In this episode, Caroline and I talk to the wonderful Dr. Jaime M. Grant, Sex and Intimacy Coach, Researcher, Writer, and longtime Activist. She has recently published Kink for Dummies, after her previous contribution to the series, Polyamory for Dummies. (Yes, it's that series!) Jaime has also written a book and been leading a workshop for many years around the world on mapping your desire, helping people get in touch with what they actually like and want and perhaps have not been able to access. Jaime has been involved in queer and racial justice movements for decades, as well as doing survivor support, research on trans discrimination and more. As you will hear, she is a passionate advocate and coach whose work really revolves around inspiring forms of connection through intimacy, relationship, and self-empowerment.

Talking with Jaime about kink, poly, and sex was extremely helpful to me for putting into perspective the role of queer sex and intimacy within struggle for liberation, autonomy, and the end of empire. I am always interested in the ways that our relationships reproduce the world around us, but I have sometimes wondered if sex as revolutionary is just a dream. (Perhaps I've taught too much Foucault). Our world is structured such that a process of self-discovery involves interrogating your sexuality and gender, so often getting caught up in the traps of identity that end up separating us or becoming modes of punishment. And even though we are told we have unique identities, we are still doing this work under social duress and shame, regardless of more expansive and visible queer communities, more attention to different ways of engaging in sex and relationship, and years of work that people like Jaime have done to support people in these discoveries. Polyamory plays a specific role within anarchist and anti-authoritarian perspectives as giving us ways to relate non-hierarchically, but as with queer love in general, can get caught up in should and should nots, or the miasma of endless processing.

Jaime brought a refreshing perspective, that really should be the first way we access these things. Her approach to creating space to discuss issues around sex and intimacy and to be frank about desire is supportive in a way that makes the possibility of naming the hidden and dark parts of you seem much easier. Listening to her wisdom and experience kind of gave me this feeling that things could actually be simpler, that this wisdom could be basic, and that we often make things too complicated. (Maybe that's just me).

I am a theory girl always getting tangled up, so I was also grateful that Caroline brought her professional and personal experience into conversation with Jaime to help contextualize the challenges that people face when trying to create new supportive relationships with poly or kink dynamics.

I was genuinely moved by this conversation, not just because of Jaime's kindness and passion, but by how clearly she was able to show the power of connection and relationship in changing the world—something I'm always thinking about but I can get pessimistic too. I hope you too find it inspiring to hear her practical perspective that helps simplify ways to open up or lives and even be kind to ourselves and the ones we love.

Jaime is accessible in many ways: You can find her at www.justsexpodcast.com, on instagram @jaimemgrant, on facebook J'aime Grant, or email [email protected]

Her books are out, and she is available for coaching!

If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing.

If you are interested, I will be leading a book club meeting on Emma Heaney's collection, Feminism against Cisness on November 19 at 5pm eastern. You are invited to subscribe and join!

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more. Check them out at www.channelzeronetwork.com

CW: This discussion mentions childhood sexual abuse

When Simon(e) van Saarloos invited me to be in conversation with them at the New York Artbook Fair surrounding their recently published Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (MACK Books), I was honored and excited. We had already been discussing recording a conversation for the Breakup Theory, so it was serendipitous that this event came along. I love doing the podcast, but it's really exciting for me to do public talks and get to engage directly with people. Simon and I met before the event and we found that we were able to really push each other's thinking into interesting and exciting places, so we anticipated a good conversation. It also turned out that we are both working on books about despair—theirs is the upcoming Trans Despair through AK Press. Mine will be out late next year . . . shhhh, it's a secret.

If you haven't yet had a chance to read Against Ageism, I'll give a brief set up. Simon writes in a hybrid personal, theoretical, and sometimes academic style (i.e. citations of academic work). This style really invites you in to their deep consideration of embodied existence, age, sex, and gender. The book is very provocative in many ways, which I'll allow you to hear about in our conversation. It turns out age is a very rich entry point into thinking about a whole tangle of things we take for granted about how we live. Of particular interest for me was the approach to different ways of thinking about time, crip time, linear time, racialized time, queer time all opposed to the cishetero narratives of growing up.

