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QUEER EVERYDAY LIFE, AESTHETICS, AND POSSIBILITIES WITHIN SPACES OF RETREAT
by
SARAH LINDSEY BECK
BA, Humboldt State University, 2010
BA, University of New Mexico, 2012
MA, University of New Mexico, 2014
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication 2019
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This thesis entitled: Queer Everyday Life, Aesthetics, and Possibilities Within Spaces of Retreat written by Sarah Lindsey Beck has been approved for the Department of Communication
______Peter Simonson
______Laurie Gries
______Lisa Flores
______Ted Striphas
______Emmanuel David
Date______
The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline
IRB Protocol #18-0244.
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ABSTRACT
Beck, Sarah Lindsey (Ph.D.,Communication)
Queer Everyday Life, Aesthetics, and Possibilities Within Spaces of Retreat
Dissertation directed by Professors Peter Simonson and Laurie Gries
This dissertation examines how queer communities use spaces of retreat as a means of thriving and seeks to better understand how queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks engage with mundane, everyday existences. As a methodology I place rhetorical theorizing
(specifically queer rhetoric, critical rhetoric, and neo-sophistic theorizing) into conversation with scholarship on queer worldmaking and on everyday life, with a particular on focus on the inventive potential for building a better future. Additionally, I use rhetorical field methods, visual ethnography, and arts/practice-based field methods, all which demand that critics’ bodies embed themselves into the spaces of rhetorical action and invention and participate in the act of co- creation with their subjects.
I engage with three unique yet interrelated sites: A-Camp, a queer adult summer camp, the kitchens of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks, and digital photographic archives of everyday experiences. The first site, A-Camp, through a reprieve from the pressures of everyday responsibilities and hardships, offers an alternative model, I argue for more just and humane everyday existences and enables participants to engage worldbuilding strategies. I forward the concept of utopic rehearsal—to describe the embodied enactment of a possible alternative future as a means of addressing a current political and social moment—as a means of enabling participants to enact more just and humane worlds. My engagement with queer kitchens asks what possibilities arise when queer individuals embrace of domesticity and the everyday world. I propose an aesthetics of everyday life as a means of examining the productive potential iv of homonormative enactments within domestic spaces. The final site, digital archives, examines the power that digital queer archives have in combating symbolic annihilation and contributing to feelings of representational belonging. I take a performative orientation to archival research, by which entails critics co-producing archival materials alongside the communities they work with. I conclude that spaces of queer retreat and everyday life can be an invaluable resource for building more humane and compassionate worlds where individuals feel seen, valued, and exist comfortably within the social world.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to many people who helped not only make the concept of this project possible, but who provided much needed support and guidance throughout the process.
First, I would like to thank the community of queer women, trans, and gender non- binary/conforming folks who allowed me into their homes, made time for phone calls, and who allowed me to share space with them at A-Camp. Without the vulnerability and generosity of these individuals, this project would not have been as successful. I am honored that they allowed their lives and experiences to be part of my work.
Thank you to my advisors Laurie Gries and Pete Simonson. Both were unwavering in their support and commitment to me and this project. They provided compassionate mentorship as I made my way through this endeavor. I am especially grateful for their patience, invaluable edits and feedback on countless drafts, pushing me intellectually, holding me accountable, and believing in me, even when I found it hard to believe in myself. I am incredibly grateful and fortunate to have them as mentors on this journey.
This dissertation also would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my doctoral committee: Lisa Flores, Ted Striphas, and Emmanuel David. Not only did they provide vital input during the process of writing this dissertation, the discussions and projects which originated in their seminars were fundamental to the development of this project.
Special thanks to the friends I made during my time at CU Boulder, Blake Hallinan,
Rebecca Rice, Nathan Bedsole, and Elyse Janish, who provided encouragement, support, humor, comradery, and accountability. I am extremely grateful that we were together on this intellectual excursion together. I would also like to thank Reslie Cortes, my first and only academic life vi mate, who began this journey with me during our time together in New Mexico, and who has provided compassion, support, and wisdom during over the last seven years.
My mom, Jan Beck, was essential in my ability to complete this dissertation. She provided hours of emotional support (and cute animal pictures) and never stopped believing in my ability to be successful in this endeavor. My dad, Don Beck, sister Shannon Rock, and brother-in-law Nick Rock, also provided support, reality checks, and humor during this process.
Finally, I would like to thank my cat, and animal familiar, Sheldon. I couldn’t have asked for a better grad school cat and his presence was life giving at many points over the last four years. vii
Table of Contents
Introduction: Possibilities of Queer Spaces of Retreat ...... 1 Chapter One: Theoretical Assumptions and Commitments ...... 14 Chapter Two: Research Methods ...... 35 Chapter Three: Utopic Rehearsal: Embodying and Imagining Possible Futures at A-Camp ...... 54 Chapter Four: Kitchens and a Queer Aesthetic of Everyday Life ...... 98 Chapter Five: Doing Archival Criticism: Performative Approaches to Archives of Queer Ordinaries ...... 139 Conclusion ...... 167 References ...... 182 Appendix A: Interview Guides ...... 196
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FIGURES
Figure 1: The main A-Camp auditorium and performance area featuring banners stating: “Be Right Here” and “Be Real Queer” ...... 61 Figure 2: View of the Ojai, CA A-Camp grounds from the dining hall ...... 62 Figure 3: Community bulletin board at the 2019 camp ...... 78 Figure 4: The A-Camp pool at the Ojai, CA location ...... 85 Figure 5: Trans, bisexual, and asexual flags hanging outside of a cabin ...... 87 Figure 6: Picture of my first kitchen pulled from my Facebook page ...... 99 Figure 7: Picture of my first kitchen pulled from my Facebook page ...... 99 Figure 8: Sliced grapefruit on the counter of my first Denver apartment ...... 100 Figure 9: A photo of my kitchen table taken from my Instagram account. The text accompanying this photo stated, "I have zero motivation to leave the kitchen table and join the real world today." ...... 100 Figure 10: My current kitchen not long after I moved in...... 102 Figure 11: Photo of refrigerator taken during fieldwork ...... 119 Figure 12: Photo of refrigerator taken during fieldwork ...... 120 Figure 13: “Protect Trans Kids” postcard hanging on refrigerator ...... 121 Figure 14: Vegan cookbooks hanging on a kitchen wall encountered during fieldwork ...... 122 Figure 15: Interview participant cutting their partner’s hair in the kitchen ...... 123 Figure 16: An interview participant standing in her kitchen ...... 123 Figure 17: Interview participants fixing coffee ...... 125 Figure 18: A refrigerator covered in take-out menus, coupons, wedding invitations, and magnets ...... 125 Figure 19: A Kitchen Aide found in an interview participant’s kitchen ...... 133 Figure 20: Screen shot of the “Queering the Kitchen” gallery ...... 154 Figure 21: An attempt to capture myself and my kitchen that ultimately was not submitted for the gallery ...... 155 Figure 22: A second attempt to capture myself and my kitchen that ultimately was not submitted for the gallery ...... 155
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Introduction Possibilities of Queer Spaces of Retreat
It seems fitting that I started the fieldwork portion of this project driving from Colorado to my childhood home in New Mexico. The drive had become almost effortless as I have driven it countless times since moving to Colorado. The trip was about seven hours, through small towns and endless grazing lands, and it ultimately deposited me in the mountains of the New
Mexico high desert that still feels so familiar even though I have not called this specific place home for almost a decade now. I’m incredibly lucky that the home I grew up in still acts as a space where I can retreat from the pressures of my everyday life and experience relief and care, which is not the case for many queer individuals. Ultimately, this project is about these sensations—the ability to take a breath, retreat, ground and orient oneself. In order to examine this sensation, I turn to literal and figurative home spaces where queer individuals are accepted without question.
Queer Ordinaries and Everyday Precarity
I originally came to this project with the goal of examining what I have labeled “queer ordinaries” or the everyday and mundane existences of queer people. During my studies, I have become somewhat obsessed with a Sara Ahmed (2017) quote in which she states: “Sometimes you have to battle for an ordinary. When you have to battle for an ordinary, when battling becomes ordinary, the ordinary is what you lose” (217). This quote speaks to the pressures of living in a world that chips away at you bit by bit; how this constant chipping, this constant fighting for the right to exist makes this fighting seem so normal that it takes on invisible qualities. I was and still am deeply devoted to the idea that queer people—particularly queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks—have the right to an ordinary, that we deserve 2 to carve out spaces for ourselves where we can reach our fullest expressions of ourselves and take a break from the heteropatriarchal pressures that are often a persistent hot breath on the backs of our necks, even when we are in spaces aiming to be queer-friendly.1
Queerness is often the stuff of trauma, death, silence, loss, shame, and hiding, which results in queer life becoming synonymous with an unhappy life. Not only do queer individuals and communities become alienated from happiness and an ordinary, but their very survival and recognition are frequently dependent on fighting—often literally—for their lives (Ahmed, 2011).
The sense of urgency and fight has become especially heightened in our current political climate, where differences such as race, gender identity and expression, sexuality, class, religious affiliations, and immigration status seem to have taken on more precarity since the 2016 election.2 It has been argued that precarity has become a condition for all who live in the world of post-modernity (due to the conditions of capitalism and state apparatuses); precarity is hardly an extraordinary circumstance, rather, it is an everyday occurrence (Musser, 2017). However, despite what seems like the universalization of precarity under capitalism, it is important to remember that we don’t all experience precarity to the same degree; precarity may have become a condition of human life under capitalism, but it is not distributed equally. Someone holding one or more marginalized identities will experience a heightened sense of precarity (Nyong’o, 2013).
For example, a white, middle-upper class, cis-gender, straight, man will feel the precariousness less than a trans woman of color whose very personhood is up for debate.
1 An example is Eves’ (2004) explanation of how the presence of heterosexual women in the bathrooms of lesbian spaces renders them no longer safe. 2 Tyburczy (2017) notes that while queer and other marginalized bodies have always faced precarity in their day to day lives, the 2016 election has prompted an urgent need to return to discussions around daily precarity. 3
Despite the precarity, loss, and abjection that queer women, trans, and gender non- conforming folks face, Luciano and Chen (2015) argue that queer thought and invention can be born through the “desire to persist in the face of precarity” (193). Persisting in a world where, as
Lorde (2007) has observed, many marginalized communities were “never meant to survive” (42) is something that should be both recognized and celebrated. Queerness, while often presented as something rooted in shame, failure, and misery, has another side, one that is full of camp, creativity, and yes sometimes even glitter. While shame, violence, and desperation might draw queer communities together, it is the community and shared experience of the heteropatriarchy that gives rise to alternative ways of existing and at times thriving in the world. This thriving is rooted in not only uncovering oppression but in coming together as a community to create alternatives. “To thrive, beyond surviving…requires sustained attention to exposing the work of oppression while attending to creating collective alternatives rooted in shared identities and cultures” (Greteman, 2018, 8). Therefore, this dissertation casts its gaze towards how queer communities are finding ways to thrive in the face of precarity.
This desire to thrive brings to fruition events and spaces where queer individuals and communities are not only carving out a life for themselves but experimenting with new and different modes of being and holding space for each other. I myself have been fortunate to experience such a community as both a queer woman and a scholar. In May of 2017, I found myself in an unfamiliar Wisconsin airport with a duffle bag (that I would later discover was under packed) and a backpack thrown over my shoulder. I was wearing an outfit (black skinny jeans, black T-shirt, green and black oversized flannel unbuttoned, and a floppy grey beanie) that to an outsider wouldn’t seem like much, but which had been carefully curated. My hair was freshly dyed a shade of pinkish-purple, and I was wearing more black eyeliner than I normally 4 wear for travel. I was a mixture of nervous and excited as I descended the escalator and made my way towards a group who I would be building a community with for the next five days.
As soon as I went down the escalator and made my way towards the baggage claim, I saw them: a group of strangers who looked familiar although we had never met. In a puddle on the floor and spread out across airport chairs were more shaved heads, flannel, beanies, unnatural hair color, facial piercings, denim vests, and political buttons and patches than I had ever seen in one place. Together we boarded school buses and made a stop at a local Walmart. Our group did not blend into the Midwestern aesthetic that we had found ourselves in as we fanned out across the snack and drink aisles. On my way out, I was stopped by two women working in the optometry department. In a slightly sheepish tone, one inquired about who we were because busses of our group had been pouring into the store all afternoon and “things like this don’t happen here.” Although she was referring to the busloads of queer people roaming the aisles of the store, her proclamation that things like this don’t just happen on a daily base was on point. It is not every day that queer individuals have the opportunity to create a community and sanctuary away from the pressures of a heteronormative world.
Later that night I sat on a bench in a crowded auditorium of the Jewish summer camp hosting us. The area around me was dark, and my body was pressed between two people who I had met that evening but were still essentially strangers. The room had been buzzing with anticipation and jitters, resembling the first day of school. There was a stage at the front with a bright spotlight light illuminating the space. What set this space apart, was that we were not gathered there merely for a workshop, reading, or performance; this was opening night of, A-
Camp, a camp/retreat devoted to queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks who were looking to “take a break” from the heteropatriarchy, make connections, and experience a 5 freedom that the “real world” doesn’t always allow when the cards you are dealt contain marginalized identities. As the camp’s founder welcomed us to the five-day-long event, she recapped the year we had all just lived through (the 2016 election and the early days of a Trump presidency where most of us felt like our personhood was teetering on an edge). Towards the end of her speech, the director led the crowd in a chant, repeating over and over “we deserve this.”
The crowd shouted her words back at her, casting a spell that had me believing that yes, I was worthy of such a space. A place where we can experience an everyday with some of the pressures of our daily lives removed, to imagine what existing in a world where the identities we hold are valid, cherished, and encouraged. Even though I was there in part to conduct research, I felt re-invigorated to look for the places of retreat where we can care for ourselves and the communities that we hold close.
Project Description and Research Questions
As a scholar invested in spaces of queer retreat and queer ordinaries, this experience turned out to be a productive line of inquiry, but it was not the only site of study for this project.
I cast my gaze toward multiple, separate but related sites in order to examine how the mundane and everyday play out in the lives of queer women and gender non-conforming folks. As the dissertation unfolds, first, I examine A-Camp, a departure from the everyday, which provides spaces for queer bodies to take a breath and imagine what mundane, ordinary existences might look and feel like and how we can translate those lessons into a world-building project. Second, I turn to the kitchens of queer women and gender non-conforming folks. While A-Camp is a break from the pressures of the everyday, the kitchens and the queer humans who inhabit them offer an opportunity to examine how the mundane ordinary can be embraced as a resource for resistive strategies. Third, I look to digital archives that capture mundane moments of queer existence. 6
These archives not only document everyday experiences but due to technology can be accessed from anywhere, making it possible for individuals to integrate these archives in their day-to-day lives. They have the potential to provide their own spaces of retreat because they offer a sense of refuge to those who feel that they don’t see themselves reflected in other forms of representation.
Overall, I am curious about how these spaces come into being, how the performances by queer women impact the existence of these spaces, and how these spaces enable alternative or creative means of building livable lives.
This project focuses on these specific sites in order to better understand how queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks engage with mundane, everyday existence in the face of precarity and hetero-patriarchal pressures. As such, my broad research questions entail:
How do communities of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks communicatively come together to co-create and enable new possibilities? How do everyday routines and normative notions of spaces provide resources for creativity? And how do spaces of retreat enable modes of queer worldmaking? In order to answer these questions, I use rhetorical field methods, visual ethnography, and arts/practice-based field methods, all which demand that critics’ bodies embed themselves into the spaces of rhetorical action and invention and participate in the act of co-creation with their subjects.
