Transcript 

Fellow citizens. You have placed your trust in my hands and I am putting forward a plan for radical action. Now we set out to change the destructive future we have inherited.

As your President, I am proclaiming a collective secession from the Nation-State.

I will serve you, aided by an Indigenous and non-Indigenous government council. All our decisions will be made collectively through assemblies that use consensus to solve disputes. In this interim form of government, this structure will continue to operate until it is no longer necessary. I am not your President, this is Queer leadership, and this is the start of our great transition.

Queer leadership is about sowing and reaping. About men, women, children, and elders changing the paths of the subterranean rivers that flow across the territory, one step at the time. Knowing that we will find setbacks, opposition, and struggle, and we are not afraid.

Only we, the people, together, can save our future. Only we, the people together, can inhabit the world differently. We are not united by the illusion of saving the world but defending life, binding ourselves to the territory through relationships of reciprocity. In order to achieve this, we will replace official government and corporate institutions with a people’s autonomous collective that operates by consensus at the local, communal level. This replaces democracy at the national scale. Our plan entails reciprocity and collective work that benefits our own communities. We will reject labour that serves only to generate profit, and place labour that nurtures our communities at the centre of our lives. 

We shall acknowledge the gifts the Earth gives us every day. Many of us are caught in cycles of hurt, and we shall fix what has been broken with therapy for everyone, repenting, and forgiving.

For too long, government entrepreneurs have profited from the continuity of deadly extractivist capitalism. Politician-vultures have exploited political identities to capitalize on your rage, your wounded moralism, while promising you that you and your demands will finally count. We feel the consequences of this just as we feel the scorching sun on our skin long after the hottest of days has ended.

You have elected me because you know I will lead us until the next phase. I speak for so many of you. These words belong to us all. As a Queer leader, I am steering us toward the next phase. Today, we enter a radical transition, turning the political formation of the nation-state on its head; I need your help to boycott corporate structures until they disappear. Slowly, we will centre our lives on our responsibility toward the Earth, toward each other, and toward those who have not yet been born. Systems of reciprocity will replace forms of domination: this is how we will destroy colonialism, and achieve freedom.

Our goal is to transform the nation into a cluster of self-governed and sustainable territories—and ultimately to make the role of a singular head of government irrelevant. To do this, many steps are necessary:

First and foremost, I acknowledge you who have been displaced from your lands, estranged from your forms of life, traumatized by a systematic pedagogy of submission, exploited, dispossessed, your bodies and lives treated as expendable.

I am also honouring the spectres of the disappeared species surrounding us, devastated by the human hand. I will prepare the way for re-establishing a series of treaties of mutual care with our environment. Its rebirth means resistance.

What concerns us the most is the long-term sustenance of life, and for this we need to heal the territory’s rivers, lakes, and oceans. As a first step, I am shutting down all the modern drainage systems, to stop sending our filth to what is most precious to life on Earth: water. This human folly must be corrected immediately. Every single household will have a dry toilet and a simple device to recycle waste into methane gas that will serve as a source for domestic energy. Rainwater collection systems will be implemented across the territory. Basic food will be distributed to everyone who needs it until every community achieves food autonomy. Healthcare, including mental healthcare, will be provided to all. We are still working on ways to provide you with sustainable fuel, but at this point, money will be forbidden for good. I invite all of you to place your special skills at the service of your neighbours. I encourage everyone to find your calling beyond productive self-exploitation to serve in our new societies.

The radical changes I foresee will surely cause you discomfort.  They will force you to create new habits and perform new unforeseen tasks. But this is necessary, and we will suck it up together. Our future depends on the resiliency we employ to create a new system of survival during this transition.

My policies will be designed to battle current waves of destruction, self-destruction, death, and suffering—levels never seen before in this territory, which has become a mass grave where murders, disappearance, torture, extractivism, the destruction of forests, and the killing of rivers are the order of the day. Government, corporations and illegal groups have come together to tear the land apart. All the measures taken by my government are geared towards transforming this territory into a confederation of autonomous territories. Together, we are building sites where collective life can thrive. We have big battles ahead of us, and we will need volunteer citizens to step up.

We are bound through stories beyond crisis, victimhood or mere survival; we recognize each other through our stories of self-determination. Let change be the rhythm that guides us. Let change be the rhythm that protects our vital processes here on Earth. The new future starts now.

“Only we, the people together, can inhabit the world differently. We are not united by the illusion of saving the world but defending life, binding ourselves to the territory through relationships of reciprocity.”

In a future where queer leadership holds the seat of power, Emmelhainz speculates on the structures of governance needed for a revolutionary, horizontal, Earth-centred territory. She addresses a nationless public as a reluctant leader—spearheading an exit from extractivist capitalism, and reimagining what participatory democracy can look like.

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Anahuac Valley (Mexico City). Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to many languages and she has presented it at an array of international venues. Her book in Spanish, The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion  (2016), is currently being translated to English to be published by SUNY Press. She has also published the books The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine with Taurus Mexico (2017) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking with Palgrave Macmillan (2019). Also forthcoming is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance in the Critical Mexican Studies series with Vanderbilt University Press. 

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