Nat Raha
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Her current research focuses on transfeminism, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism and decolonisation, across poetry, art, politics and hi(r)story. Her recent writing addresses politics, print cultures and poetics of LGBTQ, anti-colonial, feminist and Mad liberation movements in North America and Europe from the early 1970s onwards. She works broadly on sexuality and gender, critical theory and Marxism, contemporary poetry and poetics, through creative and critical methods.
Nat is a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Glasgow School of Art.
She is part of the Feminism Art Maintenance Group. Nat was a research fellow on the 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' project at University of St Andrews, and co-curator of the 'Life Support' exhibition at Glasgow Women's Library (14 August - 16 October 2021). She was a postdoctoral researcher on the 'Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing pre-HIV/AIDS queer sexual cultures' project at the Edinburgh College of Art. In 2018, she completed her PhD thesis ‘Queer Capital: Marxism in queer theory and post-1950 poetics’ at the University of Sussex. With Mijke van der Drift, She is currently co-authoring a book, Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds.
Nat is the author of three collections and numerous pamphlets of poetry - her third book, 'of sirens, body & faultlines', was published by Boiler House Press in November 2018. She has performed her work internationally and her writing has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Nat is co-editor of the Radical Transfeminism zine.
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Recent and Forthcoming Academic Publications:
'Queer Memory in (re)constituting the trans lesbian 1970s in the UK'. In Queer Print in Europe, Glyn Davis and Laura Guy (eds), Palgrave, 2022.
'A Queer Marxist [Trans]Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction'. In Transgender Marxism, Jules Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke (eds), Pluto Press, 2021.
'Embodying Autonomous Trans Healthcare in Zines'. The Europa Issue, TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 8.2, 2021.
Imagining Queer Europe then and now, Fiona Anderson, Glyn Davis and Nat Raha (eds), Third Text special issue, 168, January 2021.
‘The Place of the Transfagbidyke is in the Revolution: Queer and Trans Hirstorical Imaginaries in Contemporary Struggles', Nat Raha & Grietje Baars. Third Text, 'Imagining Queer Europe', 168, January 2021.
‘Radical Transfeminism: Trans as anti-static ethics escaping neoliberal encapsulation’, Nat Raha & Mijke van der Drift. New Feminist Literary Studies. Jennifer Cooke (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2020.
'Queer Labour in Boston: The work of John Wieners, Fag Rag, and Gay Liberation'. In Poetry and Work: Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry. Jo Lindsay Walton & Ed Luker (eds). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp 195-244.
'Breaking Ground, Cripping Mirrors; or, Lesbians don't waltz by themselves: On Jacqui Duckworth's A Prayer Before Birth', Cinenova, Forthcoming 2022.
*
Work and Research Outputs:
Research Fellow, Life Support, University of St Andrews, 2020-21.
Co-curator, 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' exhibition, Glasgow Women's Library, 14 August - 16 October 2021.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, Edinburgh College of Art, 2018-19.
Co-organiser, 'Cruising the Seventies: Imagining Queer Europe then and now' conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 14-16 March 2019.
Steering group member, 'Race Poetry Poetics in the UK 2: Legacies of Colonialism', Cambridge, UK, 26-27 October 2018.
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Poetry & Poetics (1A), University of Glasgow, Scotland, 2016/17.
Research Support Assistant, Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2016-18.
Co-organiser, Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK symposium, London, UK, February 2016; steering group member. http://www.rapapuk.com
Co-organiser, Radical Transfeminism conference stream, London Conference in Critical Thought, London, UK, June 2015.
Address: Scotland
Her current research focuses on transfeminism, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism and decolonisation, across poetry, art, politics and hi(r)story. Her recent writing addresses politics, print cultures and poetics of LGBTQ, anti-colonial, feminist and Mad liberation movements in North America and Europe from the early 1970s onwards. She works broadly on sexuality and gender, critical theory and Marxism, contemporary poetry and poetics, through creative and critical methods.
Nat is a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Glasgow School of Art.
