The dynamism of queerness and queering
Finding expansiveness in sites of liminality and states of flux
So for each of these monthly seminar topics, I have an essay that I'm working on simultaneously. Sometimes the essay is informed by the readings, sometimes the readings are simply adjacent. But as an overall project to motivate my own research in order to keep myself writing, you get to join me in this journey as I forge through to find the space to think and to work it all out. Posting things that are neither finished nor published is an interesting but liberating exercise, and I hope you're enjoying it with me!
WIP: On queerness and queering
What do I mean when I refer to queerness? I mean that queerness is the very site of liminality, of expansiveness; of the presence of all things at all times and all places in a concurrent state of being. It is a lens through which I, as a human, view the world and it shifts the way I see all things.
Many of the subjects throughout the Beyond the Altar seminar series have to do with between spaces, inquiry of the seen and unseen, and things that are either in flux, indeterminable, or both. So when I refer to queerness, I am thinking of the way queer is by definition a state of being beyond definition; expansive; and about living in the spaces between. Queer is not necessarily always about sexuality although it can be. So it must be acknowledged that to be called queer, is to refer to either gender or sexuality, or both; a pansexual, bisexual, homosexual, or lesbian person; a trans or nonbinary or gender nonconforming person. When leveraged as a slur, to designate someone as queer is to label them Other, as outside of whatever normal is supposed to be—if you are queer, you are not that. Queer as a term is hard-won and fought for, and still disliked by many people who suffered it in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. But for me as a teenager and in my early twenties in the 90s when the term was being reclaimed as a way to rally those of us who were young1, angry, and sick of the violence from not just the heterosexual majority but the queer spaces we had hoped to find a home within; to be queer was to be defiant of the rigid definitions outlined by both sides. Through these lenses, is where I find my points of departure. Therefore most of the things that I’m researching and writing share questions such as: how do we perceive; how do we talk to each other in conversation; how are we curious; what are the ways we are seeking inquiry; how do we find what lies between what we think we know and what we don’t? You see, queerness is a framework.
When we look at queering as a way to sort of lift the layers and dig beneath them, there are some very specific ways in which even straight people could understand the framework and the disruption inherent in queering, and that perhaps this further overlaps with the work of unsettling, rewilding, decolonizing, and otherwise dismantling what has become, or what is, accepted as familiar. I'm thinking of many instances of inherent queerness throughout the natural world itself and how nature demonstrates itself to be queer; and that the inquiry that informs scientific methods found throughout the world beyond the empirical method could be queer; and mysticism and magic is queer; and that possibly the very nature of all things spiritual may also be queer. I suggest this because all of these express, describe, embody a state of constant shifting, transformation and transformative power and transition that are inherent to just the way everything in the world works—and in fact, the entire universe is a transformation in constant flux. And flux is very, very queer.
So as a state of flux, queerness represents the fluidity of all things, a flow, a liquid form, gaseousness; a nebula. But such amorphous states are also themselves an uncontainable space; an edge between things, a boundary. Hermits, healers, witches, magicians, and sorcerers; artists, thinkers, iconoclasts and philosophers, though more metaphorically; all practitoners such as these have historically lived at this edge. But also, each of them navigates the overlapping lands between where humans dwell and the where the rest of the world of beings, seen and unseen, live and dwell; a crossing-over place. We step from one world, into another. We stand between what is known. We embrace the Otherness that isn’t other from reality but from a constricted and specific construct or series of constructs of it.
Can anything be queered that is inherently so? I sometimes wonder about the push to queer things that to me, have no need of being pushed or redirected towards itself, towards what it already is. Why, let alone how, should magic or witchcraft be “queered”, when it just is, by the very nature of how it works and how it’s embodied. What is art, if not queer in its most ecstatic state of embodied pleasure, set apart from the dry framework of analysis and intellectualization—which isn’t to say that intellect isn’t also queer. That means philosophy and theory as dynamic spaces of wondering, thus leading to further inquiry, are super queer. To ask questions, to live in the space of a question to then take apart and put back together anew, is as queer as can be and is the very definition of queerness—to reinvent, redetermine, shift shape, and find new life in new form. This is the very nature of the cosmos, and therefore the cosmos itself is queer; immutable, ever changing, ever growing, full of brightness and light as well as dark unknowable and unseen matter that holds itself together through a mysterious force. Perhaps it has no need even of such a designation as queer, which is inevitably a human lens; but within the openness of both the universe and the term as defined by humans towards expansive ways of perceiving and being, I find my own great comfort, and liberation.
Further reading for those interested:
Are.na | hannah aube | queer ecology + natureculture
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Unnatural Passions?: Notes toward a Queer Ecology, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, Issue 9: Nature Loving, October 2005 (online)
Dr. Hannah McCann, Queer I: Seeing Queerly, Pursuit, University of Melbourne, 2021
Southern Bramble S2E14: Queerness and Gender in Witchcraft (podcast)
Judith Butler, Critically Queer, GLQ, A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 1, pp17-32, 1993
So and Pinar Sinopoulos, Beyond the Human, Volume 6: Beyond, Atmos Magazine, 2022 (online)
Queer Nation Manifesto, 1990, republished on History Is a Weapon
Queer Nation Manifesto, 1990, republished on History Is a Weapon