Sites of Analysis
My project is deeply concerned with the power of care and how it enables vulnerability, support, compassion, and affirmation that have the ability to prompt new ways of being in the world. Therefore, the broad object of study for my project can be characterized as spaces of queer retreat. Specifically, I am curious about spaces where queer women and gender non- conforming folks come together in order to create worlds that are separate from the pressures, 7 violences, and constraints of the heteropatriarchal world. To do this I engage with A-Camp, a queer adult summer camp, and the kitchens of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. These spaces are queer not just in terms of who their occupants are, but also in terms of how the space is constructed and used. Halberstam (2005) defines queer space as “placemaking practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage as well as describing the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics” (6). These spaces are needed in order for queer bodies to become secure and reoriented. The “homes” that queer bodies construct for themselves become spaces of refuge where disoriented bodies can withdraw in the face of a relentlessly straight world.
A-Camp
A-Camp is an adult summer camp hosted by Autostraddle, a publication by and for queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. The five-day camp is self-described as a
“curated conference/camp/retreat combo” with activities and workshops ranging from the serious
(e.g. queer activism, community care, and family building) to the recreational (e.g. arts and crafts such as tie-dying, tennis and soccer matches, and dipping into NSFW (not suitable for work) topics such as dildo making and sex drives. Participants share a cabin with 15-20 other people, sleep in bunk beds, attend campfires, dance into the morning hours at the in-house night club, and attend talks and performances by invited guests. The range of activities allows campers to curate their experiences to fit their needs, with some choosing to take their time at camp to completely let go and let their inner child run free, while others choose to balance the fun with more serious workshops. Regardless of how campers choose to curate their days at camp, they are guaranteed to spend the entire duration surrounded entirely by other queer bodies in what the camp argues is a queer normative environment. The camp promises a week where queer folks 8 can take a break from the relentless pressure of existing as a queer body in a patriarchal and heteronormative world. The camp directors ask that campers forget about the everyday pressures of their day-to-day lives and “be right here.”
Queer Kitchens
Kitchens offer an opportunity to rethink aspects of habitual uses of home and domestic spaces. Despite kitchens’ long history of feeding and nourishing—both in a material and metaphorical sense—not all bodies and identities are welcomed into the space. The cultural imagination has placed heterosexual, cis-gender mothers firmly within the kitchen, through their inclusion in cleaning supply commercials, blogs, cookbooks, and women’s magazines. Queer women are rarely included in these images of kitchen and domestic caretaking. Queerness and its articulations have been relegated to the bedroom (and the closet) when it is given a place within the home, while the kitchen has remained off-limits. However, when a queer body comes into contact with a kitchen, it enables possibilities for creative interpretations. In my research, then, I will explore how queer kitchens, especially, have the ability to become spaces of creative play, experimentation, and sites for contesting cultural norms and allowing queer objects to come into view (Elwood, 2000; Gorman-Murray, 2006; Young, 2012).
My engagement with queer kitchens involves both visual representations, as well as interviews and fieldwork inside the kitchens of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. First, I examine Autostraddle’s “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery. The gallery is a reader- submitted collection of photos of queer folks and their kitchens published in January 2017.
Inspired by the reactions of Autostraddle readers reacting to representations of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks in a mundane space, such as a kitchen, I decided to 9 conduct my own interviews and fieldwork in the kitchens of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks, which, like my other methods, I will explain more in the next chapter.
Digital Achieves of Queer Ordinaries
Inspired by visual ethnography and arts/practice-based research methods I photographed my interview subjects in their kitchens, resulting in an online, photographic archive titled
“Queering the Kitchen.” Digital archives, such as the ones that became objects of inquiry for my project, serve several important purposes. First, queer archives can restore lost queer voices to the historical record (see Morris, 2006; 2007). Archives have the ability to determine not only who is remembered, but how they are remembered (Rawson, 2018). Second, queer archives have the ability to counter symbolic annihilation, the absence of representation or under-representation of marginalized groups and experiences, in the present. Because archives have the ability to publicly circulate representations of queer lives, they can contribute to counteracting symbolic annihilation by enabling queer communities to see themselves reflected back at themselves
(Caswell et al., 2016).
“Queer in the Kitchen” and “Queering the Kitchen” can be conceptualized as archives of the everyday. In this context, the everyday can be conceptualized in several ways. First, the archives literally capture the spaces and performances of everyday activities, thus enabling the underrepresented depictions of queer individuals and the mundane aspects of their lives. Second, due to the ubiquity of internet access and digital technology, digital archives such as the galleries can be accessed from almost anywhere at any time, potentially rendering them a mundane activity. Traditional archives housed within brick and mortar institutions require setting aside time, traveling to a specific geographic location, and digging through files and stacks. Digital archives, however, can easily be integrated into the day-to-day lives of users. Finally, digital 10 archives open up participation to “everyday” people. Due to advances in technology, such as digital cameras, those without formal archival education can both create their own archives or contribute to existing archives (VanHaitsma, 2019).
Contributions
The dissertation builds upon and extends existing conversations in several ways. Overall, it makes an argument for how an engagement with everyday, mundane, queer lives can contribute to queer rhetorical scholarship. Queer rhetorical scholarship often casts its gaze towards the recovery of past voices, political activism, and tragedy. While this work is crucial to understanding queer lives and fighting for better futures, my own work examines that inventive potential that takes places within spaces of retreat and the realm of the everyday. Queer communities need spaces to relax, feel comfortable in their skin, build happy lives and feel represented if they are to have the energy and resources to take on the more public fights that queer rhetorical scholarship so often turns its attention to. My project also introduces original concepts such as utopic rehearsal, or the embodied enactment and imagination of possible futures as a response to precarious social and political contexts. Additionally, I offer a theory of queer aesthetics of everyday life, which is an appreciation of the mundane and day-to-day activities performed by queer individuals and communities that enable queer bodies to access and draw on sources of happiness and feeling “at home” in the world. Both of these concepts act as tools to aid us in understanding queer worldmaking processes and the roles played by queer spaces of retreat in particular. Finally, I also put forth a methodological model that encourages critics to take up a type of performative orientation to archival criticism—which entails the scholar/critic to take an active role in the construction and circulation of archival artifacts. This approach contributes to feelings of representational belonging, the affective response that 11 underrepresented individuals experience when seeing themselves included in complex and nuanced ways (Caswell, Cifor, & Ramirez, 2016).
Chapter Preview
Ultimately, this dissertation is part academic inquiry, part love letter to a community that
I am fortunate to be a part of, and part prayer for a world that could be but is still hovering on the horizon just out of reach. An overarching theme is how communities of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks are building possibilities for lives that allow them to feel fulfilled and seen in the world. It takes seriously the role that mundane practices hold and the power that is born out of care, compassion, vulnerability, and affirmation. To do this, I utilize several theoretical and methodological traditions and literatures placed into conversation with my three distinct but intertwined sites. What these sites share in common is their engagement with the day-to-day lives of queer people and their ability to establish and restore a sense of ordinary to queer communities.
In the first chapter, I introduce the theoretical orientation for the dissertation. In it, I place rhetorical theorizing (specifically queer rhetoric, critical rhetoric, and neo-sophistic theorizing) into conversation with scholarship on queer worldmaking and on everyday life. I argue that these traditions share an investment in the inventive potential for building a better future. However, everyday life scholarship focuses the attention of possibilities within routines and mundane activities, while queer world-making, critical rhetoric, and neo-sophistic theorizing emphasize othered bodies. Taken together, these theories create a foundation for examining the potential to uncover possibilities generated by marginalized bodies within the realm of the everyday.
Chapter Two introduces the multiple methods that I utilize throughout the project. I make an argument for the productive possibilities that rhetorical field methods, visual ethnography, 12 and arts/practice-based research can have when they are used alongside each other. These methods all privilege that the critic “be there” and create alongside their participants. These acts of creation can include rhetorical artifacts, place-making, and creative projects. I utilize these methods through my fieldwork at A-Camp, mobile interviews, photography in queer kitchens, and the creation of my own publicly circulating archive. These methods attune me as a critic/scholar to be an active and performing critic.
The three chapters that follow turn to the queer worlds and spaces of retreat enacted in my three sites and dynamics of possibility across them. In Chapter Three, Utopic Rehearsal:
Embodying and Imagining Possible Futures at A-Camp, I argue that A-Camp is a contemporary queer separatist space that serves as a liminal refuge from the pressures, challenges, and dangers of the hetero-patriarchal world. This creates a utopic rehearsal, utopic referring to a more livable world that has yet to comes and rehearsal alluding to the preparations and experimentations that are needed for a future to come into fruition. The separatist nature of A-Camp enables it to act as a utopic rehearsal by asking participants to focus current moment while at camp, embrace a radical present, feel at home with their bodies and identities, and foster a culture of compassion, care, and affirmation. Ultimately, A-Camp enables participants to envision what the world might look like if these values were carried into their everyday lives.
While A-Camp encourages queer people to take a break from the responsibilities and pressures of their everyday lives, Chapters Four and Five shift focus to the opportunities and resources that reside within the mundane aspects of queer life on the one hand; and the documenting, archiving, and accessing of mundane experiences on the other. Chapter Four,
Kitchens and a Queer Aesthetic of Everyday Life, examines the power that queer kitchens have to allow queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks to reclaim a sense of ordinary in 13 their lives. The chapter argues for a queer aesthetic of everyday life that embraces the contradictory nature of kitchens. A queer aesthetic of everyday life requires a generous reading of what can be classified as homonormative longings and the work that these practices do to enable queer people to feel as if they have a place in the world. Chapter Five, Doing Archival
Criticism: Performative Approaches to Archives of Queer Ordinaries, is concerned with the power that digital queer archives have in combating symbolic annihilation and contributing to feelings of representational belonging. I argue for taking a performative orientation to archival research, by which I mean that critics to co-produce archival materials alongside the communities they work with through combining archival scholarship with rhetorical field methods and arts/practice-based research methods. This act of co-creation enables queer archival scholarship to focus on queer presents rather than only recovering lost queer voices and experiences from history.
In the Conclusion, I tie all three sites together through observations about how they demonstrate the possibilities that are present within spaces of retreat for queer communities.
Each site of analysis offers a different take on the role of everyday life and the ability for queer bodies to feel “at home.” Speaking back to the previously stated research questions, the conclusion argues that both the embrace of the everyday—in the forms of kitchens and archives of mundane experiences--and departures from it—A-Camp—provide inventional resources for worldbuilding. Taken together the three sites provide a range of how queer people are able to persist and thrive in a hostile world and find ways to grow and flourish in ways that point towards a queer future that is still on the horizon. 14
Chapter One Theoretical Assumptions and Commitments
We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality…an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’ domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see the future beyond the quagmire of the present…we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world. (Muñoz, 2009, 1)
The concept of “not yet here” that Jose Muñoz’s (2009) work builds upon is central to this project. While queerness is often seen as a loss or failure, scholars such as Muñoz see queerness as the project of hoping for a better world and believing that the queerness of the past and present—or the here and now—can provide blueprints toward a better future. My project, like Muñoz’s, believes that we should not have to simply exist in the face of a less than ideal present; it also values and believes in the inventiveness that queer communities and individuals engage in as they take active roles in moving closer to the queer horizon envisioned by Muñoz. I examine this sense of a possible future through an orientation towards rhetorical studies, queer studies, and everyday life scholarship. These theoretical orientations are tied together by their commitment to possibility and invention. Poulakos (1983) argues that it is rhetoric’s job to make known and advocate for possibilities, creating a clear link between Muñoz’s propositions and rhetorical scholarship.
The possibilities that emerge within my sites of study can be conceived of moments of rhetorical invention. In the more traditional sense, invention refers to “the construction of formal arguments to all modes of enlarging experience by reason as manifested in awareness, emotion, interest, and appreciation” (McKeon, 1987, 59). While this definition still holds true for many situations, over the years the concept of invention has been expanded beyond argument and 15 persuasion. Invention can also refer to “an array of activities, moods, and spatiotemporal openings that feed all manners of knowing, making, doing, and being in the world” (Simonson,
2014, 300). This second conceptualization of invention allows invention to move beyond great speeches and other acts of oratory and examine how invention takes place within the lived realm and plays a role in worldbuilding. Simonson (2014) re-defines invention broadly as “the generation of rhetorical material” (313). This generation can take the form of “finding, creating, assembling, translating, recombining, channeling, or giving form to” (313); while rhetorical materials refer to a wide expanse of forms ranging from language, words, and symbols, to sense of self, organizations, and places. Simonson goes on to argue that this generation is found within the intersections and interactions between a multiplicity of inventional media, including bodies, language, space and place, culture, social identities, power relationships, and organizations and communities. Inventional media provide the materials and modes, as well as enabling and constraining, the generation of new or reimagined materials.
The interactions of the inventional media are what allows new possibilities to come into view and marginalized knowledges and experiences to surface. Invention is not a solo activity, rather it is a social process located within communities (Lefevre, 1987). My project is concerned with how queer communities are generating new and renewed ways of knowing and being in the world. It draws attention to how communities are not just constrained by our current social and cultural moment, but how these constraints enable creativity and generation. The examination of these moments of invention are enabled and build off of several theoretical orientations. Queer rhetoric provides a lens for examining both queer subjects as well as queer means of existing and creating new worlds. I also draw from critical rhetorical and neo-sophistic traditions to highlight the value of knowledges and experiences that reside within marginalized bodies. Critical rhetoric 16 and everyday life scholarship attune my attention towards the lived, mundane, and everyday experiences within marginalized communities. What draws all of these traditions are their investment in examining and materializing what is possible. Let me briefly discuss each of these theoretical orientations and how I orient myself to them in the dissertation.
Queering the Rhetorical Subject
In studying A-Camp, queer kitchens, and archives of everyday activities, my work is heavily influenced by queer rhetoric. I build upon and intervene into the queer rhetorical canon by shifting my focus to domestic spaces and enclaves where queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks retreat when they are not in the public eye. Queer rhetorical scholarship has historically been invested in very public moments of discourse such as protests and speeches, or media coverage of tragedies. My work complements this by examining private world-building practices that allow queer bodies to participate in public discourses such as activism.
Rhetoric as a discipline in the US has a history of not just being invested in examining the texts and discourses which spur social change, but oftentimes sees itself as playing a role in this process (McGee, 1990; McKerrow, 1989; Middelton et al., 2015; Rand, 2014). Concerns about difference and equity have prompted rhetorical scholars to reflect on the roles these types of questions play in the practice of public discourse and democracy, as well as who rhetorical scholars are accountable to. By the 1950s, objects of study favored by rhetorical scholars within the discipline focused on culturally and politically significant public address, particularly in regard to how well these moments of public discourse affected its listeners. The social upheaval of the 1960s not only spurred cultural change, but it also forced rhetorical scholarship to reevaluate its role in public life (Campbell & Keremidchieva, 2009). This upheaval both in the 17 social world and within the rhetorical discipline laid the groundwork for the emergence of queer rhetoric as an area of study.
The move towards ideological rhetorical criticism and the works of rhetorical scholars such as McGee, Burke, Weaver, and Wander created space within rhetorical scholarship for expanding objects of study. Because an ideological critique assumes that truth is the result of discourse then these discourses can be contested and prompt social change (Campbell &
Keremidchieva, 2009; McKerrow, 2010). It was during this period that the field of rhetoric moved away from its limited objects of study, as well as “adopting a view of reality that increasingly appreciated the contingency of human motivations and perception, and their manifestations in human actions and discourse” (Campbell & Keremidchieva, 2009, 6).
