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.

Praise

“Granular in detail and expansive in scope, Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent bursts with the possibilities of self-actualization, mutual aid, and collective struggle. Resisting the redemptive arc to tell the truth about surviving domestic violence, the myth of upward mobility in academia, and the limitations of union organizing, Lawless offers not only a scathing critique of misogyny in all its forms but also an abolitionist analysis grounded in a quest for accountability and a desire to transform everything. I dare you to read this book without sobbing.”
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

“In a voice all her own, Jessica Lawless takes readers on a journey that so many of us will recognize, through all the failing institutions of the past several decades: the family, the workplace, the activist movements promising to save us. She writes of her life with unflinching honesty, sparing herself least of all, through punk rock and queer community, in feminist self-defense work and art practice and finally labor unions. She offers no easy answers but dares to dream of movements that are built on a different set of values: an abolitionist feminist labor movement, one that challenges us once and for all to find meaning in our connections rather than our work.”
—Sarah Jaffe, author of From the Ashes and Work Won’t Love You Back

“Raw, brilliant, and uncompromising. Jessica Lawless captures the brutal reality of coming of age as a queer, working-class feminist in the wreckage of the American Dream. From the punk clubs of Seattle to the adjunct trenches of academia to the belly of the labor movement, Lawless traces a path through three decades of survival, resistance, and heartbreak with the fierce intelligence of someone who’s lived every contradiction of late-stage capitalism. This is memoir at its most essential—no nostalgia, no easy answers, just the hard-won wisdom of a hard-working human who refused to be broken by a world designed to destroy us. Both deeply personal and urgently political.”
—Ariel Gore, author of We Were Witches

“Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent is all at once memoir and call to action; a history of violence and a love letter to queers and artists and freaks; a classic story of American poverty and an exceptional anticapitalist analysis from an organizer who dreams of something better for us all. Through her immersive storytelling, Jessica Lawless offers us a rich archive of a radical past that holds necessary wisdom for anyone who wants a better world.”
—Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme

“In Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent, Jess’s experiences in art and activist communities takes us on a journey of how political the personal is. Jess’ vulnerability about the violence they have survived offers so much insight into the ways the precarity of capitalism exacerbates the risk of violence. This is a stick and poke tattoo of a book: DIY, angry, messy, beautiful, fun, painful at times—and totally worth it. After reading it you will forever be a little bit different. A little punker, a little more beautiful.”
—Katie Tastrom, author of A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice

“Unable to withstand the sexist rambling of a know-it-all ponytail dude (an unfortunate character we’ve all run into at least once in our lives), Jessica Lawless finally snapped: ‘I got up and left class, remembering leaving is an act of self-defense.’ This sharp, defiant humor cuts through a raw narrative chronicling a lifetime of violence, sexism, and the collapse of a system hell-bent on crushing its own people. Like a classic punk rock album, Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent is unflinching, profane, brilliant, hilarious, and terrifying all at once. If this book is a punk ballad, Lawless is its snarling frontwoman, screaming mercilessly into the fray. Read this book at full volume.”
—Josh Fernandez, author of The Hands That Crafted the Bomb: The Making of a Lifelong Antifascist

“The do-it-ourselves ethos in this book are contagious. Lawless brings the lessons of a lifetime of organizing and creative cultural interventions to us right on time. You’ll remember it the same way you do the first song that made you want to change the world.”
—James Tracy, author of Hillbilly Nationalists: Urban Race Rebels and Black Power

About the Author

Jessica Lawless is an artist 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.

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