By James Tracy
Razorcake
April 9th, 2026
We Won’t Get There If We Stop. Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent: A Queer Memoir
Jessica Lawless is an artist and one of the co-founders of the self-defense collective Home Alive, founded as a response to the murder of Mia Zapata of The Gits. Her artwork has been shown in galleries across the U.S., 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. A former adjunct professor and labor organizer, she lives in Sacramento, California with her partner Von and their two toothless cats.
James: This is the perfect moment for your book to be published. It sums up decades of organizing and troublemaking. It’s powerful because it shows how to stay in the fray for the long term. So, tell us a little bit about your book.
Jessica: It’s a memoir about organizing. Organizing, to me, is basically bringing different pieces and parts together to create some kind of whole towards an end goal. In that way, my organizing and my art have a lot in common. I think it sums up my thinking of life, which is, “How do we hold all the pieces towards resistance, but towards transformative change?” The book is trying to tell that story. By telling that story and letting the reader be inside of it with me, instead of just telling it.
It pulls a whole lot of different things together—because I do think of it as an extension of my art practice—so even though it’s a written project, I approached it as I would a visual art project. It’s really layered. Some of my art practice has been video—video editing in the layers of taking each frame and building them up into something more—ripping up and tearing apart and putting things back together into something new. So, it covers a lot of territory.
Because it’s a life—and I’m headed into being sixty years old—and also because it’s organizing throughout the era of neo-liberalism coming and now becoming something else. It has to capture a lot—while at the same time not be overwhelming—because it’s already overwhelming.
James: Memoirs are hard to write and can be even harder to read! But you’re able to weave together different parts of you, different eras, into a coherent book. I appreciated your reference to filmmaking, because it felt like watching a film. I could picture it just like I was sitting down and watching a movie, so that made it super fun. Let’s talk about you before you become an organizer. What was your life like before you started your path as an artist organizer?
Jessica: There’s this thing around transformative change that I’m interested in. Ultimately, I believe in change and things have to change. I come from a childhood that had a lot of violence, a lot of chaos in certain ways, and not enough parental guidance. That can lead towards organizing. It leads towards art. It leads towards things where you’re trying to make sense of something. Things are chaotic. How do you make sense of it?
Just by my nature and my responses, I’m a fighter. Fighting is a part of my history. My family is fighters and my response in that was definitely to fight back—having that at the core when I was able to then start coming into political consciousness and awareness of the world around me. Then it was like, “Okay, let’s fight over here. It’s shit that needs to change. How are we gonna do it?”
James: Do you remember your first organizing campaign?
Jessica: This is a funny story. I actually have this on my website. I did not know I was organizing. I was fourteen, a freshman. I went to a large public high school, and this is 1980, so there was a smoking section in the high school. The smoking section was available to the sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but not to the freshmen.
The fourteen-year-old that I was, along with my female friends, we were like, “That’s fucked up. That’s not fair. We need to be able to smoke. If we’d go over there and smoke, we’ll get written up and get detention.” This punishment would come our way. It’s hysterical because it’s about smoking as fourteen-year- olds, right? Nobody was saying, “You shouldn’t be smoking.”
We didn’t want to keep getting written up and get detention because we were smokers, and we thought we needed to have the right to smoke someplace as well. We complained. We clearly made enough complaints, went wherever we were supposed to go, and they gave us a smoking area in the freshman school.
James: That’s a campaign victory that’s never going happen ever again. It’s a very 1980s story.
Jessica: It’s so fucking funny. It’s so the fourteen-year-old who I was.
James: But it’s also about discovering your own power.
Jessica: It absolutely was. It was all young, tough girls. We were definitely outsider kids on the edge. We were fourteen-year-olds who would have not known about feminism or understood that that was a thing. We just knew something wasn’t fucking right. “We’re girls, we should have what we need, and we’re gonna fucking make it happen.”
James: When I first became aware of your work—and this is a big part of this book—it was around the Home Alive project. I thought that women’s self-defense was pretty groundbreaking and a powerful response to the murder of Mia Zapata in 1993. (For readers who were not around then, Zapata was the lead singer of The Gits. At the time of the murder, the band was poised to break into the national stage.)
Can you talk a little bit about bringing together Home Alive and some of the lessons that you pull from it?
Jessica: Obviously, Mia’s murder was a completely significant, life-changing part of the experience of the communities that I’m from, and we are the ones who are left. Clearly, it was Mia who was the one who was most impacted, but those of us who were left in the wake of it, our world was rocked. There wasn’t an immediate, “We’re gonna do something organized,” but there was a, “What are we supposed to do?” We were living with an unsolved murder and rape. That unsolved unknown is really different in texture and atmosphere to live in than knowing what happened.
