iii. Queer World-Making

Queer(ing) World-Making

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Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine “ a future. The future is queerness’s domain.

Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” 93

José Esteban Muñoz José Esteban Muñoz talks about queerness as a state of being—one that allows us to move past complacencies to imagine better futures that are departure from the adherence to normativities and the dismantling of any systems that apply meanings of sacred-ness or morality to those normative events or practices. This non-prescription and destruction of normative ways of being is what he and other Marsha P. Johnson threw that first brick during the Stonewall riots in 1969, the world underwent not just an action against “normal” social behaviour, but her identity as a transgender drag queen was breaking cis-heteronormative social categorizations and her identity as a black woman dismantled expected racialized behaviors. The act embodied the nature of her defiant identity and brought her out of her forced invisiblity. This moment of visibility, and the subsequent riots that followed took the histories of oppression, and sculpted them into imaginations of the future. That moment, like many others of defiance, changed the world, and we are living futures today that would have been seemingly unattainable dreams. These acts of queering are to attain a state of queerness—an existence where no normal exists. In the midst of a global pandemic, there is often talk about “returning to normal,” and that yearning for a “normal” is a privileged desire. The pandemic only revealed the cracks in the systems globally, cracks that have existed since the standard was established. Privilege is the product and the foundation of capitalism—it evokes the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first,

rooted in the histories of our people. 94 It requires a queer theorists call the process of queering. 95 When queering. 96 The act of her throwing that brick was because the two are intrinsically related. Until capitalism is dismantled, privileged normals will continue to weigh down on the backs of the othered. To topple these privileged normals, imaginations of radical, queered futures are necessary. José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia discusses hope and its role in imagining utopias by centering his argument for hope with Ernst Bloch and his descriptions of abstract and concrete Utopias. 97 Abstract utopias are naive because they are “untethered from any historical consciousness,” but concrete utopias are rooted in historical struggle and revolution and are, as Muñoz mentions, “the realm of educated hope.” 98 Concrete utopias are what Afrofuturist authors and artists like Alexis Gumbs strive for—hopeful futures that are attained by the dismantling of normative systems and are spaces of equity and happiness.

Hope, in our imaginations of the future, therefore, remains central. While hope is often scoffed at, and the discourse around it is belittled in academia, hope represents a fight against complacency. This is not hope that aims for a “return to any normal” in the face of displacement from said normal, but rather a decolonized hope that is used to arm the fight against any normal.

93. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, New York: New York University Press, 2019), 1. 94. Muñoz, 3. 95. Ibid. 3 96. Shane O’neill, “Who Threw the First Brick at Stonewall? Let’s Argue About It,” The New York Times (The New York Times, May 31, 2019), https://www. nytimes.com/2019/05/31/us/first-brick-at-stonewall-lgbtq.html. 97. Muñoz, 3 98. Ibid, 3

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This thesis is, therefore, an articulation of my concrete hope. It imagines a world sometime in the future—the exact time does not matter, because time is decolonized as well. It is not linear, but fluid, where the past, the present, and the future are all flowing through each other and are built off of one another. It situates this world in a post-capitalist society, where social constructs like money do not dictate worth, technology is not weaponized or accumulated to create profits, and the binary categories of being as Haraway defines them, are

blurred. 98 This is not an abstract utopia, where post-racial themes prevail, but rather a world that acknowledges its history, and the struggles of those who enabled them to be where they are. The human race is de-centered in relation to the planet and non-human beings, and live as scavengers off of the land and the technological landscapes established by those who came before.

Since this thesis situates itself in a postcapitalist time, borders do not matter. As Andrew Herscher and Ana María León discuss in their essay At the Border of Decolonization, “Within colonial processes, two functions of the border are paramount: borders not only inscribe colonialism into the Earth, parceling land into property, but they also legitimize this inscription, as colonists pose Indigenous land without the borders they recognized as “empty.” This putative emptiness is, more precisely, an emptying-out, a conceptual deletion of Indigenous landscapes that precede, allow, and authorize the material erasure of those landscapes, and the human and non-human beings that sustain and are sustained by them.” 100 Borders exist as a result of colonial and capitalist systems and are physical manifestations of “modernity” and “progress” while remaining, ironically, invisible.

