By Michiel Terpelle AKA Becky Stabber FKA @jtakajizztaco

October 24, 2025

Against the Heroic Founder: Recentness as Collective Praxis

To be the most recent member of a collective does not mean one enters a story already in progress, one where the plotlines have been drawn, the characters defined, and the mythology solidified. If that is the case, then the collective has already failed itself. A collective worthy of the name must be permeable, reconfigurable, reshaped by every arrival and every departure. It should be a continual re-beginning.

As of September 2025, Bebe Books proclaims on its website that “by working together, we resist the modern myth of a singular heroic designer”(1)—invoking Ursula K. Le Guin’s critique of the “narrative of the arrow or spear.” Yet within the collective, another myth quietly persisted: the myth of the heroic founder.

During the Jan van Eyck residency, this contradiction became clear. The history of the collective was repeatedly framed through the biographies of its founders, a practice that became concretely visible during the residency when a founder-produced timeline was displayed. This timeline, which charted the collective’s history exclusively from its foundation, visually institutionalized the founders’ narrative. Despite attempts by other members to problematize this focus or contribute their own histories, the founder-centric story persisted, a dynamic that crystallized during a conflict over an official biography for the Jan van Eyck Academie's Open Studios. This framing positioned non-founding members not as co-authors of the collective, but as later additions—workers whose contributions were judged against an origin story (and identity) that did not belong to them. What appeared as an act of “documenting history” was, in practice, a form of narrative control.

This use of history as ownership foreclosed the possibility of a truly dynamic collective. Instead of treating each new configuration of members as a re-beginning, the collective was organized around the continuity of a founder subjectivity. If collectivity is to resist the myth of the heroic designer, it must also resist the myth of the heroic founder. To center the founder is to deny that collectivity is built—often unevenly—through many hands, tensions, and transformations. A collective worthy of its name is not an origin preserved, but a constellation continually reconfigured. This requires reframing the act of founding not as a source of ultimate authority, but as one crucial role among many—a unique set of lessons that must be integrated into the whole without solidifying into a hierarchy.

The consequences of this narrative ownership were the daily enforcement of a hierarchy that directly contradicted our stated aim of becoming a commons. While we spoke of shared resources and horizontal structure, in practice, the founders retained the authority to define the boundaries and content of ‘collective’ work. My autonomous research interests were not engaged with on their own terms, but were instead judged against a founder-controlled interpretation of our residency’s purpose, effectively smashing any divergence. Similarly, the act of presenting myself as an individual resident—a basic autonomy within a cohort-based academy—was construed as a threat to the collective’s brand. These were not minor disputes but fundamental conflicts over ownership. The ‘commons’ we sought to build was systematically hollowed out by the very ownership model it was meant to replace.

The failure of our collective reflects a wider pattern in artistic models that claim horizontality. The dynamic is one where labor, ideas, and identities are extracted while the participants are deprived of any real political agency—treated as workers without citizenship. We experienced this at the Jan van Eyck Academie as a stipend that couldn’t support living costs and a title that couldn’t secure a future, all within a structure that mimicked the very capitalism it claimed to resist. This is the inevitable result when a project lacks the infrastructure for true shared governance. Our rupture was not personal, but structural. It revealed what happens when the desire for credit outweighs the commitment to solidarity, when narrative control becomes more valuable than collective care.

To invite recentness as a position of insight, then, is to resist the closure of origin stories and to insist on collectivity as a practice of relation, not inheritance. My experience is one of exclusion, but also of clarity: collectivity is not a myth to be preserved but a structure that must be continually re-made by all who enter it. I can only tell my story, but in doing so, I hold a mirror to ours.

The Queer Collective Workers’ Union and Their Symbolic Strike

This chapter marks a shift from report to resistance. The project, which started as research into collectivity ended as its foreclosure: the lockout of workers from the very commons they had built. The infrastructures of Bebe Books—its archive, its channels of communication, its reputation—were consolidated into private ownership, while dissenting members were silenced and dispossessed. What remains is not a commons but a brand, a monument to enclosure.

Faced with this consolidation, we began to adopt another framework: no longer simply members of a collective, but workers in need of a union. The concept of a Bebe Books workers union, which later coalesced into the Queer Collective Workers’ Union, emerged to name the reality that had already taken shape. To call ourselves a union was a conceptual shift that reframed the so-called collective as a workplace. This forced us to ask: what forms of power are available to precarious cultural workers? The familiar strategies—boycott and public cancellation—were ineffective. Boycott is a withdrawal that further erases the marginal in a fragmented art scene, while cancellation is readily reframed by the powerful as persecution rather than accountability. Both dissolve resistance into disappearance.

