Anarchist Domesticities: From DIY Culture to DIY Politics in Consent Zines

Abstract

Abstract Contemporary radical and anarchist movements have made the home a central site of political contestation in ways that mirror a return to domestic spaces in recent critical thought. This essay argues that an “anarchist domesticity,” which is marked by an awareness of violence’s omnipresence, finds its clearest expression in anarcha-feminist zines about responses to sexual assault and interpersonal violence. The essay reads these “consent zines” first as texts that reconfigure zines’ do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos as a DIY politics and thereby seek to intervene directly in political struggles; and second as texts marked by encounters with traumatic experiences, which provides an alternative explanation for their fragmentary form. As articulations of radical domesticities, consent zines are, I argue, literary texts that speak to vital contemporary political issues.