Queer rhetorical scholarship is one example of rhetorical scholarship and criticism deeply invested in ideological critique and advocacy for social change. Although it has been argued that rhetoric has always been sexualized, the early 1970s marked the start of the slow trickle of rhetorical scholarship addressing gay and lesbian identities and activism work. However, as a sub-discipline, queer rhetoric did not make an official appearance until the 1990s (Morris &
Palczewski, 2015). Weeks (2011) notes that rhetoric was slower than other disciplines in responding to the “queer turn.” The early years of queer rhetoric, much like early gay and lesbian activism, took a minority model approach and was concerned with activism, homophobia, visibility, and incorporation into society (Chesebro, 1981; Chesebro, Cragan, & McCullough,
1973; Crew & Keener, 1981; Fejes & Petrich, 1993). In later years, spurred by the AIDS crisis and the emergence of queer theory in the academy, queer rhetoric became more concerned with the social construction of identities and disruptive means of imagining new worlds. The current state of queer rhetoric is now contending with increased queer visibility within mainstream 18 discourses, attending to questions of queer citizenship, and the discursive and material creation of livable worlds (Cox & Faris, 2015).
The ability that gender and sexual minorities have to participate in public discourses is a clear investment of queer rhetorical scholarship, as reflected in the objects of study taken up by scholars who align themselves with the subfield. Common objects of study found in queer rhetorical scholarship include the AIDS crisis (Christiansen & Hanson, 1996; Dow, 1994; Rand,
2008), tactics deployed by activist and civil rights movements (Bennett, 2015; Chávez, 2013;
DeLuca, 1999; Rand, 2014; Slagle, 1995), publications produced by and for queer communities such as zines which later give way to digital content (Brouwer, 2005; Driver, 2007; Fenster,
1993; O’Riordan & Phillips, 2007)), queer archives (Alexander & Rhodes, 2012; Bessette, 2013;
Cram, 2016; Morris, 2006; Rawson, 2010; Woods, Ewalt, & Baker, 2013), mainstream media representations (Bennett, 2010; Cooper, 2002; Dow, 2001), legal cases (Brouwer, 2004; Cloud,
2014; Quinn & Meiners, 2013), political action such as laws and propositions (Chávez, 2009;
Hansen & Dionisopoulos, 2012; Lythgoe, 2013), medical and scientific discourses (Brookey,
2001; Meyer, 1995; Wilcox, 2003), and trauma and violence experienced by queer communities
(Dunn, 2010; Goss, 2009).
In addition to taking up the topics and exigencies described above, queer rhetoric often makes claims about disruption and possibility—evidence of its relationship to queer theory. This is exemplified in the introductory essay to the 1993 Pre/Text special issue devoted to queer rhetoric. Morrison’s introduction defines queer rhetoric as fruitfully disruptive, destabilizing, allowing for paradoxes, and making use of queer resources such as voguing or dragging to disrupt the normative. The focus on how queer individuals and communities disrupt normative 19 expectations and understandings of the social worlds points towards the inventive nature of queer rhetorical practices, or as Chávez (2013) puts it creating, “more livable worlds” (7).
Queer Worldmaking
The creation of more livable worlds makes connections between queer rhetorical scholarship and queer worldmaking. Queer worldmaking refers to the invention that occurs when
“othered” bodies disrupt heteronormativity and develop identities, cultures, and practices and are able to develop and flourish in the face of oppression (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Yep, 2003).
Berlant and Warner introduced the concept of queer worldmaking in their 1998 article “Sex in
Public.” Through the exploration of public sexual acts (something that is assumed to be private, especially for normative, heterosexual enactments), they destabilize intimacies in order to theorize possibilities outside of official publics and logics. Berlant and Warner argue that heteronormativity is produced in every aspect of social life and is especially present in the narratives surrounding romance and intimacy, such as monogamous marriage and child-rearing.
Berlant and Warner posit a way of viewing and existing in the world outside of these narratives that can also be considered a productive, meaningful life outside of heteronormative understandings. They define this queer project as supporting "forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through ‘collective activity' " (Belrant & Warner, 1998, 562). The queer world is in turn defined as “a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (558). They call for a queer cultural building that is not just a safe zone but one of changed possibilities that offer alternatives for identities and cultures where hetero-culture is no longer the default referent. 20
Communication and rhetorical scholars have answered Berlant and Warner's call for exploration of queer possibilities. In his examination of heteronormativity in communication studies, Yep (2003) offers his own interpretation of what queer worldmaking might look like.
Yep defines queer worldmaking as "the opening and creation of spaces without a map, the invention and proliferation of ideas without an unchanging and predetermined goal, and the expansion of individual freedom and collective possibilities without the constraints of suffocating identities and restrictive membership" (35). Yep invokes queer worldmaking as a possibility for healing, growth, transformations, and new possibilities. West and his co-authors also take up Berlant and Warner's queer worldmaking and place it firmly in the rhetorical realm.
They define queer worldmaking as moments of connection and relationships, ways of creating community and publics that challenge patterns such as kinship and sociality. These connections function as "the rhetorical relay of memory reactivated in the present to create lines of identification between those who may understand themselves as separated by space, time, and age" (West et al., 2013). Queer worldmaking for West and his co-authors functions to give presence and legitimacy to the queering of public cultures. These understandings of queer potential echo Halberstam's (2005) conceptualization of queer as referring to “non-normative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment and activity in space and time” (6). For the authors I’ve spoken about above, queer is not just about how the individual identifies or who they want to fuck. Rather, queer becomes a way of connecting and bringing about possibility that goes beyond individual desires. Queer recognizes “resistance as a relational and contextual troubling of mythic norms in the employment of vital worldmaking practices in specific spaces and temporalities" (West et al., 2013, 25).
Third Sophistic and Feminist Neo-Sophistic Rhetoric 21
While queer rhetoric and queer worldmaking provide the scaffolding for examining queer objects of study and the creation of queer worlds, they need to be supplemented with a more substantial framework that draws from rhetorical theory in order to better understand the rhetorical dynamics of their ongoing production. To do this I turn towards neo-sophistic rhetoric, specifically third and feminist theorizing, and critical rhetoric in order to shed light on how marginalized and “othered” bodied provide inventional resources that serve emancipatory purposes and contribute to the imagining of what could be possible.
My project suggests that one of the rhetorical interventions made by the queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks at camp, in their kitchens, and archives of mundane activities is the possibility for alternative ways of life. Rather than a top-down, paternalistic rhetor presenting what is possible, A-Camp and the kitchen galleries cultivate a collaborative imagination of what a queer futurity could look like. To make sense of these sites, I needed a framework that draws on and values the knowledge of women’s voices outside of the binary opposition to man and heterosexuality. This framework also needed to celebrate disruption that reveals multiplicities that, in turn, offer possibilities to build more livable worlds. Third sophistic and feminist neo-sophistic theorizing proves useful in meeting these needs. First, it makes an orientation towards future possibilities a rhetorical project. Second, third sophistic theorizing gives value to disruption and rupture as the place where possibility resides. And finally, feminist neo-sophistic theorizing values the bodily experiences of women as sources of productive disruption.
Contemporary neo-sophistic theorizing took off in the 1980s when scholars began to look towards the sophists again, casting their gaze towards the ancient, often overlooked and demonized, wisdom of the sophists to make arguments about contemporary rhetorical problems. 22
Many scholars making this move value the recovery of the forgotten and overlooked voices of the elder sophists, who had fallen victim to Plato’s critique of them and Aristotle's shadow within contemporary rhetoric. Poulakos (1983) offers a revisionist account of sophistic rhetoric stating, "Rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture inopportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible" (36). The three components of
Poulakos's definition—kairos (the opportune moment), to prepon (the appropriate), and to dynaton (the possible)--frame rhetoric as an art that works within the realm of actuality in order to suggest what is possible, giving language a flexible status rather than the holder of an absolute truth. In 1984, Poulakos expanded his discussion of to dynaton, arguing that the elder sophists had a preference for a world of possibility. This worldview assumes that the universe is incomplete, and that the role of rhetoric is to open new horizons as well as advocate for their pursuit.
The concept of to dynaton, or the possible, is a key aspect of my own theorizing, as it speaks to a world that could be rather than solely remaining in the present moment. A neo-
Sophistic view of rhetoric "links rhetoric to a movement originating in the sphere of the present and striving to attend to a place in that of potentiality" (Poulakos, 1983, 6). By using the present as a jumping-off point for what could be, rhetoric plays a role in imagining a better world, and it allows both rhetors and critics to advocate for a more just and humane society. The rhetoric of possibility is also an ongoing project without a fixed conclusion, which “opens new horizons and advocates for their pursuit, thus giving man [sic] the chance to venture finding what he lacks”
(Poulakos, 1984, 224). All three of my sites, while very much operating within the current social and political climate, cast a gaze towards the future and lay the groundwork for a future that could be if we take these communities up on their offer. 23
Several neo-sophistic theorists have taken up this political position, and they locate demystification and considerations of power dynamics as sites of possibility. Borrowing from
Poulokous, Vitanza (1991) offers the Third Sophistic, a theory of multiplicity that emphasizes possibility. Vitanza claims that the fragile connections that symbols have to what they represent are where Poulokos' sophistic possible come in. Vitanza states "A Third Sophistic, or
Postmodern/Para Rhetoric, would be, or is, an art of ‘resisting and disrupting’ the available means (that is, the cultural codes) that allow for persuasion and identification; the ‘art’ of not only refusing the available (capitalistic/socialist) codes but also refusing all together to recode, or to reterritorialize, power relations” (133). Vitanza’s Third Sophistic is important to the queer spaces of retreat in that it places possibility within the destruction of relationships of meaning.
When these meanings are severed, they create space for a multiplicity of new meanings that exist outside of the current structures of power and can be emancipatory in nature.
My project relies on such theories to identify not just what new meanings can be made in moments of disruption or rupture, but also to help center the experiences of queer women and gender non-conforming folks as advancing practices that promote these ruptures. Dolmage
(2009) argues that traditionally, the rhetorical body has been a male body and that for normativity to function, this body must remain unmarked. Dolmage calls for embracing the othered body as one that questions and complicates mainstream understandings of truth and reality. This speaks directly to my project which centers queer women, trans, and gender non- conforming folks, who all reside within bodies that have been marked as “other.” The experiences and performances of “othered” bodies are taken seriously as key sources of knowledge within all of my research sites. 24
In a similar move, Ballif (2001) offers a model that centers women as the bearers of rhetorical invention through disruption. She argues that just as women are characterized as
"boundless liquidity, so is sophistry: a perpetual motion ignorant of boundaries" (53). Ballif suggests that we take advantage of the ruptures that women facilitate. This can be achieved by taking up the figure of the Third Woman, a figure who is not constituted as the binary opposite of the phallus, and who offers an alternative to the binary system. It is not enough to simply re- write women and othered bodies into rhetorical theory and history because simply including women “does nothing to the phallogocentric economy which disenfranchised them" (95). Ballif’s observations are useful to queer modes of inquiry because she troubles binary thinking. Like
Ballif, who argues that women should be judged based on their own merits rather than being compared to men, I am not approaching the queer subjects in my work as a binary opposition to heterosexuality. Rather, I am approaching them in the same way that Ballif deploys the Third
Woman, as a form of agency that exists not in opposition to but in spite of heterosexual domination. Ultimately, the feminist and third sophistic scholars discussed above take up the suspicions of representation and reality in a politically inflected way that renders “the other” as a source of rhetorical agency and power.
Taken together, neo-sophistic thinking enables me to do several things. First, it casts an analytical lens of the possible and establishes the future as a rhetorical project. I build off the concept of the rhetor offering a possible future for an audience to be persuaded to carry out, and instead, I argue that communities cannot just present a possible future but actually embody and enact them. This troubles the concept of a paternalistic rhetor instructing the audience and instead returns power and agency to the communities most impacted by unjust social practices.
The power and agency that marginalized communities have is born out of honoring the 25 experiences and knowledges of “othered” bodies as a model for what these possible futures could look like.
Critical Rhetoric
Neo-sophistic theorizing provides a foundation for understanding possibility, rhetorical creation, and the knowledge generated through othered bodies. It is weaker, however, in offering broader social views of patterns and domination. Critical rhetoric provides the tools needed to examine not only how systems of domination oppress marginalized groups, it also enables critics to ask questions about how the constraints of domination bring forth opportunities for emancipatory actions and resistance. Additionally, critical rhetoric takes a performative orientation to criticism, arguing that critics as well as rhetors create texts, a rhetorical theory that partially underwrites the methodologies I discuss in the next chapter.
Thee critical turn in rhetoric enabled critics and scholars to ask questions not only about how communities become marginalized but also how they fight back against oppressive structures and institutions. Critical theory, in general, is concerned with how both marginalizations, as well as resistance, occur in society. It takes seriously the lived realities and experiences of people’s day to day lives as sites of inquiry and analysis (McKinnon, 2009). A critical approach to social phenomenon is not just interested in how reality is constructed through language and shared meaning, but it also takes into account social hierarchies, power, and the unequal distribution of material resources and political power. An overarching goal of taking a critical approach to phenomena is to connect the everyday actions, practices, rituals, and other forms of meaning-making to the larger sociopolitical contexts within which they take place
(Holland & Novak, 2017). 26
While concerned with material conditions and how dominant systems and institutions control meaning, critical rhetoric is also invested in how these conditions create opportunity for resistance and emancipatory actions. Termed “the critique of freedom” in McKerrow’s (1989) influential article, the ability to tease out the emancipatory opportunities created by dominant systems is paramount to critical rhetoric, as well as this project. This dissertation is heavily invested in how marginalized communities and individuals carve out means of thriving and existing within these oppressive systems. A critique of freedom “is an attempt to place the focus on a not-yet-determined future, captured as a freedom to become other than we are at this moment” (McKerrow, 2009, 234). All of my sites focus on how communities are crafting and experimenting with a “not-yet-determined future” for queer women, trans, and gender non- conforming folks in light of oppressive forces. All of the performances, actions, and rituals I examine are the direct response to and made necessary by dominant pressures and would most likely not exist under different circumstances.
McKerrow (1989) argues that taking a critical approach renders criticism an act of performance. Critical rhetoric casts rhetoric as a mode of practice, and criticism, rather than merely an analytical act, is performative because the critic, as well as the rhetors, are inventors of texts. In this sense the critic takes an inventional approach to criticism, creating alongside rhetors, and this act of creation constitutes a performance in itself (McGee, 1990). McGee asks critics to break down the dichotomy between theory and practice and to not only examine rhetorical artifacts but to also become critics who can create their own rhetorical performances
(Haskins, 2003; Simonson, 2010).
A key component of the performative nature of critical rhetorical practice pertains to the role critic’s role in the construction of texts. Texts have historically been conceptualized as 27 oratorial texts that would then be put through a close reading by a critic to reveal their intentions, effects, and pervasive qualities. This began to change in the 1970s when the scope of rhetoric was expanded to include a wider array of cultural processes. More recently, scholars have argued that, as part of the post-modern condition, texts that don’t have clear, clean-cut boundaries, but are rather messy and incomplete (Middelton et al., 2015). Texts are seen as being made up of multiple fragments, and it is the role of the critic to bring these fragments together in order to construct an object for criticism. This construction of a text fit for criticism is an important aspect of the performative aspect of critical rhetoric (McGee, 1990).
In my project, I rely heavily on several aspects of critical rhetoric theorizing. First, I am invested in understanding how marginalized communities develop creative responses to dominant, oppressive social forces. I am curious how spaces of retreat such as A-Camp, queer kitchens, and digital archives of everyday activities can become emancipatory resources for the participants and communities they serve. Additionally, I exercise a type of performative criticism in the bringing together many textual fragments to create an overall argument about spaces of queer retreat. Collectively, these fragments come out of published texts, such as written coverage of A-Camp and the “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery; my experiences at camp and in kitchens; interviews; and elements of the broader historical context. By piecing them together, I am in a position to draw conclusions about how queer communities are developing means of thriving within a hostile world.
