What do I mean when I say Queer?
In response to Bojana Cvejic; thank you for challenging me.
[Queerness] enacts this refusal that can’t be recognised by the system that is refusing it. - Dr. Leigh M. Johnson, The Ethics of Refusal (Hotel Bar Sessions)
Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. - George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
During the interview for KHiO’s (Oslo National Academy of the Arts) Master’s in Choreography Programme, Bojana Cevjic asked me to define “Queer”; how I related to it as a practice, and what I meant when I continuously used the word to describe to my work. In the moment I struggled to answer, in part because it is a huge and possibly impossible question, and in part because she, who is both myth and person in the niche world of dance academia, was looking at me with such quizzical intensity as to be almost entirely disarming. It was exhilarating, and frustrating, and in answering her I fell short. The following text is an attempt to fall shorter.
The question of definitions and understandings has been a long standing point of resistance in the queer conversation. As Cvejic quoted in her Dansens Hus lecture series (Dramaturgy Seminars 2023 - 2025) “we work with the material that resists us” (Huillet and Straub). And so much of my work, in writing, choreography, pedagogy, and dance practice, has been about confronting the seemingly impossible contradictions of “defining queerness”, or, maybe more usefully, locating it.
This text will not define or contest the practical or bureaucratic notions of queerness; the systematised understandings of queer peoples, useful at least in part as a site of domination under surveillance capital, but also in forms of resistant struggles. This politics, the politics of recognition, is well discussed and valiantly fought for, but its inherentness to queer politics is not as concrete as has been often imagined.
The difficult thing when talking about queerness is that, as stated by the above quote, queerness, and the refusal it enacts, cannot be ignored by the systems of domination that wish to control it. Structural language fails to capture the queer because it must contend with its own limits in order to do so, must acknowledge that life is not contained within discreet linguistic objects–the Queer is beyond such discursive language.
Queerness, instead, can be broadly located in relation to things against which it contends. One site of this contention is against linguistic and categorical understandings, but the major and most obvious sites of Queer contention arise in the questions of gender and sexual relations. (In fact, as I begin to understand Derrida’s deconstructionist approaches, I could label Queerness as “the auto-deconstruction of gender and sexual relations, and there associated sociological terrain.” However, I am not an expert in deconstruction or Derrida, so I will save such tentative labelling for the safety of the parentheses.) This relationship, between normative ideations of bodily expression and relation and the disruptive forces of queerness begins to locate something of the particulars of the queer politic I am interested in.
In situating queerness in contention (and with some stake in gender and sexual politics) the terrain quickly unfurls. If there are dykes who date men, men who are also women, and people who do not fit into any discreet category of definition, then we must begin to approach each situation with a more particular attentiveness. Our academic and discursive tools must adapt to meet the fluidity of this situation, or otherwise be left floundering and incomplete. What exactly is a man, if, beyond the questions of transness, one applies the lens of race, ethnicity, disability, economic status or any other myriad interlocking factors? And how does one approach someone through the embodied knowledge this contestation presents?
In the interview, Cvejic languaged this as a non/anti-judgemental politics. This is a fair, but not entirely accurate description of what I am circling, in heavy part influenced by the inadequacy of my momentary response. Indeed, the desire for a liberated relationship to others—liberated meaning not controlled (without resistance) by hegemonic or normative standards of being—is paramount to a queer politics. However Queerness is not simply “allowing things to be as they are / not judging people for what they do”. There is an inherently critical lens to Queerness, it is an applied social practice, one that we must continuously engage in. Queerness, being situational and relational, arising in conflict to expectations and norms, does not have a particular end point, one does not “finish” the work of Queerness.
My approach to queerness is heavily influenced by my relationship to anarchism, and in many ways the words have become synonymous to me. Justin Muller’s description of anarchism as “a cluster of ideologies, movements and theories that share a family resemblance to each other, rather than to a largely enclosed and holistic system of thought … like Marxism” inspires my understanding of queerness as, in turn, a family of ideas that relate, contrast, conflict, and deepen one another. That queerness and anarchism contain within them a natural plurality of possibilities feeds both the academically indecipherable nature of the pair, and their importance in developing understandings of social and political relationships ‘as they are’. Queerness will always be an ‘on the ground’ object, one resistant to forms of coercion and concretisation, because it aims to encompass the entire breadth of human expression.
Jesse Cohn writes “[attempts] to so tightly control meanings as to choke off alternative meanings … reintroduc[e] authoritarianism into the heart of anti-authoritarian thought and practice.” Queerness, which by its nature emerged on the edge of social and cultural norms, will always resist this fascistic approach to understanding, as the anarchist will and must.
Points of Reference and Recommendation:
Against Prefiguration: An Anarchist Iconoclasm, Frankie Hines
The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
Talking to Sunniva Moen Rørvik, Ulf Nilseng, Anders Engebretsen, and potentially Per Roar
The Southern Reach Quartet, Jeff VanderMeer
All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks
A True Story, 71Bodies/Daniel Mariblanca
The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam
Staying with the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway
Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day? / Bashtaalak sa'at, Mohammad Shawky Hassan