We are an affinity group of furious queer & trans radicals, survivors, and writers, based in the so-called United States and United Kingdom.
We take our name from the story of Judith, the widow who beheads the commanding general Holofernes, who had been charged by his king (usually taken to be Nebuchadnezzar) with suppressing rebels against Nebuchadnezzar’s claim to power. Judith has long served as a cipher for men’s fear of women’s violence, and more generally for kings’ fear of subjects’ violence.

The history of patriarchy is a history of epistemic violence—a history of abusers controlling the narratives of the abused. Of kings, cops, priests, and pederasts interpreting the bodies of their own victims, of each other’s victims, and violently transforming those bodies into stories of the rapists’ and tyrants’ own innocence and heroism.

We are driven to write because we are outraged by the violence of the archives in which so many subaltern voices, so many women, queers, trans people, and children, have been buried anonymous and silenced.

So we carry the anger of all these ghosts, and we fight like dogs for a world in which the voices of the oppressed drown out the oppressors in an avalanche of rage.

signed,
narcissus, lohse, tor, merc, left_adjoint, nakam, n, loa,
and Judith’s Fucking Dagger.