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While the rivalry on the football field between WVU and Pitt is well known, on the streets we declare our comradely support. On Tuesday, November 14^th a coalition of autonomous students occupied Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning. At the time that we release this document the occupation has been ongoing for 18 hours. Faced with federal, state, city, and university police intimidation, the occupiers face an uphill battle to have a list of 15 demands met.

We call on the university to immediately fulfill the 15 demands as written. We also call on WVU autonomous students and other Morgantown radicals to show solidarity with the occupation and equal commitment to similar goals in our city and campus. Occupations and the fulfillment of the demands are only the first steps in the development of an anti-capitalist struggle. Even after the demands are met, we and our comrades will continue to demand the impossible.

Why are students occupying?

https://fillerpgh.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/forauniversityagainstitself-imposed.pdf

More information on the occupations:

https://www.facebook.com/pittsburghsolidarity/

CW: discussion of anti-trans violence

This past Friday the 8th of April, Pitt lent its spacious dining room in the O’Hara Student Center to Reverend Scott Stiegemeyer. He is a Lutheran pastor who often uses the pulpit as a means of furthering a transphobic agenda that would see prayer and crocodile-tear “compassion” take the place of life-saving hormone treatments and surgeries that allow many trans individuals to feel at home in their own skin. Even before the event, Stiegemeyer’s crusade against the “sin” of deviation from his interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story by making our bodies match our minds could be gleaned from his numerous writings and interviews available online.

Thus, a large contingent of the Pitt community was deeply concerned and angered that Stiegemeyer would be welcomed by the administration to speak on campus. Around 100 transgender individuals and cisgender “allies” showed up at the event, outnumbering the rest of the attendees. Still the Reverend went on with his brazen diatribe against trans bodies based on the idea that an unseen entity has the sole right to decide who is male or female, with the ecclesiastical class as God’s gender police. Early on, Stiegemeyer told an anecdote, in rather poor taste, about a child disfigured by a botched circumcision who was raised as a girl but later decided he was a man. He seemed to imply that this story reflected the experience of most trans people; that transition is something brought about by external forces of confusion, malice, or sin. Thus he concluded that we, as trans people, were “disordered”. Quickly he amended this, saying that everyone was disordered because of original sin. And in a way he is right. All of us, cisgender and transgender alike, are caught up in the cultural disorder of enforced gender norms. But the source of that disorder is not original sin. It is something the church is far more familiar with: the patriarchy.

A small contingent of trans people and their cisgender accomplices stood up in defiance, refusing to sit in silence until the “Q&A” period. We saw that this hate speech contributed to the same internal angst and suicidal tendencies the Reverend says saddens him deeply. We raised our trans flags and banner with a battle cry of “Your God Can’t Control My Body.” Immediately self-appointed “peace police” within the body of “protesters” sprang into action, demanding that we sit down and continue to take Stiegemeyer’s bullshit while our trans siblings die every day through murder and suicide. With at least five cops present at the event other than the “volunteers,” we decided to leave the space with a chant of “No Justice, No Peace, No Gender Police.” Though we didn’t stay for the Q&A session, our friends who remained inside told us that most of the questioners saw Stiegemeyer as the wolf in sheep’s clothing he was and asked some very pointed questions to expose his thinly veiled hate speech.

Those who stood up to oppose us played directly into the hands of the Reverend’s ilk. By presenting themselves as the “respectable” LGBT community, they took the side of the Reverend and the cops against those who were not willing to be silent in the face of the war against our trans bodies. They forget the war cry of ACT UP’s fight against AIDS during the 80’s and 90’s: Silence Equals Death. Only those “allies” who are not directly threatened by hate speech against trans people and the violence against us it engenders have the option to remain silent without potential deadly consequences. When our fellow queer folk call for us to be quiet, many trans people are greatly upset. Instead of joining our mutual enemies in attempting to snuff out our rage, we’d prefer you to accept our methods as equally valid to other forms of struggle so we can all take on our adversary in our own ways. We see you as potential accomplices in our liberatory project, and would much rather fight beside you than against you.