She is part of the Feminism Art Maintenance Group. Nat was a research fellow on the 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' project at University of St Andrews, and co-curator of the 'Life Support' exhibition at Glasgow Women's Library (14 August - 16 October 2021). She was a postdoctoral researcher on the 'Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing pre-HIV/AIDS queer sexual cultures' project at the Edinburgh College of Art. In 2018, she completed her PhD thesis ‘Queer Capital: Marxism in queer theory and post-1950 poetics’ at the University of Sussex. With Mijke van der Drift, She is currently co-authoring a book, Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds.
Nat is the author of three collections and numerous pamphlets of poetry - her third book, 'of sirens, body & faultlines', was published by Boiler House Press in November 2018. She has performed her work internationally and her writing has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Nat is co-editor of the Radical Transfeminism zine.
*
Recent and Forthcoming Academic Publications:
'Queer Memory in (re)constituting the trans lesbian 1970s in the UK'. In Queer Print in Europe, Glyn Davis and Laura Guy (eds), Palgrave, 2022.
'A Queer Marxist [Trans]Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction'. In Transgender Marxism, Jules Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke (eds), Pluto Press, 2021.
'Embodying Autonomous Trans Healthcare in Zines'. The Europa Issue, TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 8.2, 2021.
Imagining Queer Europe then and now, Fiona Anderson, Glyn Davis and Nat Raha (eds), Third Text special issue, 168, January 2021.
‘The Place of the Transfagbidyke is in the Revolution: Queer and Trans Hirstorical Imaginaries in Contemporary Struggles', Nat Raha & Grietje Baars. Third Text, 'Imagining Queer Europe', 168, January 2021.
‘Radical Transfeminism: Trans as anti-static ethics escaping neoliberal encapsulation’, Nat Raha & Mijke van der Drift. New Feminist Literary Studies. Jennifer Cooke (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2020.
'Queer Labour in Boston: The work of John Wieners, Fag Rag, and Gay Liberation'. In Poetry and Work: Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry. Jo Lindsay Walton & Ed Luker (eds). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp 195-244.
'Breaking Ground, Cripping Mirrors; or, Lesbians don't waltz by themselves: On Jacqui Duckworth's A Prayer Before Birth', Cinenova, Forthcoming 2022.
*
Work and Research Outputs:
Research Fellow, Life Support, University of St Andrews, 2020-21.
Co-curator, 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' exhibition, Glasgow Women's Library, 14 August - 16 October 2021.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, Edinburgh College of Art, 2018-19.
Co-organiser, 'Cruising the Seventies: Imagining Queer Europe then and now' conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 14-16 March 2019.
Steering group member, 'Race Poetry Poetics in the UK 2: Legacies of Colonialism', Cambridge, UK, 26-27 October 2018.
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Poetry & Poetics (1A), University of Glasgow, Scotland, 2016/17.
Research Support Assistant, Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2016-18.
Co-organiser, Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK symposium, London, UK, February 2016; steering group member. http://www.rapapuk.com
Co-organiser, Radical Transfeminism conference stream, London Conference in Critical Thought, London, UK, June 2015.
Address: Scotland
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PhD Thesis by Nat Raha
Queer Marxist theory is then deployed in an extended literary analysis that focuses on the work and life of gay femme poet John Wieners, and is finally developed in a creative portfolio – a collection of poems of sirens / body & faultlines. On the basis of archival research, the thesis situates Wieners’ writing and political activities of the 1970s in the Gay and Mental Patients’ Liberation movements of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as a form of queer labour, which includes the production of Gay Liberation newspaper Fag Rag and the publication of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (1975) by Boston’s Good Gay Poets. Furthermore, reading letters, journals and other poems through a Mad Studies lens, I elaborate Wieners’ survival of numerous psychiatric incarcerations from 1960 – 1972 in the context of institutional homophobia, and its influence on his politics and aesthetics.
of sirens / body & faultlines develops a linguistically-innovative queer lyric, elaborating experiments in language and life, amid contemporary transformations of capital and neoliberal regimes of social and economic divestment in London. Inhabiting the present tense and attending closely to to its material conditions, the poems deploy language and its visual permutations on the page in the service of queer and trans life and a queer of colour, anti-capitalist politics that refuses assimilation, attempting to rupture the syntax of homonormativity and transnormativity. The poems capture moments of political and affective affirmation and tumult, provide radical elaborations and defamilarisations of trans and queer embodiment under the conditions of neoliberal capital disinvestment, wage labour, and queer life while dreaming in the service of queer and trans world-making.
