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Jack Halberstam: "Vertiginous Capital Or, The Master’s Toolkit"

audre-lorde

At the website Bully Bloggers, Jack Halberstam has a stirring call to arms that asks us not to work for the improvement of the system he labels “vertiginous capital,” but rather to “tear it all down.” Here’s an excerpt:

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” diagnoses perfectly our current predicament as we are pulled by the motion of vertiginous capital into a sinkhole of our own making, trying to claw our way out with the same methods that created the whirlwind in the first place. It is clear by now that you cannot resolve sexual assault with more criminalization, or the abjection of queers with marriage, or wealth disparity with real estate transactions. We cannot end sexual harassment on campus by throwing such a wide net that the predators wriggle free through loopholes of their own making while women and queers stand accused of unnatural, inappropriate and criminal conduct. It is clear that the moral policing we have engaged in the hopes of tackling heteropatriarchal abuses has come back around and now accuses us of misconduct. And so, it is time for new tactics: fewer strategies of repair and more damage to the system; less fixing up and more taking down; fewer victims and more fighters.