Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies by Scott Branson


Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies
Title : Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1629639710
ISBN-10 : 9781629639710
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 307
Publication : First published October 1, 2022

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition—of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society—this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more.

Contributors include Che Gossett, Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Toshio Meronek, and more.

Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies Reviews

  • hauntedandholierthanthou

    Vital reading, very relevant to my work in a uni setting

  • Hugh

    We aren’t supposed to take this book seriously, right? This is just supposed to be an effort by some lazy editors to cash in on the explosion of social justice literature post-2014 and especially post-2020? They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I sadly slogged through the book, and found that it’s exactly as unserious as the cover would have you believe. Nobody outside of the most dedicated sociology/poli-sci major would ever pick up a book advertising not just the abolition of police, but of prisons in general, of universities, and of family, in addition to a whole slew of other things that won’t be allowed in these writers’ perfect society (you can still form a dedicated, close-knit family unit in this fictitious society, though, as there won’t be any police to stop you). Social justice buzzwords are thrown around until they don’t mean anything, sort of like how if you repeat a gibberish word over and over again it starts to sound really weird. “Surviving the Future” is the butt of a joke, feeding right into the hands of the people that these writers and editors swear to hate - seriously, just imagine if anyone held this book up in a debate against a leftist. The argument would be over. If you like jokes, go read a joke book, or a comedy. “Surviving the Future” is funny in all the wrong ways.