“Gossip as Direct Action” in Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography (Pluto, 2013) pulls no punches as a ‘personal’ ethnographic account of sexism within contemporary anarchist collectives. In the process I mobilize and develop classic feminist debates regarding the construction of “public” vs. “private” space to suggest that anarchists operate according to state logic more than they may realize.
This piece is based on the ethnographic research of my Masters thesis in anthropology (2007), and also forms part of Chapter 2 in my PhD dissertation and current manuscript in progress, “Good Politics”: Property, Intersectionality, and the Making of the Anarchist Self.
Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher has translated “Gossip as Direct Action” and presented it in compilation with a francophone edition of Occult Features of Anarchism (“Anarchisme Occulte”, Remue Menage, 2022), emphasizing the feminist intervention of this work. (To date Occult Features of Anarchism has received more attention for its treatment of “conspiracy theory” than its feminist critique of the Left.)
In Contesting Publics Sally Cole, Lynne Phillips, Marie-Eve Carrier-Moison and I also discuss the importance and challenges of public scholarship in our conclusion, “A Pedagogical Conversation: Public Scholars and Public Scholarship”.
Erica Lagalisse 