© COPYRIGHT by Jennifer D. Grubbs 2015 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED QUEER(EY)ING THE ECOTERRORIST: NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM, POLITICAL REPRESSION AS DISCIPLINE, AND THE SPECTACLE OF DIRECT ACTION BY Jennifer D. Grubbs ABSTRACT The following analysis forges an innovative and interdisciplinary bridge between theory and practice that brings together an anthropological lens emphasizing local modes of knowledge, a communication lens underscoring rhetoric and environmental communication, and a digital media lens that stresses social media and e-communities. Through a mixed-methodology of critical discourse analysis, ethnography and performance studies, this project examines the ways in which anarchist antispeciesists co- construct and negotiate identity and power within physical and digital communities through disidentification. The project relied on a strong commitment to collaborative engagement with the research population and a queer disengagement with traditional social movement theories to expand the political imaginary through political theater. Activists utilize performative protest as both a methodology to disrupt hegemonic speciesism and also a playful solidification amongst politically repressed, geographically dispersed, oftentimes clandestine non-State actors. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The following project would not have been possible without the dedication and support from Dr. Daniel Sayers, Dr. William L. Leap, and Dr. Stephen Depoe. I am grateful for their theoretical guidance, their willingness to invest time and energy in my scholarship, and their confidence in my ability to succeed. I am eternally grateful to my mother, who provided countless hours of childcare while I typed away in my office. I am humbled by the community of anarchist antispeciesists that risk it all for the liberation of all beings. I am inspired, intrigued, and energized by their resolve and I am encouraged by the potentiality for change. Lastly, I express my gratitude to my family for their patience and understanding while I was absent from their adventures to complete the project. My partner and source of encouragement, I would choose you again and again. My beautiful daughters, Emory and Simon, let my sleepless nights and relentless efforts remind you that your worth is your own, and that obstacles are but merely triumphs in the works. And let the revolutionaries described in these pages remind you that if there is oppression, there must be resistance. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION..................................................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO: METHOD............................................................................... 33 CHAPTER THREE: ETHNOGRAPHY .............................................................. 60 CHAPTER FOUR: NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM AND CONSTRUCTING THE ECOTERRORIST...................................................................................... 134 CHAPTER FIVE: DIRECT ACTION AS SPECTACLE .................................. 160 CHAPTER SIX: DIALECTICAL DISCIPLINE AND PERFORMATIVE POWER .............................................................................................................. 197 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION ................................................................ 240 APPENDICES ................................................................................................................ 254 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 277 iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Baby, what’s that confused look in your eyes? What I’m trying to say is that I burn down buildings while you sit on a shelf inside of them. You call the cops on the looters and piethrowers. They call it class war, I call it co-conspirators. ‘Cause baby, I’m an anarchist…You watched in awe at the red, white, and blue on the fourth of July. While those fireworks were exploding, I was burning that fucker and stringing my black flag high…You have faith in the elephant and jackass, and to you, solidarity’s a four-letter word… ‘Cause baby, I’m an anarchist, you’re a spineless liberal. We marched together for the eight-hour day and held hands in the streets of Seattle, but when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window, you left me all alone. [Against Me! 2002] This project examined the ways in which anarchist antispeciesists in the animal and earth liberation movements (AELM) in North America, as an example of leftist social movements, queer [rearticulate and reconfigure] traditional forms of protest through their oppositional articulations and resistance to constructed social and ecological hierarchy12. The project will further interrogate the mechanisms of repression deployed by the State- Corporate Industrial Complex to silence anarchist antispeciesists through the construction of the ecoterrorist. Anarchist antispeciesists advocate an intersectional analysis of the exploitation and commodification of beings and ecologies within capitalism, the State, 1. There is significant overlap in philosophy and tactic between the two movements, thus the following analysis will refer to them as one movement. The conflation has been made by many activists and scholars throughout the movement’s history (Nocella and Best 2004; Loadenthal 2010). 2. The application of queer theory and queer linguistics is discussed later in the chapter, as well as in Chapter Two: Method and Chapter Three: Ethnography. 1 paradigms of power, and speciesism3 (Foreman 1993:27; Rosebraugh 2004:120). In order to gain an in-depth understanding of this subset of leftist resistance, I conducted a multi- sited, multifaceted ethnography of the decentralized, clandestine movement for 18 months. The methodological and theoretical framework was built on the anthropological understandings of standpoint theory and the value of studying up (Nader 1972; Naples 2003).4 Through an emphasis on individual standpoints and performativity, I engaged in participant-observation during demonstrations, convergences, general assemblies, and legal proceedings. The following project utilized ethnography as an anthropological method to connect local modes of knowing with larger, structural and ideological issues of power through performativity. Anthropological literature on social movements emphasizes political positionality within normative party categories such as: republican, democrat, libertarian, moderate, conservative, and liberal (Hodges 2011). This analysis, however, adopted a queer understanding of direct action and activist identity that is based on tactic in combination with political positionality5. Queer, as both a concept and framework, provides a productive epistemology to examine the ways in which activists both destabalize and rearticulate the State’s repressive paradigm of good versus bad through performance. Specifically: 3. The term speciesism, coined by Richard Ryder in 1973, is used to describe the systematic privileging of the constructed category human over the constructed category animal (Singer 1977:7). 4. This project solely uses Nader’s concept of studying up and strongly disassociates with her history of problematic interactions with critical anthropologists. Without giving credence to her dismissive treatment of queer anthropologists, I have fractured studying up and do not align myself in any sort of trajectory of her scholarship. 5. Direct action is not defined solely by the physical act, but also the ideological underpinnings and symbolic meaning the act represents. Thus it is not a label of tactic demarcation, but rather it is an inclusive framework to conceptualize activism (Graeber 2009b:210; Thompson 2010:57). 2 Eve Sedgwick’s recent reflection on queer performativity ask us not only to consider how a certain theory of speech acts applies to queer practices, but how it is that “queering” persists as a defining moment of performativity. The centrality of the marriage ceremony in J.L. Austin’s examples of performativity suggests that the heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring which bring about what they name. “I pronounce you…” puts into effect the relation that it names. But where and when does such a performative draw its force, and what happens to the performative when its purpose is precisely to undo the presumptive force of the heterosexual ceremonial? …The performative is thus one domain in which power acts as a discourse…The term “queer” emerges as an interpellation that raises the question of the status of force and opposition, of stability and variability, within performativity. The term “queer” has operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation.” The deployment of queer as a liberal binary of assimilation and transgression, however, has also called into question the contradictions and complicities that warrant reflection (Puar 2007:24). The potentiality of a queer inquiry is expanded through reflexivity and the creative rearticulation of what constitutes “assimilation” and “transgression.” The research population, anarchist antispeciesists, is constituted by individuals that are geographically dispersed throughout North America, and politically overlap and diverge on particular campaigns, and do not cohesively self-identify as anarchists or antispeciesists. The population is unifyingly distinct, however, in its use of confrontational