We needed a tactic that reframed the field of struggle. A strike, conceived not as a traditional withdrawal of labor but as a symbolic action, offered this. It is an interruption of the feedback loops through which power secures its permanence—loops of capital accumulation, visibility, and institutional legitimacy. The archive is where practices inscribe themselves into legacy; to resist exploitation, we must resist how it writes itself into history. This text is that intervention. It is a counter-archive: a visible, legible record of how collective labor was extracted, how resources were centralized, and how silence was deployed as a weapon.

Seen through the lens of labor, this strike also becomes a form of governance. Grohmann, Rocha, and Guilherme describe worker-led governance as the capacity of workers to shape systems even when they lack ownership or formal authority.(2) They identify three forms of power—structural, institutional, and discursive. In our case, structural and institutional power were denied to us: the infrastructures were seized, the institution privileged procedure over justice, and the channels of representation were closed. What remained was discursive power—the power to intervene in how this history is written and remembered. The symbolic strike is therefore not a consolation prize but a deliberate strategy: our means of governing the narrative in the absence of every other resource.

The strike names silence as the founder-owners’ primary instrument of control—silence as punishment, as refusal of accountability, as erasure of dissent. Against this, we return to language and action. Following Audre Lorde’s insistence that silence will not protect us, the strike turns enforced quiet into testimony, exclusion into narrative force. It reclaims speech not as appeal to authority but as collective declaration.

To frame resistance in labor terms is to clarify the stakes. The contradictions at Bebe Books were not interpersonal but structural: ownership versus work, extraction versus care, brand versus commons. In principle, such contradictions could have been generative. Every radical movement lives with its own tension between commodity and commons, identity and brand, visibility and solidarity. Approached dialectically, these frictions can become sites of transformation. The symbolic strike makes these contradictions public. It rejects the institutional script of neutrality, which stages abuse as a matter of perspective and resolves it by attrition. It refuses to individualize systemic harm into personal grievance.

Disruption is justified when the violence of exploitation is normalized and institutionalized. Economic precarity, enforced silence, and the hoarding of collective resources are already forms of violence. To strike is to refuse complicity, to transform private injury into collective memory, and to ensure that what was dispossessed does not vanish without trace.

The lockout is complete: the passwords are changed, the infrastructures guarded. Yet the strike makes clear that the story cannot be enclosed. It exists here, as record and refusal. If ownership was the weapon, then archiving is the counter-weapon. The Queer Collective Workers’ Union strikes so that this account ends not with disappearance, but with presence—an insistence that the commons, once imagined, cannot be erased, only reclaimed.

Pink Tears and the Gay Karen: On the Weaponization of Queer Vulnerability

The conflict within Bebe Books was never just about ideas, projects, or labor. It was a clash over reality itself, fought with the weapons most effective in liberal spaces: identity, emotion, and the language of harm. To understand how a queer collective could replicate the very oppressions it claimed to resist, we need to examine the tactic that shielded power from critique: the architecture of pink tears.

I use “pink tears” to describe the affective performance of vulnerability by privileged queer subjects in order to deflect accountability and re-center their own emotional experience. The term builds on the concept of white tears,(3)(4) where white fragility halts conversations about racism. Deployed by those whose vulnerability is recognized and prioritized by dominant structures, pink tears function within queer collectives as a similar mechanism: they reframe critique as cruelty and disagreement as violence.

Within Bebe Books, this tactic was deployed with precision. When structural concerns were raised about ownership, resources, or collective authorship, the founders collapsed the distinction between themselves and the collective. Critique of Bebe Books as a structure was misperceived—and reframed—as a personal attack on their feelings. Mert’s long public text accusing me of “ego,” “rhetorical power grabs,” and “narcissism” was not a counter-argument but a performance of woundedness. By labeling critique a “paranoid interpretation,”(5) he invoked the spectre of Eve Sedgwick not to engage in intellectual debate, but to pathologize dissent. Name-dropping a famous queer theorist not to genuinely discuss her ideas, but to make criticism seem like a mental health issue rather than a valid structural critique. Ruud’s repeated statements—“Today has been difficult,” “That was unpleasant to read”—effected a similar outcome: positioning themself as the victim of the discourse, rather than as participants within a structure whose hierarchies they actively reproduced.

The effect was a form of gaslighting. The conversation was no longer about whether extractive ownership models were being reproduced, but why I was making everyone “feel so bad.” Emotional exhaustion became the central issue to be managed, effectively holding the entire process hostage to their comfort. This is the core of the pink tears tactic: it weaponizes the language of care and safety to protect the status quo. It demands that the oppressed tend to the hurt feelings of their oppressors, creating an infinite loop of emotional labor that ensures no structural critique can ever be completed.

