Contagion Press 2014, paperback SKU: n/a If the first issue of Baedan was a knife thrust wildly in the dark, the second is an effort to examine our enemies in a new light; enemies who bear scars yet endure. In a sense, this issue follows through our initial attack and pushes beyond our own horrors at the consequences of words. We write at a time when everything which seemed slightly possible two years ago has borne its rotten fruit; when queer recuperation has become more powerful and accepted than ever, while the fetish for technology has reached an unprecedented frenzy; when so many efforts at subversion languish under the tyranny of cybernetic identity and aesthetics (even our own etymologies have become identities!); when friends turn away out of fear of the unknown, turn toward all the comforts and certainties of the past (identity politics, traditionalism, religious morality, activism, et al). The old enemies rear their heads and the terrain is as bleak as ever. And yet we take seriously that adage: “There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Baedan – a queer journal of heresy, over two hundred pages of original content including: a scathing critique of gender and domestication, an exploration of the poetry of Percy Shelley, a vindication of anality and the fecal decomposition of society, an experiment with anarchist rituals and nihilist archetypes, correspondence (friendly and otherwise), and a new translation of Guy Hocquenghem.
