Interesting article where Mad Pride meets Anarchism after the author read
Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory
Some favourite bits:
There is something horrible and depraved about getting up at 5:00am to work for somebody else. The whole body rebels against it, the brain seems unable to correctly fire, and even tastebuds rebel in their own special way, making sure whatever coffee you have tastes like shit.
[…]
“I have to override my natural tendencies so that I can sell products [to rich people] I could never afford so that I can afford to make ends meet,” she lamented. “I am stifled and held captive by the need to stay afloat. I can’t tell you how many times in the last six years where I’ve wondered how much of my goddamn life I’ll spend within the same four walls.”
Are her desires unhealthy? Or is it a healthy human response to a very sick world? Millions of people are being ground up because they refuse to fit the capitalist “truth.” They become living testaments that competition between business is not some magic pill that makes everything okay or creates beautiful meaning for the lives it touches. For those on the bottom, it is hell. Gods help you if you can’t obey the master’s whip, or just aren’t cut out for mindless, repetitive tasks.
When we really start to examine what “normal” passes for, it certainly is a byproduct of “our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy” as Johanna puts it.
[…]
Society is nothing more than the madness Capitalism has deemed healthy for its own existence. Young boys locked in classrooms, women locked up in mental wards, all this in the name of making them “well” enough to function in a system where sociopaths are rewarded with praise and promoted to positions of leadership. Even having anti-authoritarian opinions is enough to get you looked at funny, held against your will, and shot up with Thorazine in the name of social good.
[…]
One might add it is also the behaviors and states of being deemed “normal” and “healthy,” the arbitrary dividing line that separates behaviors that serve the ruling powers, and those that don’t. Whether under Capitalism or Feudalism, every life that doesn’t fit into the dominant society is deemed ill and sick.
[…]
Anarchism should be built on real people, real experiences, rather then mental constructs that easily filter people into “sick” or “well” binaries like masculine/feminine, violent/peaceful, soft/hard, magical/secular.
Too Weird to Live: The Case for the Individual in a Sick Woman’s World
QueerAnarchism 