tools for commensality 🧿RE: https://assemblag.es/@inquiline/116393292245545697
this may be more important antifascist praxis than is currently acknowledged (the article about Mpls is strong on this point)
Oh, Chicago was doing it too!
Protesters mock ICE, Broadview police at dildo day of action outside detention center
The spectacle saw hundreds of phallic items, big and small, flood the designated free speech zone—a small barricaded area where people have been permitted to demonstrate since President Trump’s mass deportation blitz swept through Chicagoland.
articulating more of why i think this protest repertoire is important:
IMO jiggling colorful dildos are semiotically effective in a way that many/most objects or symbols can't be--they kind of only look silly and because of the (queer) sex for pleasure element, they can't be reclaimed by fascism. there are very few objects like that
do i like consumption & plastic (silicone) waste? no. but as a collective improvisation to locate symbolic repertoires that contest fascists? i'm ok with it
a counterpoint here, i should not have said that categorically the fash can't claim dildos:
https://kolektiva.social/@kiwi/116400309122322932
anyway, my point overall is the collective improvisations (plural), not actually the dildos
TinDrum@inquiline pretty well understood limitation of theory's failure to anticipate weaknesses in the model yeh?
i reckon it might be fair to say much of what's happening now's demonstration of that failure to anticipate and therefore to think outside of models
if i understand what yr saying, i don't think that this is a failure by people doing dildo protests--the DC counterexample notwithstanding (it's important), the preponderance of semiotic meaning right now is pretty squarely anti-fash. symbols are polysemous and ambivalent, pretty much
i don't see how we "think outside of models". we think with models until we break or refashion them
what i'm trying to draw attention to here is not actually dildos but the collective improv
@inquiline i was being cheeky, the idea some symbol or other can't be appropriated is weird to me, can probly argue it's an emotional assessment
i had a friend who proclaimed trump yesterday's man when he came down that escalator. she didn't seem to think it was worth considering there was anything to consider
gotcha! i have literally written elsewhere about fascists appropriating everything even liberation language so it was simply a hasty-fingers sloppy overstatement to say this symbol *couldn't* be appropriated, my bad there
(it's also why, after a point, it's not worth trying to pick words and symbols they can't appropriate, they will try anyway, no matter what)
have you seen the rejoinder to the golden escalator? https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/golden-toilet-sculpture-dc-trump-lincoln-bedroom-bathroom-1234779264/
may (or may not) interest your friend 😂
Adam Greenfield@inquiline The locus classicus of dildo-centric political theater is of course the Kasparov dildocopter press conference of 2008.
ophiocephalic 🐍@inquiline
Late to this, but wanted to offer up an additional datapoint. In one of the Unicorn Riot fascist chat board leaks during the first Trump term, I can recall a long thread in which the fash plotted with great excitement on appropriating various progressive elements to poison them.
At a certain point one of them started posting his mockups for turning queer symbols like the color flags into fascist ones, dumb shit like rainbow swastikas and so forth. All the other nazis immediately turned on him for being "too gay" and hounded him out of the chat.
I found this instructive on the prospect of queerness as fash-bane, as you reference. Earlier attempts in that period to weave homofascism into the movement did not endure. Wondering if @kiwi 's example works more as a signifier from the kind of boneheads who still consider "gay" to be an insult, rather than an appropriation per se
interesting, thanks. i regret my hasty wording in my post (but opted to post again rather than edit)--it's obviously complicated, and too simplistic to say any symbol means only one thing
(silly me, have even written elsewhere about fascists cooping liberatory language. but posting and nuance do not always mix perfectly, as i learn over and over, lol)
@inquiline
No, I think you're on to something. This is an important subject because stealing other people's symbols, images and ideas are all these new fascists are able to do. They are incapable of creativity or originality, everything in their "culture" is either stolen or mimicked