Gender

A workshop on the Against Equality collective by Yasmin Nair, at the 9th annual Platypus International Convention, on April 8, 2017. Moderated by Nunzia Faes.

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Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Event Description The political and cultural Left, which have stood for increasing the scope of freedom, have historically shifted positons on issues of gender and sexuality. For instance, where once the Left challenged gender and family norms in society, there has been a turn to advocation participation in predominant institutions, for instance in legal reforms and the medical industry: there has been some conflict in LGBTQ circles over the politcs of the trans identity, whether it should be considered a subjective development or an objective condition, and further if it should be considered at all by the Left. [Read More]

Workshop on Trans Liberation, held at the Platypus Affiliated Society international convention 2016, by Xavier Danae Maatra, Saturday 2 April 2016.

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IN 1968 THE SOCIALIST GERMAN STUDENT LEAGUE (SDS) of Stuttgart printed a poster that said: “Everyone talks about the weather. Not us.” This slogan was originally used by Deutsche Bahn, the national railway. Instead of the depiction of an electric locomotive of the original poster, the SDS printed portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin below the caption. This alone should have raised some concern. To this day, Deutsche Bahn is incapable of not talking about the weather, which so often disrupts their stereotypically German concern with strict punctuality. [Read More]

ON NOVEMBER 23, 2010, Sunit Singh conducted an interview with psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College in Cambridge. Although Professor Mitchell’s rehabilitation of Freud is well chronicled, the attempt in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)1 to rescue the core content of the Marxist tradition – its emphasis on emancipation – remains unexplored. What follows is an edited version of the interview. Sunit Singh: The sociologist C. Wright Mills, in an open letter to the editors of New Left Review in 1960, exhorted the still inchoate “New Left” to reclaim an ideological space for socialism over the chorus of liberal commentators proclaiming “the end of ideology” – the idea that there are no more antagonistic contradictions within capitalist society. [Read More]

A workshop held on May 29, 2010 at the 2010 Platypus International Convention at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Led by Pablo Ben. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Description An analysis of how sexuality as a sphere of modern life was formed due to the emergence of capitalism. Sexuality did not exist before the 18th century and it has emerged since then in several parts of the world following the expansion of global capitalism. [Read More]