By Queer Collective Workers’ Union

March 30, 2026

An open letter to those invited into collectivity on the condition that they do not interrupt its structure,

We are writing this—although the open letter format itself was listed as one of the “20 most powerless” in the art world—to remind you that you are not alone in your intuition: the images of your working hands have silently profited infrastructures which demand gratitude and silence as conditions of inclusion.

These infrastructures, often privately governed despite collective labor, sustain themselves by performing the image of affirmation, while foreclosing the negativity through which such affirmation could become transformative. If these conditions silence your critique by framing it as selfishness, and conflate compliance with care, it does not mean your refusal is isolated. It situates you within a genealogy of struggles against enclosure, which operates through moral affirmation where care, inclusion, visibility, safety, or growth are mobilized as gestural claims that suspend economic and political accountability.

From feminized care labor rendered non-economic in the name of love, to queer movements absorbed into entrepreneurial visibility, to urban commons gentrified as creative projects, to the language of love itself instrumentalized within settler-colonial projects—most starkly condensed in the image of an Israeli soldier holding a pride flag over the rubble of Gaza—this genealogy names a common condition under which class emerges relationally, outside the logics of representation. It is from within this totality that we offer a concrete example. This case of the enclosure of queer commons that we have recently witnessed will likely sound familiar to many working in the cultural industry under the category of “community.”

Our experience is grounded in our work within Bebe Books, a project publicly framed as a queer collective, and within cultural institutions, where this framing has been institutionally hosted. When we addressed the contradiction between the collective’s public claims and its private structure—specifically the founders’ unilateral control over infrastructure, representation, and decision-making—this critique was met with explicit verbal aggression from one of the founders, followed by a refusal to acknowledge harm. What ensued was a retaliatory sequence: critique reframed as bullying, dissent pathologized as hostility, and institutional protocols mobilized to discipline those who spoke up. Access to shared communication channels and decision-making processes was subsequently restricted, demonstrating how infrastructure itself functions as a mechanism of discipline. Rather than resolving the violence, institutional policies were used to normalize it, teaching us that power in supposedly “queer” institutions often operates not through overt repression, but through retaliation, procedural capture, and the erasure of critique under the language of care and neutrality.

(For a more detailed account, please visit: An Account of Dirty Dishes)

This open letter is our response to these extractive conditions and the accountability that must be borne by those who design and unilaterally benefit from them. It is also part of an ongoing process of collective organization emerging in response to these conditions. While calls for accountability have often been denounced as “cancel culture,” the scope of our work is beyond the problematics of certain individuals, as it proposes a framework for the class formation specific to the struggles within minoritarian movements. Therefore, we expand the meaning of the following terms from our experience as recurring categories of class.

(Queer) Collective names an open sociality productive of transformative potentials through shared labor and collective authorship.

Founders name a class within collectives that mediates between the radical negativity of marginalized life and the affirmative demands of the market.

When collective labor produces infrastructure that remains privately governed, the collective ceases to function as a social relation and instead becomes a brand that extracts value from the image of collectivity.

This redefinition, however, is not to give an excuse to the individuals implicated, but to situate their violence within a political context, and correspondingly define what their accountability practically can be.

Based on this framework, these demands and questions emerge as structural necessities. The demands operate across multiple, interdependent levels: the level of lived experience, where harm must be acknowledged; the level of institutional mediation, where procedures must cease to function as instruments of enclosure; and the level of infrastructure itself, where the material and representational conditions of collective life must be reorganized.

(I)
Acknowledgment of Harm and Labor

We demand explicit acknowledgment of verbal aggression and structural harm, rather than their reframing as misunderstanding, disagreement, or “diverging perspectives.” Such reframing is itself part of the violence it conceals.

We demand recognition of collective labor—including affective, representational, organizational, and intellectual labor—as labor. The conditions of extraction depend upon the systematic misrecognition of this labor as friendship, voluntary contribution, or personal interests. To name this labor as labor is the first step in interrupting its enclosure.

(II)
Transformation of Institutional Mediation

We demand accountability mechanisms for founders and institutional power-holders that do not rely on self-regulation, neutrality, or closed mediation processes that deny underlying power relations. Mediation cannot function as a tool of resolution when it remains structurally aligned with those whose power is being contested.

We demand that complaint and conflict-resolution procedures materially protect those subjected to harm, rather than functioning as instruments of institutional self-protection. Procedures that exist only to preserve institutional legitimacy reproduce the violence they claim to address.

We demand the right to critique—including artistic, theoretical, and speculative critique—without retaliation, censorship, or the weaponization of care, safety, or accusations of bullying as disciplinary tools. Critique is not a failure of collectivity, but the very condition of its possibility.

(III)
Redistribution of Collective Infrastructure and Narrative Power

We demand redistribution of access to and control over collective infrastructure—including archives, platforms, representation, and communication channels—that has been built through shared labor. Infrastructure produced collectively cannot remain privately governed without transforming collectivity into a mechanism of extraction.

We demand the right to narrative self-determination. Collective history and public representation belong to all whose labor produced them, not to a founder-centric brand or privately held image. The enclosure of narrative constitutes an ontological negation of the collectivity itself.

(IV)
Organizational Consequence

These demands are also a call for cultural workers within the collective to organize. The Queer Collective Workers’ Union emerges as a historically specific form of labor’s antagonism and a strike against representational extraction. This necessity arises precisely where collective labor’s apparent autonomy internalizes the heteronomy it claims to resist, giving rise to the form of organization specific to its condition.

Open Questions

(1) What does it mean for a “queer collective” to exist when its infrastructure remains privately owned and unilaterally governed?

(2) When does representation cease to function as a tool of emancipation and instead become an extractive value-form?

(3) Who benefits when critique is redescribed as hostility? When critique is rebranded as cruelty, what vocabulary and tactics remain available for resistance?

(4) How do institutions decide what counts as harm, and who is authorized to make that determination?

(5) What forms of violence are normalized when neutrality is treated as an ethical position rather than a political one?

(6) How can collective organizing avoid reproducing the same logics of enclosure and discipline it claims to resist? How do we found institutions without reproducing a propertied class within them?

(7) What infrastructures are necessary to sustain collective accountability without retaliation, and collective authorship without enclosure?

As a workers’ union, our goal is to collectively reimagine forms of organization that do not reproduce the violence we have witnessed. This requires systems of value in which representation is no longer the totalizing value-form, and the development of reclaimed tools for genuinely collective authorship. This letter does not conclude a struggle, but marks its beginning. The infrastructure necessary to sustain it is already under construction and beginning to take public form.

With care and attention,
Queer Collective Workers’ Union
http://qcwu.work/