Speech that can bring bodily harm is not “free speech.” Even if Stiegemeyer has no personal malice towards trans people, his de-legitimization of gender transition is an invitation for others to engage in even harsher attacks on our experiences and our bodies. Make no mistake: we trans people are in a war for survival whether we like it or not. We are dying by the hundreds and thousands. This society wants to kill us, either physically to erase us entirely, or rhetorically to be “born again” as good law-abiding cisgender men and women within patriarchy. The only way for us to survive and thrive is to transform the social landscape by dismantling patriarchal structures and ideas in our communities. To that end, we must regard the priests of patriarchy not as partners in a “dialogue” but as an enemy force to be smashed.

Nor should we allow the self-appointed peace police to colonize the trans experience that had its birth in the insurrectionary street battles of Stonewall with demands that all us angry trans folk quiet the fuck down and assimilate into the trendy bourgeois white gay male culture. The waning of the AIDS crisis from public view and the passage of marriage equality are not grounds to retire direct action as a means of queer liberation. Far from it. That time will not come until the murder and colonization of trans and queer bodies and the heteropatriarchal artifice that enables it comes crashing down in flames.

Fuck gender cops, peace cops, all cops.

Love and rage,
An angry-as-fuck trans girl

CW: patriarchy, rape culture, violence

Notes toward organizing an anarcha-feminist assault on campus rape culture.

by Angel and Brett

While academia theoretically exists as a space reserved for education and intellectual growth, universities across the country have been making headlines as they continue to fail to provide safe and equal access for women, gender nonconforming folks, and people of color—all of whom are at greater risk for sexual violence.

But the university is not alone in its failure. Patriarchy permeates social life on every campus; from frat row to sports teams, and often even to the social justice organizations that claim to fight it. We’ve all heard the statistics by now. One in four of our classmates will be assaulted at some point in their academic career, every 21 hours there is a rape on an American college campus, and on and on. 

To assert that sexual assault is simply a failure of the university to provide proper security or advocacy groups is to completely ignore the roots of the epidemic. Sexual assault doesn’t thrive because there aren’t enough police on campus, but rather because assault is the violent enforcement of male dominance in the social sphere. [“Reality isn’t Safe” explores this premise in greater depth.]

Despite the programs discussing and advocating prevention measures, the painfully inadequate counseling centers, and the countless ways to navigate the labyrinth that is Title IX, none of the existing efforts address the heart of the issue: the fucking patriarchy. Obviously men are not the only ones committing assault, but rape culture is deeply tied to the patriarchal attitudes that surround sex and intimacy. Rape culture is a frontline in the social war, and even the most marginalized person might choose the side with more power.

Until we find concrete ways to disrupt and deconstruct both institutionalized patriarchal structures and their socio-cultural roots, sexual assault will remain a staple of the college experience.

To begin, we need to analyze the ways in which the administration, media, and campus culture rationalize and trivialize assault, not as problematic or internalized attitudes, but for what they really are: strategies in perpetuating and reifying systems of patriarchy. All social hierarchy, from gender to race to class, is imposed by the threat of violence. It’s irrelevant whether a media pundit understands their logic as serving an agenda of strategic oppression or as a “rational” and “objective” approach to a contentious issue; the logic remains the same, with the same violent impacts, and it is all the more insidious.

Analysis is a continuous process, as patriarchy has proven to be one of the most flexible hierarchies in that it is quick to absorb the aesthetic of our opposition without detracting from the violence of male dominance. We need not look farther than the irony of having a sexist like Joe Biden speak at Pitt for the “It’s On Us” campaign as proof of this.1, 2 We have to constantly challenge ourselves to hash out the details of enemy strategies in order to better defend and empower ourselves.

The most prevalent strategy in seizing and erasing a survivor’s narrative is the tactical redirection of classic American individualism.

First, the stage is set with a “prevention” discourse that asserts that the people most at risk of facing violence (women, queer folks) need to be the ones responsible for preventing it. It’s almost cliché to point out that our society teaches people how to avoid assault instead of teaching people not to rape in the fucking first place. What this discourse really teaches us is how to live in fear, how to confine our self-expression to the culturally accepted practices that reproduce patriarchy. The result is that victim-blaming is effortlessly disguised in the rhetoric of prevention discourse: shouldn’t you have known not to leave your drink unattended at frat parties?

Second, what is objectively a social epidemic is quickly personalized, typically as an issue concerning only two individuals. This is an especially easy maneuver when the survivor has some sort of “romantic” history with the perpetrator.

