Call me a sissy, but I've never particularly cared for being referred to as cisgender. Still, the work of transgendered activists within Occupy Wall Street has been one of things that keep me optimistic. At a November 13th teach-in at Zuccotti Park, just days before the brutal eviction, trans activists took over the people's mic for an hour-long lesson in occupying gender, educating their non-trans listeners on the unearned privileges we enjoy whenever we conform to ascribed gender; outlining the work that groups like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project have long been engaged in, against police violence and medical pathologization; and outlining pragmatic and principled tactics for an occupation open to trans and cis-gendered people alike. >>

Sometime in early October I showed up to an OWS organizer's meeting at 16 Beaver Street. 16 Beaver, like 56 Walker or Charlotte's Place, is one of these magically anachronistic spaces in lower Manhattan that feel like something out of Patti Smith's Just Kids -- free space for art, activism, and organizing, embedded in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Of course, to label these spaces "anachronistic" is to cede to capital its totalizing power. >>

I didn't realize how claustrophobic Wall Street's Liberty Park was until I arrived at my home Occupy in Oakland. Rather than the jumble of tarp-covered shelters that grew and morphed rhizome-like through Liberty Park, Occupy Oakland's colorful tents felt positively suburban, arranged over hay-covered ground, navigable by palate paths. The tent village occupied open public space surrounding city hall, overlooking the sunken architecture of a nouveau Greek Amphitheater  directly in front of the mayor's door. Occupy Oakland held their General Assemblies in this amphitheater, an ironically unwelcome reclamation of the original intentions of that  architectural form. (The Occupy movement in Oakland and elsewhere has repeatedly called the bluff of contemporary urban "public" architecture-as-simulacra--the aestheticization of the public--showing that the much... >>

If you have spent anytime with Occupiers, you have seen people (sometimes by the thousands) hold their hands above their heads and wiggle their fingers. Jazz hands? Cult sign? Known as "twinkling" when it expresses a positive sentiment, the hand signals are perhaps the most visibly and phenomenologically ritualistic part of Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly process, a protracted exercise in mass participatory decision making.At a minimum, the phrase "General Assembly" has two meanings in the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together movement (see General Assembly Guide). On the one hand, it is used to refer to the collective Occupy participants in and beyond Liberty Park, (as in, we are all part of the General Assembly). On the other hand, and more... >>

In her 1966 book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas famously explains dirt as "matter out of place." Dirt does not index an objective category of pathogens or pollutants she suggests, but rather the designation of "dirt" indexes a contravention to a social order, and by extension, its boundaries. >>