There were a couple of people in Seattle bands who first brought Home Alive together. Valerie Agnew from 7 Year Bitch and Gretta Harley, from Maxi Badd, were two who were really saying, “We have to do something.” They called some meetings and people came together. Maybe after two or three meetings, it came down to a group of nine women. We were women who had something going on that had freaked our fucking life out and we needed to do something. We just kept meeting and got around to talking about self-defense, because they’re like, “We don’t know what happened.”
We know the police weren’t saying that Mia was raped at first. We were like, “Why the fuck are they not talking about that? We need to understand how to take care of ourselves and what happened.” So that led us to self-defense. Figuring out how to get free self-defense into our community was the main impetus in the beginning.
James: Out of this tragedy comes a very important and innovative mutual aid project, national in scope, swift and effective. I don’t recall anything of this scale happening again until the Common Ground Relief efforts in 2005.
Jessica: We ended up being a part of those conversations without knowing it, which is, I think, how a lot of it happens. It wasn’t intentional to be a mutual aid project. We started doing a lot of things that would now be called transformative justice and healing justice. Shira Hassan described Home Alive to me once as a non-carceral feminist response to violence at a time period where (responses to violence were) very carceral. It wasn’t like we were sitting around reading theory. We weren’t even in school. We were responding. It was the zeitgeist of the time for those of us who had punk politics. Some of us had anarchist politics. We had leftism, so it became what it was.
James: Parallel developments towards what we would now call the prison abolitionist movement. I think the collapse of the Soviet Union really opened up a space for anti-authoritarian work like this to bloom.
Jessica: We were conscious of that. Those of us who ended up being the nine who were sitting there trying to figure out how to do something, we were activists, activist-oriented, obviously. We were certainly aware of that kind of stuff, so we were coming from that place. We’d all been involved in activism against the first Gulf War, so it’s like that. We were doing other kinds of activism.
James: One of the things I noticed in your book that I really think is great is how you get into more traditional labor organizing in different ways, but throughout is this critique around cultural capital, right? It’s important, but not exactly a priority of the labor movement as we see it today. Tell us a little bit about what cultural capital is and why it doesn’t pay the rent.
Jessica: I’ve been a labor organizer, non-traditionally, from the first day I started working young. Cultural capital doesn’t pay the rent is actually something I quipped in an interview while I was an adjunct professor. It was an interview at Inside Higher Ed., and a friend and I were interviewing each other for a series of articles about adjuncts talking to adjuncts. An adjunct professor is someone who is hired on a contingent basis to teach and receive far less benefits than their tenured counterparts, if at all.
Cultural capital is the supposed benefits you inherit from a middle-class family or earning college degrees. It can also come from bring an artist or musician. It is a form of exchange that isn’t financial, but it is classed.
Even with all the critique, there’s still a buying into the middle-class myth, the American Dream myth. I have an immigrant father, so I have that instilled into me. No matter how young I started saying, “Fuck that,” there’s still something in my mind telling me that if you do the right thing, you’ll be able to have some kind of financial stability.
I took that belief on more than I ever really wanted to. I didn’t go to graduate school in a traditional timing, didn’t get my degrees in a traditional timing. I’d created a myth for myself that I wanted to go from being someone who had been in shelters and through domestic violence to becoming a college professor. I did, but what it actually meant to be a professor was completely different than what I thought. The myth just didn’t hold up, but the contingency was there. It was through the Great Recession and post-Great Recession economy. Trying to have any kind of stability through academia was not possible in the ways I was thinking it could have been.
The book title comes from that particular moment of mine. I’d always fought against the system, and I said, okay, “I’m gonna go into the system. I’m gonna try to do this right thing. I’m gonna try to get the reward of being in the system and doing it,” and it absolutely did not happen. It’s not because I didn’t do the right things, and it’s not because I didn’t put the work in.
James This led you towards adjunct organizing?
Jessica: A big wave of adjunct organizing first came for me during the Great Recessions. A lot of people were having this shock, of the system not working for them. That means, for the first time, they were facing the possibility that the system could fail them. That showed a certain set of racial, class, and gender privileges to be able to be in your thirties or forties, have gone to grad school, and then turned around and go, “Why didn’t this work? I’m entitled to get my piece of it and this didn’t work.”
You have to recognize the places where you have access to the privilege of what’s there, and recognize the places where you don’t have access to that privilege.
James: With all the shifts in the economy, many people who thought they had escaped precarity through professional work are finding out there is no escape. Labor organizing isn’t just about the workplace, it is about, as Jane McAlevey taught, the whole person and the communities they’re a part of. It never has been, but especially today.
Jessica: Yeah, exactly. Additionally, because I’m queer and multi-ethnic—because of the different parts of who I am—I have an understanding of not having certain privilege and access within systems. But I do have some middle-class privileges. My book talks a lot about being mixed-class. That’s one of the important things I want to get across in it, too, is that class is a mixed identity as much as the many other ways that we might have points of identity that are mixed. I’m someone who has some middle-class privilege. I’m also someone who lived in shelters, lived on nothing, did not have family backup, did not have anyone else and had to scrape by, and both of those things are true. I think that that is the condition of neo-liberalism.
