Introduction
In this episode of Voices, Isabelle interviews her young queer friend, Mk Zariel, popularly known online as the author of the "Debate Me, Bruh!" blog. On this blog, they post about anarchy 101 from a queer/trans perspective. Below is a transcript of the main interview questions & responses.
1. Who is MK Zariel? Introduce yourself to the Voices Audio Blog!
When classmates ask the question, sometimes I just say the tranarchist you were warned about. But in all seriousness, I'm a trans and neurodivergent anarchist, theater artist, and performance poet. I do counter-info work (which I'll get to later in the podcast), am the youth correspondent for the Anarchist Review Of Books, founded a queer anarchist collective at my school and another in my suburb, and am very involved in my city's queer and trans organizing spaces. As far as theory goes, my strongest influences are the Queers Bash Back tendency, the anarchafeminist writings of Emma Goldman, and of course the Xenofeminist Manifesto.
2. As a queer anarchist organizer, what are your highest priorities? What are you doing right now to make positive societal change?
Right now, given the rise in anti-trans legislation; the oppressive paramilitarism, statism, settler colonialism, and antisemitism in Palestine; the abortion rights crisis in the US; and the use of RICO charges against the predominantly trans and POC movement Defend The Atlanta Forest, I think a lot about countering all forms of repression and control—from nation-states, corporations, and cisheteropatriarchy itself. If there's one common theme in all my organizing, it's the prefigurative-insurrectionary practice of creating queer spaces, whether through education or mutual aid or anything else. In my organizing, I try to position queer spaces as more than harm-reductionist "community support." Queer spaces can and should resist repression; whether queer chosen families do that through legislative support around abortion and trans healthcare, mutual aid in support of queer Jewish and Palestinian communities, jail support for trans organizers facing RICO charges, or just supporting one another in our lived experiences inherently outside statism, it's meaningful and beautiful to let our queerness negate all forms of control and hierarchy.
3. You are popularly known in anarchist circles as the author of Debate Me Bruh, a queer anarchist blog with both free and premium posts. What inspired you to create it, and what keeps you coming back to the project?
I created Debate Me Bruh to make "anarchy 101" more accessible and less static—because I'd seen so many awesome introductions to anarchy, but when I actually talk to queer friends who want to learn about it, they sometimes have really different questions than those introductions cover. They wonder if their friends will accept them if they're anarchists, or how homophobia would be dealt with, or how they'll protect themselves from gendered street harassment, or if decolonization is a part of anarchy (spoiler: it totally is), or how they know if they're an anarchist for all. I wanted to start this project to give voice to the questions that femmes, trans people, neurodivergent people, people of color, and everyone else who's marginalized even within anarchist spaces actually have about anarchy, and to start conversations that don't end with me having the final word, but instead are generative and queered and atemporal (just like my gender, lol). I come back to it because it brings me joy to teach my queer community about anarchy, and to hold space for our visions of liberatory queer spaces. Because that's all anarchy really is, a queer space.
4. Chosen Few Software is all about lifting up queer and trans voices in the IT community, as well as in general. What is your greatest ambition, and how do you hope to achieve it in the future?
I aspire to start an explicitly anarchist queer youth arts program one day. I've always found poetry and theater really healing as a trans person—as someone who experiences dysphoria, when I'm performing I feel my embodiment is queered, and that experience is so beautiful for me. But it's not conflictual with the existent, and it can be. Queer performance can be every bit as disruptive as sabotage or protest or strongly worded manifestos. This has always been a tendency within queer anarchy—in fact, if you read Emma Goldman's "The Social Significance Of The Modern Drama," she positions theater as the ideal cultural vehicle for anarchy. I don't have plans for this kind of project at this point, but I'd absolutely love to build this ethic into my organizing in the future.
5. Shameless plugs! Share them :)
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