Pink tears never operate alone. Their performance of fragility requires a counterpoint, a foil against which vulnerability can be made believable. This is the logic of the ‘Karen’ archetype—understood here as a cultural pejorative and social media trope: every ‘Karen’ needs a villain. The tears only have power if they can be read as a response to danger, and so a danger must be produced.

In Bebe Books, our insistence on accountability filled that role. Structural critique was redescribed as aggression; disagreement reframed as hostility; our presence cast as intimidation. It was not the content of our critique that mattered, but the need for a villain to make the tears legible. In the framework of the ‘Karen’ script, fragility is always performed in relation to a constructed threat.

This is why the archetype is so durable. It transforms critique into proof of cruelty, and refusal into evidence of menace. The critic becomes the aggressor, not because of what they say or do, but because the archetype demands it. The ‘Karen,’ whether white or queer, claims victimhood not in spite of their power but because of it. Their power is secured through a ritual of reversal: harm is performed as vulnerability, while accountability is recast as violence.

Seen this way, the ‘Karen’ is not an insult but an analytic. It describes the mechanism by which authority within progressive or queer spaces is preserved through the theater of fragility. Pink tears are the affect; the ‘Karen’ is the role; the villain is the supporting character required to make the story cohere.

Together, these elements produce a closed circuit of control. The ‘Karen’s’ tears position them as the besieged protagonist; the designated villain (always the critic) is the aggressor. Within this story, the refusal to share ownership is not recognized as domination but reimagined as self-protection.

And this logic extends beyond Bebe Books. It echoes a broader liberal demand that critique be endlessly soft, persuasive, and deferential to those in power. If accountability causes discomfort, the failure is attributed to the critic’s delivery, never to the abuse itself. This demand for comfort is another face of control: it insists that the exploited not only bear exploitation, but also soothe the emotional fragility of their exploiters.

Activism, however, is not meant to soothe. It is meant to confront. The losses of privilege, control, and a comfortable self-image that follow are not acts of cruelty; they are the necessary costs of accountability.

The ‘Karen’ archetype (also in a queer context) shows us how power adapts in spaces that proclaim radicality. It does not deny harm but appropriates the language of harm, wielding fragility as a weapon. Its tears are not weakness but a technology of governance, ensuring that even in queer collectives, hierarchy persists.

What emerged most clearly from these events—and what I want to make the reader explicitly aware of—is the presence of the default. The default is not neutral. It is the unmarked ground that presents itself as natural, original, or self-evident, against which others appear as deviations. It is whiteness as the absence of race, cisness as the absence of gender, straightness as the absence of sexuality. It is not a position earned, but one assumed; not a truth, but a concealment.

The labor of the default is invisibility. The labor of the other is translation. Those who inhabit the default are spared the work of naming themselves. Those outside it are tasked with making themselves legible in its terms. It is not that trans people invented “cis,” or that queerness invented “straight,” or that the critic invented the “Karen.” It is that the presence of the other exposes what the default would rather keep unspoken. The default is always there, but only becomes visible when its power is disrupted.

This thesis itself is an act of translation. Its arguments are not offered into a neutral space but into a rigged field, one where the burden of proof falls on those excluded from the default. My account must be reasoned, annotated, careful—even when the dynamics it describes were blatant, visible to anyone willing to see. The form of the text reflects the condition it analyzes: the compulsion to explain what was already obvious, because disbelief is the first privilege of the default.

Audre Lorde described this compulsion as a diversion of energies: women called upon to educate men, women of color called upon to educate white women. “This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors,” she wrote, “to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” Translation absorbs the time and emotional labor of the marginalized, ensuring that the default remains intact.

This is the condition Noam and I found ourselves in within Bebe Books. Our labor was not confined to production; it was also the hidden, unacknowledged work of interpretation. We bridged the gap of ignorance, rendered conflict legible, and tried to give language to dynamics that the founders could neither name nor face. It was not simply that tasks were unevenly distributed, but that the very economy of attention and explanation fell on us. Our position as “other” guaranteed it.

To analyze this economy is not to complain about a workload but to expose the structure by which marginality is exploited. The default protects itself not only through resources, ownership, or narrative control, but through the expectation that others will do the exhausting work of articulation on its behalf. To resist, then, is not only to demand fairer distribution of tasks, but to refuse the compulsory labor of translation. It is to insist that those who claim neutrality name themselves, interrogate themselves, and translate themselves back.

This concluding chapter argues that the failure of Bebe Books is not merely a story of a dysfunctional collective, but a symptom of a broader cultural process: the aestheticization of queer politics. Transformative demands for power redistribution are neutralized when institutions (and the collectives that mimic them) prioritize the image of queerness—diversity, representation, friendship, radical aesthetics—over the material politics of ownership, labor, and accountability. What remains is not solidarity but a brand, a hollowed-out symbol easily absorbed by the very systems it claims to resist.

