, an incredible story of political history and knowledge, and an inspiring way to read the devastating moments against a belief in the necessity to act. In fact, Vicky emphasizes the potential timeline of power consolidation by these fascist forces and the urgency for us to prepare ourselves for managing our lives and mounting attack. This was recorded at the end of February, so of course there have been new terrible political developments, but the analysis itself still stands as a way for us to assess the possibilities. If you haven’t already, please go over to cawshinythings.com and sign up to read the works that Vicky, me, and the amazing carla joy bergman and dani burlison are sharing there. Things have been incredibly difficult for me (and everyone), but I am coming back to regular recording and writing, so stay tuned. My column there is called “she’s not there.” But all of us are posting our articles, essays, writing prompts, and recordings—there is plenty for you to sink your teeth into. And I will be also offering other projects along with my collaborators.  The online journal is currently open to subscribers but will pivot soon to a subscription service with a pay what you want option. Check it out and help spread the word. As always, if you want to submit a question, scenario, or problem for us to discuss from an anarchist/autonomous and queer perspective of ending things, you can write us at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories or call us at (917) 526-6548. We have a couple agony letter episodes coming up, and we love to hear from you. If you like this podcast, please share with your friends, rate us, and follow us where it is you receive pods. The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN will help you discover a library of amazing audio projects, so check them out at channelzeronetwork.com

Hello everyone! I have been away longer than usual between episodes due to circumstances, and I appreciate you all coming back to listen. As a kind of compensation, this is a long one today—I got to talk to one of my favorite people to get into it with, Conner Habib. We had recorded a conversation along with Dean Spade in the approach to the election in order to reorient people’s thoughts and attention towards politics beyond the state—and so we decided to reconvene, the two of us, post-election, to discuss the relationship of feeling to thinking and doing. There was of course an intensity of feeling after the election, with many claims about how people should respond and act. Instead of going that route, Conner and I try to explore ways of not giving up our feelings and power to the spectacle of politics and everything it demands from us. In doing this, we aim to expand the possibilities of action, and to reconceive our relationship to the political in a way that develops a new language or a new grammar that no long constrains us. Along the way, we talk about nottaking materialism as the only basis for politics, which gets us into both religious forms of power and the consideration of a spiritual relationship to the self and the world. As I say at the end, Conner’s podcast, Against Everyone /w Conner Habib, is an incredible resource that dives into many of these ideas through discussion and thinking. Conner references a recent series of episodes he published as a guide to engaging in a spiritual life. That might be a great place to start if you have not already listened to his podcast. He also wrote the intense novel, Hawk Mountain, which I also highly recommend. Subscribe to Conner’s Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ConnerHabib), and find Hawk Mountain here. Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/

In today’s episode, River and I return to a conversation about Gaza, focusing on the discourse surrounding it, the function of antisemitism in the colonial creation of Israel, the state of resistance and the state of Israel’s genocide, as well as decolonization and the way whiteness and identification with institutions hampers leftist’s solidarity with decolonial movements. Perhaps a fitting epigraph for this episode would be a line from Aimé Césaire that River quotes in our conversation: “Europe is indefensible.” The end of Israel is not enough, we need the end of Europe and the end of the United States. One facet of our discussion is trying to get at the way we can find true solidarity with and inspiration from the resistance in Palestine. How do we bring the decolonial force from the colony to the heart of empire? In thinking about this, we touch on what stops people from having solidarity, or what trips up white leftists in their conceptions of decolonization. We also talk a bit about knowledge production in the academy and writing and thinking during this endless series of horrors surrounding us and escalating every day. But don’t worry, it’s not just doom and gloom: we find hope in the ways that Palestinians and others are teaching us life independent from the state. Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/    

CW - the last part of this episode contains mention and some details around sexual assault We’re back with another entry in our letters episodes! In this conversation, Caroline and I discuss three different dilemmas presented to us by listeners. In the first we address the problems that come with queer longing and the difficulty of living single amidst the horrors of the world and social arrangements for couples. The second letter raises issues of ethics in relation to friendships: do you break up with a friend whose job you have a moral objection to? Are you obligated to tell them? Remember, as the endless merch says, all cops are bastards! And finally, the third letter comes from a haunted house, where the writer is battling ghosts and a very specific and terrible situation with an abusive ex, while still harboring an expansive dream of liberation for all. I want to give a content warning here, the letter discusses sexual assault, with some upsetting details, so if you are not up for that, turn the episode off after the second letter.     I really love the chance to discuss your issues, so I am very grateful for everyone who sends them in. I hope that our conversations prove helpful to you, as we look at things from multiple angles: these issues are so often, despite particular details, shared experiences and common struggles. And like with everything else, there are not many places to untangle the conjunction of relationships and our desires for liberation and anarchy, to step out of self-help into collective struggle.   We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!   If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/

