Details

ISBN-10:
ISBN-13: 9798887440101
Publisher: PM Press
Publish Date: 09/26/2023
Dimensions: 7.90" L, 5.00" W, 0.70" H

Fag Hag

Translator: Donald Nicholson-Smith
Afterword by: Hélène Hazéra

Paperback

Price: $17.95

Overview

“Some girls fancy sailors, others fancy soldiers. But you, my dear, are a fag hag!”

Lola Miesseroff’s childhood certainly predisposed her to be a rebel. She was born in Marseilles in 1947 to immigrant parents, her mother a Russian-Jewish social worker, her father an Armenian-Russian with a sandpaper-making workshop in sheds left behind by the Americans. The family ran and lived in a nudist colony, a place where the men were allowed to be feminine, the women masculine. Hers was what she calls a “degendered” childhood: “I never suffered from identity problems. There were two genocides in my background, one Jewish, the other Armenian, and my education was Russophone, naturist and libertarian, not least with respect to love and sex. In other words, we were marginal in every possible way.”

Lola’s picaresque memoir Fag Hag tracks her peregrinations through what she calls the “Outer Left”–always deeply committed and involved in women’s liberation, sexual liberation, gay, and LBGTQ liberation–yet always on the fringe of formal organizations (or driven there) because of her belief that anarcho-communist revolution (not her term) trumps all (inter)sectional struggles without reducing them. From Marseilles to Avignon and Paris, Lola’s trajectory epitomizes a far left that opposed a spirit of provocation and raillery to the austerity of many militant groupuscules and experimented enthusiastically with communal and polysexual living.

“I have dredged my memory,” Lola writes, “in the hope that revisiting the past might help illuminate our present; if it doesn’t, I shall have failed. I want to contribute in some small measure to the struggles of today by exposing the strengths and weaknesses of the struggles of the past, and to contest fragmented identity politics in favor of all-for-one-and-one-for-all. Which is my way of continuing to challenge the power structure.”

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Reviews

"... a breath of fresh air in a time when inquisitorial constraints
seem to have the whip hand whichever way we turn.... Lola writes in the
first person with a simplicity that makes you feel good...; her message
is healthy, invigorating–may it free us from the ambient Jesuitism."
–Jean-Claude Leroy, author Médiapart


"Lola lives revolt: anarchism, Situationist International,
libertarian communism, 'outer left'... action committees, Women's
Liberation Movement (MLF), Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front (FHAR),
Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes), Les Gazolines.... Communal apartments,
scandals, doing drugs (joints and acid–but no needles), dérives,
living from odd jobs and expedients, drinking, making love/fucking
(where was the dividing line?), networking, traveling to find friends
and comrades (but no hippy trail to Katmandu–that would be a copout),
and ever ready for action but never lapsing into militantism ("the
highest stage of alienation")."
–Gilles Dauvé, author of Your Place or Mine? A 21st Century Essay on (Same) Sex


"In the summer of 2020 some twenty-five million people came out into
the streets of the USA under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Could
this unprecedented–and multicultural–display prefigure the transcendence
of an identity politics which, for all its victories in the maistream,
has plagued and scattered the universalizing radical energy of
the '1960s'? Whatever the answer, Lola Miesseroff's provocative book
cannot fail to fuel this cardinal debate."
–Dave Barbu


"Now that our zones of freedom have ossified, this book of Lola's is a
precious manual, a fine guide showing how to combine political activism
and personal liberation."
–Hélène Hazera

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10:
ISBN-13: 9798887440101
Publisher: PM Press
Publish Date: 09/26/2023
Dimensions: 7.90" L, 5.00" W, 0.70" H
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