When placed into conversation with each other, queer rhetoric, critical rhetoric, neo- sophistic theorizing, and queer worldmaking create a rhetorical framework that draws on and values the embodied knowledge of women and gender non-conforming individuals and looks towards the future. All four orientations take seriously the agency, resources, experiences, and 28 performances of marginalized individuals and communities. By engaging with communities who operate under oppressive dominant social institutions, this orientation reveals the unique ways that queer communities respond to and build upon these social conditions, revealing renewed means of existing within the world. These means of existence not only make the present bearable but also offer alternatives and can point towards a more just and humane future. Taken together, this framework celebrates the knowledge of “othered” bodies and the forms of disruption that reveal multiplicities, ultimately offering possibilities to build more livable worlds. When the various definitions of queer worldmaking are placed in conversation with rhetorics of possibility, they result in the creation of queer dynaton.
Worldmaking and Everyday Life
Queer worldmaking and the engagement with possible futures does not occur in a vacuum, instead, these inventions often take place within the realm of the everyday. As
Nakayama and Morris state (2015): “Queer worldmaking takes place in all kinds of places, at all different times, involving all kinds of people, who work toward creating a different world. It is not a strategic plan, organized by anyone, but a bottom-up engagement with the everyday” (v).
My project engages with everyday life and its ability to foster queer worldmaking in three different sites. First, A-Camp examines how taking a break from the pressures of everyday responsibilities offers an alternative model for more just and humane everyday existences.
Second, my engagement with queer kitchens, in contrast to A-Camp, asks what possibilities arise from an embrace of domesticity and the everyday world. Finally, my last chapter delves into the potentiality in archiving everyday and mundane queer experience.
Everyday life has been theorized and described as the routine, ordinary, and mundane, as the most universal aspect of social life, and as the place that re-orients and grounds us (de 29
Certeau, 1984; Felski, 1999; Lefebvre, 2008). Everyday life is also extremity elusive and has been categorized as the excess, or what is left over after all of the other aspects of social life have been categorized (Highmore, 2008). Everyday life plays an important role in the social world because the ordinary and mundane moments and routines not only account for our day-to-day actives, but it also lay the foundation for “higher” human activities, and therefore should not be overlooked (Gardiner, 2002; Lefebvre, 2008). The mundane practices of ordinary people and the practical knowledge that is situated within everyday contexts are how we create our fundamental realities (Shotter, 1993). Everyday life is much more than just a backdrop to activities and identities. Rather the space and the routines and actions performed within it have the potential to constitute ourselves as individuals, connected to the larger social world, where our dreams and desires are born (Lefebvre, 2008). As Gardiner (2002), building from Lefebvre, puts it, “the everyday is where we develop our manifold capacities, both in an individual and collective sense and become fully integrated and truly human persons” (2).
Repetition, routines, and habits are important aspects of how we make sense of identities and the roles we perform. Repeated behaviors, actions, and activities have a profound impact on how we come to understand identity because “we become who we are through repetition”
(Felski, 2000, 84). Our identities are often the results of practices and routines that take place day in and day out, within the realm of the everyday. Our bodies become used to going through these motions to the point where our identity performances become habituated and come to be seen as naturalized. For example, gender performativity argues that gender expressions and the bodies they are linked to become normalized to the point that we forget that they came to be through repetition. For example, gender performativity becomes associated with everyday spaces.
Historically women have become closely associated with domestic spaces and the caretaking 30 labor they perform within these spaces. Many women constitute themselves as women through morning beauty rituals, daily and weekly chores, and the routines that come with raising children. These routines do more than just makes life more bearable; they enable many women to see themselves as women as they perform these ritualized tasks.
Taking on everyday life as a heuristic not only reveals cultural values and practices, but it can also reveal possibilities that reside in the mundane and ordinary. Lefebvre (2008) argues that the purpose of the critique of everyday life is to uncover its possibilities and transform it. This means not only identifying how ordinary people are finding agency within the banal social world but also how this agency can change or disrupt the standard tools that people use to make sense of the world. The participation in the rituals of everyday life does not render individuals passive and submissive, but rather they are active participants in the environment in which they reside.
Individuals and communities have the ability to manipulate their environments through everyday actions, resulting in acts of subversion and resistance. This refers to the concept of reuse, or the opportunity to manipulate the mechanism of institutions and structures that seek to discipline. In this way, the oppressive institutions themselves dictate what types of creative reactions are available (de Certeau, 1984).
For rhetoricians, the material world and its symbolic relations become much more than the context upon which rhetorical acts happen. Rather, rhetoricians are interested in how the material dimensions themselves take on rhetorical agency to persuade, move, and constitute.
Ackerman (2003) argues that spaces of everyday life are useful heuristics for rhetoricians because they suggest that rhetorical situations have spatial dimensions. These spatial dimensions are not neutral but rather provide insights into cultural values and practices. Dickinson (2015), in a similar vein, argues that the symbolic resources that have become articulated with everyday 31 spaces, such as the suburbs, become resources for people to build what they see as a "good life."
Dickinson starts at the level of space and how people use these symbolic resources to feel at home in a place literally.
World-Making and Queer Ordinaries
The focus on the construction of the mundane that structures everyday life scholarship may initially feel as if is at odds with queer theory’s investment in making a mess of normalized routines; however, what both traditions share is an investment in uncovering and shedding light on how norms came to be in the first place, which is not out of line with queer theory’s project.
Queer theory may seem at odds with many of the grounding assumptions of everyday life theorizing. While everyday life legitimatizes the banal and routine as objects of study, queer theory’s project is to smash, question, and disrupt routines. Despite the differences, both theoretical models share an investment in social construction and seek to critique and transform.
Taking a cue from Berlant and Warner (1995) who ask, "what can queer theory teach us about
X?" I am not only asking what light queer theory can shed on everyday life theorizing but also and posing the question "What can theories of everyday life teach us about queer lives?” My project takes such line of inquiry as a guidepost and even more specifically asks how critiques of everyday life can shed light on how queer individuals and communities create more livable worlds. More specifically, turning towards the everyday is important for at least two reasons: first, the realm of the everyday is essential to accessing the discourses of marginalized communities; second, the everyday is where the routines and tactics for getting by manifest and hold the possibility for resistance.
The realm of the everyday is often key in accessing the discourses and practices of marginalized communities, which often don’t circulate widely within mainstream public spheres. 32
As Highmore (2008) argues, everyday life is often invoked to refer to the practices, rituals, and traditions of women and other marginalized groups who have been left out of the “official” historic record. The mundane nature of the discourses which enable the livelihood of marginalized communities often “precede the production of traditional forms of rhetorical action
(i.e. speeches or image events)” (McHendry et al, 2014, 304). However, these practices are often crucial to “understanding rhetorical action that shapes everyday, vernacular, and oppositional rhetorical communities” (McHendry et al., 2014, 304). By including the everyday and mundane, rhetorical critics are able to expand the range of what counts as rhetoric. Turning to the everyday and mundane also helps to enhance critical and neo-sophistic rhetorics’ aim to take seriously the voices of marginalized communities; document rhetorical action that often goes unseen; and make visible practices that serve emancipatory functions (Middleton et al, 2011).
Accessing the ordinary and mundane is not only about including voices that have been left out of mainstream discourses, it also reveals the sites of invention and resistance that take make life livable for marginalized communities. Everyday practices that enable survival often become invisible because when communities live in a constant state of crisis, what from an outside perspective might be viewed as extraordinary, because it’s a daily condition becomes ordinary to those who live within it (Pezzullo & Depoe, 2010). This is exemplified in
Manalansan’s (2014) engagement with a group of queer immigrants sharing a small apartment in
New York City. Manalansan observes that from the outside the apartment and its six inhabitants appear to be living in disorder and chaos. However, when viewed from the residents’ point of view, the chaos was actually part of an everyday rhythm that enabled them to survive. Despite having to fight multiple marginalized identities, the queer immigrants were able to create means of existing that operated outside of normative standards. 33
The fight that chips away at queer and other marginalized existences, while exhausting, can also prompt creative acts of resistance and offer models for new possibilities of living.
Because queer (and other marginalized communities) are denied an ordinary, due to their having to fight for an existence, it is worthwhile to examine how queer communities construct and reside within the realm of the everyday. By tweaking or reworking mundane and rhythmic practices, there is a possibility of altering or changing the symbolic resources that construct reality. Because queer communities have been denied an ordinary that is free of fighting, they must construct their own versions of a mundane existence in the face of precarity (Ahmed,
2017).
Williams (1989) states that not only does culture reside in the ordinary, but that it has two components, the known and the new which is offered and tested. When marginalized communities are forced to develop tactics and practices that allow them to exist or develop a sense of routine in their lives, it creates opportunities to take up Williams’ call to experiment with different ways of moving about the world that are not part of the known. As such, my dissertation aims to offer an account of how queer individuals and cultures take up and re- appropriate practices that are markers of “the good life” and negotiate with that reality in order to build a life for themselves.
My project builds on this thinking, asking questions such as how are communities thriving in a hostile world through the use of routines and mundane activities? How do the constraints of normative social and cultural structures enable creative ways of resisting and thriving? I am concerned with how the conditions of everyday life shape the inventiveness of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks, and ultimately determine how the 34 practices of living and surviving under precarity can offer models that can be implemented outside of this very specific community.
Conclusion
Bringing the together aspects of rhetorical theorizing, queer worldmaking, and everyday life scholarship allows me to do several things. First, while queer rhetoric, neo-sophistic, critical rhetoric, everyday life, and queer worldbuilding are all invested in potentialities enabled by ruptures, when placed into conversation with each other, they can fine-tune how we approach moments of possibility. Everyday life scholarship makes a case for the place of possibility and world-building to be located within the realm of the mundane, while neo-sophistic, critical rhetoric and queer worldmaking theorizing gives us the resources to attend to "othered bodies."
When taken together, they offer a theoretical lens that locates the realm of possibility in the performance of queer and "othered" bodies within the realm of the everyday.
All of these theoretical traditions when brought together provide the framework for examining how inventional media such as queer bodies, space and place, rituals, cultural and social expectations, social identities, and dominant institutions and structures come together to not only critique our current social world but to invent a new one. World-building is often complicated and messy work, and a theoretical model that focuses on queer invention and possibility with a gaze towards the future allows us to examine the present while at the same time reaching for what can be. While it might be easy to slip into a utopic vision of the future and place the communities and sites in question, as Muñoz reminds us, a utopic queer futurity is one that is still on the horizon. The possibilities offered by the sites and communities of my research are by no means perfect, however, they offer the ability to examine and experiment with
(re)newed ways of existing in the world. 35
Chapter Two Research Methods
It is common for queer experiences and subjectivities to be explored using artifacts such as films, artwork, speeches, theatrical performances, internet sites, and archival documents such as activist pamphlets. In contrast, my project is invested in lived rhetorical action and invention that take place in the realm of the everyday and mundane. I shift focus to what queer ordinaries can and do look like when queer individuals and communities are not actively fighting. I specifically focus on the spaces where queer day-to-day living and existence is invented and carried out by actual, rather than theoretical, queer bodies. In taking up such focus, I use a combination of rhetorical field methods (RFM), visual ethnography, and critical arts/practice- based research methods.
There are several common threads that link these methods together and make them useful tools in examining spaces of queer retreat. First, all three methods ask the critic/scholar to be an active participant in the creation of rhetorical actions and artifacts. These approaches to data gathering and analysis go beyond the critic bringing together fragments of texts as an act of performative criticism and ask that the critic participates in the creation of rhetorical texts alongside the communities they are engaging with. The act of creation alongside the communities being examined speaks well to queer methodologies because as Halberstam (2005) has observed, those who examine queer communities and performances are often part of the community themselves, creating slippage between researchers/critics and the community.
Additionally, all three methods ask critics/scholars to “be there” and enter the field in some way.
As Simonson (2014) notes, an ethnographic sensibility can be beneficial in observing and recognizing inventional media and the networks they form. When critic/scholars enter the field, 36 they are able to experience (and even participate) firsthand in the ongoing habits and actions which feed creative rhetorical production.
In what follows I describe RFM, arts/practice-based research methods, and visual ethnography and make an argument as to why they are useful in the examination of queer spaces of retreat and observing moments of rhetorical invention toward possible futures. I conclude by placing these methods in conversation with each other and argue that together they enable me as a critic/scholar to not only watch as moments of rhetorical invention unfold in the present moment, but to participate in the performances as they take place. Additionally, these methods enable me to take the products of my fieldwork and transform them into a publicly circulating archive, ultimately contributing to the wider discourse about queer community practices.
Rhetorical Field Methods
All of my research sites include material and lived elements that cannot necessarily be represented by textual representations alone; as such, it is imperative that I, as a critic, experience moments of rhetorical invention and action. Consequently, I use rhetorical field methods to access my site. Rhetorical field methods can be defined as “a set of approaches that integrates rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field” (Endres et al., 2016, 514). RFM offers tools for rhetorical scholars interested in working with objects of study that center around everyday vernacular texts, marginalized voices, and rhetorical situations which are co-created by multiple rhetors, audience members, texts, critics, and contexts. As a method, RFM lends itself to the analysis of protests, memorials, and mundane everyday performances and has the potential “to analyze situations in which meanings depend on places, physical structures, spatial delineations, interactive bodies, and in the moment choices” (Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011). Rhetorical field methods claim 37 to intervene in rhetorical criticism through an appropriation of qualitative methods that position the critic within the material environment where texts are being created and enacted. By entering the field, rhetorical critics gain access to the kairotic, material, embodied, and affective aspects of a rhetorical situation (Rai, 2016). Through their presence in the field, RFM practitioners also trouble the relationships between texts, critics, rhetors, audiences, and contexts.
RFM not only imports methods from qualitative modes of inquiry, but with these methods also come theoretical commitments that RFM practitioners take up in their scholarship
(Endres et al., 2016). Rossman and Rallis (2012) argue that empiricism, or "the philosophical tradition that knowledge is obtained by direct experience through the senses," is a key element of qualitative inquiry (5). Qualitative inquiry takes seriously the role of the researcher in obtaining data and values the natural setting in which social phenomenon takes place. This mode of inquiry has become especially useful for rhetorical scholars who wish to engage with vernacular or everyday discourses emanating from those who reside in the margins of society (Endres et al.,
2016; Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). When rhetorical scholars practice qualitative methods, they can incorporate local knowledges into their evaluations of texts and rhetorical situations (Lindlof &
Taylor, 2011). The incorporation of local knowledges is critical to work that centers marginalized voices because these voices are often left out of or misrepresented by mainstream discourses.
In my project, I use participant observation and qualitative interviews. Participant observation is closely associated with ethnographic methods, meaning it is concerned with providing a holistic account of a lived social situation. Embodiment is a crucial component of participant observation. While the word observation skews towards a focus on the visual, participant observation also lends itself to the researcher experiencing first-hand knowledges that 38 reside within other senses such as smells, sounds, tastes, proximity, and temporality. While participant observation allows a researcher to experience rhetorical action first-hand, qualitative interviews allow for the experiences and voices of participants to be heard. These interviews (see
Appendix) rely on open-ended questions that elicit information, reactions, histories, and narratives from participants (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Participant observations and qualitative interviews are useful for my project because they add depth to what is known about the context from which rhetorical invention and action emerge, shedding light on the experiences of the queer women and gender non-conforming folks who attend A-Camp or occupy kitchens.
I conducted participant observation at three sessions of A-Camp. This involved me partaking in activities just as other campers. This included sleeping in the bunk bed style cabins with other participants, eating meals with my cabinmates, attending and participating in workshops and panels, sitting on the lawn and chatting, and screaming along with the band at the final concert and dance. I took field notes in a small discrete notebook, often taking advantage of down time between activity sessions to note my observations so as to not intrude on the actions taking place during the activities. Once I was home from camp, I typed up more extensive field notes, adding and elaborating on details based on my handwritten notes.
