A statement in protest of Kristian Williams speaking at the law and disorder conference by a woman in Portland. Needless to say the conference is not allowing open discourse on the event page and is deleting people who are against KW speaking, despite the fact that there are panelists refusing to do their workshops in protest: I would like to address some of the arguments being used to defend Williams and point out how they rely on misogynistic scripts and gas-lighting tactics. The portrayal of Williams as being “bullied” or intimidated by blood-thirsty, tyrannical feminists completely inverts power dynamics as they actually exist in the world. In this narrative Williams is the defenseless victim of the vast and unchecked powers of bezerker survivors and feminists. This is absurd given any basic understanding of the patriarchal social relation, the normative treatment of abuse survivors in radical communities, any familiarity with the actual social position of the players involved or the specific events as they transpired. Kristian Williams is perhaps one of the most famous anarchists in the United States. He has an enormous amount of social capital and a vast network of contacts in the radical milieu. Williams has used his well-respected and widely heard platform and position to push a politic that has real, devastating consequences for feminists and survivors. Furthermore Williams is not some intellectual maverick putting forth an unpopular minority position in TPoD. He is not shaking up any “party line” as some of his supporters have suggested. His article reiterates typical depictions of women as hysterical, malicious, and childish and enforces the status quo treatment of gender violence in our society. Silencing, stigmatizing, and purging of survivors, centralizing the subjectivity of the abuser, invisibilizing the violence and minimizing its effects (putting “triggered” in scare quotes for example) are the normative ways that this violence is treated and thus replicates itself. Williams is simply using a bit of sophistry to repackage garden variety misogynistic narratives as a radical discourse. Additionally while TPoD pretends to be a critique of “call out culture”, it is itself a nasty and divisive call out. The feminists depicted have been ghoulishly recast as utter strawwomen of the most extreme variety. Virtually every misogynistic trope, cliche about lifestyle anarchism, as well as general bad-jacketing is rolled into one completely evil and undesirable package in his caricature. Kristian is the intrepid man of reason vs. the howling irrational maw of blood-thirsty totalitarian feminism. It is an utterly polarizing distortion. If Kristian were actually interested in a constructive critical dialogue, he would have included the feminists he is critiquing in his audience. He is not doing that, he is projecting the worst intentions and traits onto us to win his audience to his view. There are numerous other examples in that article that identify it as in no sense a call in. In fact, he has never in all this time--including the *two years* before Patriarchy and the Movement that the survivor was trying to hold Pete accountable in private-- expressed any interest in having any sort of dialogue with the survivor supporters. Instead he has consistently treated us as complete political enemies, and has ratcheted up the consequences every time we have refused to shut up. It would seem that virtually every single thing that the pro-survivor side of this conflict is accused of is perfectly legitimate for the pro-Williams team. It is fine for Williams to treat feminists as total enemies, to depict survivors as imbecilic and dangerous monsters, but if we should get angry or upset about that, we are completely invalidated. Gossip is only labeled such when it issues from a non-male mouth, Little and his comrades maligning the character of the survivor widely for years is considered valid political criticism. It is fine for Williams and his supporters to make unsubstantiated declarations of truth as well as unsupported accusations about the survivor and her supporters. In fact the criteria for what constitutes ‘proof” is an ever shifting and unattainable bar that we are asked to meet, while Williams and company’s version of events are accepted as the obvious default truth if we fail to do so. We are set up to fail. This is a double-bind. If we fight back in any way, we are proving Williams’ point. No matter how thoughtful or supported our criticism are, we are being irrational and divisive. This is patriarchy happening, folks. This continual denial of all the ways that patriarchy is devastating *besides the individual acts of rape and physical abuse* the ways that rape and physical abuse are supported by the brutal and dehumanizing treatment of survivors, this web of patriarchal solidarity is being made invisible even when it is right in front of our faces. This is called gas-lighting. It is a crazy-making tactic of abusers. It is the denial of reality and the switching of the script, making the abuser the victim. It is abuse logic on a community scale, something that the Law & Disorder conference is now participating in by silencing while pretending no silencing is happening, and protecting patriarchy while refusing to acknowledge the existence of any patriarchal power dynamics.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 23:07:06 +0000
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