What if a queer communal “we”-feeling instead of a “me”-feeling could be our key in order to find our way to our true “me” and survive

One thing that really stuck in my head from Tara Houska’s text is the principle of living a “we”- instead of a “me”-life. As Houska describes, Western Society mostly lives in a world of individualism that mostly operates on “me” instead of “we”, also regarding the climate movements (214). Houska also offers options on how to reconnect with the “we”, namely by returning to humility, recognizing our fragility and our role in the wider, interconnected net of nature, including empathy, courage and respect (218).

I think queer communities hold the power to reconnect us with each other and create a “we”-feeling instead of operating as “me”-individuals. Further, I think that by experiencing and living a “we”-life, we can reclaim our true individual self, a “me” that many queer people had to lose on the way or hide due to the expectations and norms society presses us into.

As we talked about in one of our class discussions, being together and having a community (the “we”) can help us reclaiming our bodies (and therefore finding ourselves, the “me”). This can also be seen in Brokeback Mountain, where Ennis and Jack were able to use the mountain as their safe space where they could simply exist. For short periods of time, they were able to form a “we”, even though they never verbalized it, connecting their bodies where words have failed them, overcoming the restriction of not being able to form a personal connection (a “we”) that society imposes upon them. On page 17, Proulx writes “As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall”. I interpreted this as the double-meaning of on one side slowly starting to “fall” for Jack, and on the other hand falling out of the “normal picture” he was trying to uphold of himself “down there” (in town). Some aspect about him seems to have changed on that mountain, and while in the safe space of the mountains it didn’t matter, it does seem to matter “down there” in the real world, where society and its expectations are portrayed on Ennis.

I know these are two very different situations, but I can relate to that feeling of coming “back to reality” after you had a break/ an escape from it by temporarily moving to another place. Especially the aspect of having changed personally while being gone and the unsureness of how to fit back into the “old” world is something I experienced before. Whenever I come back from college to my parents’ house, I struggle with who I am, because I have changed so much regarding my identity and became more open and proud of who I am at college, but once I am back home I struggle to implement these aspects of “me” and instead I tend to slide back into old patterns and “my old role”. It sometimes feels as if I get to “reinvent” myself and “play a new role” whenever I start at a new place, but then once I’m back “home” I have those many fragments of “me”, different roles, and it’s incredibly tough to combine them.

I think having that “we”-feeling of community might support me in ultimately finding the real and “full” “me”-feeling as well, instead of trying desperately to puzzle all those different fragments of “me” that I have collected over the years together. If I had a “we”-community around me that supports me, there would be no need for different versions of “me” (each version trying to conform to the picture the respective person has of me) which would result in the true and real “me” being able to finally become “me” because the pressure of conformity to things that are not mutually conformable would be gone. This is why I think that we first need a communal “we”-feeling instead of a “me”-feeling in order to find our way to our true “me” and survive.

Stones and Heat

The metaphor of stones and heat recurs throughout the chapter “Stones in my pockets, stones in my heart” by Eli Clare. He talks about how not aligning with the identity he was “stamped” with as well as the damage and violence that resulted from the ableist, homo- and transphobic perceptions of others that did not match his internal sense of self stole his body from him, leaving him with the stones in his heart and his pocket as the only home he had left. Throughout the chapter, he repeatedly asks “how do I write not about the stones, but about the heat itself”.

I would argue that, in order to reach and write about the heat and go beneath the skin, we cannot ignore the stones but have to face and embrace them. The stones, resulting from the abuse and violence based on the marginalized aspects of identity function like a mask or a protective shell to assure Clare’s survival, they are a refuge home for him since his body was stolen from him. I think that to get back to the “heat”, i.e., to the passion and true, raw self, lying beneath the stones, we have to carefully dismantle and work through the stones and the pain that is stored in them. That is because by confronting them, we can change the narrative and reclaim power about our own story as well as reclaiming our own identity and multi-facetity of our identity.

Many people who belong to a marginalized group encounter their identity being reduced to that one aspect of experienced violence when in fact we all consist of countless aspects resulting in complex, multifaceted identities. The process of “facing” and “observing” the stones helps us to overcome the idea that violence is the definer of our identity, that our identity equals our experienced abuse, like we talked in class.

