Samu/elle Striewski

This chapter explores how drag performers can be understood as Gramscian organic intellectuals within queer and trans∗ counter-communities, generating theory through embodied practices that resist cis-heteronormative, capitalist, and colonial structures. While drag is often dismissed as mere entertainment and can become sanitized as a commodified product for mainstream consumption, this chapter foregrounds its radical potentials as embodied intellectual labor in the daily practices of many drag artists. Weaving together canonical socialist and anarchist thinkers (including Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Kollontai, Goldman, and Gramsci) with contemporary queer, trans, and feminist theorists (such as Gago, Halberstam, hooks, Muñoz, and Preciado), the chapter explores four of drag’s critical capacities: to disrupt property logics, to reclaim the "means of gender production", to challenge assimilationist politics, and to contribute to transversal feminist strikes. It situates drag’s critical force in practices of disidentification: mocking and reworking hegemonic norms while simultaneously prefiguring alternative forms of sociality. Through workshops, story hours, community shows, and political protests, the chapter argues, drag performers engage in a form of theorizing that bridges lived experience, aesthetic creativity, and communal activism. Conceived as an embodied anarchafeminist philosophy, drag can thus resist privatized and normative regimes of gender, rehearse solidarity across difference, generate counter-knowledges, and offer tools for imagining and enacting more joyful, just, and livable futures.

The essay interprets the poem “Poem” by Langston Hughes drawing both from biographical material about the author (e.g., the biopic Looking for Langston) and from political writing about queer friendship and solidarity, notably Sara Ahmed, José Esteban Muñoz, and Judith Butler. Instead of engaging in a close reading that tries to do justice to the queerness of the “historical” Langston Hughes, the text tries to identify the power of the poem in providing suggestions of how marginalized individuals can challenge societal norms and open spaces for alternative modes of being. Referring to Michel Foucault’s ideas of gay friendship as a disruptive mode of resistance to existing structures of power, the essay develops a more nuanced idea of how Hughes’s poetry subscribes to a poiesis of susceptibility. In other words, the article argues that the poem allows for a shift away from the dominant mode of subject-formation within oppressive norms by presenting utopian speech and new modes of interrelation, namely Black, male, and queer friendship. Hence, it rethinks how those to whom the future does not belong can try to reclaim it by creating spheres where potentiality, difference, and otherness can exist and individuals can make themselves intelligible who were previously unrecognizable. Poetry functions in this process as tool that builds and reconfigures the frames of susceptibility allowing for friendships and softness that found no place before or outside of those.

The paper comparatively reads Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay (1995) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) to trace the ways in which both novels show the complex intertwinement of the climate crisis with gender, class, race, subalternity, anthropocentrism, and veganism. Bringing together Gayatri C. Spivak’s notion of “planetarity” with ecofeminist philosophy and literary criticism, the article proposes a planetary ecogender reading of the two texts and their representation of the non-man, non-human, and non-subject. Building up further on Jacques Derrida’s critique of carno-phallogocentrism, the pedagogy of a relational ethics of “nurturing” is hence presented as a form of resistance against the continuing cannibal consumption of both the planet and the non-(hu)man, presented in the novels and existing in the real world alike.