Cindy Barukh Milstein. 2024. Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice. London: Pluto Press.
Constellations of Care is an anthology of answers to a fundamental question: what do people do to survive and thrive from the margins of society? According to the volume’s editor, Cindy Barukh Milstein, the goal of state-based systems is not to provide prosperity and security for all. Rather, they strategically reserve material and political protections for those who conform to a masculine and heteronormative model of the ‘good citizen’. The various authors of this anthology, all members of various anarcha-feminist collectives, employ the praxis of anarcha-feminism to suggest that resistance to state-based exclusion depends first and foremost on the practice of care, sustaining and building relationships that give life to those without political and economic power or opportunities, who unwittingly or willingly do not conform to the standards desired by the state. Empowerment and social transformation are not driven by massive state projects, but by interpersonal and highly specific interventions managed by those who share the ontological experience of exclusion through inhabiting queer or feminine bodies.
What follows is a collection of histories, reflections, conversations, and artwork that reflect collective, anti-hierarchical, and locally organized efforts to care for a global network of the excluded. Whether written by underground abortion care providers in Poland, communal kitchen collectives that sustained anti-government protests in Colombia, or unhoused and precarious sex workers in Philadelphia who hold weekly needle exchanges, each of its thirty-seven entries offers an approach to creating communities by and for the marginalized.
In some ways, Milstein’s work sits at odds with a strictly academic style of writing. One of the first entries in the book, written by members of the Nightshade collective in Philadelphia, actively denounces the ability of formal academia to understand and advance anarchist theory, suggesting that academia is inherently hierarchical, focuses on creating grand universalist theory rather than accepting theoretical plurality, and gatekeeps legitimacy through economically restricting access to academic credentials (p. 24). Constellations of Care is based on the idea that theory is created, interpreted, and used not by researchers, but by the everyday stakeholders in the political processes that it analyzes. The book emphasizes alternatives to academic style in some of its editorial choices. For example, each section’s author biography veers away from listing degrees or institutional affiliations, and rather briefly chronicles the author’s skill sets and political positions, as well as their close relationships to both communities and geographies, often defined by a city or an Indigenous land designation, rather than a nationality. However, the main contribution of the book is to showcase/underscore/reveal both the vastness of anarcha-feminism’s theoretical considerations and approaches, as well as highlight the difficulties of living out radical politics on a day-to-day basis. The reader is constantly invited not only to explore the deep-seated reasonings that drive the book’s storytellers, but are also challenged to forget clean, academic theory and engage with the messy process of extending a hand to the people around them.
Queer/Feminist Alternatives to Both Historical Anarchism and State SystemsAnarchist organizing has often struggled with how to oppose hierarchical structures without simply reproducing their harms or coercive authority in less formalized ways. These anarcha-feminists often characterize state power with masculinized values and phenomena, including violence, individualism, and the influence of charismatic and ambitious political leaders who are willing or able to take public risks in the name of a cause. Two members of Food Not Bombs, a collective that gives away free meals to unhoused people and at protests, write that “emphasizing only the most visible, frontline, or confrontational forms of activism fails to acknowledge the massive amounts of labor carried out every day that…are part of the glue that holds us all together” (p. 348). This invisibilized labor is often only understood from the standpoint of those who are either doing the work of caring for the marginalized, a disproportionately feminine group, or who are outside of normative economic, familial, and domestic structures, a key part of the ontological experience of queerness.
This understanding offers a corrective course to both official marginalization and trends within social movements that prioritize direct action against a hostile authority over the daily needs of vulnerable people. What it doesn’t offer is a clear idea of where masculinity as a concept or masculine bodies reside in a framework of care. The book, like many of the collectives featured within it, is entirely the work of women and queer contributors, with a range of opinions from wanting to work in tandem with more ‘masculine’ political groups, to advocating for full autonomy of feminine and queer anarchists from cisgendered and heterosexual men as a strategy towards harm reduction. The argument is clear-cut that a theory of masculinity in line with the values of horizontal, communitarian care politics is the responsibility of men themselves, not women or gender queer people. At the same time, anarchism as inherently pluralist, inclusive, and non-hierarchical cannot simply condemn or disregard masculinities and move on. In presenting a gendered understanding of the division of roles in alternative and social movement spaces, Constellations of Care highlights the unclosed gap between a queer feminist politics of care and both institutional and radical politics that are understood to be masculine.
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