Author: Other Weapons

Elastic Anthology vol 1 is a collection of poetry, prose, photographs, messages, and illustrations from sex workers gathered in collaboration with Xue Shen. It is the first issue of a serial publication that aims to extend our contact with one another.

Whores speak in slant rhymes. The syntax of sex work takes many forms. It is at once direct, askew, total metonymy, embodied metaphor. Constructing a fantasy is labor: our bodies collude or rebel. We mystify and are mystified in every moment of refusal or capitulation, negotiating risk in any moment. Our work and our refusal of work throws the value of time, bodies, and exchange into crisis. The dominant grammar, as we know it, cannot account for these crises.

Our bodies bear them. We must work in many genres to register the crises we produce, and the crises we survive. It is in the heart of these crises we find each other. We articulate them often in jokes, often in tyrades, often in gossip, often in support circles, often across Blacklist platforms. We must document what we know, because otherwise what we know will be crushed: the intimate knowledge that law nor history can possibly confront.

Elastic Anthology bears this intimate knowledge. Our poems are psychedelic forms of journalism. Our manifestos come from the gut. When there are no words, we snap photos at the end of a shift, an hour, a night, an overnight. The mirror is often our closest comrade. If we are lucky, we are working with friends, who show up imprinted in our psyches. We remember in flashes: tattoos, thread counts, bruises, minutes passing. Magic isn’t anything other than being able to make something appear, that has been rigorously disappeared. Whores are the tear in the reality. The veil is thin. It is in our hands.

Contributions from Vanessa Carlisle, Mer Starr, Squiggles and Sluts, Evie Vigil, Aria Dove, Mata Flores, Aasir Cherot, Xue Shen, Skeleton Johnson, and Brandy-Alexander Weber.

OW 006 Risograph Printed by Empress Editions in Johnstown, PA January 2023

photographs featured in this post are by Skeleton Johnson

OW distro is a semi decentralized circulation of materials and ideas. We aim for something collaborative and generative in our exchanges. Freely print and distribute all that you find useful in our archive. We do limited risoprinted runs of poetry chapbooks and pamphlets. If you would like to buy one, or distribute a larger quantity, get it touch with the author or with us:

1. 1. send an email to owdistro(at)protonmail(dot)com with the following:

• name of desired zine/chapbook/etc
• number of copies
• your name and mailing address

2. wait for our response which will include paypal info for donations

Other Weapons is a site for amassing and proliferating knowledge, stories, and positions by sex workers. It has no set place, but circulates in the form of printed zines, online pdfs, emails, stickers and wheat-pasting, and occasional public appearances. Our aim is to experiment with sex workers and our accomplices toward material strategies for our autonomy and liberation. We are for finding life outside of any given parameters, for finding ways to live, interdependently, beyond survival. Through print material, discussions, letters, poetry, film, music, and visual work, we attempt to distribute intelligence often hidden or unpublished.

We are currently looking to publish experiences of sex work that highlight the proximity to criminal and criminalized existence, and how this position can be a site of knowledge, resistance, and solidarity, by refusing the narrative of “innocence” often necessary to make us relatable, or our deaths worth counting or accounting for.

We are open to any medium, format, length, or genre, what matters most is the content and the urgency of the ideas expressed in the work.

For this round of open calls, we will address author payment with the specifics of each project. If the submission will be sold in our store upon publication, we will give the money generated beyond the cost of printing to the author directly. If it is not something that will be sold, or the author wants it to be available online for free, we will work with the author or artist to provide money based on what they need to be supported in their work. The money we are able to offer will be agreed upon and determined before we move forward with publishing. The books are yours to freely reproduce after our initial run.

At OW we generate money by selling merchandise and through the sales of publications. All the money we generate is distributed to autonomous sex worker organizing, various cashapps, bail funds, commissaries, and directly to sex workers in need. Groups we have sent money to recently include Whose Corner is it Anyway, Answer Detroit, Bimbos, Cleveland SW fund, GLITS, CDMX street worker solidarity group, Lysistrata, Black and Pink, and SWOP behind bars. As this is a rolling submission period, we will be continuously fundraising and adding to our pool of funds in an effort to always provide cash support to both contributors and other sex workers.