I have typically taken an approach to thinking about age from a perspective of youth and youth liberation, specifically addressing the situation of trans kids. In this book, Simon focuses a bit more on the so-called older ages, perception, and relationship—and also death and grief. All of these issues Simon intimately connects to sexuality and desire and the experience of transness and queerness they have had (and that other people might share and understand).

This episode comes directly from a recorded conversation at MoMA PS 1 in Queens, NY, so the format is different than normal episodes. I am grateful for MoMA PS 1 and Printed Matter (who hosted the bookfair) making this recording and sharing it with me.

Simon and I found this conversation so generative that we are planning another—so if you like this one, look forward to another on a different timeline.

Besides sharing this podcast and rating/following it, if you want to access more of my work as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can find us at CAW where you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free.

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more. Check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com.

CW: brief mention of suicidal ideation

Oh my god, we are so back! As with everyone, this has been a year of hell, or lead paint, or whatever, and I have only been able to release a few episodes. But let me tell you, I am sitting on a few waiting to be edited and have plans for more, getting back into a regular production.

For this episode, I invited the beautiful Dean Spade to respond to a listener letter with me. He has started up a podcast in the wake of his book, with the same name Love in a Fucked Up World, where has been discussing relationships and giving advice about how we can fight and love together better.

This letter came from someone who had a terrible experience with an accountability process and over the years this has caused them to become disenchanted with the ideas of transformative justice, prefigurative politics, community and life . . . It has gotten really bad for them. As Dean has many years of experience with TJ and accountability process, working with different groups in figuring out how to address conflicts, dealing with conflicts in his own groups, I thought that he would be a perfect person to think this through with.

We aren't able to solve the letter writer's problem of course, but we explore all the ways that it becomes difficult to deal with conflict, to lose faith in accountability and any kind of movement work, and how inability to figure out relationship issues derail us. We discuss the emotional spaces that all of these issues take us into, the trauma and pain we bring into each room, and the ways we get stuck perceiving others' perceptions of us.

I personally share a kind of pessimism on accountability with the letter writer (as you may know if you've read some of my work), while Dean offers a more capacious understanding: that transformative justice describes any situation where we don't involve cops, defer to any authority, and no one gets arrested. It isn't based on the success so much as the attempts to address conflicts. In this way, many of the problems come from high expectations, lack in skills in conflict or mediation, and lingering liberal models.

Some of the advice we do offer pertains more to how someone can try to find healing in themselves and do a process, including grieving, even when people are disappointing them, even alone. As always, I come down to letting people go, letting them and yourself off the hook, and trying to find the simplest soothing such as a hand on your chest.

I hope that the writer takes something from this. Their letter is already very insightful about the issue, and so that seems to me to be a step, not towards a reenchantment, but perhaps something else.

Just to give another content warning, there is brief mention of suicidal ideation and suicide in the letter.

If you want to support me and the making of this podcast, please go over to cawshinythings.com, my writer-worker collective CAW with carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. We offer a variety of things, some for paid subscription and some freely available. Podcasts, advice columns, stickers, zines and a regular roundup of our work comes with a free subscription. If you pay $5, you have access to all of our content, including a discord where we offer writing workshops, movie nights, and book clubs.

The Breakup Theory is part of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, you can check all of the offerings out at channelzeronetwork.com

In this episode, I speak with two beautiful trans writers, artists, thinkers, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. They recently published Trans Femme Futures with Pluto Books. Their book describes an expansive ethics of collectivity, care, and complicity from the perspective of trans femme knowledge and experience. Nat and Mijke developed the book over the last number of years through different iterations as a zine and a conference, but also as an offering from many years of organizing, not just for trans liberation, but for all people.

In reading the book, I found, you take on a slight altering in language as they inflect words we have used and think we know with a different tone, which creates a web of understanding that helps us find our position in the world. One throughline that I found incredibly important was their thinking of complicity, as this attends to the leftist piety of purity, as well as the guilt of enforced participation in the state and capital. For them complicity just means, as Mijke says in our conversation, we start from "what you do with your body in this world." From this place, we can then figure out the dynamics of making collectives. It's a way to address our entanglements with power from all the different positions of vulnerability with an aim of untangling hierarchical power for everyone. But beyond complicity, trans shows us we don't have to remain stuck in a world or a body not of our choosing. They tell us that trans "does the unchosing," and, as Nat says, femme "opens up worlds."