On today’s episode, I got a chance to talk with Solomon Brager, the artist and author of the recently published graphic memoir,  Heavyweight. Solomon Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. They are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artists Fellow, a member of the Pinko magazine editorial collective and the director of community engagement at Jewish Currents magazine. Heavyweight deals with Solomon’s own search through the archives to learn the story of their German Jewish family fleeing the Nazis and escaping the Holocaust, specifically through Solomon’s elective affinity for a great grandfather, Erich, who was a boxer (and punched Nazis). The book is careful to tell the story of the Holocaust within a larger context of European colonial genocide, so that we see the eventual targeting of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others as a continuation of German policies in Africa, for example. In this light, as Sol and I discuss, we can also view the eventual statehood of Israel as a culmination of this history of colonialism and violence. Though the book’s focus isn’t on Israel, we do spend time in this conversation analyzing the dynamics of Zionism in relation to the stories and teaching of the Holocaust to American Jews, and the idea of Jewish exceptionalism. One of the things I loved, and that we discuss also, is the way Sol represents in the book their own ambivalence about the this history, both in terms of family relations and scholarly practice, an ambivalence that Sol discusses as an ethical relationship to the past, an openness to being wrong. In this light, I also love the way this book depicts a kind of trans choosing of history and ancestors, as Sol finds a link to a Jewish masculinity in their great-grandfather: this is another ethical ambivalence, one that I think shows us we can tell stories of the past that don’t determine our future as inevitable, while still honoring the complexities of the dead.  I highly recommend this book, it is honest, vulnerable, and thoughtful. You can find Solomon Brager at https://solomonbrager.com, or on Instagram @jbbrager. I also am linking a comic that Sol did for Jewish Currents debunking claims to Jewish indigeneity, “When Settlers Become Native”—they mention it in our talk, and it’s a text I have also called on in my own writing. I also recommend checking out Pinko and Jewish Currents. As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project! The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Check out this link to find many other important and fun projects, like my buddies, The Final Straw Radio.

On today’s episode, I talk with Ariel Ajeno, who recently published an essay in the latest issue of Pinko, called “After Consent”: What is the role of consent in a revolution? Ariel Ajeno is a writer, dancer, and independent scholar based in Chicago, IL. The beautiful essay mixes personal experience with theoretical and practical analysis of the benefits and limits of consent and how that relates to the work of transforming the world beyond the principles of oppression that contain us now. Our conversation digs down into some nitty gritty questions about sexual consent, its difference from bodily autonomy, its parallels with revolutionary or resistant actions and organizing, and prefigurative aspects of how we might relate to one another, including experiences with cruising. As Ariel says towards the end of the conversation, There is going to be sex at the barricades, there is going to be sex at the encampment. So we should be honest about how we want to deal with the overlapping of revolutionary and sexual desires. I think that desire or pleasure is often left out of the overly serious conversation of destroying this world and forming other ways of relating, both as a legacy of masculinist authoritarian Marxist party organizations, and in reaction to the failures of gay liberation and radical feminism. But we can’t just dismiss the ways that these earlier militants engaged with these questions, nor the obstacles they faced and created. Having sex at the barricades means we need to be able to step in to difficult, complicated, messy relations that we can’t control or predict—in other words, an anarchist vision of action and change. Assessing the end of the radical gay movement, only a year after it started, Guy Hocquenghem said that they had radically changed the homosexual geography of Paris, where their general assemblies became giant cruising sites, with the police threat removed. And that in itself is not so bad. Thinking after consent really asks us to confront our desire for control and our willingness to experiment and fail, in other words how we must engage with our own power in between us. Ariel’s analysis in the essay and the conversation feels very thorough and generative, and I’m excited to share it. I will link to the essay and to the wonderful Pinko collective in the show notes. You can also find Ariel on Twitter @generoajeno and on Instagram @ariel_ajeno As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!