Articles, Book Chapters & Reviews by Nat Raha
Eds Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke
'The first collection of its kind, Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of transgender studies and Marxist theory.
Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of surviving as transgender under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home, and give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against ‘gender ideology’.
Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.'
In the early 1970s John Wieners became involved in significant activities of the Gay Liberation movement in Boston, Massachusetts and beyond, alongside Boston’s Mental Patients’ Liberation Front. Wieners’ involvement included reading poems at movement events; attending national events as a Gay Liberation representative; and publishing writing in numerous radical newspapers. Wieners was also part of the publishing collective for Fag Rag, a gay male anarchist newspaper. Drawing upon Wieners’ archives and that of Gay Liberation organisers and newspapers, this chapter situates Wieners’ poetic praxis, the publication of his work and its critical reception, within the work of the Gay Liberation movement. Wieners understood his poetry and political action as both important aspects of supporting the transformations of everyday life engendered by Gay Liberation. The chapter develops the dialectic of queer labour and queer consciousness posited by Matthew Tinkcom (as “camp labour” and “camp consciousness”), to theorise and consider the labour of Wieners and the Fag Rag collective as a mode of “queer world-making” (Berlant and Warner).
The essay defines radical transfeminism as a collective political praxis and critique which centers transfeminine bodies that are or find themselves precariously employed, poor, overworked and/or pathologized. Radical transfeminism is oriented around forms of care and support amid conditions material precarity, which include cultural production, political protest and solidarity and forms of socially reproductive labor.
The essay historically situates such bodies and the labor they undertake at the crossroads of the political ascendency of the far right in parts of the world, and the ‘transgender tipping point’. Focusing on the context of the United Kingdom, it argues that the securing of national borders throughout the fabric of public and private spheres undermines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Responding to recent discussions considering transfeminism, trans people of color and the politics of prison abolition, the essay argues that the cultivation of radical transfeminism as both a life praxis and political practice may inaugurate a more livable world. The essay calls for the transformation of the material conditions that fracture transfeminine life.
Online at The Critical Flame.
Podcasts by Nat Raha
In this episode, writers Nat Raha and Eli Clare discuss writing as a space for both survival and dreaming, articulating queer and trans politics through poetry, and their work on our Many Voices project in partnership with LGBT Youth Scotland. Playwright Jo Clifford talks about her play being banned in Brazil and gives a powerful speech to the importance of defending persecuted trans writers around the world.
28 April 2017
Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Despite the recent resurgence of social reproduction theory and Marxist feminist political praxis, the social reproduction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) lives remains under-theorised. While heterosexuality as a form of work has long since been considered as part of Marxist feminism’s analysis, the consideration of queer sexualities, and the reproduction of life and labour-power outside and beyond of the cis-, heteronormative nuclear family, have been sidelined in the canon of Marxist Feminism. Bridging the theoretical work of queer Marxism, Black feminism and trans studies, and the political praxis of LGBTQ groups Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Wages Due Lesbians, this paper will address the expanded definition of social reproduction necessary to understand the social reproduction of LGBTQ lives.
The paper will argue that the forms of caring labour that enable LGBTQ lives take place in spaces beyond the domestic sphere and within familial forms that exceed the nuclear family; and moreover that such labour includes the reproduction of genders, desires and bodies anchored in non-normativity – work that is often naturalised and not considered as labour. Furthermore, the continued failure of the capitalist socius to support the lives of poor trans women and trans femmes of colour and/or sex workers raises questions of how the politics of queer and trans liberalism(s) devalue and compound the conditions of queer and trans social reproduction under a racialised and gendered division of labour.