In order to imagine a truly post-capitalist world, dismantling notions of “modernity” and “progress” is vital. While being invisible, borders are used as physical tools to dehumanize and prescribe value to lives based on the location of that life in relation to the border. Borders not only divide and define human identities, but they do so to land, water, air, plant and animal life. The imagination of a world without any borders, therefore, requires decolonizing the thought that prescribes value to invisible lines etched on the planet. This process is imagined as rematriation of the land, which as Herscher and León mention,“refers not just to the return of land, but to the regeneration of sustaining and sustainable relations with the land’s constituent parts. The rematriation of land is not a metaphor: it is the specific and irreplaceable horizon of restoring land to Indigeneity. The motion of turning towards this horizon, of yearning for it, is the unraveling of border thinking.” 101 Land is, in this imagination, rematriated and those who occupy it live with the knowledge and the memory of its colonization and the fight for its rematriation and its acknowledgement as a being itself. In order to imagine this world, it is imperative to listen to the stories of those who have been marginalized by systems of oppression and to merge all of their dreams with personal dreams, to prescribe by what Muñoz calls revolutionary consciousness—“Feeling revolutionary opens up the space to imagine a collective escape, an exodus, a ‘going-off script’ together. Practicing educated hope, participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness, is not simply conforming to one group’s doxa at the expense of another’s. Practicing educated hope is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be. It is thinking beyond the narrative of what stands for the world today by seeing it as not enough.” 102 To take on this project of dreaming, this thesis turned to Afro/ Muslim/Trans/Indigenous/Dalit futurist works, to understand the struggles of marginalized groups and to create a collective, intersectional, revolutionary consciousness.

This revolutionary consciousness is embodied by the scavengers in this world. They understand their histories, and the struggles of their ancestors. They understand that race, gender, money, sexuality are social constructs that dictated the value of their ancestor’s lives. They understand the land beneath their feet to be a being that they exist-with, not something that exists for them, and the non-humans around them are entitled to the same existence as them. This non-extractive, noncapitalist, non-patriarchal world identifies the layered nature of identities and the historical connotations and oppression of those identities, and does not erase those histories. Rather, the scavengers acknowledge these histories and therefore understand the privilege of existing in a world that was fought for—a fight that enabled their identities to not be placed in a hierarchy.

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100.Andrew Herscher and Ana María León, “At the Border of Decolonization,” e-flux, May 6, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/at-theborder/325762/at-the-border-of-decolonization/. 101. Herscher and León, 2020 102. Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, “Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue,” Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2009): pp. 275-283, https://doi.org/10.1080/07407700903064946.

“to denaturalize the way we dwell (move) in the world is to denaturalize the world itself in the favor of a utopian performativty.” 103

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

The knowledge of their history and its relationship to their current existence allows these scavengers to live in a state of fluidity outside of the categorizations of the Capitalocene. This implies that the hierarchies of value placed on human and non-human life by the colonial epistemologies do not exist and a flat ontology prevails. 104 The first image shows a scavenger collecting food in a scoop-like structure, and the second image shows a deer eating out of the same structure at night. The importance of this discourse of fluid existence is not about the recipient of the food gathered by the scavenger—themselves or the deer—but rather that it does not matter. Animals eating out of human stores of food is a common occurence, but the difference here is that food is not possession and cannot be claimed. The act of gathering the food does not entitle the gatherer to it, and in this world, therefore, concepts of possession and exceptionalism—stealing, thievery, property—do not exist. This applies to all aspects of their existence—when no hierarchy exists, property and possesion become empty concepts.

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103. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 151 Utopia in this thesis is a reference to Munoz’s discussions of Concrete Utopias as opposed to Abstract Utopias—straight time is rejected and a queer aesthetic is used to understand new ways of being. 104.. Selina Springett, “Going Deeper or Flatter: Connecting Deep Mapping, Flat Ontologies and the Democratizing of Knowledge,” Humanities 4, no. 4 (2015): pp. 623-636, https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040623.