Now with the stage set and the spotlight focused, the administration, media, or police can completely remove the survivor’s story from the broader socio-political context through tactics like victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and prude-shaming. Let’s be perfectly clear: assault has nothing to do with whether or not a survivor is drinking heavily and incapable of making sober decisions. Nor does it have anything to do with how a person dresses or where they choose to sleep at the end of the night. It has everything to do with the attacker refusing to respect boundaries and choosing to satisfy their urges with the understanding that they’re unlikely to face repercussions. The constant threat of character defamation is what keeps survivors silent and “illegitimate” in the public eye.

The final step in the tactical maneuvering of hyper-individualist logic is isolation. Now that the cumulative weight of prevention discourse, personalization, and character defamation has effectively stolen control of the survivor’s narrative, the social stigma of the whole ordeal can potentially isolate the survivor from any sort of support structure or “legitimate” framework for seeking justice. This is how the constant violence of patriarchy disguises itself, and is just one of many ways the broader social war remains hidden.

There are many more enemy strategies we can and should analyze. But we can only refine our notions and theories through immediately proceeding to action, or else we risk losing relevance in the constantly shifting socio-political terrain. In understanding the discursive and material practices of the administration, we can identify weak points in the authoritarian, patriarchal structures that define the University under capitalism. But so long as neoliberalism continues to creep onto our campus, Pitt will continue increasing tuition rates alongside the size of the student body. And if Pitt wants to do this, it will inevitably try to cover up the violence of campus culture. Because that’s just good business.

Anarcha-feminism is not merely intersectional feminism taken to its logical conclusion. It is a fluid framework that is capable of informing and evaluating our resistance to patriarchy within a broader vision for offensive revolutionary action.

Anarcha-feminism expands the feminist project of gender equality by asking questions that aim to facilitate the merger of means and ends. Do our efforts merely educate and raise awareness, or do they challenge the material conditions of patriarchy? Do our efforts disperse power and legitimacy, rather than concentrating it? Do they build our sense of autonomy? Do they empower survivors? Do they meet our needs?

In Part II, we’ll explore several of these questions as they relate to the struggle against patriarchy at Pitt.

In the meantime, here are some cool local projects to check out:

In Our Hands – a grassroots community accountability skill-building group based in Pittsburgh. They just put out the first issue of their zine!

Night Shade – a new crew of women and queer folks based in Oakland that are organizing a network of safe-houses, anti-fuckboi patrols, community support efforts and more! Contact studentsolidaritypgh@gmail.com and the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition will put you in touch with them.

The Fourth Wave – a monthly intersectional feminist publication run by Pitt students!

The University of Pittsburgh’s student orientation guide: Very Dank Edition

Disorientation: The Task Ahead of Us

Welcome to Pitt! From the prison of high school, it looked cool and inviting, full of new freedoms and the chance to learn something real for the first time. But soon enough, you’ll watch the excitement fade. The task of orientation is to clue you in on what’s ahead, to provide a glimpse into the new social terrain.

Pitt is the rich suburban kid’s first real glimpse of something resembling diversity. Pitt is the working class kid’s first five-figure loan. Pitt is Chancellor Gallagher, decked out in the best suits money can buy, threading his way through the lines of underpaid janitors, cooks and security guards rallying outside his office for a better contract and a living wage. Pitt is a private police force harassing people of color on Forbes, or taking pictures of student protestors to build files on troublemakers. Pitt is breaking your roommate’s friend’s brand-name bong underneath the Schenley Bridge. Pitt is the ongoing gentrification of North Oakland and outright colonization of South Oakland.

Pitt just raised tuition again this year.

Aging high school rebels now rail lines of crushed-up Adderall in library bathrooms. Teenaged football stars now stagger from the frat party to the Econ recitation. Entire semesters spent studying the latest scientific forecasts of the coming century’s mass extinctions, ocean acidification and sea level rise of five to fifteen feet are consumed with the same glazed eyes found scattered across a college algebra seminar. Lectures on the tipping points recently crossed, on the massive population displacements and inevitable global destabilization, elicit raised eyebrows but nothing more. After all, tomorrow is Thirsty Thursday and my geology lab was due yesterday.

As the illusion of social peace crumbles with this year’s uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Seattle and the Bay Area, Pitt invites you to spend your free time drinking in sweaty basements, to join the iPhone Generation and the growing army of debt-ridden interns. After all, you are some of the smartest people they could find and you’re needed on the team – the Clinton team, the Trump team, the IBM team – pick it, there’s a slot for you somewhere.