If the previous chapters documented the mechanisms of enclosure—the lockout, the pink tears, the unpaid labor of translation—this final chapter examines the cultural logic that makes such enclosure not only possible but profitable. The conflict within Bebe Books was, at its core, a conflict between queer politics and queer aesthetics. Our demand was for the former: a radical redistribution of authorship, infrastructure, and power. What was defended, and what ultimately prevailed, was the latter: the preservation of a recognizable, institutionally legible, and ultimately marketable queer image.

This process of neutralization is what Hal Foster, critiquing a certain trend in art, identified as the aestheticization of the ethnographic “other.” He recalls Walter Benjamin’s warning to the artist: your progressive alignment with the exploited proletariat means little if your work still serves the interests of the patron. Today, the “other” is often the cultural or queer subject, and the patron is the neoliberal institution. The institution may fund projects under the guise of social outreach or radical critique, but it ultimately absorbs them as forms of PR, economic development, or aesthetic capital. There is always, as Foster notes, an element of “self-othering” involved—a performance of marginality that confirms the institution’s inclusivity while leaving its power structures intact.

Bebe Books became a masterful practitioner of this self-othering. The collective expertly performed the aesthetic of a non-hierarchical, queer utopia—a performance that was legible and valuable to the institutions that funded it. This performance provided a powerful image of diversity and resistance. But this was representation without redistribution, visibility without power. The very infrastructures that created this image (the archive, the communications, the network) were the same ones privatized during the lockout. The work was an aesthetic gesture: it looked like a commons but functioned as a private firm. It was the image of queerness as a product, deployed to mask the practice of queerness as exploited labor.

The Jan van Eyck Academie, in its response, became a co-producer of this aesthetic gesture. It hosted our research into “commoning” and “collectivity” as a sign of its own progressive commitment. Yet, when that research produced actual, messy conflict—a demand for real commoning—the institution retreated behind a facade of procedural neutrality. The Code of Conduct was not a tool for accountability but an aesthetic one: it gave the impression of a safe, regulated space while its enforcement was withheld, deferred, and ultimately placed in the service of institutional harmony. The Academie, however, positioned itself as the sole authority entitled to determine whether a breach had occurred. The “two-studio solution” of separation and the rebranding of the collective into “Bebe Books_004” and “Bebe Books_A202” were not acts of mediation but of aesthetic management. They were bureaucratic tools to make an irreconcilable conflict look managed, to contain dissent without addressing its root cause. This framing of abuse as “diverging perspectives” is a quintessential liberal tactic, prioritizing the comfort of a resolution narrative over the messy truth of power asymmetry.

This is where the aestheticization of queerness reveals its profound political consequence: it demands that critique be delivered in a palatable, non-disruptive form. Our calls for accountability were deemed not wrong, but ugly—aesthetically disruptive to the collective’s image and the residency’s smooth operation. The Pink Tears tactic is the emotional engine of this aesthetic demand. It frames structural critique as a personal attack, a dissonant note in the harmonious performance of queer collaboration. The ‘Karen’ archetype is its protagonist, performing a vulnerability that must be protected from the unsightly reality of conflict.

Therefore, this thesis culminates in a demand: we must relentlessly critique the substitution of aesthetics for politics. Politics is not about how we look; it is about how we are organized. It asks: “Who controls the infrastructure?” “Who controls the narrative?” “Who controls the money?” and “Who grants access, and on what terms?”

The symbolic strike of the Queer Collective Workers’ Union is an attempt to force this distinction. By archiving the truth of our exploitation, we refused to let our labor vanish into a sanitized aesthetic narrative. We insisted that the story be told not as a tragedy of personal falling-out, but as a political case study of enclosure.

The revolution will not be funded by the Jan van Eyck Academie, nor will it be found in a branded queer parade. It is in the unglamorous, un-aestheticized work of building accountable structures. It is in the refusal to do the unpaid labor of translation for the default. It is in the insistence that every representation of a queer body must be accompanied by a demand for the power that body is denied. To do otherwise is to provide institutions with the very tools that hide their supremacy, allowing them to continue their exploitation under the cover of our own image.

The work now is to lay these power dynamics bare, to tell the true stories, and to demand that the promise of collectivity be fulfilled not as an aesthetic gesture, but as a political practice.

Sources

(1) About Us — Bebe Books. bebebooks.be/About-Us. By working together, we resist the modern myth of a singular heroic designer - what Ursula K. Le Guin referred to as “the narrative of the arrow or spear.”

(2) Grohmann, Rafael, et al. “Worker-led AI Governance: Hollywood Writers’ Strikes and the Worker Power.” Information Communication & Society, June 2025, pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2025.2521375.

(3) Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

(4) DiAngelo, Robin J. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.

(5) Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 123–151.