Constructionist and Deconstructionist Faerie Politics at Folleterre by Luna
T
he Pan Gathering at Folleterre in the summer of 2017 was my first Faerie gathering. As with many other Faeries I’ve met since then, that first gathering was for me the most life changing and consequential. Depending on from which side of the fence you are looking, you could say that Faeries are great at either reviving or wrecking people’s lives. Like myself, I have seen a few Faeries who arrived to their first gathering having perfectly “respectable” middle class lives and a few years later ended up selling their homes, quitting their jobs and hitting the road in search of themselves. I can’t say that I have never looked back–life on the road has plenty of opportunity for retrospection–but I am definitely a happier person now than I was then. I am always keen to listen to stories about how people have changed through the Faeries. Usually they are stories of healing and discovery. My fae sister May discovered her calling as a sexual healer (a form of sex work) and Silkie started doing political standup comedy in Parisian bars after performing in many no talent shows. I believe that the changes we undergo, in subtle and overt ways, are a testimony of the potency of the Faeries to have an impact in the world. In other words, those changes are a measure of how the Faeries are radical and political. As I see it, one possible way to understand Faerie politics is as a means of de-programming us. In my case, the Faeries managed to de-program me from following a middle class life that was slowly killing my soul. More broadly, the kind of de-programming carried out at Faerie gatherings is directed at the violence and toxicity of a majority society that invalidates and at times still persecutes the expression of our desires and identities. Using a more evocative and yet somehow speciesist language, I think that is what Harry Hay was after with his call to “throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation”. The hope is that by de-programming ourselves we will create the conditions for a truly caring and emancipatory culture. Although the overarching task of de-program-
ming is shared, at my home tribe in Folleterre I see two different strategies to go about it. The first strategy, what I call the deconstructionist approach, is indebted to the politics of the radical queer scene. In this approach, the task of deprogramming ourselves goes through the process of becoming aware not only of the oppression we have suffered but also the oppression we have interiorized and that we continue to exert, often unwittingly. It also aims to raise awareness about the privileges to which we are often blind in terms of sexual orientation, gender, race, class, etc. A central practice in this approach is to demonstrate our awareness of such inequalities and our willingness to dismantle them by naming and owning the categories that frame our experience. In my case that would be: gay, cis male, white, middle class, middle aged, etc. I call this the deconstructionist approach because, as I understand it, its project is to pick apart the bits and pieces that have given rise to each of us through historical processes and socialization and to discard or transform those parts that continue to reproduce oppression and injustice. The other de-programming strategy that I see at play, what I call the constructionist approach, seems to have originated within Faerie experience itself although it is indebted to the hippie movement and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In this approach, the focus is not on deconstructing the fucked-up elements of the default world but rather to create a different reality. In effect, it is a form of imaginative politics that through play and experimentation wants to enquire into the emancipatory possibilities of community living. In the quest to give birth to something new, it actively attempts to erase or at least blur, some of the class markers imposed by socioeconomic extraction. It empowers people to express what we aspire to be, or what we perceive as our hidden, and yet most authentic, selves. That is, I think, the operational politics behind practices such as choosing a Faerie name or NOTAFLOF. At Folleterre, for instance, donations are anonymously deposited into a mailbox and, as a result, I am blissfully ignorant about RFD 183 Fall 2020 27
