Tag: queer

519: “You Don’t Know” (Jack Halberstam)

                “You don’t know what your child will be like when they grow up. Just as you don’t know what profession they will have, you probably shouldn’t know what form their social intimacies will take. Maybe they’ll have many friends and date many people. Maybe they’ll be single their whole life. Maybe they’ll join a commune. But the idea that we already know in advance exactly how their life will play out after the age of 23 tames the wild potential of human existence and human complexity.” -Jack Halberstam, in this wonderful interview

                Sometimes—often—I’m sad that so many of my loved ones are in so many different places. Doing so many different things. But today I was outside, seeing all these plants I don’t know growing together and it’s beautiful. With so much up in the air and unknown, I’m trying to listen to Halberstam. To swerve to a kind of open unknowing, a kind of context, in which unpredictability can blossom into wondrous gardens of possibility. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s lovely.
                In the interview Halberstam thinks about “the terms under which unpredictability can thrive.” This isn’t about an individual epiphany. This is looking for social forms that celebrate and support the unpredictable, that make space for different ways that someone might walk. I think about what those forms might be. I think about food systems. Housing systems. Healthcare systems. Education systems. Resistance networks. Mutual aid networks. I think about all the systems that insist they do know what life will look like in fifty years, and how they’re wrong again and again and again. Obviously. Hilariously. Crushingly. With so much up in the air and unknown, I want to feel the wild as beautiful and bursting with life. As it is.

by Azlan

506: “Mi Vida Les Agobia” (Alaska y Dinarama)

“Mi vida les agobia
¿Por qué será?”
[My life overwhelms them—
And why is that?]
                -Alaska y Dinarama, “A Quien Le Importa”

                My love and I have been watching La Casa de las Flores (The House of Flowers), mostly because it’s so much wild fun, and so good to lie down and snuggle at the end of the day. Last night the third episode finished with my favorite scene so far. A young man coming out to his family takes advice from a queer performer, and so sings his coming out. But (as his sisters remind us, when he stands up to start) he’s no singer. The show’s filming blends from the awkward, uncertain beginning of his song to a color-washed version of the same performance, the young man shifting from hesitating to alight. From awkward to alive. And then we go back to the first, reserved version. The bright version was “in his head,” you might say. (In that version both his parents are joyful, supportive). Or maybe we were seeing for a little while with our hearts and our hopes and our delights.
                I love when art blends these two: a world “a camera might capture,” you could say (though it’s not that simple), and a world inside. Blends them, and shows how interconnected they are. Last year I learned that broadleaf plantains are edible, and so these days I walk around the neighborhood, and where before I saw weeds, weeds, weeds, I see foods, salads, delights.

by Azlan

499: “Frivolous, Promiscuous, and Irrelevant” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

                I’m writing a book for my PhD dissertation. I know, I know, but I couldn’t fit in the bird bath (it looks so fun!) and you have to do something. So earlier today I’m at a cafe with my advisor, chatting about my constantly changing book ideas. She laughed at me. I would laugh at me. What this book is and what it’s about has been changing week to week. We laugh together, and she says, “Well, what book do you want it to be like?”
                And I think about Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. 
                Now I’m not going to write anything like The Queer Art of Failure. For one thing, Halberstam is brilliant. For another my pages tend to have more personal story stuff than that book. But I did tell my advisor, You know, I wish what I was writing was funnier. 
                Since then I’ve been thinking about why my pages aren’t funnier. And I could say, well, the book’s about difficult things, and that’s true, but so is Halberstam’s. And Halberstam’s is funny as me trying to think my way out of overthinking. (By which I mean, very). I think part of the seriousness in my pages is that I’ve bought into exactly what Halberstam is warning against, what they’re so gleefully refusing: this idea that I want to be a success, and I know what that means, and so I’ll go along the paths I’m supposed to until someone severe and somber says, “Yes. Look what hath you wrought.” And that’s rot. Which is to say: this week I looked at someone who’d made their neck and chin look like a burger. This week I showed that to my friend, and now to you. This week my friend and I talked about her work, which means we talked about how our medical systems fail to support her and her relatives. And we got angry. And we got sad. And we laughed, too, because in person that’s easier, even with the angry and sad, and I think laughter can be pavement for the detours that lead to where we hope we’re headed.