My A-Camp fieldwork was supplemented with qualitative interviews. I interviewed ten former campers. Eight of the campers identified as white, while the remaining two chose not to disclose their racial identity. The majority of the interviewees were in their early twenties to early thirties, with the youngest being in her late teens and the oldest in her forties. Seven of the ten identified as cis women, one identified as a transwoman, and two identified as gender queer and/or gender non-binary. While most participants did not disclose religious affiliations, two identified as Jewish and one as being raised Christian. With the exception of one face-to-face 39 interview, all took place over the phone. I recorded the interviews using an audio recorder and later transcribed them. Interview participants were located through reaching out to contacts I had made at my first camp, as well as a call posted to the unofficial A-Camp Facebook group.
I also conducted interviews with eight queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks in their kitchens. Participants ranged in age from early twenties to mid-thirties. Five participants identified as cis-women, two identified as people of color. All were employed outside the home and had access to a kitchen in a residential setting. None of the kitchen interview participants were parenting or providing regular child or elder care. These interviews included a more traditional sit-down qualitative interview in which I asked about the participant’s background and general feelings about kitchens. This was followed by a mobile interview where participants showed me around their kitchen and I photographed them, their kitchens, and the objects that resided within the kitchens. Most interview participants were individuals who had seen the Facebook call that I had put on my personal page, which was additionally disseminated by my friends and contacts. These interviews were also recorded using an audio recorder and later transcribed.
Rhetoric In Situ
What sets RFM apart from other rhetorical methods is the emphasis on the critic placing themselves in the field. By placing their bodies in the field critics can attend to "the embodied, emplaced, material, visual, affective processual, and vernacular dimensions of rhetorical practice that intersect in these places inhabited by activists, speakers, audiences, and observers to shape shared understandings of significant phenomena" (Middelton et al., 2015). Within RFM, the critic bears witness to moments of rhetorical invention and expression as they unfold, and often the critic goes beyond the role of documentarian and witness and participates in the invention of 40 the rhetoric itself. The affective and ephemeral qualities of sites prompt RFM practitioners to value “being there.” Pezzullo argues that “presence” is key to understanding how affective modes of rhetoric move people and bodies. For example, RFM practitioners may actively participate in protests and community outreach efforts or consult with their subjects to understand how rhetoric acts upon bodies. Therefore, the RFM critic is far from objective.
Rather, critics who practice RFM see their participation as a valuable and crucial means of gaining knowledge about the rhetorical situations they are embedded in. “By participating in the rhetorical communities from which ‘live’ rhetorics emerge, critics are better able to locate those practices within the material and discursive contexts” (Middleton et al., 2011, 399). For the critics invested in RFM, participation in the field allows for access to moments of invention that a static after-the-fact text cannot necessarily reveal, as well as enhance the critical judgments made about their objects of study (Middelton et al., 2015).
Fieldwork especially enables critics to witness ephemeral or fleeting moments that would be lost in traditional conceptions of texts. RFM values the knowledge that can be gained by treating the ephemeral as a part of the collective textual fragments. Ephemeral texts are not the sole property of bodily movement; even texts that appear to exist in the verbal realm “are imbricated within bodies and places” (Middelton et al., 2015, 19). The bodily understandings of rhetoric cannot be separated by the time and place in which they are experienced. When a critic enters the field, they are not only taking in a more holistic experience of the situation, they are also being impacted and affected by the field and communities (McHendry et al., 2014).
Therefore, when critics, such as myself, enter the field, their contextual and affective bodily experience becomes part of the mangle of texts, and this messiness can potentially "affect" and shape critical analysis. 41
Examples of how being present in the field can impact how a critic approaches analysis include Haililuc’s (2016) critical ethnographic rhetorical analysis (CERA) and Landau’s (2016) concept of the feeling rhetorical critic. Critical ethnographic rhetorical analysis emphasizes that
“being there” impacts how the critic knows and engages with empirical data. CERA calls for the critic to enter the field open to what they will discover. A critic entering the field with a thesis already in mind is a direct contradiction of this method of analysis. CERA, like its qualitative cousins, embraces the unknown and asks rhetorical critics to be vulnerable in ways that more traditional, bounded texts do not. Like CERA, the idea of a “feeling rhetorical critic” asks the critic to be attuned to moments that are not necessarily discursive in nature. Being a feeling rhetorical critic requires taking affect seriously, noting how spaces and places move bodies, and documenting visceral sensations while acknowledging that these sensations are often social and political in addition to individual.
Another benefit of moving rhetorical critics away from their desks and into the field is that the critic has the potential to actively co-construct and constitute texts along with those they are studying (Middelton et al., 2015). The move towards co-constitution and studying texts as they unfold influences the temporality of rhetorical analysis. More traditionally-based textual methods ask a critic to examine an artifact after the fact. “A conventional text-centric approach to rhetoric analyzes rhetoric that has been documented, and therefore, dethatched from its original instantiation” (Endres et al., 2016, 516). By taking myself into the field and engaging with the A-Camp staff and attendees as they are producing rhetoric, for instance, I gain access to texts as they unfold within the present moment. In my effort to investigate how queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks communicatively come together to co-create and enable 42 new possibilities, RFM aids me as a critic to not only witness how possibilities come about but co-create them alongside my participants.
Pezzullo (2016) also argues that one of the advantages that fieldwork offers rhetorical critics is access to immediacy. When critics attune themselves to the immediacy of a situation, they gain access to embodied epistemologies that are inaccessible after the fact. The immediate is vital to the development of not only rhetorical invention but to how we understand ourselves.
If rhetorical critics engaging with queer subjects and spaces are invested in examining moments of rhetorical invention and becomings, then RFM becomes a tool for accessing these fleeting moments.
While there is already an impressive archive made up of written materials, photos, and videos on Autostraddle.com and the accompanying A-Camp website, RFM offers a means of engaging with a fuller range of bodies, spaces, and the creation of rhetorical artifacts that cannot be captured in written and visual texts. I attended three sessions: the 2017 camp in Mukwonago,
WI (one and a half hours outside of Madison), and the 2018 and 2019 camps located in Ojai, CA, where I took on the dual role of critic and camper. I stayed in cabins with other campers, ate meals in the dining hall, and participated in a wide variety of workshops and activities ranging from social justice presentations to making a terrarium out of a mason jar. Being at camp alongside the staff and other campers I was privy to moments as they unfolded. I was hit full force with the excitement of the concert and dance the final night, I watched as people shared their fears and allowed themselves to become vulnerable in front of a group of strangers and was extended support and friendship from the other participants. These moments would have not been as prevalent if I had relied on interviews, photos posted to Instagram, or written accounts alone. 43
Visual Images and Photography in Scholarship
For this dissertation, I use photography in the service of visual ethnography and critically informed arts/practice-based research method. My use of visual images and technologies builds off assumptions about the role that visual images play in the creation of social worlds and shared meaning, as well as how image technologies such as photography can play a role in the research process.
Visual images play an important role in how humans make sense of the social world and their place in it. Danesi (2017) states that “there is no culture without visual textual traditions and customs” (10). This points toward the importance that the visual plays in how we interact with the world around us, as well as the role of visual images and artifacts in the creation of visual culture. Rose (2012) argues that there are five aspects of visual culture. First, images and other visual artifacts render social difference visible or invisible. Within this perspective the visual play a role in the social construction of the world as well as structure power relations. Second, it is important to consider how images are looked at and how viewers are positioned in relation to the image. Third, images are embedded within the wider cultural context they exist within.
Fourth, audiences are not passive spectators, but rather bring their own interpretations to the images. Finally, images also are not passive, but also take on agency of their own; scholars have begun to move beyond asking what images/representations are, but rather what can images do.
My project specifically examines the role of photographic images and photography within the larger visual culture. Photographs have the ability to allow underrepresented identities and experiences to literally be seen and shift the power dynamics of who can represent whom.
Additionally, my project takes seriously the cultural impact that circulating images have for 44 underrepresented communities and how photographs are used to construct, change, and reflect subjectivities.
Building upon the concept of visual culture, within rhetorical studies photographs taken by others become objects of study to build new theories about the how visual artifacts have the ability to move and hail those who encounter them, much like verbal language does (see Barthes,
1981; Finnegan, 2004, 2010; Foss, 2005; Hariman & Lucaites, 2002, 2011; Ott, Aoki, &
Dickinson, 2011; Ott & Dickerson, 2009). Finnegan (2004) argues that a goal of visual rhetorical scholarship is to identify the ways in which “images become inventional resources in the public sphere” (198). For this project, I too use photography in such way as I analyze how visual images can hail audience members into (re)newed subject positions and aid in the construction of queer worldmaking in order to make an argument for the inventional role of photographic archives in worldmaking.
Yet, I also follow the lead of scholars in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and geography to use photography as a means of conducting ethnographic research (see Becker,
1995; Collier & Collier, 1986; Holm, 2014; Rakic & Chambers, 2009; Ruby, 2005). For instance, like many who use visual technologies as research tools, I am interested in the production and consumption of images such as photographs, how visual images aid in the interpretation and analysis of culture, and how culture can be visually represented. Chapter Four, for example, examines both the production of as well as reactions to a photographic gallery and how the circulation and creation of images can hail (re)newed queer subjectivities.
Visual Ethnography
Visual ethnography provides a beneficial bridge between RFM and arts/practice-based research and a model for my own research. As a method, visual ethnography combines audio- 45 visual media with ethnographic practices in order to research, analyze, and represent research findings (Pink, 2008; 2013).Visual ethnography acknowledges the increasingly important role that images play in the social world, and therefore employs forms of visual representation such as photography, videography, hypermedia, and virtual reality to “provide a means for recording, documenting, and explaining the social worlds and understandings of people” (Berg, 2008, 934).
Common means of incorporating visual methods into ethnographic practices include photo- elicitation, where informants are asked to react to and describe existing photographs, along with using photography and video as a tool for documentation (the gathering of evidence or data and creating a record) and representation (the portrayal of self or others) (Pink, 2004). In addition,
Pink’s (2015) research model makes evident, visual ethnography does not aim to discover an objective truth but rather privileges “the embodied, sensory and affective experiences, and the negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced” (35). Thus, visual ethnography enables new routes to understanding that cannot necessarily be captured by more traditional forms of ethnography.
The capturing of images within visual ethnography engages in photography and filming not as visual field notes, but rather as a means of creating knowledge and gaining insights that cannot be captured in verbal representations. Recording videos or capturing images enables new routes to understanding that cannot necessarily be observed and recorded in writing. As Foss
(2005) has noted, many human experiences are not easily expressed in verbal or oral forms, however, visual images are able to capture and represent human experiences that are non-linear, multidimensional, and dynamic. Visual ethnography speaks to the limitations of verbal and oral forms of understanding and representations and provides the tools for accessing that which other forms of representations cannot capture. Visual representations, such as photographs, have a 46 unique ability to capture and preserve the ephemeral qualities of people and places (Cvetkovich,
2014).
Capturing images when doing visual ethnography is thus useful not only for producing visual reminders of what was witnessed but creating knowledge and gaining insights that can capture events as they unfold. This tactic is demonstrated in Herbig and Hess’ (2012) project, which combined rhetorical theory, ethnography, and documentary filmmaking in order to examine participant voices at a rally speaking out against mainstream media practices. By taking a camera to the rally with them, they were able to capture, in real-time, the reactions and performances of rally participants as they happened. Therefore, they were able to gather data about what was happening in the present moment, not just relying on media coverage or interviews after the fact. They argue that the presence of their video camera accomplished several things. First, it allowed rally attendees to have a voice and react to the rally and the circumstances leading up to it. This enabled rally participants to become collaborators with
Herbig and Hess in the creation of a critique. Second, it created a publicly available media text, a documentary film, that was accessible to both the participants in the project as well able to circulate outside of academic discourses.
My use of the camera and decision to use photography in my engagement with queer kitchens draws heavily from tenants of visual ethnographic research. I conducted photographic mobile interviews in the kitchens of eight queer women, trans, and non-binary folks. Going into the actual kitchens was important because as Pink (2008) has noted, visual ethnographers engage with place-making through their work in several ways:
First, we investigate how the participants in our research make place themselves; second we reflect on how we collaboratively make place with research participants through research practice; third we consider how in representing our research we reconstitute place; and finally, we anticipate 47
how audiences/readers of our work inurn create place as they follow and add to its narratives (para 4).
When I took my camera into the kitchens with me, I was not only documenting who and what resided within the kitchen; I also was able to attend to the ways in which my participants were making sense of themselves within the environment of the kitchen (Pink, 2013).
Arts/Practice-Based Research Practices and Visual Images
While qualitative methods for analyzing photographs, such as visual ethnography, are useful research techniques, they often overlook the production process as a viable means of knowledge production. An arts/practice-based research approach to photographic research privileges the creative act as a means of knowledge production in its own sense rather than just being a supplement to traditional ethnographic methods. In addition to studying the images themselves and taking photos as part of my research process, I thus also turn my attention to how the act of taking the photograph (rather than the images themselves) impacts how marginalized communities become hailed into subject positions through a performative process.
Ethnographic methods such as RFM and visual ethnography have been invaluable in obtaining access to affective and ephemeral moments. In order to deepen my engagement with the production of visual images within the ethnographic setting I turn to arts/practice-based research, which I argue can enhance and provide another dimension to a rhetorical critic’s engagement with lived rhetorics through the creation of visual (and other artistic artifacts). For example, while RFM encourages critics to co-create rhetorical texts and performances alongside communities, this often takes the form of participating as an activist or educational activist, such as attending protests or handing out pamphlets, or as a visitor at a place of public memory such as a museum or memorial. Taking an arts/practice-based approach to rhetorical field methods opens up new possibilities for creation within communities. However, this can take the form of 48 an interoperative dance performance, videos, sound art, or art installations. Often these acts of creation are born from the collaboration between researchers, community members and organizations, opening up doors for opportunities to participate in the co-creation of rhetorical materials alongside the communities being studied. For my own research, this method, like
RFM, enables me to explore how queer communities co-create and enable new possibilities through participation but also it adds the bonus dimension of documenting and circulating the products of this co-creation.
Defining Arts/Practice-Based Research
Arts/practice-based research is both a methodological and an epistemological approach to academic inquiry. Practice-oriented research often moves beyond scholarly writing as a means of both doing and presenting research (Nelson, 2013). Theoretical, technical, and creative aspects of a project are not considered separate entities, but rather, they are muddled together to co-inform and construct each other (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2012). Chapman and Sawchuck (2012) have identified four sub-categories of research-creation: research-for-creation, research-from-creation, creative presentations of research, and creation-as-research. Research-for-creation encompasses the initial gathering of materials, ideas, collaborators, and technology. The authors liken this to the work that many academics do when preparing to write an academic article. This type of arts/practice-based research is valuable because even though the formal project has yet to start, the process itself can relive insights about how choices are made and engage their ethical and aesthetic dimensions. The second, research-from-creation, should feel familiar to scholars who regularly engage with artistic texts. In this sub-category, creative acts such as performances, experiences, and interactive works of art become means of understanding phenomena. This 49 category privileges creative works that the scholar must actively participate in as an audience member.
Arts/practice-based research projects generally integrate the creative process into the study. Topics and objects of study which lend themselves to this type of research typically could not be addressed without aesthetic or artistic component being part of the project. This includes lives and stories which otherwise might remain untold, as well as experiences that require illumination of embodied experiences such as sound, movement, and images (Chilton & Leavy,
2014). Practice-based research thus often relies on creative writing, dance, musical composition and performance, exhibitions, film, photography, performances, sound works, blogs, and other multimedia texts. While visual ethnography often relies on similar texts, participatory/arts-based methods are often more concerned with the creation of these texts rather than the finished product.
