Comic Strips

I appreciate the candor regarding your own suspicions It helps clear the air. My request for a feminist framing wasn't an intellectual 'screening' or a test of virtue. It was for a common language where we could talk about the actual mechanics of power.

Here is where we still diverge on the logic of restorative spaces:

1. Can we strategically use the exclusionary spaces?

You argue that exclusion is an 'analgesic' that leads to bad habits. If a space exists purely for catharsis, it risks becoming a 'shrine to nature.' It becomes therapy and not politics. A therapeutic intervention may be need to find kinship and language, but what you do with that determines if it is a political organization. Politics move beyond the therapeutic. Politics changes the state to make sure that these acts don’t violate others like you. A larger politics, the one I will always argue for, connects with other oppressed nodes.

However, you are viewing these groups through a therapeutic lens (identity) rather than an intersectional political lens (formation). From the XF manifesto:

The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies.

In a political laboratory, 'sterility' is about controlling variables. When you say a group shouldn't restrict access because an outsider might be an 'invaluable ally,' you are making an untested assumption. In the early phase of formation, an uncalibrated 'ally' often inadvertently forces the group to translate its internal strategic needs into the language of the dominant gaze just to be understood. That political terrain is not set for this act of translation.

This isn’t a new idea in our conversation, I previously said

“[Men’s only groups in the past] is radically different from a the support some women may get in a women’s conference or the strategy and tactics developed from shared seed experiences for the political project of over throwing patriarchy.”

And I still stand by this. During the transition from therapeutic space to political space, there’s a push and pull, a back and forth. You are developing new language that speaks to the oppressed group, providing some healing, but acting politically through developing tactical methods, strategic goals and, eventually when you open up to other nodes, language they can understand. The explicit exclusion is about fostering unfettered creative political engagement. Unsealing this to the public can cause the political goals to evaporate.

These exclusive groups may invite “outsiders” for very specific insights. But it’s invitation only for strategy and tactic building. It plants the seeds for node interfaces.

2. Nodes and Hinting Beyond Nodes

Opening up to another node is an explicit strategic decision that requires political coherence in language and in body. More than negotiation, you are inviting to coordinate shared political goals with other nodes, not individuals seeking validation from allies.

Addressing when you said: “If we are truly connecting these nodes, then there isn’t exclusion to begin with arguably.”

Nodes start unconnected to develop internal integrity. The exclusion is real, but temporary. Nodes need to develop trust with one another first. This is cold. Creating trust exists in a sea of uncertainty. But the goal is not to stop there. But there must exists since oppressions are try to oppress and exploit as individuals while preventing node formation. The coldness is for functional integrity. The exclusion exists, but the that is not the goal.

The eventual goal is not to live exclusively in the nodes as a node resident, but free from nodal labeling through a transformation of the system that oppressed individuals even before nodes existed. This 'cold' coordination is the only way to ensure that when we do connect, we are doing so as a cohesive political body capable of directed subsumption, rather than being swallowed whole by the very system we are trying to dismantle.

3. Clean Spaces Are Not Clean

No space is perfectly 'clean'. We all bring internalized cultural norms with us. But the purpose of the exclusive space isn’t to ignore those internalized toxins, but to create a controlled environment where we can isolate and deconstruct them without the external pressure of the 'out-group' reinforcing them in real-time. We don't resist these thoughts. We analyze where they come from to determine if they serve a political purpose or if they are just 'memetic parasites' that need to be purged.

4. The 'Long Game' of Subsumption

The goal is a directed subsumption. It is a deliberate construction of new procedures that 'soften the shell' of the current system and dismantle its defenses. It is done is near simultaneity with the isolation and deconstruction of internalized toxins from the dominant system. In the process of self release from the internalized system, the tendency to attack the system politically opens up. This is only the beginning of the subsumption process. We engineer the future through destroying the inhibitators. We get creative space to develop new modes while this is happening and imagine what these modes can be if they open with the fall of the oppressive structures.

If we are to engineer a future beyond the binary, we have to be willing to build the 'barracks' where those procedures are designed. This is not asking for a place to hide, this is so we can build the infrastructure of transition.