You can listen and download a 57-minute sample of the audiobook here!
Upcoming Speaking Events–Wear a Mask!
My new book is coming out and I am doing a bunch of conversations about it. I will keep updating this list as they get confirmed, but for now, mark your calendar, and use the links below to get tickets when relevant (I’ll update the links with specific event links as my hosts make them ready).
I’m asking that everyone wear KN95 masks to in-person events, in hopes of making these events more accessible to more people. Masks will be provided at events, and people will be asked to wear them unless an access need prevents it. If you have other access questions or requests about these events, please contact the people hosting the events, since they know more about their venues than I do.
November 21 Mills College, Oakland, CA
November 21 St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA
November 26, Portland State University, Portland, OR
December 4 Online Mutual Aid Workshop
January 17 Elliott Bay Books, Seattle, in conversation with Angela Garbes
January 19 Powells Books, Portland, OR with Walidah Imarisha and Demian DinéYazhi
January 24, Creating Change Conference, Las Vegas, NV, in conversation with Jaime Grant
January 29 Possible Futures Bookstore, New Haven, CT
January 30 Yale Law School, New Haven, CT
January 31 Making Worlds Bookstore, Philadelphia, PA
February 3, Bluestockings Bookstore, NY, NY in conversation with Mariame Kaba
February 4, Brooklyn Heights Branch, Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, NY
February 12, Online, hosted by Seattle University School of Law.
February 14 (still being confirmed), Fireweed Collective, Online
February 28, California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA
March 3, University of California, Berkeley
April 4, University of Wisconsin, Madison
April 4, A Room of One’s Own Bookstore, Madison, WI
May 1, Loyalty Books, Washington, D.C., with Jaime Grant, author of Polyamory for Dummies
May 3, Red Emmas, Baltimore, MD
Further events still being finalized for Madison, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chicago, D.C., Olympia, Los Angeles, Bellingham and more.
New Book! Out January, Pre-Order Now
My new book will be out January 14, 2025!
Around the globe, people are faced with spiraling crises, from the pandemic and climate change-induced disasters to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, genocide, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. More and more of us feel mobilized to fight back, often dedicating our lives to collective liberation. But even those of us who long for change seem to have trouble when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Too often we think of our political values as outward-facing positions again dominant systems of power. Many projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age. How do we divest from cultural programming that gives us harmful expectations about sex, dating, romance and friendship? How do we recover from the messed up dynamics we were trained in by childhood caregivers? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom into step with our desires for healing and connection? Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, so we can stick together while we work for survival and liberation. Pre-order through Bluestockings and get 15% off with the code F*CKED<3.
Click here to watch the webinars I did with Fireweed Collective over the last four Valentine’s Days about dismantling the romance myth, which capture some of the themes of the book.
New Tool: Cultivating Solidarity in Times of Escalating Repression
I’ve been working on this new tool about how to respond to escalating repression without falling into classic anti-solidarity traps with Community Justice Exchange, Jocelyn Simonson, PIlar Weiss, Atara Rich-Shea and Zohra Ahmed since last year, and we’re excited to share it! You can find the entire tool at bit.ly/cultivatesolidarity. Check out the video from our launch event below.
Video: Defending mutual aid
Don’t miss this recent webinar, packed full of info about the current ways that mutual aid work is being criminalized and attacked, and how organizers can keep doing our work even as pressures build.
New Interview with Sad Francisco Podcast
It was delightful, as always, to talk with Toshio Meronek about nonprofitization, queer resistance, gentrification, cops and more. Check it out.
Videos: Romance Myth Webinar Series Updated with 2024 Video
I had the pleasure of collaborating with Fireweed Collective again to put on a fourth installment of my Dismantling the Romance Myth webinar series. The fourth webinar focuses on how we get caught in fears of abandonment and engulfment and what we can do to act in alignment with our values when those fears show up. Below you’ll also find the prior years’ videos and links to the slide decks from each year’s webinar.
Fourth Webinar with ASL:
Fourth Webinar with Spanish Interpretation:
2023 Webinar:
2022 Webinar:
2021 Webinar:
Old anti-marriage animated video
Something I made a long time ago, when it was fun to make animated characters say your propaganda for the first time. Content warning: dry humping.
EVENT: Should Social Movement Work Be Paid? January 5, 2023
Should Social Movement Work be Paid?
Thursday, January 5, 2023
7PM EST/ 4PM PST
Sponsored by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University, and BCRW
REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dean-spade-should-social-movement-work-be-paid-tickets-483783729157
The COVID pandemic and George Floyd/Brionna Taylor rebellion of 2020 brought new attention to the role of mutual aid work in surviving crises and organizing resistance. People started thousands of projects giving out food, rent money, and bail money, doing errands for each other, providing childcare, emotional support, transportation, and other essentials. Many people learned more about the histories of mutual aid in social movements as vectors of survival and mobilization. The long-time critique of non-profitization of social movements reached newly politicized people as debates surfaced about whether to register mutual aid projects as non-profits.
In this talk, Dean Spade will explore a vexing question being discussed in many movement groups: should people be paid to do this work? Should groups should seek funding to create staff positions or stipends for people participating in the work? Is it a matter of racial, economic, gender and disability justice to pay people to be part of movement groups? Does the process of raising money tie groups too closely to philanthropists or governments? Does paying participants limit the potential growth of movements? Is payment the best way to recognize labor in groups? Is paying people a good way to reduce barriers to participation? How does paying people impact the culture of social movement work? Does it institutionalize the work? These questions have immediate practical significance, and also unearth larger themes about what it means to do resistance organizing within capitalism where people are demobilized, isolated, and struggling to meet basic needs.
This event is a continuation of the Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups workshop series, which started as a series of four online workshops led by Dean Spade:
Workshop 1 – No Masters, No Flakes! (October 28, 2021)
Workshop 2 – Decision-Making (November 11, 2021)
Workshop 3 – Skills for Abolitionist Practice (December 9, 2021)
Workshop 4 – Bringing New People into the Work (January 20, 2022)
ACCESSIBILITY
ASL and live transcription will be provided. This event is made possible by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University.
Podcast Interview about Jealousy, Relationship Anarchy and the Romance Myth
