New Book Helps Organizers Become Better Lovers and Comrades
Dean Spade joins Eman Abdelhadi to discuss how we can be balance our intimate relationships with our political work
Jane Houseal, Eman Abdelhadi and Dean Spade
Some organizers’ radical beliefs don’t seem to extend into their personal relationships, from treating comrades poorly to chasing unrealistic “romance myths” that aren’t aligned with their political principles. The dissonance can cause isolation within activist spaces and be the downfall of their projects. In his latest book, Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, longtime organizer and educator Dean Spade aims to provide leftists with a self-help tool that can provide some guidance.
Spade has spent more than 20 years working in trans liberation, prison abolition and other causes, and it shows. His previous book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), provides steps for organizers to engage in life-changing cooperative support. Now, Spade accomplishes what other modern self-help writers cannot — creating a compassionate guide for leftists who want to work toward more abundance in their relationships while building political power in their communities. Love in a F*cked-Up World breaks down the harmful ways cultural narratives and social conditioning inform our ideals and behavior, providing practical advice for navigating love and friendships.
In These Times columnist Eman Abdelhadi joined Spade for a virtual discussion, revealing what it would look like if we worked together to overcome these missteps. As Abdelhadi says, “It is a book that takes very seriously our interdependence and our obligations to one another and the development of an ethical system in the ways that we treat one another, especially in community.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
EMAN ABDELHADI: I absolutely love the book, Dean, and it’s come at exactly the right time in my own life, having gone through a breakup in the fall and being in a place to reconsider how I approach relationships personally and in this movement.
A lot of us are rightfully skeptical of the self-help genre. It is often advice from people we don’t trust and whose values we don’t share; this book is the exact opposite. Leftists deserve self-help, too, so it’s really nice to get it from a comrade. Take me through your journey of writing this book.
DEAN SPADE: I have relentlessly used all of the worst self-help tools out of desperation, holding my nose while I’m reading them and often sharing things with friends, but having to interpret for them — because I can’t hand you this literature that’s so openly ableist or racist or imagines the “good life” as being skinny, owning property and being white. I just can’t endorse a lot of these tools. But there is something in them, often about self-awareness or introspection, and I had this idea of just trying to create something that would translate a bit of that out.
I would also read stuff and listen to podcasts and they would be missing the core thing — the conditions that make us all so miserable. You’re talking about sex and romance without talking about patriarchy, racism and colonialism. You’re talking about people feeling inadequate and not talking about capitalism or white supremacy. It ends up being victim-blaming and very individualizing, and I really wanted to shift that.
One of the antagonists of the book is the “romance myth.” Can you share how you think it influences our behavior in relationships?
DS: I don’t know where I first read it, but that’s a term I picked up from 1970s feminists. Romance has a mystique; people think owning a house or having the right kind of partner or body will make them safe and happy. Specifically when it comes to sex, dating and love, there’s an idea that this is the most important relationship and you should ditch everything else for it. People get super isolated and have really unrealistic romantic ideals. This is the kind of stuff that makes people full of resentment, and it makes most romantic relationships into places where people get really entrapped.
The romance myth is used all throughout our culture. There’s a lot of elements to it. Even people who are very politically astute, when it comes to our very personal lives, often believe these things. We think these are our feelings and, actually, it’s just a cultural mythology of control, the same one that tells you that owning property will make you safe and that you shouldn’t share with others. This myth is affecting so many of our social circles and our activist circles that I think it’s affecting everyone, regardless if they identify with it or not.
I found that so refreshing in the book. You remind readers not to weaponize tools in ways that basically reproduce carceral logics, or logics of punishment and blame. You talk about abundance a lot. When we let go of this romance myth, what do we get?
DS: The romance myth is about scarcity and insecurity and really fomenting that in us. It leads to us all not being as right on toward our friends, lovers or people in our community as we could. I want us to treat our friends like our lovers and our lovers like our friends.
Treating our friends like our lovers means the specialness. Let’s have a friendiversary. Let’s have sleepovers. Let’s give each other sweet gifts. Let’s make our friendships special and revered and weighted with tender meaning, the way we might with a romance.
And then treating our lovers like our friends — with our friends, we’re more likely to want the best for them rather than wanting to control them. People get highly critical and threatened by their lovers’ other activities and connections.
I talk in the book about a promiscuous support system I want us to all have, whether you are sexually promiscuous or not. I want less exclusivity in general. A lot of people are just isolated if they have a lover and that person is the only person they’re getting emotional support from. Instead, what if we all had lots of really deep relationships? Your lover doesn’t have to be everything to you, and neither does any one of your friends. It’s not a threat that we all need lots of support.
We just all actually need people. Whether or not we like them or it’s easy or comfortable, we have to find a way. I think part of the abundance I’m talking about relates to how we just live in the most isolated culture of all time. More of us live alone than ever. We pay more for everything. We work more. We commute an enormous amount. People are very isolated, and isolation makes whatever bad thing you go through more dangerous. So this kind of abundance is a social abundance, with many kinds of connection at many levels.
I really resonated with all of that in the book. It felt very hopeful to reassert that we have these resources and support systems that we can build, we just need to invest in them. With movements, I want to ask about some of the behaviors you talk about as being particularly harmful: gossiping and campaigning. What happens when we let gossip rein free?
DS: Gossip can be a care circuit. I want to separate useful, practical information and care for people. That’s different from what I think most of us do, which is, we’re very afraid of direct feedback. We don’t give it and we don’t receive it very well, and I think it’s actually one of the most dangerous things in our movements. Rather than telling other people that I’m frustrated, I gossip about you. Or in our movement, something people do a lot is not even say the content — instead, they’ll say, “They fucked up,” or they’ll say, “That group is fucked up.” People don’t know why and feel like they’re supposed to shun something, but they don’t even know what the content is. And it can turn people away from our movements, and it can also cause disorganization of trust.
The other piece, the campaigning piece — and that is really important to me — is when we break up as roommates or lovers or an activist collaboration, and then go around and need everybody to know that you’re bad and to exclude you. That is so disorganizing. One of the things I’m hoping the book does is offer us all the chance to remind each other that it’s not actually satisfying. If it’s the mayor, fuck yeah, humiliate the mayor all day long, and the arms company and the university president. But we forget in our communities to discern the difference between somebody else in our movement who we could give feedback to and try to influence. It doesn’t mean you’ll listen to me the first time. Most of us need to be told something by like 20 different people before we listen. Feedback isn’t an immediate satisfaction always. But I know it’s worthwhile for me to tell someone, who I know shares my values, something I think they’re doing that maybe doesn’t seem values-aligned.
I’ve dog-eared like every page. I know it’s a book I’m going to be coming back to over and over. As you say in the book very poignantly, growth is a spiral staircase, and so there is a constant kind of return. There’s a constant back and forth that happens. So, thank you.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.
Dean Spade is a professor at Seattle University School of Law. The second edition of his book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published by Duke University Press. His book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), was published by Verso Press. Find out more about his work at deanspade.net.