James: What is?
Jessica: That there are groups of workers who did not expect themselves to be identified as a worker, in the sense of who needs the protections of a union beginning to organize. Organizing with adjunct faculty, that became really clear. I’ve used it in other points of organizing as well. There actually would have to be a lot of time in the organizing for people to talk about their shit. Just get to the emotional aspects of what it was to have that sense of trying to have done the right thing and it didn’t work. Or that sense of, “I’m just fucking exhausted and I need space for this.” Every group of workers needs that.
Labor organizing can be too parched. When the organizer skips to, “Here’s the message. Here’s the point. Here’s the solution. This is what we’re gonna do,” it cuts out the reality of just living as a human. It cuts out the places where we need to connect around race, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, whatever it might be. When we can put that back in, then we can find more solidarity with each other.
James: The model of organizing that you’re critiquing here is really good at recruiting people and really bad at retaining people.
Jessica: It’s medium good at recruiting people, is what I’d say. If the measure is numbers, then yeah, that’s a measure that might be good, but it leads to losing people and relying on too few people to do the work.
James: Your book is billed as a queer memoir. How does queerness, as you understand it, contribute to your organizing?
Jessica: My favorite synonym with queer is “askew.” Being queer—in a left-politicized queer identity—does mean viewing the world askew and being able to see things not in a straight line. Being able to find approaches that are outsider, alternative, different, unexpected, glittery and glamorous, fun and ridiculous. Also tragic and emotional ways. To live one’s queer self in a politicized way—if we then view organizing through that—then we’re bringing in a whole lot of skills that are not in traditional organizing.
James: You have a lifetime of figuring out how to have those difficult conversations—interpersonally and politically—not that there’s that big of a difference between that. I know today you’ve been very active in Palestine solidarity, which is filled with thousands of those kinds of conversations. How did you prepare for this kind of work?
Jessica: That’s a hard one, because there are so many places to go with that. On the one hand, it’s a genocide is the most obvious thing. Even in the way mainstream media is framed around it; that there’s still even a question of that. I’m trying to stay out of the Jewish conversation around it; just the fact that there could be a question about the state of Israel is committing genocide, with at least 72,000 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023. I’m thinking about other ways to talk about it.
One way, to me, is the similarity to the experience of being through domestic or interpersonal violence, where you have been gaslit into thinking that your experience is not what you experienced. The story is somebody else’s story. It’s not my own story. That’s a very easy to make that connection to how this genocide is being viewed in this fucked up way, and that the connection to interpersonal experience, to geopolitical experience of violence really needs to be needs to be in the conversation.
Then, in terms of even the queerness is the sense of not always being able to be who you are because people don’t accept who you are. The people who are supposed to be the closest to you and love and care for you the most—your parents, whomever—whether they accept it or not, and how they do or don’t accept that queerness.
That’s actually similar to a conversation, being from a Jewish family, to discuss Palestine. Discuss this as a genocide in Gaza now—or even just the question of genocide—it’s not a new conversation.
I’ve been an anti-Zionist for a long, long time. The hardest place to have a conversation is within my own family. The hard conversation is harder there than most places. I don’t stop, because you just don’t stop. We won’t get there if we stop. We have to keep trying.
James: We’re living in some real shit times but there are a lot of things to take inspiration from, right? I see a lot of projects that are definitely in the do-it-yourself vein. I see a lot of incredibly brave young people.
Jessica: I’m inspired by people in Minneapolis and what they’re doing. One of the places I’ve been watching it from recently is from Indian Country Today, and trying to get my news from them as regularly as I get it from any place else in the world. I’m so inspired by the framing of Indigenous folks from that area who are out there in solidarity and holding signs that say, “No one is illegal on stolen land,” and showing that kind of solidarity in a lot of ways, where they don’t always get solidarity back.
ICE doesn’t have any fucking training, but anyone who’s been in that fucked up field for a while has been trained by the IDF.
James: It’s the imperial boomerang.
Jessica: That relationship exists, but it’s inspiring by the fact that people are fighting back, and fighting back against that training. It reminds me of Ferguson (following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014). There was such a strong connection between Palestinian resistance and the resistance happening in Ferguson. To see it again with Minneapolis and Gaza, it’s so heartbreaking but it’s also inspiring. The resistance is there, and it’s there. It is so interconnected.
James: Let’s imagine that when your book drops in April. A young, queer person walks into a bookstore, picks up your book, and takes it home with them. What do you hope that they get out of it?
Jessica: That they’re not alone and that they have friends.
https://jessicalawless.nethttp://www.teachhomealive.orgJames Tracy is an author and organizer based in Oakland California. He is the co-author of No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements.
