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

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 murder 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 a cultural agitator 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.