I tried to combine the description of being queer feeling like a loss of home in Clare’s “Losing home” with his proposal in “the mountain” that our body as a home has to be understood as not singular and as something that can be reclaimed, and connect these two to the liberating view of “queer” being able to represent possibilities, as Sedgwick proposes in her text “Queer and Now”. Thereby, it becomes visible how reclaiming our queerness and embracing our stones can help us overcome the feeling of loss of home and help us to “climb” the stones we have to deal with in life, so that ultimately we are able to reach the heat again that is lying beneath the surface of our skin.

What is Queer?

“If we think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (310)” (Halberstam, 1).

My first thought is Sedgwick’s Tendencies, specifically Sedgwick’s definition of queer, as well as the exercise we did on the first day of class of what queer means. Sedgwick describes queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick, 8). While Sedgwick is referring to queer as elements of sexuality or family that differs from the “list” society has made as acceptable; Halberstam define queerness as abnormalities or as something differs from the norm, but not just family and sexual identity but everything, like time and space. Their core definition is similar, not sticking to the norm or the status quo in whatever way (this also reminds me of the song “Stick to the Status Quo” from the first High School Musical). What is truly interesting is that on the first day of class before we read anything, we talked about what does queer mean. We used many words and phrases to describe this word, including one particular phrase, something different than “cis”. In Sedgwick’s Tendencies, she has two lists that describe elements that makeup, in the first list, what a family is, and sexual identity in the second list. The elements listed are what we would consider being “cis”, just a bit fancier.

My second thought is about the quote from Friendship as a Way of Life that Halbustam uses, “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex”. This is interesting because a lot of people use words like “lifestyle” and “choice” when talking about homosexuality. In their minds, people are making the conscious decision to stray from the list of what is acceptable. That these people are more afraid of their lives being upturned than of how a couple or group likes to have sex. If people start turning away from what is “right” and “acceptable” then what does that mean for the people that have structured their lives around it. We see this is Lisa Dordal’s Mosaic of the Dark in the poem Intersection, “Have you ever thought you might be… – / …It wasn’t an option, you said. / Your head never turning, both of us looking straight…” (Dordal, 11). Dordal’s mother tells us in this snippet that being anything other than a heterosexual woman, that being attracted to anyone other than a man was not possible. What is more terrifying, two people of the same sex having sex? Or the timeline people are brainwashed into believing is the only is not the only way?

Born to Die

What is the point of movement when movement indicates life and life indicates hope?  I have neither life nor hope.  Better than to fall in with the crumbling wainscot, to settle with the dust and be drawn up into someone’s nostrils.  Daily we breathe the dead” (108)

Perhaps the most obvious syntactical choice in this passage is the structure of the first sentence.  The “x begets y begets z” form instantly implies unflagging forward motion. Word choices such as “fall” and “drawn up” conjure the idea of a cycle, and the narrator’s repetition of words such as “life” and “dead” lead me to believe that ze is referring to the circle of life.  To live, we must breathe.  However, the narrator makes the point that the air we breathe, the key to life as many would argue, consists of the dead.  That image in and of itself it wonderfully poetic.

While my explication of the passage could end there, with that dark yet beautiful image, I think that it connects really well to Judith Halberstam’s piece called “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.”  Halberstam introduces to us the idea of “queer time” (1).  The heteronormative timeline is generally considered to play out as follows: birth, school, job, spouse, kids, retirement, and finally death.  However, Halberstam poses the idea of “queer time” that breaks this timeline, as it focuses on “other logics of location, movement, and identification” rather than “reproduction” (1).  The narrator actually addresses this idea in a passage soon after the one I chose to analyze, listing the “characteristics of living things” that she was taught in school.  In fact, ze goes on to say, “I don’t want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new” (108).

Halberstam’s idea of “queer time” allows us to eliminate reproduction from the list of “characteristics of living things” that exacerbate the narrator (108).  In fact, of all the aspects of life that “queer time” allows us to move around or eliminate, birth and death are the only two constants.  We will all be born, and our lives will all push forward until we die, our dust mixing into the atmosphere to sustain the new life to come.  Beyond that, it is fair to say that nothing else is constant.  We our slaves to our own desires, but our own desires are just that; our own.  Just as desires vary from person to person, so should the characteristics and timelines of our lives.   Perhaps if the narrator was able to read some of Halberstam’s work, ze would struggle less with how zir own wants and desires don’t fit into the supposed timeline we’re all supposed to follow.