Dean Spade's New Self-Help Book Wants "The Personal is Political" to Include Dating
Stephen Anunson | Bea Oyster
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Anyone who’s been involved in the heady rush of community organizing and protesting knows it’s easy to look over at the person to your left and feel a spark of connection. As Dean Spade writes in the introduction to Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, released January 14, “It’s not surprising that friendships and sexual relationships develop between organizers, where passions run hot, and shared values and goals give a sense of belonging or intimacy.”
Spade would know, with over 20 years of political organizing and theorizing under his belt. In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a New York City-based legal organization supporting trans, nonbinary and intersex people living at the margins. Since then, he’s written multiple books, most recently 2020’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), which became an instant classic for organizers and the social justice-minded. Teen Vogue has cited his work on subjects like police and prison abolition and hate crimes more than once.
For his latest book, Spade, who teaches at Seattle University School of Law, knew that to bring about the kind of radical change he envisions for our society, he needed to focus on the ways we treat one another. Love in a F*cked-Up World is a self-help book for those who are deeply invested in change-making work, but who need a little guidance bringing that change about within themselves.
Growing in part out of a series of yearly talks Spade’s given on “dismantling the romance myth,” the book includes all sorts of workbook questions and vignettes of the sorts of conflicts that might arise in messy relationships, with the hope that any reader might be able to relate.
“I do want the book to be useful to people doing a wide variety of creative and political projects, because these same patterns seem to be happening in all the realms in which I've ever done organizing or creative community work,” Spade tells Teen Vogue over Zoom in a January interview. “Whether we're talking about climate, or trying to stop people from building a jail, or trying to get in the way of a pipeline or do a child care project for people who are going to court, or get people their welfare benefits — we fall apart along these relational lines over and over again.
“I'm hoping [the book] helps people feel that alignment between what they want for themselves in their sexual and romantic and friendship relationships, and what they believe in for justice and liberation for the world,” Spade continues. “A lot of times, those things are very hard to line up in our society.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: How did your political work on abolition lead you to write a “self-help” book?
Dean Spade: This book comes from my 25 years in the prison and police and border abolition movement in the US, on two levels. One [is] that all of our movements are made of groups and collaborations that are only as strong as our relationships. If our relationships fail, and if we treat each other badly and our group falls apart, we're never gonna get the thing done. … But [two], because the abolition movement has asked a deep question: How do we become more safe? What's actually dangerous to us?
Without police, what do we do about the rapists and abusers? Here's the answer.
This society tells a lie about what's dangerous. It says there's murderers out there who are out to get you and police on every corner, and we know that the real dangers to us are things like the police and also the dangers inside our relationships: That the most common violence is violence inside sexual and romantic relationships and family relationships. So for me, this book is really about violence prevention, and that broader abolitionist goal of building real safety in our communities by being connected to each other and knowing how to talk about relationships, how to build healthy relationships, knowing how to support each other when we're in unsafe relationships.
Self-help literature is mostly de-politicized in the sense [it’s mostly] racist, [these books are] about upper-class, white, middle-aged people. They're not mostly for us. They're not for queers. They're not for trans people. They pretend that problems are individual and not collective.
TV: Why do you think social justice spaces avoid addressing interpersonal and romantic relationships as related to “the work,” and what do you see as the risks of dismissing this type of interpersonal emotional work?
DS: [The book] is coming out in this moment of this really intense right turn in the United States and globally, this particular moment of ecological crisis, of the genocide in Palestine. But many of these [relationship dynamics] are quite long term, and I think are going to be with us, as are those crises. The premise of the book is that we are going to be needing each other more than ever for the rest of our lives; we're not in a short-term crisis here. And so the ways that we struggle to stick together are really quite dangerous for us.
I think that relational patterns and troubles are often relegated to be “women's work,” or not serious. Especially things related to sex, dating and romance are kind of coded as feminine and unserious for “real leftists.” And of course, like feminists have always said, the personal is political. It actually matters who does the dishes after the meeting. It matters who changes the diapers. This book is along those lines — how we do or don't care for each other, and how we treat each other in our groups, explodes our groups.
TV: How were you thinking about young people when working on this book?
DS: I had my feminist awakening when I was in high school, when I was 15, because of the gender dynamics that were happening between me and people around me, between girls and boys. I didn't know about queer and trans people at that time in my life, but I could see that it was a really bad deal for girls. A lot of people I knew were experiencing sexual violence and other forms of violence with boys that they’d go on dates with, or boys who were their boyfriends. There was also that kind of violence happening in my own family, and I learned at a very young age that this is one of the most dangerous areas of our lives. I'm not likely to be killed by some kind of robber in the park, I'm actually most likely to be hurt or killed by somebody I date or have sex with or somebody who wants that from me, and that is a really big deal in our society.
That is a big motivator behind this book. How do we learn how to form relationships that work better for us, learn how to help each other get out of relationships that aren't working for us? How do we figure out that these things don't usually start in our relationships as extremely violent and harmful, they often start with smaller dynamics?
I wrote this book hoping it's really easy for teenagers and young people to get into, hoping that people will skim it, that people will just take one page out of it and share it with their friends over lunch. [I’m] hoping that it's highly accessible to young people, because I think that is a pivotal time in the shaping of our relationships for life, and also because it's a time when a lot of people do get hurt quite badly.
adrienne maree brown's new book offers tools on navigating contested subjects, from COVID-19 to Gaza, to change hearts and minds.
TV: I was thinking a lot about adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections, which is also about navigating conflict in intimate relationships, though more about how the internet impacts our ways of relating to one another. Memes and social media do come up in the book; how much did you consider the internet as a character in this dynamic?
DS: I am very aware that some of the main places right now where people are getting our senses of self are actually technologies designed by our enemies, and we do have to think carefully about that. How can we make sure that we are using those technologies and not being used by them exclusively? How do we notice how they're changing social dynamics? Adrienne's work is a really good example.
I've read a lot of research about how most [young people], by the time they’re in high school, have already had at least one experience of something really embarrassing or accusatory happening to them online. People come into being a teenager and into adulthood already afraid of these certain kinds of exposure and embarrassment. I see it when I teach my students. A lot of them are afraid to talk in class. There's a feeling of like, I'm afraid to be overly exposed. There's a feeling also of desperately wanting to be seen in this way by strangers online, and having a hard time figuring out whose opinions about me really matter, having a hard time figuring out how to have conflict with others that isn't all happening in a realm like social media, where it's public. There's a lot of historically new, difficult questions.
There's another thing that's happening where most people are getting bad news when they're by themselves scrolling. In the history of human evolution, people got bad news, at least with one other person, and often in groups. What's happening to our bodies when we get terrible, terrible news about genocide or about police killing somebody by ourselves? How does that affect our nervous systems? Are we getting the support we need emotionally if we're living in very scary times to be alive?
There's just a lot of complex things to build discernment about, and I think we build that discernment best with our friends. We all just need support to be like, what about this is real? If these people are saying stuff about me online, how do I figure out how to balance that against the people who love me in real life? How do I make sure I have enough different kinds of connections so that I'm not isolated in one particular way, that will mean I don't have what I need? How do I make sure I have enough people who have my back in lots of realms, including people who bring me food when I'm sick or go with me to a funeral? How do I make sure that I have many kinds of connections?
One person is not enough for any of us. It's just a total setup, it makes relationships bad. A lot of people don't have enough in-person friends who have their backs, because too much of their attention is only online, with people who are really far away. We all need a combination of kinds of support. I hope if people take one thing away from this book, it's deeply valuing friendship.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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