This issue of Filler explores the growing resistance to the Pitt Patriarchy. A lot of bullshit prompted this issue, some of which you can read about in the collection Milo Goes to Pitt. A print-ready PDF will be uploaded whenever we get around to it. Content warning: misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, violence… probably more. Not a light read.
Reality Isn’t Safe
“Reality isn’t Safe” is the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition‘s response to an open letter that accused PSSC of “anxiety-mongering” in their opposition to far-right and proto-fascist organizing on campus. As part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” the alt-right propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos came to Pitt to give a lecture billed as “Free Speech in Crisis.” Roughly 30 people engaged in a variety of tactics to protest the event.
“Reality isn’t Safe” is broken into two sections. The first takes on specific right-wing arguments against the existance of the heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. The second contextualizes the controversy on Pitt’s campus within the broader social war. READ.
On Tactics: A Response to PSSC’s “Reality isn’t Safe”
Written by Liam Swanson, a Pitt and New-SDS alumni.
“The Student Government Board at Pitt, if I remember correctly, came out of radical student struggles in the 20th century as a concession, a ‘pressure valve for would-be dissidents’, as you say. However, this characterization, on its own, minimizes the actual impact the SGB has on everyday life. It is not just a pressure valve; it is a positive formation, a method of distributing bodies, affects, labor. It is unimaginable, in the reign of the ‘marketplace of ideas’, that this distribution could be specifically anti-fascist. If the liberals succeed in making the SGB anti-fascist, even in this minimal way, they have achieved the impossible, and achieving the impossible is a radical, leftist goal.”
It’s a Man’s Campus, Let’s Fuck it Up! (Part I)
Notes toward organizing an anarcha-feminist assault on campus rape culture.
Written by Angel and Brett. Angel is an organizer with Illegal Queers PGH. Brett does Filler stuff. They both volunteer with The Big Idea Cooperative infoshop, participate in PSSC, and hang around the autonomous student scene.
“Anarcha-feminism is not merely intersectional feminism taken to its logical conclusion. It is a fluid framework that is capable of informing and evaluating our resistance to patriarchy within a broader vision for offensive revolutionary action.
Anarcha-feminism expands the feminist project of gender equality by asking questions that aim to facilitate the merger of means and ends. Do our efforts merely educate and raise awareness, or do they challenge the material conditions of patriarchy? Do our efforts disperse power and legitimacy, rather than concentrating it? Do they build our sense of autonomy? Do they empower survivors? Do they meet our needs?”
Destroy Gender
Written by Lena Kafka, a Pitt and PSSC alumni. She fucks shit up and stuff.
“Gender is but another apparatus to be smashed, burned, and scattered. To destroy an apparatus, we must destroy its roots. But first, the soil that covers and protects the roots. The police, racists, misogynists—patriarchs of all varieties—this is the soil we must dig up.
Easier said than done. Confronting police requires militancy (vigilance + awareness + tactical knowledge), but militancy demands the kind of commitment and preparation many aren’t ready for. In most ‘progressive milieus’, going on the offensive is seen as hasty, ill-advised, or at worst, as reactionary. Revolutionaries know that those who wait for the state’s offensive to hit them, who wait for some tragedy to use as leverage and justification for reform, are the real reactionaries. Revolutionaries need to push beyond half-measures, beyond reform, concession and rollback, and push for breaking from the normalcy of daily life. We must push for insurrection against all governance.”
FILLER // ZINE & DISTRO 