Poetry Collections & Pamphlets by Nat Raha
Queer Marxist theory is then deployed in an extended literary analysis that focuses on the work and life of gay femme poet John Wieners, and is finally developed in a creative portfolio – a collection of poems of sirens / body & faultlines. On the basis of archival research, the thesis situates Wieners’ writing and political activities of the 1970s in the Gay and Mental Patients’ Liberation movements of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as a form of queer labour, which includes the production of Gay Liberation newspaper Fag Rag and the publication of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (1975) by Boston’s Good Gay Poets. Furthermore, reading letters, journals and other poems through a Mad Studies lens, I elaborate Wieners’ survival of numerous psychiatric incarcerations from 1960 – 1972 in the context of institutional homophobia, and its influence on his politics and aesthetics.
of sirens / body & faultlines develops a linguistically-innovative queer lyric, elaborating experiments in language and life, amid contemporary transformations of capital and neoliberal regimes of social and economic divestment in London. Inhabiting the present tense and attending closely to to its material conditions, the poems deploy language and its visual permutations on the page in the service of queer and trans life and a queer of colour, anti-capitalist politics that refuses assimilation, attempting to rupture the syntax of homonormativity and transnormativity. The poems capture moments of political and affective affirmation and tumult, provide radical elaborations and defamilarisations of trans and queer embodiment under the conditions of neoliberal capital disinvestment, wage labour, and queer life while dreaming in the service of queer and trans world-making.
Eds Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke
'The first collection of its kind, Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of transgender studies and Marxist theory.
Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of surviving as transgender under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home, and give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against ‘gender ideology’.
Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.'
In the early 1970s John Wieners became involved in significant activities of the Gay Liberation movement in Boston, Massachusetts and beyond, alongside Boston’s Mental Patients’ Liberation Front. Wieners’ involvement included reading poems at movement events; attending national events as a Gay Liberation representative; and publishing writing in numerous radical newspapers. Wieners was also part of the publishing collective for Fag Rag, a gay male anarchist newspaper. Drawing upon Wieners’ archives and that of Gay Liberation organisers and newspapers, this chapter situates Wieners’ poetic praxis, the publication of his work and its critical reception, within the work of the Gay Liberation movement. Wieners understood his poetry and political action as both important aspects of supporting the transformations of everyday life engendered by Gay Liberation. The chapter develops the dialectic of queer labour and queer consciousness posited by Matthew Tinkcom (as “camp labour” and “camp consciousness”), to theorise and consider the labour of Wieners and the Fag Rag collective as a mode of “queer world-making” (Berlant and Warner).
The essay defines radical transfeminism as a collective political praxis and critique which centers transfeminine bodies that are or find themselves precariously employed, poor, overworked and/or pathologized. Radical transfeminism is oriented around forms of care and support amid conditions material precarity, which include cultural production, political protest and solidarity and forms of socially reproductive labor.
The essay historically situates such bodies and the labor they undertake at the crossroads of the political ascendency of the far right in parts of the world, and the ‘transgender tipping point’. Focusing on the context of the United Kingdom, it argues that the securing of national borders throughout the fabric of public and private spheres undermines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Responding to recent discussions considering transfeminism, trans people of color and the politics of prison abolition, the essay argues that the cultivation of radical transfeminism as both a life praxis and political practice may inaugurate a more livable world. The essay calls for the transformation of the material conditions that fracture transfeminine life.
Online at The Critical Flame.
In this episode, writers Nat Raha and Eli Clare discuss writing as a space for both survival and dreaming, articulating queer and trans politics through poetry, and their work on our Many Voices project in partnership with LGBT Youth Scotland. Playwright Jo Clifford talks about her play being banned in Brazil and gives a powerful speech to the importance of defending persecuted trans writers around the world.
28 April 2017
Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Despite the recent resurgence of social reproduction theory and Marxist feminist political praxis, the social reproduction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) lives remains under-theorised. While heterosexuality as a form of work has long since been considered as part of Marxist feminism’s analysis, the consideration of queer sexualities, and the reproduction of life and labour-power outside and beyond of the cis-, heteronormative nuclear family, have been sidelined in the canon of Marxist Feminism. Bridging the theoretical work of queer Marxism, Black feminism and trans studies, and the political praxis of LGBTQ groups Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Wages Due Lesbians, this paper will address the expanded definition of social reproduction necessary to understand the social reproduction of LGBTQ lives.
