Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent: A Queer Memoir by Jessica Lawless

Jessica Lawless's memoir is a queer, anarcho-punk history of community care and healing justice.
About this Event

Join us for an event with Jessica Lawless in conversation with Shira Hassan to celebrate the release of Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent: A Queer Memoir.

This is a mask-required event.

Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent is a story about loss, economic survival, and three decades of organizing against the interlocking hellscapes of neoliberalism. Jessica Lawless's memoir is a queer, anarcho-punk history of community care and healing justice.

An original member of Home Alive, the Seattle-based, feminist self-defense collective founded as a response to the unsolved rape and M**der of a beloved friend, Lawless takes the reader into subcultural spaces of the 1980s and '90s where anticapitalist concepts of race, gender, and sexuality were developing against the backdrop of the Christian right's early culture wars.

Digging into their personal archive of pre-internet flyers, meeting notes, zines, photos, newsletters, exhibition announcements, journals, and funeral programs, Lawless explores the somatic impacts of remembering and forgetting. Her attempts to leave violence in the past lead her to the institutional violence of academia, the absurdity of the Los Angeles art world, the crushing poverty of cyclical subemployment as an adjunct professor, and the heartbreak of working in the labor movement.

Reflecting on the past while entering menopause, Lawless crafts a narrative that twists and turns along a winding path, continually rejecting normative conclusions. Cultural Capital Doesn't Pay the Rent is a moving account of abolitionist feminist resistance that will inspire anyone who's experienced the hopes and hypocrisies of leftist activism.

Jessica Lawless is an artist and one of the cofounders of the self-defense collective Home Alive. Her artwork has been shown in galleries across the US, included in international anarchist and queer film festivals, and censored by a Catholic university. She was a regular contributor to make/shift magazine and periodically contributes to the Anarchist Review of Books. Jessica wrote the introduction to Lady Lazarus: Confronting Lydia Lunch (Questing Beast, UK), contributed a chapter to Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video (University of Minnesota Press), and had pieces in the anthologies Feminisms in Motion: Voices for Justice, Liberation, and Transformation (AK Press) and Places Like Home (Literary Kitchen). A former adjunct professor and labor organizer, she lives in Sacramento, CA with her partner Von and their two toothless cats.

Shira Hassan (she/her) is the co-founder of Just Practice Collaborative, a capacity- building project for organizations and community members working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm, reduction, and collective liberation, and the former executive director of Young Women's Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and Pr*son abolitionist, Shira has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. She is the co-author of Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Mariame Kaba, and the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. She is currently the Transformative Justice Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization where she runs the Transformative Justice Help Desk.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required for this event and we have free face masks at the door for those who need one, though we deeply appreciate you bringing your own. We have one industrial air purifier, two smaller air purifiers, and four ceiling fans throughout our space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. If you need a reserved seat or other access needs please email .