We have a really in depth conversations—Nat and Mijke were very generous with their time. We weave together concepts and analysis from their book with Nat and Mijke's own personal histories of involvement in movements and community. I highly recommend reading Trans Femme Futures—they find a beautiful way of articulating what transness and femmeness can teach us about how to live. You can find it at Pluto Books, or wherever else you get your reading materials.

If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free.

CAW has just put out an invitation for people to contribute to a piece we are constructing around the question, "How Do You Love, How Do We Live." As we write on the website, the aim of our invitation is to deepen collective mutuality and connections because we know that when we feel more connected and a sense of belonging; our capacities increase, propelling us to show up and do and be more in the now, and into the future. People can either record an audio file of up to one minute, using the Breakup Theory hotline: (917) 426-6548. Or email a text up to 200 words to [email protected] (please just add How Do You Love, How Do We Live into the subject line). You can remained anonymous or include your name. We want all approaches and genres, so don't shy of getting freaky if you want. For more information, you can see our Instagram post, or look at the website!

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more. Check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com

If you like this show, please rate and follow us, and share with your friends who need help ending things!

In this episode, Caroline and I respond to a letter from a listener who is trying to navigate a tricky relationship. It is a relationship with a lot of fuzziness, moving from romantic and sexual to friends. There are also attempts at real conversation, though they aren't always clear, producing a difficult dynamic to understand and find bearings. They know they need to end it—or at least take space from it—but they also are tied into the queer anarchist community in a small town that centers around this person's house. As they say, they are trying to put the ghost back in its grave, because all of their attempts at clarity and space get lost in confusing communication and signals.

This letter really brings up dynamics that are probably familiar to you all: the relationship where one person chases and the other person distances (then flips), the feeling that the end of the relationship will damage your relationships with other people, and of course deep personal connection and history that is hard to let go of, even if it is clearly part of the past.

The listener seems to know what they want (they work it out in the letter pretty clearly), but all of these ties and ghosts keep them bound. Caroline and I try to discuss the dynamics from many angles, perhaps not coming to a simple solution, but hopefully giving a helpful perspective for all of our listeners who may be caught in similar situations.

I do want to note that when I was listening back to the conversation, there are points where I am not sure I gave enough space to relationality. In other words, I give credence to many of those relationship truisms about centering yourself in a breakup, but feeling yourself can't really be done without others. You can choose whom to share yourself with, but we are made up of all of these relationships and depend upon them to see and understand ourselves.

To check out more of my work head over to CAW Journal, the writer-worker collective I started with carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. You can subscribe for free to get access to our newsletter, podcasts, advice column, and zine/sticker library. If you pay for a membership, you get access to all of our projects, including writing workshops, book clubs, movie nights, and a thriving Discord community.

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Check out Channel Zero for more shows including interviews, analysis, news, reportbacks, stories, and more.

Today I'm sharing a conversation I had with one of my favorites, Dean Spade, about his recent book Love in a Fucked Up World out with Algonquin Books. Dean has been an inspiration for a long time with his commitments to abolition, anti-Zionism, and trans liberation, among other things. His previous book, Mutual Aid, came at a perfect moment when people were getting together in response to COVID-19 and the George Floyd Uprising. This new book has also appeared right when we need it, when we feel worn down and scared, and need to find better ways to connect with each other. His thinking here lines up very closely with the things that concern me, namely thinking beyond politics and anarchism as relationships, building bottom up. Dean starts from the idea that all of our movements and struggle are based on our relationships, and if we can't get those right, how can we expect to work together to end this world and build another. Love in a Fucked Up World finally gives us a self-help book for queer anarchists: it contains so much insight matched with practical suggestions to help guide you through your own stories and the ones you project on others that get in the way of real connection. It really moved me in moments and gelled certain ways to understand myself in relation to others.

