Out of the Woods

Cancel culture and identitarianism with Clementine Morrigan

Episode Summary

In this episode, we hear from Clementine Morrigan, a writer who has recently started speaking out against “cancel culture.” Her story begins with her as a teenager who dropped out of high school because of homophobia, then started attending a queer alternative school in a new city. This is where her entry into social justice & identitarianism began. After years of active alcoholism she got sober, re-entered social justice culture and gradually her career as a self-employed writer creating zines about trauma, sobriety, being queer succeeded big time on social media. This summer, she was, in her words, Fucking Cancelled. We hear her story, but we also talk together extensively about cancel culture and social justice.

Episode Notes

In this episode, we hear from Clementine Morrigan, a writer who has recently started speaking out against “cancel culture.” She started a podcast with her partner Jay, Fucking Cancelled, and published a zine called Fuck the Police Means We Don’t Act Like Cops to Each Other. Clementine shares her story entering and exiting what she refers to in her podcast as “the nexus,” or identitarianism, what Mark Fisher refers to as “the vampire castle,” and what episode 1 of Out of the Woods would call social justice culture. 

Her story begins with her as a teenager who dropped out of high school because of homophobia, then started attending a queer alternative school in a new city. This is where her entry into social justice & identitarianism began. After years of active alcoholism she got sober, re-entered social justice culture and gradually her career as a self-employed writer creating zines about trauma, sobriety, being queer succeeded big time on social media. This summer, she was, in her words, Fucking Cancelled. 

We hear her story, but we also talk together extensively about cancel culture, identitarianism, abolitionism, concerns about how this ideology may impact workers, and our desire for a leftist critique of this ideology. 

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Clementine's website

Clementine's patreon

Fucking Cancelled podcast (Clementine's co-host & partner Jay has a lot of great essays on their Patreon about the nexus and neoliberal identitarianism) 

Fuck the Police Means We Don't Act Like Cops to Each Other - Zine

Instagram: @clementinemorrigan

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References & reading list: 

Planet of Cops - Freddie deBoer 

Exiting the Vampire Castle - Mark Fisher

Kai Cheng Thom

Adolph Reed

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

The Social Justice Industry Isn’t Helping Oppressed People - Jen Pan & Ariella Thornhill on Jacobin

The Year of Racial Reckoning and the Dead End of Identity w/ Vivek Chibber - The Jacobin Show hosted by Ariella Thornhill, Jen Pan and Paul Prescod 

Nonsite.org - Peer-reviewed, online, open access journal. Today, the various theoretical forms of neoliberalism—from the postmodern to the posthuman, from the new historicism to the new pluralism—have become so pervasive that they are nearly invisible. nonsite.org seeks first to make them visible and then to make them less pervasive. Our goal is to criticize what is and replace it with what we think ought to be.

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