About

(banner photo by Lasse (Larson) Heinonen)

Welcome to Radical Noise!  Radical Noise is LOUD and RADICAL. This is a site that get to the root of social problems (what radical in the best sense means) as well as making noise (hopefully exciting, confrontational and perhaps even at times musical) for revolutionary social transformation. As someone who in high school was called “commie, pinko, fag” and who has also been referred to as a human megaphone Radical Noise is particularly apt. This is the site for Gary Kinsman that I will be using as often as I can since I have officially retired from teaching Sociology at Laurentian University but have certainly not retired from the struggle for social justice or from doing activist research and writing. As I make the transition from being a university based activist intellectual to becoming a much more public and community-based activist intellectual, I hope this site will become a place where people can learn about my latest work but also about my history of activism and research, and also read briefer comments I post from time to time on current developments.

Drawing inspiration from the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico and the rip they have made in the fabric of capitalist and oppressive social relations, along with direct action anti-poverty organizing, anti-racist feminism, the global and climate justice movements, and more recently the Occupy movement and Idle No More this site is committed to anti-capitalist and anti-oppression politics and to struggles for queer liberation. It is inspired by some of the red threads within autonomist Marxism. It is important given where I am now writing to begin with stating that I live on occupied indigenous land and that this site is committed to the struggle to support indigenous struggles and self-determination. Radical Noise will therefore put ‘Canada’ and other ‘nation-states’ in question.

Rather than trying to provide answers often posts on this site will raise questions and hope to provoke dialogue and debate. As the Zapatistas put it “Walking We Ask Questions.” As we move together against capitalism and oppression we do not know all the answers and it is only by asking questions that arise as we move that paths forward become clearer. There is a relation between practice and developing theory – in developing revolutionary praxis.

If you are not familiar with who I am here is a very brief biography. I am the author of The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities, co-author (with Patrizia Gentile) of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, and editor of Whose National Security?, Sociology for Changing the World and Mine Mill Fights Back. I am currently working on a new book project called The Making of the Neo-Liberal Queer and I am involved in the AIDS Activist History Project. I am a long-time queer liberation, anti-poverty and anti-capitalist activist. I have taken early retirement from teaching Sociology at Laurentian University, on the territories of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek nation. For those interested in how I got involved in radical and queer politics please see the interview Deborah Brock did with me called “Workers of the World Caress” on the Left History site that is also on this site.

This site remains in formation but includes:

• An archive of some of my unpublished and published written work as well as videos and interviews. Some of this is done through links to other sites.
• Material on some of my recent work on the making of the neo-liberal queer and the resistance to it, autonomist Marxist organizing in ‘Canada’ in the 1970s, doing activist research and history, and recovering AIDS Activist histories as part of the AIDS Activist History Project.
• Continuing commentaries on the problems with national security and how the Canadian state has still yet to apologize to queer people for the Canadian war against queers or to provide any form of compensation for most of the people who had their careers destroyed by the anti-queer campaigns of the national security state.
• Some materials that I found useful in teaching radical sociology over the years.
• Links to other sites that I like and find useful for a variety of purposes.
• Occasional commentaries on developments that I have a chance to respond to. This includes reports on some of the activism I am involved in.

I hope you will enjoy, be challenged by, and use Radical Noise. Please let me know what you think by contacting me at gkinsman@laurentian.ca

I am also on twitter at @GaryWKinsman

In solidarity,

Gary