Not only are creative acts integrated into the research process, but they also cannot be separated from the research results. Examples of practice/arts-based research include performances and storytelling such as a "research-creation laboratory" as created by Tipi
Confessions (http://www.criticalpolyamorist.com/homeblog/tipi-confessions-a-research- creation-laboratory), housed within the University of Alberta. Another research-creation project is the Vaccine Project (http://www.thevaccineproject.com/), which brings together artists, health care providers, and scientists with creative media such as interactive projections, videos, prints, and zines to explore the complexities of the vaccine debate. A third example is the Walking Lab
(http://walkinglab.org/), which describes itself as “a partnership research-creation project to study and advance the theory and practice of walking methodologies, exploring and developing innovative interdisciplinary practices." In all of these examples, the object of analysis is not 50 necessarily the end product of a creative act but rather the creative practice and new forms of knowledge generated through production.
My work and intervention are dependent on the third and fourth categories of arts/practice-based research: creative presentations of research and creation-as-research. The creative presentation of research is not merely about moving beyond the genre of academic writing to engage audiences outside of academia. Rather, it works under the assumption that how we integrate our projects with ourselves and others impacts the insights and outcomes of the research as well as how we come to understand ourselves. The final category, creation-as- research, requires an act of doing or making for research to emerge. Research "results" include the creative output as well as the process of getting to the output. It involves often moving in a non-linear fashion between creation and reflection of knowledge development. Chapman and
Sawchuck (2012) argue that creation-as-research is a form of academic intervention that can contribute to knowledge production, even if it takes on a different flavor. They classify creation- as-research as having epistemological implications, stating, "Creative productions constitute knowledge in a different, but culturally equivalent way to other forms of transcribed research findings such as academic journal articles, scholarly books, mathematical formulae, research reports, studies, theses, et cetera" (21). Also, creation as research impacts the temporality of the research project. Much like RFM, an orientation towards the creative process rather than the outcome moves the site of analysis to a present instead of past tense.
In addition to making such epistemological interventions, arts/practice-based research can also serve emancipatory functions. Rolling (2013) refers to this intervention as a critical- theoretical art-making model. A form of creation-as-research, critical-theoretical art-making draws from critical theory and positions creative practices as a mode of critical reflection. Within 51 this model, creative practices render invisible assumptions, norms, and values visible to transform and critique unjust social relations. It can empower marginalized communities and individuals. Critically informed arts/practice-based methods not only can make the lives and experiences of marginalized people and communities legible but can also move people towards action.
Critical practices in arts-based research can present new modes of existence and allow space for the creation of and experimentation with identities. Finley argues that “Good critical arts-based research grasps our imaginations, grabs ahold of our souls, and unabashedly strives to affect our very ways of living, being, and co-being, as researchers, as social scientists, as people.
It transforms our identities and gives new ways of expressing our differently evolving identities"
(Finley, 2014, 531). Critical arts/practice-based research has the ability to not only create space for discovering what is new, but it can also ask questions about what is "not yet" (Finley, 2014).
This speaks to Muñoz's (2009) call for a queer futurity which places queerness as on the horizon, something that is not here yet.
Archives as Methodological Collision
My research is heavily invested in co-producing archives alongside my research participants. Because rhetorical field methods are invested in vernacular rhetoric that is often unseen and invisible, field methods can help not only capture observations but can also expand the availability of secondary archival materials (Middelton et al., 2015). Doing rhetoric in situ results in field notes and other evidence of rhetorical activity being brought back from the communities from which they originate (McHendry et al., 2014). Additionally, taking a visual ethnographic and participatory/arts-based approach not only compels me as a researcher into the field but also results in visual artifacts that can be brought back with me. This creation of an 52 archive that did not yet exist is often imperative for scholars who work with communities who fly under the radar of mainstream textual accounts because, as Ono and Sloop (1995) argue, many communities have been written out of history.
The “Queering the Kitchen” (queeringhtekitchen.com) archive seeks to address an absence of representation through the co-creation of an online archive, that enables the products of my ethnographic field-work and arts/practice-based research to be accessible to the communities I am examining as well as the wider public. The online digital archive is presented in a format not hidden behind academic journal paywalls or other inaccessible forms that prevent the general public from accessing the products of academic work. The format of the archive is one that is clear, easy to navigate, and should not alienate non-academic community members.
Brouwer and Squires (2003) argue for “the importance of oscillation between scholarly and wider lay audiences, the ideal result of which would be relevance through translation of knowledge across publics” (p. 212). By encouraging the public circulation of my own gallery/archive, I am also making available knowledge that might otherwise remain unseen within the realm of the ephemeral (Cvetkovich, 2015, 47). Making this knowledge public is especially important for scholars who engage with queer or other marginalized subjects. The absences of non-normative bodies, identities, and experiences can render the non-normative body as affectively lost, forgotten, or even empty (Lee, 2016).
Conclusion
The assemblage of methods offered above grant me the resources to attune myself as a critic to the mundane and everyday resources that build more humane and just worlds within the spaces and performances of queer bodies and communities. All three methods enable me as a critic to focus on the present moment, the here and now, as is it are unfolding. Additionally, the 53 critic is invited to produce or co-create alongside the participants. This co-production can range from participating in activities with the community in question to co-constructing place or engaging in creative projects such as photography. Being there and doing, rather than just watching and observing, is key to all of my chosen methods—thus, rendering me an active and performing critic. This is especially beneficial, as I belong to the community that I am examining, and an active and performative approach not only garners insights that may be lost by focusing solely on after-the-fact texts, but they also allow me to navigate between my identities as community-member and scholar.
While the “being there” and field-work elements of my method facilitate my ability to witness rhetorical activity as it unfolds in the present, the use of photography and arts/practice- based research allows me as a researcher to use documentation to participate in the creation of texts that not only aid in research but can be shared with the community. The use of photography as a visual ethnographic method attunes fieldwork towards the visuality of my chosen sites and is a valuable resource for generating knowledge about the identities and performances taking place at A-Camp, queer kitchens, and the galleries. Additionally, the archive of photographs and stories gathered during the research process enable the products of my fieldwork to circulate publicly and add to the available representations of an underrepresented group.
54
Chapter Three Utopic Rehearsal: Embodying and Imagining Possible Futures at A-Camp
I pulled up to the gates a few minutes past 3:00, the absolute earliest we were allowed to show up at the camp. There was already a line of cars stopped in front of me as I checked in with a security guard and made my way through the narrow, winding road up to the cabins. I timidly pulled my car over on the shoulder, grabbed my bags out of the car, and, after some searching, located my cabin. The cabin was reasonably quiet when I entered the main room, which was full of bunk beds, with two smaller rooms feeding off of it. The walls were a soft warm white, and there were windows high on the wall, which, as I later discovered, would filter in the morning light that made the whole cabin glow in the early morning as I was trying to convince myself to get out of bed. Once inside the cabin, I were greeted by our counselor, who I recognized as a contributor for Autostraddle, and received my swag bag (a blue tote bag with that year's camp logo, a printed program, a bandana that correlated with our team color, and other goodies such as safe sex supplies, finger-nail clippers, a copy of Bitch magazine, and a Planned Parenthood water bottle). After unloading my bags into the cabin, I went outside to move the car, and a different
Autostraddle writer who I adore put her arm around my shoulder. We had a geeky conversation about how we had the same model Jeep and how well they handle weather conditions. The
Autostraddle writer concluded our conversation by telling me to leave my Jeep in the overflow parking lot and just forget about it for the week. Forgetting about my Jeep for a week was just the first step in an escape to an alternative world.
Spaces dedicated to women and their experiences have become precious in the contemporary moment. As women have gained more public recognition and discourses around gender roles begin to shift, these spaces—particularly those with political agendas—are often 55 seen as less crucial, a relic from a past era. As Ahmed (2017) states, “women’s spaces are gradually being eroded, often through the assumption that they are no longer necessary” (232).
However, spaces dedicated to women and others who are marginalized within society perform important functions. Ahmed (2017) argues that when queer bodies feel out of place, they often seek places where they can feel less displaced from straight orientations. “Bodies that experience being out of place might need to be oriented, to find a place where they feel comfortable and safe in the world” (158). Queer gatherings often facilitate the first steps to creating spaces for queer bodies to feel oriented in a disorienting social world. These gatherings create opportunities to explore and “form new patterns and new ways of making sense” (171). Queer gatherings and space-making practices are creative and productive means of developing new ways to exist and, in some instances, even thrive in a hostile world.
While queer gatherings offer unique affordances for individuals, they also play an important collective role for worldbuilding practices. This chapter argues that queer spaces such as A-Camp perform a utopic rehearsal—the embodied enactment of a possible alternative future as a means of addressing a current political and social moment that is often hostile and violent towards queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. To begin, I overview A-Camp and place A-Camp into conversation with the legacy of lesbian separatist spaces, ultimately arguing that A-Camp acts as a contemporary queer separatist space. Next, I examine A-Camp as a utopic rehearsal, using a neo-sophistic rhetorical lens to illuminate how it operates. I conclude that the experience/performance of A-Camp is a collective rhetorical enactment that speaks into the opportune moment, creates a different sense of the appropriate, and provides a vision of different possibility—the utopic rehearsal for a world that isn’t yet born beyond the borders of
A-Camp but is fully present within them. 56
Queer Spaces
Queer spaces play a critical role in the production of utopic rehearsals, yet unfortunately they are often difficult to generate and find. Halberstam (2005) argues that queer space is the result of placemaking practices that allow for “new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics” (4). These places of engagement and creativity must often be built from scratch as a place of both belonging and refuge. Ahmed speaks about the painstaking work that can go into creating these spaces, which are needed for queer bodies to become secure and reoriented. The "homes" that queer bodies construct for themselves become places of refuge where disoriented bodies can withdraw in the face of a relentlessly straight world and cultivate an ordinary. Queer bodies often spend much of their lives fighting for an ordinary. As Ahmed
(2017) states, “when you have to battle for an ordinary, when battling becomes ordinary, the ordinary can be what you lose” (217). When queer bodies continuously have to battle to feel secure, to feel? the promise of the "happy life" or a life where you can let your guard down, where you do not have to explain yourself to others, the mundane existence is what is at stake.
Because of the loss that queer bodies face in a straight-oriented world, even with rights granted by recent legislation and Supreme Court rulings, the few queer spaces that do exist function as vital opportunities for refuge, community building, potentiality, becomings, creativity, and opportunity.
If women's spaces, in general, are receding into history, spaces for queer women are on even shakier ground. The lesbian bar scene, which was once one of the pillars of queer women's communities and social lives, are even rapidly closing their doors. The queer community has made many political strides since the early years of activism in the 1960s and '70s, followed by increased visibility and political action due to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. With 57 the Supreme Court ruling on DOMA, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, an increase in what are often considered positive media representations, and the rise of medical technologies that assist non-heterosexual couples in conceiving biological children, it appears that queer culture is on the fast track of becoming mainstream and that dedicated spaces and political organizing are not as prevalent as they once were. Queer women's spaces have also not been immune to the digital takeover that have plagued feminist gathering spaces that catered to women regardless of their sexuality. While the digital may, on the one hand, seem to offer a utopic answer to queer women, trans, and non-binary folks to connect regardless of geographical locations, these spaces are thus also in precarious positions. For example, the pop culture website After Ellen's editor and founder was ousted by its corporate ownership after failing to make a profit.
In light of such precarity, queer spaces often become the focal point of rhetorical studies.
Yet, while rhetorical studies into queer gathering spaces are common, they often center themselves in the archives or with activist communities. Additionally, scholars such as Muñoz,
Ahmed, and Halberstam have explored issues of queer space and time by studying media texts, artwork, and, in the case of Muñoz, performance spaces without bodies. My project contributes to such research by taking a mixed-method approach that includes textual analysis and fieldwork to examine the construction of embodied queer spaces as they unfold in the present moment.
Doing fieldwork in spaces of queer refuge, such as A Camp, is important for several reasons.
First, it contributes to queer, cultural studies, and rhetorical studies by placing the center of research in queer time and space. In addition, it prioritizes the exploration of contemporary spaces dedicated to queer women, spaces that have not received nearly enough scholarly attention.3
3 There is work on lesbian separatist communities in the 1960’s-80’s, but there are few contemporary, empirical works on spaces dedicated to queer women and non-binary folks. 58
A-Camp
My engagement with contemporary separatist spaces centers around A-Camp, an adult summer camp for queer women, trans, and non-binary folks hosted by the queer online publication Autostraddle. Autostraddle is a website that provides content by and for queer women and gender non-conforming folks. The site features original content, such as first-person accounts, advice columns, reviews, tutorials, and weekly comment threads. The site is self- described as “an intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressively feminist online community for multiple generations of kickass lesbian, bisexual & otherwise inclined ladies”
(“What Is Autostraddle?,” 2012). Autostraddle is a distinctive publication because it focuses solely on queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks and is devoted to centering queer women’s experiences (the site is unapologetic about not catering to cis, gay men and straight women). Its mission is best illustrated by the first sentence of their mission statement:
"Autostraddle's girl-on-girl culture is rooted in basic social values and ideals — we want women to feel good about themselves, we want equality and visibility for all marginalized groups, and ultimately, we'd like to change the world" (“What Is Autostraddle?,” 2012).
Autostraddle is an independent publication that relies heavily on its readership and community to generate revenue. While the website regularly features advertisements and sponsored content, often from queer-owned or queer-friendly companies, the revenue brought in by ad sales is not enough to sustain the website and its staff. The site’s primary support comes from the site’s membership program, known as A+, in which for a monthly or annual fee members get access to exclusive content; as well as revenue made from A-Camp, and merchandise sales (“What Is Autostraddle?,” 2012). Despite the support readers provide, in July of 2019 the site launched its biggest fund raiser in history in order to raise the wages of their full- 59 time staff members and hire more writers who identified as trans and/or people of color. The site raised almost $150,000 in a week, exceeding their original goal of $100,00.
In addition to the fundraising campaign, summer of 2019 also marked the start of a partnership with REI. The company sponsored several activities at A-Camp, such as a campfire complete with smores (with vegan options), beer, and mini bottles of kombucha. REI also hosted a zombie survival workshop at camp and sent several openly queer employees to represent the company at camp. Since the 2019 A-Camp sponsorship, REI has regularly been featured on the
Autostraddle website in the form of side bar ads and sponsored posts. While A-Camp has historically had sponsorships, the REI sponsorship is unique in that it is the largest and most well recognized company to financially partner with Autostraddle and A-Camp.
A-Camp as a concept was first conceived in 2012, when inspired by an Autostraddle party hosted by the site’s founder and the desire to bring Autostraddle readers together in the material world, A-Camp was born. A-Camp is self-described as:
A unique, dynamic, immersive, ever-evolving home-away-from-home queer adult camp that has been changing lives and taking name-tags since 2012. It is a curated conference/camp/retreat combo with a little something for everybody: diverse panels and workshops, hilarious comedy, kickass musicians, intense discussion groups, arts & crafts, dance parties, serious bonding and a peaceful refuge from the heteropatriarchy.
The event brings together approximately 400 self-identifying queer women, trans, and non- binary folks for five days. Most campers lodge summer-camp style in cabins I described earlier, cabins that are alight with a morning glow, full of bunk beds and a shared bathroom. Camp activities involve panels and workshops on topics ranging from "queerleading" (a queer interpretation of cheerleading) to cooking, writing, activism, rope bondage, polyamorous relationships, natural menstruation remedies, and ways to deal with conservative family members post-election. Other activities include meditation, campfires, arts and crafts, sing-along 60 hikes, pool parties, paddle boarding, a camp-wide Donald Trump hex, dance lessons for those who identify as masculine of center, letter writing for queer incarcerated people, and on the final night, the camp dance. As the list indicates, camp activities range from the silly to the serious— making space to address the genuine and tangible realities of existing in the world as a queer body. By making room for community building and connection around issues that make navigating the world in a queer body uncomfortable if not deadly, the camp recognizes the sticky realities of living in an often hostile, straight-oriented world. A-Camp works to make space where fun and resistance do not have to exist on a binary spectrum but rather can mingle and inform each other.