Our conversation goes into nitty gritty relationship issues and zooms out to the ways these affect our collective work. We talk about how anarchists and leftists deprioritize and avoid doing this internal and interpersonal work, only to find that all of the problems appear in every place you go. It is so important to talk explicitly about our social needs and how our collective work fits into them. We can't separate politics and love. Meetings are social spaces and our search for political direction is completely enmeshed in our search for intimate connection.

But I'll let Dean tell you more about this—he wrote the book on it.

First, I want to announce the official launch of CAW, the writer worker collective that I belong to along with carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. It is a subscriber based platform where we will share all of our projects, a discord server, and offerings like writing workshops, book clubs, movie nights, as well as a zine and sticker library. If you sign up for free you get access to our weekly newsletter, our advice column, our podcasts, and the zines and stickers. If you subscribe to a paid membership, you have full access to everything. We have various subscription tiers, but everyone who subscribes has the same access. Please go over to https://www.cawshinythings.com to check out what we are doing there, and join if you want!

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which brings together important shows with news, analysis, reportbacks, and culture. Check it out at https://www.channelzeronetwork.com

(Note: I incorrectly say thechannelzeronetwork.com. There is no THE in the URL!)

Today I'm re-releasing a conversation I recorded for the Final Straw Radio with Joshua Clover in 2021. Our conversation focuses around his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot, in part within the context of the George Floyd rebellion. I wanted to present this conversation in memoriam of Joshua, who we learned last week had died. As many of the testimonials you can find online, Joshua was a great friend and comrade to a wide range of people. He is remembered not just as a poet and an academic thinker, but also as someone ready to throw down in the streets. I didn't know him really beyond his work and this conversation, but I appreciated the depth of his thinking and his willingness to go into it with me.

I am rereleasing this episode in its entirety as it was originally released by The Final Straw Radio. I wanted to do so in order to suggest anyone who has not listened to the show to check it out further. This is an essential long-running anarchist podcast that presents conversations with people involved in many different struggles, a necessary tool for us to figure out how to form international solidarities. It also engages with anarchist writing and culture. It's a unique wide-ranging breadth of subjects. They gave me a chance to dig into wideranging and complex conversations with writers and people on the ground.I highly recommend checking them out, and digging into their past episodes. They also produce transcript zines of many of their conversations. You can find them on all the podcasting platforms or at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.com

Both the Final Straw and the Breakup theory are part of the anarchist network of podcasts Channel Zero. This is another resource for so much great anarchist work. To find more conversations like these, plus totally different approaches, go to channelzeronetwork.com

I've been away for awhile, but I have new shows to release, and plan to start posting again regularly. As of May 12, I will be moving all of my writing to my new collaborative project CAW, an online journal of autonomous writing. This is a writers collective formed by me, carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil. It will be a subscription based service to help support us in devoting more time to our work. In addition to articles, essays, and interviews, we have an advice column and a free library of zines and stickers. Check us out and subscribe at cawshinythings.com.

In today's episode, Caroline and I respond to a listener's letter about breaking up with their psychoanalyst after five years. Right now, there is such an emphasis on therapy as a means to address trauma, as well as to adjust to the terror of the current conditions in the world. There is also a whole industry of self-help that coincides with shaming of people by individualizing their faults and failures. We may all need therapy to a certain extent—but when do we end it? Breaking up with a therapist is a kind of practice breakup: it's a controlled environment where you can exercise your own determination and decision and face the consequences practically and emotionally. As the listener details in their letter, ending things comes with a large dose of ambivalence, and we tend to reason our way through it with pros and cons, or assigning blame and guilt. However, as the breakup theory tries to suggest, we can breakup for no other reason than it is what we feel is right in the moment. Caroline and I have a far reaching discussion about all of these ideas and many others, ultimately as a way to support the listener in their decision and their already well thought out process of marking this ending. But this conversation should be helpful to any listener, in or out of therapy, as another approach to encountering our feelings about the end and our own attempts at power and control.

