Anarchy In Southeast Asia

Where have I been? It’s like I woke up from a two-year nap and just discovered that one of my favorite academic journals—Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies—has just published an entire issue on Anarchist movements in Southeast Asia. Anarchy in Southeast Asia: https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/issue/view/1576

I had shut down my Twitter accounts in 2021 after the first wave of COVID hit my city. I despised Twitter, but I was barely hanging on to it for two reasons: 1) using it to inform people in my city about COVID and local pandemic resources; and 2) a day-by-day connection to the revolutionary movement in Myanmar and the broader Milk Tea Alliance in Southeast Asia.

I had started my Mastodon accounts in 2017 after shutting down my Facebook accounts. I found that by 2021, Twitter was already so unbearable that I had to get off it once and for all. Since I shut down my Twitter accounts (and thank dog I did, before Melon Fusk took over and turned it into a total shitshow), I lost my connection to daily reports from Myanmar and the Milk Tea Alliance.* As nice and friendly as Mastodon is, it doesn’t have a cadre of people connected to the revolution in Myanmar (I have 2 connections), nor the Milk Tea Alliance network. I’ve been told that there are accounts I could tap at Telegram, but I wouldn’t touch that platform–it’s rigged with disinfo-snipers from all over the dark web. Having lost that connection to daily reports from Myanmar and the MTA, it had gradually slipped off my radar.

So as I was going back over some of my Ph.D. research on Academia, I linked to one of my articles that was published in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies in 2015: Strange Attractors: Queers, Chaos and Evolution. Hit the front page of ADCS, and BAM! there it was, just published, 2023-06-24: Anarchy in Southeast Asia. Revolutionary connection restored!

*Which seems to be the whole point of turning Twitter into a fascist hellhole—to drive left activists off the site, thus denying them the organizing power of Twitter.

ADCS is a free, totally open-source journal, so you should be able to download and read everything in it without any permission barriers. Here’s the Abstract for the article on Southeast Asia:

Claudia C. Lodia is a lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. As a queer lesbian Pinay, her research interests lie at the intersections of queer theory, Asian diaspora studies, critical race theory, and activist ethnography. Broadly, her research explores the connections, aspirations, and ruptures between and among themes and ideas in these diverse fields. Before joining the Department of Asian American Studies, Claudia held a Teaching Fellowship and a Writing Fellowship at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she also received her PhD in Anthropology and Social Change. As part of her on-going activism Claudia has co-organized and facilitated talks on queer Asian diasporic experiences and non-state spaces, contributed commentaries to Io, an international feminist collective based in the Philippines, and participated in activist forums that highlight the role and urgency of co-creating an interdisciplinary social science practice. She has contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Inter-disciplinary.net, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. More recently, she participated as a fellow at the 2023 Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) Summer Seminar held at the New School for Social Research, New York. She has also begun a collaborative research project that explores the queer outside, a conceptualization inspired by the work of Fred Moten.