Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies

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.

Shuli Branson is a queer/trans anarchist writer, translator, community organizer, and teacher. They were one of the organizers of the two UNC Asheville/Davidson College queer conferences that inspired this book. They translated Jacques Lesage de la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison (AK Press, 2021) and Guy Hocquenghem’s second book of essays addressing the May 1968 uprising in France, Gay Liberation after May ’68 (Duke University Press, 2022), for which they also wrote a critical introduction. Shuli is the author of Practical Anarchism: A Daily Guide (Pluto Press, 2022) and is currently working on a book about the institutionalization of queerness for Duke University Press as well as a book on trans-anarcha-feminism. They often contribute to The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast.

Raven Hudson is an activist, writer, and researcher with a BA in English and Gender & Sexuality Studies from Davidson College where they co-founded the Asian American Initiative (AAI), co-edited the student literary magazine Libertas, and helped create and host AAI’s Coalasian: A Southern Podcast. Their recent work centers on wounds and the melancholic subject within contemporary queer, Asian American poetry.

Bry Reed is a queer black feminist from Baltimore, MD currently pursuing doctoral study in American Studies at Purdue University. She is committed to prison abolition, pleasure, and care work as tools for black liberation. Beyond her doctoral study, she is a writer, educator, and radical troublemaker.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012), focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war. Her following project is called The Promise of Beauty. She has published widely, including in Signs, Camera Obscura, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.