what is feral anarchy?

end of the subscription drive, start of a very neurodivergent explainer on feraltity

q: what is feral anarchy?

a: hey all! i’m interrupting the trans voices series as we got our first reader question for a while:) and this will just be an explainer. if you’re like me, you’ve heard a LOT more talk of being feral in the anarchist community than usual lately—especially in the context of postciv experiences. like every new label, this is a confusing one with a lot of room for interpretation. however, a reader asked me about this, so i’m hoping to clear some stuff up.

(btw this is the last day of our subscription drive. so here’s the signup link for that while you’re here lol.)

put simply, ferality is defined by a lifeform rejecting domestication—it’s postciv and very much about negating social norms, conformity, and (crucially) self-control. it’s a practice of shaping your life based on your and others’ most primal and queer desires, in large ways like anarchist organizing and in smaller ways like refusing to repress our queerness or act with a mindset of moral duty or have normative physical movements or engage in small talk and eye contact or write in a structured way or otherwise exert governance and control over yourself. being feral means applying anarchy and queer liberation to every action (rather than just broad questions of social organization). it means choosing not to control yourself, act with social norms in mind, participate in groupthink, or govern others.

ferality is a personal identity rather than a political ideology, which is why the question of “feral anarchy” can be a tad misleading. as i put it to a friend the other day when explaining my own experiences in this regard, “being an anarchist, in day to day life, comes up when there’s statism, capitalism, or bigotry—sadly often but not always. Being feral applies to literally All The Things.” being unable to co-exist with the very act of self-repression is all-encompassing, as even in an idealized anarchist society, there can still be some level of conformity and order (at least if speculative fiction is to be believed). some feral beings report feeling like self-repression is deeply alien and irrelevant to them, or even struggling to understand it when people engage in it.

ok, i get that feral beings don’t self-repress, but what does it mean to have postciv desires? like all anarchist stuff, this is a pretty nebulous decision. a friend of mine describes it as “desires of an extremely disorderly sort separate of agricultural/industrial rhythms,” but of course, this is so broad as to be less than helpful. i’d say from experience that it’s mostly finding beauty in existing as a conduit for desire rather than needing justification or external validation—sometimes this experience is synaesthetic, sometimes it’s rooted in egoist anarchy or some other form of theory, but either way, it’s outside of normative civilization and social organization.

what about other experiences? well, labels are tools, and people who adopt this label can have any lived experience at all. in my experience, the feral beings i know tend to experience intensely non-civilizational desires (which is one of many reasons that this is common in anarchist spaces) such as finding chaos/disorder aesthetically pleasing, novelty seeking, needing a lack of structure to feel safe, and the like. experiences for some folx (though not everyone) can also include delighting in the loss of control itself (rather than anything external), and more generally needing a feeling of negation and conflictuality in addition to a deeply anarchic universal love. feral beings tend to be intensely violated by order and structure itself—not just rigidity or hierarchy, but anything with an orderly aesthetic framework. i know some feral folx who are harmed by anything static (fixed locations, the gender binary, you name it), some who have issues with orderly academic disciplines (STEM can be a huge pain point), many who have problems with syndicalist or structured ways of organizing (ML is also…a lot for us), and so much more—some people don’t mind this type of order, but feral beings emphatically mind it. an abnormal or indifferent relationship to time is also a theme (although this might be every anarchist ever).

who identifies as feral? anyone can use any labels that help them, or none at all, or whatever. in my limited experience, the label of ferality is pretty common in spaces at the intersection of Mad Studies and anarchy. this is in part because Mad Studies tends to reclaim formerly harmful labels and make them empowering and generative…and in part because anarchy does the same thing. ferality is in no way a new concept (there have always been people who feel this generalized aversion to restraint and postciv way of experiencing desire) but is, to some extent a new label.

so yeah—being feral is a label that some of us apply to ourselves to talk about various emotional or neurological experiences. it has some philosophical underpinnings (being postciv, valuing a duality of the destructive and generative, taking issue with imposed order and hierarchy) but isn’t exactly political. ferality isn’t an anarchist belief so much as a lived experience that provides further evidence for the necessity of anarchism. <3