by Azlan

463: “Research is my saving grace” (Shelby Criswell)

                “Research is my saving grace, and it led me to every person who inspires me in this book.” -Shelby Criswell, Queer as all Get Out: 10 People Who’ve Inspired Me

                Sometimes I think about the many different things research can be.
                Most of the undergraduate students I teach don’t like “it.” Research papers feel like a threat. Or maybe I’m projecting, because for me, “research papers” often felt like a threat. There was a right way to do it, though people wouldn’t tell you—they’d just tell you what you did wrong. There was a place you were supposed to find in the pile of encyclopedias, library books, search engines, online journal databases. It was like trying to find the right grain of sand on the beach.
                In my classes I’ve started playing two games. The first is a common wikipedia game, the one where you start with some page (this one, for instance) and try to get to a common page (this one, for instance) in as few clicks as possible. (Or as quickly as possible). Then you can play around by talking to people about the different “paths” people took through information. The second is starting with some random page and then clicking along until you find your way to something that interests you. I like hearing people describe their experiences with these two games. Some people say the first is fun, because someone wins: there’s a goal, a finish line, and in a group someone does it the fastest. That gives the game momentum. Some people say the second is fun because there isn’t a goal, a finish line, and in a group no one has to do it the fastest. I get both. And I wonder about what I mean by research, or rather, the many things I could mean, and all the different ways to walk into or excavate or link or challenge or weave together or build with or sing along to the so many ideas washing around us. 
                So it’s fun to stumble across perspectives like Shelby Criswell’s. There are plenty of times I still don’t like “research.” Times I feel intimidated by it, or frustrated by what voices the research-assigner counts as “legitimate” or not, or realize I’m more interested in some question besides the one I’m “supposed” to be focused on. And sometimes I love it. Or even find my way to love through it.

by Azlan

458: “There Will Be A Name” (Marcelo Hernandez Castillo)

                “Because the bird flew before / there was a word / for flight / years from now / there will be a name / for what you and I are doing.”
                -Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, from “Cenzóntle,” Queer Poets of Color

                The birds have been singing in my neighborhood, and I love it. And I know, yes, that’s the kind of thing that people say is cliché—the birds are singing—but it’s delightful to let myself be delighted with all these things that are sometimes called clichés.
                Marcelo Hernandez Castillo helps me here. I love how Castillo (and poetry, and love, and Castillo’s loving poetry) plays back and forth with the meaning of things, and for me, the rhythm of that play washes me at least two different ways. There is the idea I read: how there was flight before the word “flight,” how what we do will become a linguistic possibility because we’ve done it. What you and I are doing becomes a word, a thing we can say. We name we’ve taken up to live with.
                And another way. I can say “the birds are singing,” that old cliché, but the cliché isn’t the specific birds who are right now outside my window. The birds who might be the same ones who sang to my friend and I yesterday evening, as we lay in the grass outside. Those good neighbors. Or maybe they’re new birds, new neighbors. And though I say “the grass outside” don’t think it was only grass, or don’t think grass is simple (a mistake I sometimes make), because as we lay there we noticed so many different leaves, so many different shades of green, so many growing joys in what I could simply call a “field.” There is so much more abundance, so much more life, than my simple namings. And while there will be a name for what we do, another side of that same thought, for me, is that the name for what we do will be part of our doing—maybe a celebration of it, or a reminder, or an invitation—without being all of our doing. Without being the birds or the songs that they’re singing. Which is lovely, isn’t it?

by Azlan