Introduction to Queer
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It feels important to voice my (and many of my friends’) rejection of the way ‘queer’ as a term and as an identity label has been appropriated and exploited under the guise of acceptance and the false promise of equal rights for all. Queer as an umbrella term for rainbow capitalism. Queer as interchangeable with the LGBTQIA+ acronym that lumps us together as though there is uniformity in our experience and politics.
The multiplicity of queer experiences is part of what I want this issue to restore. Personally, I do it through opposition to the homogeneity of normativity, but that’s not the only way. As José Esteban Muñoz writes:
“We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2009.
Each artist and writer here has a different way of navigating the totalising forces of the here and now, but each of them starts from here—resisting, opposing, dreaming, playing, shining light on those other ways of being in the world.
In this issue you will find dissident voices searching for a distinct language, dialect, and vernacular to put to their experience: language and art that has in part emerged from queer relationality, and often marginality, but that also speak from the intersections of complex and subjective worlds.
We are not only our marginality. We have varied interests, desires, drives, hopes, and dreams.
These contributions are textual impressions of people living—feeling love, pain, panic, ecstasy, frustration, hope and beauty. These are some of our experiences of the world—what are yours, do you feel resonance?
You can navigate the contributions in whatever order—but my personal suggestion would be listening to SJ Norman’s audio contribution first as a way in. It’s a long one but he’s casual, eloquent and articulate, speaking directly and tangentially about life, faggotry, ‘queer spaces’, blak queerness, and the arts.
“What sense can we make of the event of our attraction?” Alexander Power asks Oriane Leon. Their expansive text begins, simply, by asking what it’s like to fall in love as two trans women? What are the worlds omitted between Oriane and Alexander, what do they find together and apart?
And V Barratt, a trans-everything artist in Tarntanya/Adelaide—Xeno Dad of two kids, a son called Grace, and a witchchild named Alice—struggles to mouth what it’s like to be “fucked in the head” as a symptom of the world as doomscroll: “Now moreso than ever in my life before”?
What are the parallels between the physics of lightning and an energised moment as Tyberius Larking steps into himself, in the face of societal and familial barriers?
As I read Ari Angkasa’s associative flow, the boundaries between definitions lose their grip and I begin to feel HER. She spans travel, luxury, longing, desire, and finally kinship, care and LOVE. And where is she going with that tiny bottle of gin in her bag? As the other becomes the self, I feel the boundaries between bodies become more porous.
How can we reconfigure language and search for words to explain slippages between worlds and attempts of translating complex personhood?
We are not all the same.These contributions exist independently, in their own voices, but oscillate around each other, intersect, and move along and away from the same desire lines.
Subcultures have their own spaces, their own worlds, their own places for sharing life and art with each other. These are PRECIOUS. Through the appropriation of queer as an identity marker, queer spaces are threatened. As a response, there is a fugitivity happening. It’s exciting to observe and take part in. It’s where I see the best art, hear the smartest shit, and feel the best love.
This is why I’ve invited these writers to be part of this edition. They are the vanguard of this fugitivity and they have so generously shared a glimpse of their private worlds (lucky you)—but it is just a glimmer—firstly because experience is infinite and endlessly transmuting—secondly because some things must remain behind closed doors. They are precious, and must be protected.