To get a sense of what we might be interested in, please review our archive to see titles we feel address our pressing demands and otherwise overlooked positions in sex work politics.

Please, no politicians, gatekeepers of the whore-archy, defenders of the state, cops, bosses, borders, or prisons.

We are accepting inquiries/submissions on a rolling basis, and read submissions at the end of each month. We aim to get back to you within 4 weeks.

Email owdistro@protonmail.com with pitches or completed material.

CALL FOR PHOTO ZINES

Other Weapons is seeking strippers for a new series of limited run photo zines. We invite you to sift through and share your strip club photographs and ephemera as an exercise to reflect on your time and work at the club; the aura, the people, the pain, and the unforeseen pleasure of this deep world. What has surfaced in the ocean of your mind and body since your club was forced to close since the pandemic? For those of us who may never return: What is your ode to those rooms? What is your final hex?

The content and form is open to you. We will support and collaborate as much as you would like. We can help to edit, format, and design your book, as well as produce a run of 30 zines. We will host the books in our online store, at a price you name. Any money beyond printing and shipping will be yours to keep or sent to a fund of your choosing. The books are yours to freely reproduce after our initial run.

For this round of open calls, we will address author payment with the specifics of each project. If the submission will be sold in our store upon publication, we will give the money generated beyond the cost of printing to the author directly. If it is not something that will be sold, or the author wants it to be available online for free, we will work with the author or artist to provide money based on what what they need to be supported in their work. The money we are able to offer will be agreed upon and determined before we move forward with publishing.

At OW we generate money by selling merchandise and through the sales of publications. All the money we generate is distributed to autonomous sex worker organizing, various cashapps, bail funds, commissaries, and directly to sex workers in need. Groups we have sent money to recently include Whose Corner is it Anyway, Answer Detroit, Bimbos, Cleveland SW fund, GLITS, CDMX street worker solidarity group, Lysistrata, Black and Pink, and SWOP behind bars. As this is a rolling submission period, we will be continuously fundraising and adding to our pool of funds in an effort to always provide cash support to both contributors and other sex workers.

We are accepting inquiries/ submissions on a rolling basis.

Email a message of interest and a few photographs to owdistro@protonmail.com

“If the world swells to the right size, like when hard rain disturbs an afternoon, a window opens. Through it, you can see the blur you have been removed from. Crawl through this window. You fall upwards infinitely. It feels like quitting your job. Birds thank you on your way.”

Nora Treatbaby’s Hope Is Weird is an inquiry into what unfolds between one world and the next. In flight of the utopias produced by hope’s images, Treatbaby gives us molten weapons. We are at our most threatening when we remain unhardened. A transpoetics at gender’s edge, we are calmly moved through nihilisms counternote. We are dipping our nipples in champagne.

Nora Treatbaby is a queer writer in New Orleans. She is the author of the chapbook Ammo in Hairdo (Impunity Press). Hope Is Weird (OW 002) was printed in May 2020 in New Orleans, Louisiana by Max Seckel. It is Other Weapons’ second title. Cover Images by Nick Anderson. (sold out, second edition coming May 2022)

order here

Read / Print / Purchase (coming soon)

Other Weapons is a site for amassing and proliferating knowledge, stories, and positions by sex workers. It has no set place, but circulates in the form of printed zines, online pdfs, emails, stickers and wheat-pasting, and occasional public appearances. Our aim is to experiment with sex workers and our accomplices toward material strategies for our autonomy and liberation. We are for finding life outside of any given parameters, for finding ways to live, interdependently, beyond survival. Through print material, discussions, letters, film, music, and visual work, we attempt to distribute intelligence often hidden or unpublished.