The paper will argue that the forms of caring labour that enable LGBTQ lives take place in spaces beyond the domestic sphere and within familial forms that exceed the nuclear family; and moreover that such labour includes the reproduction of genders, desires and bodies anchored in non-normativity – work that is often naturalised and not considered as labour. Furthermore, the continued failure of the capitalist socius to support the lives of poor trans women and trans femmes of colour and/or sex workers raises questions of how the politics of queer and trans liberalism(s) devalue and compound the conditions of queer and trans social reproduction under a racialised and gendered division of labour.
Videos available at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=o.374143072745830&type=3
Across the mid 1980s and early 1990s, the London chapter of Wages Due Lesbians, part of the International Wages for Housework movement, enumerated a multitude of forms of ‘emotional housework’ undertaken by lesbian and bisexual women. Such emotional housework included caring labour to support partners and families, to challenge societal homophobia and racism, to fight for one’s right to remain in the UK, and to express one’s gender and sexuality in a hostile environment, as lesbian women in precarious and marginal economic positions. Wages Due’s challenge to the heteronormativity in conceptualising unwaged domestic labour under capitalism provides an important insight into (the archive of) queer social reproduction. Furthermore, in the historical context of both Margaret Thatcher Government’s economic disinvestment in the working classes and of Section 28, which banned the promotion of “the acceptability of homosexuality as a ‘pretend’ family relationship” within the public sector, Wages Due’s critique exemplifies the challenge of difficult, queer women whose everyday lives contravene social norms.
Considering of political contestations made and supported by Wages Due, this paper will problematize the notion of the common good through queer and trans social reproduction. I will argue that the social reproduction of LGBTQ subjects, in particular queer and trans women and femmes, depends on forms of collectivity that are socially and economically marginalised, including by neoliberal LGBTQ rights projects. How might the common good depend on forms of extraction from queer and trans bodies? How does queer of colour critique, in practice and through praxis, elaborate queer forms of the common good?
This paper will draw insights from queer Marxism, queer theory, Marxist feminism and transgender studies to consider the labour of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) persons and the work of queer emancipation as crucial aspects of a queer political economy.
Addressing the contemporary contradiction of the enfranchisement of LGBTQ subjects through civil and legal rights (including employment rights); and the corresponding disenfranchisement of such subjects (along intersecting lines of race, class, gender, ability, nationality and immigration status) under neoliberal regimes of capitalist accumulation and austerity, this paper will discuss Marx’s dialectic of the ‘natural form’ and the ‘value form’ of the commodity (posited as part of the labour theory of value in Capital) to consider how queer and trans* bodies are drawn into the contemporary flows of capital. This will highlight the importance of LGBTQ rights for the capitalist reproduction of value; the role of value’s homogenising abstraction in the production of (homo)normativity; and how the social restructuring of contemporary regimes of capitalist accumulation impact on the social reproduction of queer and trans* life.
Fag Rag published significant and influential critique for Gay Liberation in the USA, aiding the development of the radical consciousness of gay liberation. This critique addressed the multifaceted social and material issues facing gay and lesbian people and sociality at the time – challenging oppression and/or violence from the state, psychiatric institutions, religious institutions, prisons, imperialist war, poverty and job discrimination, alongside sexism and forms of gender oppression, racism and ageism. Furthermore, this critique was socially necessary for the realisation of liberated gay consciousness into various forms of social and sexual praxis; to “create our own existences”, “media” and “community” (Shively 2012), with the intention of a revolutionary transformation of society. Alongside this critical work, Fag Rag also published gay male literature and especially poetry.
Developing the dialectic of queer labour and queer consciousness posited by Matthew Tinkcom (as ‘camp labour’ and ‘camp consciousness’, 2002), I will consider the labour of the Fag Rag collective as a mode of ‘queer worldmaking’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998) that enables and amplifies the sexual politics of Wieners’ writing exemplified in Behind the State Capitol: or Cincinnati Pike (1975, published by members of the Fag Rag collective as the press Good Gay Poets). This will enable a reading of Wieners’ writing from the period as the realisation through poetic labour of the sexual and political challenges of the liberation era. The paper will also address questions of heteronormativity in the publishing of Wieners’ work and archive, and its impact on the critical reception of Wieners’ poetry.