The camp also attempts to enact what it claims is a queer normative space. The A-Camp website states, “forget about the patriarchy and income tax and the internet and BE RIGHT
HERE.” As suggested here, camp organizers encourage campers to unplug, get in touch with their inner child, and embrace the unique opportunity that A-Camp offers. A-Camp promises a refuge away from the responsibilities and pressures of the world. It constructs a present (albeit an alternative present) that fosters and highlights queerness rather than forcing it into unseen corners. In doing so, A-Camp, as a departure from the everyday, creates a present yet utopic relationship with time so that campers can be radically present and fully embody their queerness with less fear of persecution or the day-to-day responsibilities of adulthood. 61
Figure 1: The main A-Camp auditorium and performance area featuring banners stating: “Be Right Here” and “Be Real Queer” To explore such possibilities that A-Camp offers, I relied heavily on textual materials such as the camp website, program, and post written about camp published on the main
Autostraddle website, as well as conducted fieldwork at camp and qualitative interviews with past camp participants (see Chapter Two). Interview participants were recruited through contacts
I had made while attending camp, as well as through posts on A-Camp social media groups. I interviewed a total of ten former campers, eight identified as white, most were in their early twenties to mid-thirties, seven identified as cis-women, and one identified as having a disability that required accessibility resources while at camp. In addition to interviews, I attended the 2017 camp held in Wisconsin, as well as the 2018 and 2019 camps in Ojai, CA. At all camps, I stayed in the cabins, ate meals with other campers, and participated in workshops and activities. I felt that it was important to attend camp because, as Conquergood (1991) has suggested, when scholars focus too heavily on textual artifacts we can miss the cultural work that does not exist in the texts or can be fully captured by a textual account. As suggested earlier, fieldwork helped 62 me as a critic both experience and study how utopic rehearsals are produced as a mode of imagining and enacting possible alternative futures.
Figure 2: View of the Ojai, CA A-Camp grounds from the dining hall A-Camp and the Legacy of Lesbian Spaces
A-Camp is not unique in its quest to create a space for queer women, but rather is part of a much longer history of spaces of retreat. The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to women-centric spaces such as consciousness-raising groups, women's centers, feminist bookstores, intentional communities, protests and social movements, music festivals, and women's studies departments on college campuses. Spurred by civil rights efforts of the women’s movement and gay liberation work, lesbians began to organize and fight for their specific needs as both women and gay. While the lesbian movement may have seemed ripe for coalitional work with feminist and gay activism, many lesbians felt unwelcome in both the women’s movement (Betty Friedan famously referred to lesbians as the “lavender menace”) and the gay liberation movement, which was dominated by gay men (Enszer, 2016). 63
The discomfort felt by lesbians within the women’s movement was most likely due to their purposeful distancing from men. Ahmed (2017) argues that becoming a lesbian body is an investment in the redistribution of women’s energies. Instead of investing energy in relationships with men, the lesbian instead redirects this labor into relationships with those who are not cis- men. The reorganization of women’s labor in the face of a heterosexual social world can contribute to loneliness and isolation in straight spaces. Because lesbians pour their energies into other women instead of men, they are often out of line with both heterosexual feminist women and gay men.
One reaction to being out of line with straight women and gay men was the development of lesbian separatism or the voluntary relocation of lesbians from mainstream society. By focusing their energies solely on other women, lesbian separatists felt that they could discover their authentic selves, which they saw as being silenced or dulled by the patriarchy (Enszer,
2016). The 1970s New York City-based group Radicalesbians defined lesbian separatism as “the primacy of women relating to other women, of women celebrating a new consciousness of and with each other which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution” (Radicalesbians, 1970, 4). While lesbian separatism did not fix the social woes that still plague those who exist at the intersection of being gay and a woman, it did offer utopic possibilities and “process for living in the world” (Enszer, 2016, 181).
Some lesbians took the separation of themselves from men and heterosexual women literally by setting up women’s land communities across the US. In addition to barring all men, many of these communities aspired for complete autonomy from the mainstream world. In their quest for an alternative society, these communities established food co-ops, publishing outlets, and credit unions (Levy, 2009). Lesbian separatists were not the first counterculture to seek 64 refuge from the pace and pressures of mainstream life; instead, they were following in the footsteps of the back-to-the-land subculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, a rejection of the post-World
War II culture of consumption and commodification. These communities often took the form of intentional, self-sustaining communities and hippie communes (Burmeister, 2014). This model provided an ideal prototype for lesbians who were looking for means of disengaging with heterosexual patriarchy. As stated by the—still active—Oregon Women’s Land Trust’s document titled “Herstory”: “In the mid-1970s there was great interest among many women in the lesbian feminist movement in having access to rural land in order to be able to live outside of mainstream patriarchal culture, which was ridden with violence against women, gay people, and the environment.” Going “back-to-the-land” was especially appealing in that it offered opportunities for lesbians to construct and experiment with new identities, relational patterns, economic exchange, and above all, to create spaces where lesbians felt both safe and honored in their love and devotion for other women (Burmeister, 2014). The Oregon Women’s Land Trust’s articles of incorporation, for instance, state that the purpose of the trust is to support the emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being of women by promoting self-sufficiency, providing women access to land regardless of financial situation, and fostering humane relations with other women as well as the earth (Oregon Women’s Land Trust, 2004).
Despite the vital role that the lesbian land movement played in allowing queer women to feel "at home" in a place, lesbian back-to-the-land communes, like other communities and spaces devoted to lesbians and queer women, are in decline. While organizations such as the Oregon
Women’s Land Trust still host programs and open its doors to women interested in environmental sustainability and stewardship, many have disbanded as members age and younger generations do not flock to the fields to replace them. This decline could be due to 65 several factors. First, the complete separation from men forced women of color to choose between the men of color and white lesbians. The Combahee River Collective, for instance, called out white lesbian separatists for making demands that lead to fractionalization rather than alliance building, arguing that it was not a viable political strategy (Enszer, 2016). Another factor in the decline of “women’s land” is the antiquated notion that trans women and gender-queer people do not belong in “lesbian” spaces. As Allie Conti (2016) reports, many board members of existing women’s land trusts are in their 60s and 70s, and are stuck in their ways, refusing to adapt to changing notions of gender and who counts as a “woman.” The “womyn-born-womyn” policy of many women’s spaces, such as festivals and intentional communities, are particularly alienating to newer generations of queer women and gender non-conforming folks.
The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Michfest), a well-known women’s feminist music festival, which ran from 1976 – 2015, has, like lesbian back-to-the-land communes, provided space for women to gather without men but not without facing trouble. Music festivals like Michfest are often revered because they not only facilitated networking and the celebration of womanhood, they also offered “the experience of women-only space and the utopian ideal of a female community” (Luis, 2018, 21). Michfest, and its counterparts, are transient in that they co- opt spaces for a temporary amount of time. This makes them accessible to women who cannot for various reasons leave their lives and jobs in the "real world" and for a set period of time experience what a woman-centered and run community can look like. Despite their temporary nature, Michfest, like many music festivals, allow women to come together to form protective enclaves where they are free to be themselves, away from the often violent and oppressive gaze and control of men (Luis, 2018). 66
Yet even as Michfest has been successful in its founding mission to center women,
Michfest has come under fire and been forced to grapple with changing notions of gender. For years, the festival faced controversy over its policy barring transgender women from the festival.
Their “womyn-born-womyn" policy was particularly a site of disagreement and generational strife. The festival argued that it was creating a safe space for women to be free from men and male genitalia, often claiming that many of the participants were sexual assault/abuse survivors and that the presence of trans women could potentially be triggering. Trans women and their allies (who were often younger cis-gender queer women) pushed back on this policy, citing the social construction of gender and calling out the hypocrisy of allowing trans men or masculine- of-center individuals to attend the festival. Ultimately, the organizers decided to end the festival rather than amend their policies.
As justification for their choice, Michfest clung to biological definitions of womanhood.
As queer and transgender studies have nuanced feminist and lesbian conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, they also have produced tensions and perceived losses, which often pertain to the decentering of cis-women’s embodied experiences (McConnell et al., 2016). While many both in and outside the academy now embrace a fluid and socially constructed definition of gender and gendered experiences, many Michfest participants opposed to the inclusion of transwomen justified their stance by arguing that trans and queer identities have “eroded” the boundaries that preserve spaces for cis-women and lesbians. Michfest attendees cited biological experiences that cis women experience as sacred and argued that the inclusion of trans women would inhibit celebration of biological womanhood. This view posits that cis and trans women have different journeys to womanhood, and therefore need separate spaces.
A-Camp as Contemporary Separatist Space 67
Even as it functions to prioritize queer women’s experiences, Autostraddle and A-Camp reject Michfest’s conceptualization of gendered experiences. A-Camp is a trans-inclusive space that embraces a more intersectional approach to lesbian communities, acknowledging that gender is shifting and fluid, both culturally and individually. A-Camp’s “no cis-men allowed” policy echoes the history of spaces such as lesbian back-to-the-land movements and festivals such as
Michfest, yet they demonstrate self-reflexivity concerning gender identity. The A-Camp website clearly states that from its inception, the camp’s mission has been to center queer women’s experiences. However, unlike Michfest and many of the remaining women’s land trusts, A-Camp welcomes transgender women with open arms. Their website explicitly states that trans women are encouraged to attend and emphasizes that the camp employs several trans women who provide guidance in making camp accessible and comfortable to trans women, makes available a trans woman point person to field concerns and answer questions, and provides sensitivity training for all staff members.
Additionally, A-Camp welcomes folks who identify outside the gender binary with open arms. The FAQ page explicitly states that cis-men are not welcome but indicates that those who identify as trans men or gender non-binary are encouraged by the organizers to attend camp. A-
Camp organizers state:
I’M NON-BINARY, CAN I COME?
Initially, A-Camp was intended as a women's space, but as so many of our staff and campers began identifying as / coming out as non-binary, that intention shifted, which is just to say: YES! YES YOU CAN COME! Which brings us to....
I'M A TRANS MAN, CAN I COME?
Again, this was initially a "no." But now it is a "yes!", for many of the same reasons. We understand and recognize the political implications and historical complications of trans men often being more welcomed into 68
women's spaces than trans women. A-Camp has always been and will always be a place where trans women are welcomed and affirmed as the women they are, but it's a space where many trans men feel comfortable and welcomed as well. We do not expect all trans men to feel comfortable in a space that evolved from a female-centric intent, but many do and are very much members of the A-Camp family.
At the camp itself, staff and participants performed this policy in several ways. First, when arriving at camp, the first-day campers are asked to select a color-coded pronoun sticker to adhere to their name tag. This accomplishes several things; first, it acknowledges that despite
Autostraddle’s original mission to center the experiences of queer women, not all campers will necessarily identify as women. Second, it encourages campers to "announce" their pronouns in a highly visible manner, removing much of the emotional labor of both being misgendered in interactions with other campers and having to disclose and ask about pronouns. Third, it offers a measure of security; while some campers report using camp as a safe place to experiment with new pronouns, others claim camp is one of the only places where they can publicly disclose the pronouns that feel is best for them.
In a world where gender is becoming more and more blurred and categories are being smashed, it may seem outdated to some to single out straight cis women and cis men of all sexual orientations as unwelcome at camp. However, I see A-Camp as creating a space for those who have experienced patriarchy and heterosexism in ways that straight cis women and cis men may have not. This definition of a queer community is much more in line with Maggie Nelson
(2016) who states that it is not necessarily the sameness in regard to genitals or bodies that constitutes the "same" in same-sex marriage, but instead it is "the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" (25). In this vein, A-Camp has adapted to changing notions of gender while still providing a protected space for the community to come together to relieve themselves of the pressures of the broader social world. 69
Separatist Spaces as Enclaves
A-Camp’s mission is significant because, as Ahmed (2007) argues, when queer bodies feel out of place, they often seek places where they can feel less displaced from straight orientations. The camp is an example of a protected enclave or places where groups can come together and experiment and explore new ideas and arguments in a safe and encouraging environment. Groups often find themselves withdrawing into these spaces due to the marginalization and oppression that they face in public (Mansbridge, 1994). While withdrawing from the wider public social world can seem like a depressing symptom of violence and power imbalances, withdrawal into enclaves where community members feel safe and can let their guard down enables the community to engage in creative and inventive practices (Chávez, 2011).
Much like the lesbian separatists before them, A-Camp organizers feel strongly about crafting an enclave where queer is the referent and straight people and heterosexual culture are the weird ones. By safeguarding who is and is not allowed within the space, A-Camp acts as an enclave where campers can experiment with other ways of being in the world.
While it could be argued that queer normative spaces such as bars, bookshops, performances (e.g., concerts or poetry readings), art shows, and workshops are queer-centric spaces, A-Camp differs both from historical lesbian spaces as well as contemporary queer spaces. In interviews with current campers, many spoke about the importance of A-Camp as a protected space. Unlike other public events such as Pride or bars, A-Camp organizers act as gatekeepers concerning who is or is not allowed in the space. While Pride and gay bars center queer experiences, they are open to the public and straight people are allowed to enter and participate in the space. Sometimes they are allies who show up at Pride parades to demonstrate support for queer communities, but more troubling are invasions into queer spaces like 70 bachelorette parties being held in gay night clubs. A-Camp addresses the issue of straight allies head-on in their Camp FAQ in response to the question "Can my straight best friend come? She's such an amazing queer ally!" They state:
No. A-Camp is a queer-normative space — the only queer-normative space most of us will ever be in. Keeping it that way is part of what makes the A-Camp experience so magical. It's difficult to explain this intention in writing without making this camp sound like it's focused on romantic connections (It isn't! That happens sometimes, but IT'S ABOUT MAKING FRIENDS), but we at Autostraddle.com have been fielding your questions about crushes on probably-straight girls for eons, and we wanted this to be one space where even if your crush doesn't like you back or is otherwise unavailable, you wouldn't have to worry about whether or not they liked girls at all in the first place.
A-Camp’s no cis-men allowed policy enables the space to de-center male experiences.
One participant spoke about a queer social group where gay men would regularly interrupt women who were speaking or would dominate the conversations. She saw A-Camp as a response to this problem by creating a space where the voices of queer women, trans, and gender non- conforming folks were centered and held up. She reported that A-Camp allowed her to experience a queer community where she did not have to do the emotional labor of managing and responding to gays men’s feelings. Another participant spoke about how gay men are often prone to mansplaining and dominating queer spaces, and that A-Camp was a welcome relief compared to queer spaces open to anyone regardless of gender. As evident in such claims, A-
Camp and many of its campers are unapologetic in their desire to experience a queer community that centers and celebrates the experiences of queer women (including trans women) as well as welcome those who identify as gender queer/non-conforming and trans men.
A-Camp as Neo-Sophistic Utopic Rehearsal
A-Camp can be viewed as a kind of collective rhetorical performance—a utopic rehearsal for a world that is still on the horizon (Muñoz, 2009). The Oxford English Dictionary 71 defines utopia as "An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect." However, utopia does not have to be a perfect, unattainable goal; rather, it can refer to suggestions for how to construct a world that is more livable and looking towards a better future (Jones, 2013). Here,
I thus use utopia here to refer to “any kind of symbolic expression of hope for a better world”
(Portolano, 2012, 114), hinting at the rhetorical nature of utopic work.
For many queer individuals and communities, rhetoric is a means of producing possible futures or alternatives that can be strived toward, futures that might include the imagination of ideal social worlds (Portlano 2012). As Miller (2002) states, “Rhetoric is the art of simulation, an art by which we create alternative worlds, alternative selves, alternative modes of belief” (78).