All this and more is yours for just four easy payments of $28,000! Welcome to Pitt.

I guess you could say that we – the small group of your new classmates who wrote this nonsense – are a little jaded. Of course it’s not all bad; Pittsburgh is a pretty awesome city. But we can’t help but to feel there is something missing from Pitt’s campus culture. It is an absence that speaks to those vague, fleeting thoughts so many students drag from the classroom to the library. Sure, it’s easy to drown out the doubts leftover from those first college applications with weekend binges and house shows, but perhaps it was the entire high school experience that left us suspicious to begin with. There is a rational angst that we struggle to articulate: the absurdity of what we accept as “normal” today.

We browse shopping malls for aesthetics and attitudes, and then fiddle with social media and smartphones until they fit just right. We namedrop brands and artists as if they count as our own expression, and then we scoff at the banality of our parties and scenes as if we play no part in their creation. Our perceptions of both the successful career and our own imaginations have been swept away by notions more lavish and distant than Aldous Huxley could write about. Apathy is hip.

But how can we students even think to blame ourselves? Youth today look toward a future deflated by ecological and economic collapse; a future where opportunity is postponed in light of the immediacy of debt, stagnating wages, and corporate oligarchy. A future where the promise of sustainability is found exclusively on billboards advertising “clean” coal, “green” skyscrapers, or hope, change, and vote; a future where even the most optimistic visions of climate change include mass migrations, displacements, and extinctions.

The point is we do not choose to be apathetic. Rather, apathy has been institutionalized, integrated into the relationships we have with education, work and culture. Education does not cater to our personal needs and desires, but is instead intended to prepare us for participation in the market.

The logic of the market is also now the logic of the classroom. Students are customers, paying for-profit businesses to consume “products” in the form of marketable career paths. After all, you need to go to college to land a good job. Our understanding of what it means to be a student is confined to a sort of profit-driven pragmatism, where the pursuit of knowledge ultimately becomes a race to the ever-shrinking job market.

This race places us in direct competition with other students to determine who will have access to the most resources upon graduating. But so many people are enrolling in school that the job market is oversaturated with college degrees, and by the time some students finally have enough credentials to follow their dreams they’re pushing 30 and working just to pay back loans.

And so we approach education with the same tired indifference we dedicate to the part-time jobs that prevent us from sleeping in on weekends.

The atmosphere inside today’s classroom is disorienting. Feedback comes in the form of customer satisfaction surveys. The curriculum is set before the teacher even meets their students. Discussions of real world events never extend beyond the speculative bubble of academia, where debate is applauded so long as it neglects social immediacy; systemic racism is discussed without reference to the intersection being shut down by protestors right outside the classroom window.

And just what are students here for anyway? You would think the $1.2 trillion in student loans, a figure that inversely correlates with state funding cuts, would at least give college graduates some sort of edge in the race to the job market, but reality is as sobering as the bills. Over 40 million students will be graduating in a worse financial situation than any generation in American history. Nearly the entire prospective labor force is already faced with a lower standard of living than that of their parents.

But work hard, play hard, amirite?

There’s potential for so much more than this. The curtain is lifting on the same scene at universities all over this country. Whether it’s Berkeley, or Madison, or NYU, students have discovered that the only way to learn anything is to reclaim our passion, and the only way to make life truly exciting is to fight back.

How you fight is entirely up to you. We painted the situation with a broad brush, but students aren’t so monolithic. Our generation is bigger and more diverse than the Baby Boomers, and we all have different interests, needs, desires… maybe you want to throw parties where sexist assholes are kicked out, maybe you want to use your parents’ money to buy weed to share with your classmates who can’t afford it, maybe you want to “redecorate” the walls and alleyways of Oakland, maybe you want to join a student group that vibes with what you feel, maybe you want to kick our asses for writing this bullshit. The point is nothing’s going to change unless you act in your own interests, here and now.

Let’s fuck shit up this year.

***

[Adapted from “The Task Ahead of Us” – Filler #3 – Pittsburgh 2015, Communiqué from an Absent Future – Research and Destroy – California, 2009, Welcome to NYU – New York, 1968]

[The original, print-ready pdf is available at the bottom of the page at The Anarchist Library ]