If you haven't already, please go over to cawshinythings.com and sign up to read the works that Vicky, me, and the amazing carla joy bergman and dani burlison are sharing there. Things have been incredibly difficult for me (and everyone), but I am coming back to regular recording and writing, so stay tuned. My column there is called "she's not there." But all of us are posting our articles, essays, writing prompts, and recordings—there is plenty for you to sink your teeth into. And I will be also offering other projects along with my collaborators. The online journal is currently open to subscribers but will pivot soon to a paid subscription service. Check it out and help spread the word.

As always, if you want to submit a question, scenario, or problem for us to discuss from an anarchist/autonomous and queer perspective of ending things, you can write us at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories or call us at (917) 526-6548. We love to hear from you!

And if you like this podcast, please share with your friends, rate us, and follow us where it is you receive pods.

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN will help you discover a library of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com

On today's episode, I have a conversation with Vicky Osterweil, a fellow member of our new writing collective, CAW, and the author of the indispensable history and provocation, In Defense of Looting, and a forthcoming book on intellectual property and Disney, called The Extended Universe. We decided to have this conversation in the opening month of the Trump administration to game out some possible scenarios as we observe the administration demolishing the constitutional and administrative state, against all the establishment assurances the the institutions can withstand any attack. Though our conversation does engage the fear and threat of the situation, we also discuss openings for us to take bold action that uses this moment of (bad) revolution to expand our collective power.

Vicky is one of my favorite people to talk with. She has a brilliant analytical mind, an incredible story of political history and knowledge, and an inspiring way to read the devastating moments against a belief in the necessity to act. In fact, Vicky emphasizes the potential timeline of power consolidation by these fascist forces and the urgency for us to prepare ourselves for managing our lives and mounting attack.

This was recorded at the end of February, so of course there have been new terrible political developments, but the analysis itself still stands as a way for us to assess the possibilities.

If you haven't already, please go over to cawshinythings.com and sign up to read the works that Vicky, me, and the amazing carla joy bergman and dani burlison are sharing there. Things have been incredibly difficult for me (and everyone), but I am coming back to regular recording and writing, so stay tuned. My column there is called "she's not there." But all of us are posting our articles, essays, writing prompts, and recordings—there is plenty for you to sink your teeth into. And I will be also offering other projects along with my collaborators. The online journal is currently open to subscribers but will pivot soon to a subscription service with a pay what you want option. Check it out and help spread the word.

As always, if you want to submit a question, scenario, or problem for us to discuss from an anarchist/autonomous and queer perspective of ending things, you can write us at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories or call us at (917) 526-6548. We have a couple agony letter episodes coming up, and we love to hear from you.

If you like this podcast, please share with your friends, rate us, and follow us where it is you receive pods.

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN will help you discover a library of amazing audio projects, so check them out at channelzeronetwork.com

Hello everyone! I have been away longer than usual between episodes due to circumstances, and I appreciate you all coming back to listen. As a kind of compensation, this is a long one today—I got to talk to one of my favorite people to get into it with, Conner Habib. We had recorded a conversation along with Dean Spade in the approach to the election in order to reorient people's thoughts and attention towards politics beyond the state—and so we decided to reconvene, the two of us, post-election, to discuss the relationship of feeling to thinking and doing. There was of course an intensity of feeling after the election, with many claims about how people should respond and act. Instead of going that route, Conner and I try to explore ways of not giving up our feelings and power to the spectacle of politics and everything it demands from us. In doing this, we aim to expand the possibilities of action, and to reconceive our relationship to the political in a way that develops a new language or a new grammar that no long constrains us. Along the way, we talk about nottaking materialism as the only basis for politics, which gets us into both religious forms of power and the consideration of a spiritual relationship to the self and the world. As I say at the end, Conner's podcast, Against Everyone /w Conner Habib, is an incredible resource that dives into many of these ideas through discussion and thinking. Conner references a recent series of episodes he published as a guide to engaging in a spiritual life. That might be a great place to start if you have not already listened to his podcast. He also wrote the intense novel, Hawk Mountain, which I also highly recommend. Subscribe to Conner's Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ConnerHabib), and find Hawk Mountain here.

Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at ‪(917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us!

If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I'm having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/