Due to the marginalization that queer individuals and communities have faced, queer communities are often compelled to look towards and take rhetorical steps to create an alternative world where they can live their lives freely and express themselves without fear of death or violence. In this way, queerness is not just an identity description but a productive performance of approaching the social world. As Muñoz (2009) states, “Queerness is…a performative because it is not only a being but a doing for and towards the future” (1). Longing for and thinking about utopia is not enough, then; instead, active steps must be taken to bring utopic visions into being (Noss, 2012). Realizing as much, A-Camp, its staff, and campers do more than just dream about a world away from the hetero-patriarchy. Rather they put in the rhetorical work—physical, temporal, and emotional—to enact, or rehearse, what a more compassionate world could look like.
Taking a cue from Muñoz (2009) who asks “how do we stage utopia” (99), I identify such rhetorical efforts as utopic rehearsal and offer this concept as a heuristic to examine how in liminal, enclaved spaces queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks not only imagine 72 but enact and embody possible futures. Muñoz (2009) explains that the purpose of the “notion of the future in the present is to summon a refunctioned notion of utopia in the service of subaltern subjects” (49). In such utopic spaces, queer possibilities orient themselves towards a potential future. As Ahmed’s work makes visible, queer bodies are often denied a present and a future since they have been denied both the ordinariness of an everyday and happy objects. In queer spaces, on the other hand, queerness is conceived as always on the horizon, something that is not yet achieved. Such orientation toward a queer potentiality is productive in that it creates possibilities for alternative paths. More specifically, it allows for spaces outside of heteronormativity to be imagined and collective potential to be realized. Queer spaces such as A-
Camp are especially important sites where the present and the future come together to generate a space of possibility for imagining and enacting alternative futurities.
In the remainder of this chapter, I examine how utopic rehearsal is enacted in queer spaces such as A-Camp by approaching utopic rehearsal through Poulakos’ neoseophistic theories of rhetoric. Poulakos defines rhetoric as “the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible” (36). This definition contains three key concepts, kairos (the opportune moment), to prepon (the appropriate), and to dynaton (the possible). In the following section, I focus on each of these key components of Poulakos’s definition and argue that each element contributes to A-Camp’s functioning as a utopic rehearsal for a world that has yet to manifest but is still visible on the horizon.
Kairos
Within rhetorical studies, the notion of kairos refers to the opportune moment. In more traditional understandings, kairos refers to the relationship between time and the speaking 73 situation. Often referred to as occasion, kairos not only denotes that something should be said or done, but it refers to what is appropriate in the temporal space that a message is created.
Circumstances, dictated by time, ultimately determine what—both stylistically as well as in regard to content—is fitting (Kinneavy, 2002; Sutton, 2006). Kairos is concerned with not only the “right timing” but also the proper measure of the response. The response to a given exigency is not a universal truth, but rather a contingent and qualitative response drawing from the practical wisdom of the community in question (Sipiora, 2002; Smith, 2002). When temporality of a given situation is considered, it informs what is considered in good taste and ethical within the specific historical, social, and cultural context in which the message is deployed. Poulkaos
(1983) argues that not only do ideas possess a time and place; it is also imperative that unless they are voiced into existence at the correct moment, "they miss their chance to satisfy situationally shared voids within a particular audience" (39).
Kairos comes to play an important role in the utopic rehearsal being enacted at A-Camp because much of what happens there is a direct response to what is going on politically and culturally in the United States. While A-Camp originated several years before the Trump campaign and subsequent presidency, the temporal moment marked by Trump’s hateful rhetoric and threats to revoke hard-won civil-rights hung heavy at all the A-Camps I attended. A-Camp had always had the mission to provide a refuge from the hostility and pressures of a heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, and ableist world, but the current political climate added a more intensified need to come together to escape the heightened feelings of precarity.
Such kairos is particularly evident in A-Camp’s opening ceremony. Camp opens each year with dinner, a formal welcome by the staff, followed by “cabin initiations” where individuals cabins introduce themselves to each other and establish ground rules for the shared 74 space. A palpable sense of precarity and emotional labor that goes into existing in a heightened state of hatred and violence was especially present at the 2017 camp’s opening ceremonies where
Trump, the election, and the hate-filled rhetoric we had all spent the last year enduring was front and center. In light of this context, Riese Bernard, Autostraddle’s co-founder and editor-in-chief and the executive director of A-Camp, led that year’s group of campers in an affirming chant. As she stood on a stage and faced the rest of us, sitting packed into hard wooden benches in the performance space of a Jewish summer camp, Riese confidently stated, “we deserve this.” The crowd in front of her responded with the same words. As “We deserve this” was repeated over and over, the chant gained momentum, almost casting a spell on the room. Energy picked up as the chant went on, and I found myself, along with the strangers seated next to me, believing that despite the dehumanizing rhetoric that had been spewing from media outlets all year, yes we deserved a space to have fun, make connections, forget about all of the hard stuff that prevents us from being fully present in our lives. We deserved to surround ourselves and engage with those who understood best what existing in our current historical and cultural moment is like.
The following year, in 2018, kairos had shifted somewhat, but the current political climate still rang clear. By the summer of 2018 we were well into the Trump presidency and were dealing with damaging rhetoric and actions such as immigration enforcement, climate change, banning transgender individuals from serving in the military, roll backs on LGBT protections in the workplace, and the continued high murder rate faced by trans women of color.
Whereas in 2017 the camp staff and participants seemed to be still running off adrenaline to fight a Trump presidency, this year the energy was lower; you could tell that the day to day existence was harder, that people were tired. When Riese opened the 2018 camp, therefore, instead of chanting that we did indeed deserve to be there, the chant had changed to "we need this," 75 signaling the vital role that places such as A-Camp play in the well-being of a community and their ability to continue to grow, flourish, and thrive.
This enactment is very much in line with Poulakos’ theories of kairos (1983), who states that opportune moments are often born out of times of stress and that the need to intervene into stress and hostility prompts rhetors to propose alternative solutions. As Bitzer (1968) argues in his definition of the rhetorical situation, rhetoric often has a pragmatic function and in most cases does not exist simply for the sake of existing. Instead, rhetoric "functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world…rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action" (3). When kairos is taken into consideration, it enables inventive responses by "interrupting [the] limitations of [the] present moment" (Pauck & Pauck,
2015, 73). A-Camp can be seen as responding to the exigency of the challenges and dangers of existing as a queer woman, trans, or gender non-conforming individual in a hostile world. A-
Camp does not exist for the sake of pure entertainment, but rather A-Camp exists as a means of creating and experimenting with changed ways of existing in the world.
One way A-Camp responds to the immense pressure of existing in a patriarchal and homophobic world is by engaging in a queer temporality as it manifests a utopic rehearsal.
Halberstam (2005) argues that queer time does not follow the rules of heterosexual time, which adheres to a narrative of growing up in a linear fashion where the ultimate goal is a reproductive future (both in relation to child-rearing and economics). Rather, queer time is often contradictory and found in queer counter-cultural spaces such as the night club where relationships to the present and the future become distorted (Dinshaw et al., 2007). A-Camp generates a utopic rehearsal by offering campers permission to pause their fight, take a break, partake in “a simpler 76 time” and have fun by participating in what might be classified as typical camp activities such as tie-dying, jewelry making, and talent shows. The ability to spend a week away from our everyday lives and the pressures that come along with it may not seem productive, but it is a creative means of responding to a "radically particular" moment in time (Miller, 2002). In leaving behind the pressures of the present moment outside of camp, these activities not only allow campers to take their mind off of the political-cultural stresses caused by the current moment, but simultaneously engage in childish activities as a means of caring for their present adult selves. In effect, campers are able to generate and exist within a queer temporality that is collectively produced and lays the foundation for a reimagined future.
This temporality is especially evident in the end-of-camp dance, which in my own experience as well as speaking with other campers, reverted us to the alternative space and imagination of our teenage years. The dance is a re-enactment of the senior prom that we all deserved but many never experienced due to factors such as heteronormative expectations associated with school dances or not being out as queer. On the surface, the 2018 dance mimicked the stereotypical prom. Just like on TV, strings of lights stretched across the ceiling of the multipurpose room where the dance was being held. At the front stood a stage with a homemade banner above it declaring it the “Sea Star Theater.” Additionally, sea-themed decorations that would have been the pride of any homecoming decorating committee lined the walls. But rather than dress in formal attire, some campers were dressed like extras from a 1960's
B-side surf movie in swim shorts, bikini tops, and grass skirts, while others were dressed in fancy dresses and bow ties (I was especially taken with a homemade light-up jellyfish costume).
And once inside, after being greeted by the A-Camp Family band, we all jumped up and down 77 and shouted the lyrics alongside Mary Lambert and the other performers as they belted out the
Cranberries’ “Dreams.”
In terms of kairos and in light of the previous discussion about A-Camp functioning as a direct reaction to the current political climate, the arts- and crafts-based activities and the dance may seem frivolous, a waste of time. Yet, many of the campers I interviewed had strong feelings about their experiences, and many cited the dance as one of their favorite aspects of A-Camp.
One of the former campers I spoke with told me about dancing in public for the first time there.
She described camp and the dance as a space where she felt safe to experiment with her own body and live in the moment with herself. She described finding a corner and letting loose, not caring if anyone was watching her. This testimony resonates with Muñoz (2009) who reminds us that when queer bodies partake in activities such as dancing, they are not just engaging in movement. Instead, they are creating and transmitting ephemeral knowledge that emits and shares queer history and possibilities. One of the resources kairos offers is the ability to link the present to events of the past and future (Strong, 2018). Placed in the current moment, the dance allows campers to imagine, through embodied enactment, what their past could have been like if we lived in a world where queerness was seen as a celebrated resource, not something abnormal or shameful. At the same time, it looks towards a future where high school prom is a queer event.
In this sense, the present, past, and future all map onto a queer temporality that generates its own affective rhythm.
This rhythm, which was manifested through other camp activities as well, undoubtedly, is heavily influenced by the temporary nature of A-Camp as a space. Unlike the land trusts of the past, A-Camp does not have the resources to become a permanent community set apart from the mainstream world. Therefore, instead, A-Camps offers campers a temporary refuge from the 78 heteronormative world they just left and to which they must return. In Turner’s terms (1969), we might think then of A-Camp as a liminal space, a threshold from one state of being to another.
This threshold enables participants to withdraw from normative modes and expectations of being in the world and reconfigure social and cultural practices such as values, identities, and community.
Figure 3: Community bulletin board at the 2019 camp Turner notes that this withdrawal is often disorienting, and this certainly was the case at
A-camp. Campers reported to me that being surrounded by so many queer people and feeling like they belonged is overwhelming, if not daunting, because it is so different from their day to day experiences. In addition, interviews with campers confirmed my own experience of what is known as “camp time.” Campers report feeling that each day at camp is equivalent to a week in the outside world. Because A-Camp is a temporary state, many campers, myself included, feel that we must take advantage of every opportunity that camp offers, resulting in an exhausting yet exhilarating and intense five days. Additionally, several campers I interviewed found the affirmation and support they received at camp to be radically different from their experiences in 79 the outside world. One camper, a white, non-binary individual in their mid-twenties, describing their reaction to this phenomenon stated, “it was like oh my god why is everyone being so nice?”
It is this temporary, or liminal state, that makes A-Camp a rehearsal for rather than enactment of a new world. In the temporary in-between state of A-Camp, we can experience different means of existence that cannot be fully enacted in the world outside its borders, hence the utopic, in utopic rehearsal. This temporary state is not only opportune; it could also be read as enacting an “appropriate measure.” If we all retreated from the larger social world permanently, after all, then there would be no hope for larger social change, as no one would be there to push for it. But more to the point, in providing a temporary opportunity for marginalized people to take a break, regroup, foster connections, and imagine anew, A-Camp offers an opportunity for participants to take what they experienced at camp and enact it in the larger world beyond camp. Several interview participants spoke about taking the lessons they learned about the importance of fostering community and loving and accepting themselves back into their everyday lives. As a liminal space, then, A-camp becomes a rehearsal for undetermined possibilities for building a more humane day-to-day life.
Overall, the kairos of A-Camp is an important aspect in regard to how it performs a utopic rehearsal. While A-Camp may have been born out of less than opportune conditions for queer communities, A-Camp is a creative and fitting response to a hostile world. Additionally,
A-Camp is sensitive to how the past and present become crucial resources as it experiments with possible means of crafting a more just and humane future. Finally, A-Camp’s temporary state means that it has the ability to move back and forth between the actual and the possible in ways that permanent separatist communities do not.
To Prepon 80
The second component of a Sophistic definition of rhetoric is to prepon, decorum, or the appropriate, which is also crucial to the utopic rehearsal performed at A-Camp. This concept is very much related to kairos, as the temporality of a situation determines what is appropriate or in good taste. Moving back to its origins, the idea to prepon, when expressed in Greek, refers to what is fitting, or appropriate, for a given situation. Hariman (1992) identified the three significant components of decorum as: "(a) the rules of conduct guiding the alignment of signs and situations, or texts and acts, or behavior and place; (b) embodied practices of communication and display according to a symbolic system; and (c) providing social cohesion and distributing power” (156). What is considered suitable or appropriate is very much related to the social and cultural organization and expectations, meaning that there is no universal understanding of what is and is not appropriate. Appropriateness or decorum accomplishes more than structuring and organizing social life; instead, they "become the aesthetic sense by which one masters this process" (Hariman, 2006).
Queerness and its expressions are often seen as being at odds with what is considered appropriate in mainstream social settings. This inappropriateness can include queer relationships being seen as unnatural. Despite marriage equality legislation, many still see same-sex relationships as repulsive and something we must protect children from. Moreover, queerness itself has a long history of balking against what is considered “appropriate,” which has contributed to a queer aesthetic that includes clothing and hairstyles, relationship models, and even types of militant and disruptive activist techniques. Interestingly, Pérez and Brouwer (2010) advance a concept of queer decorum that implies a remaking of the rules of conduct, relationships, and social structures. Queer decorum is a means of freeing indecorum, or the failure to conform, from a negative constraint and recasting the sense of appropriateness as a 81 resource for identification and community building (see also Stoneman, 2011)—a line of thinking that resonates with Halberstam’s (2011) ideas which reminds us that the ingenuity of queerness often emerges from moments of failure. Thus, in terms of decorum, it could be argued that queer’s failure at performing appropriately, or indecorum, becomes a rhetorical resource for invention and possibility. This inventive failure becomes a means of queer decorum—a creative response to normative expectations.
Queer decorum comes into play with A-Camp in that A-Camp provides a space where what is considered "appropriate" is re-written with queer standards rather than mainstream, heterosexual, cis-normative, and white sensibilities being held up as what should be aspired to; in doing so, A-Camp facilitates what they term a "queer normative" environment. At A-Camp queer identities and cultural norms become the default, and straight, normative, heterosexual become strange. This takes the pressure off of campers to conform to what mainstream standards consider appropriate and enables campers not to have to worry about being persecuted or judged.
When standards concerning appearance, relationship models, and other queer means of existing in the world are shifted away from hetero-patriarchal norms, it allows for queer bodies to not only re-orient and feel comfortable in a space but also enable identification and community building. A-Camp’s embrace of indecorum is, in other words, a “process of invention” (Hariman,
1995, 181).
One of the most visible aspects of queer decorum being centered at camp is through the clothing, hairstyles, and accessories that people chose to adorn themselves with while at camp.
Many campers use A-Camp as an opportunity to display and flaunt markers of queerness through their clothing, hair, and accessorizing. Outfits that would seem outlandish in a mainstream
American public space morph into a sea of similarity. Examples include unnaturally died hair 82 with shaved portions, lots of denim vests with political patches and pens, exaggerated femme outfits that veer towards camp in their intentionality, and multiple tattoos and facial piercings.
Gender expression varied wildly swinging from high femme fashions as campers often were seen in vintage style dresses, heels, and impeccably applied make up, to those who allowed the straps of their binders to peek out from tank tops with large arm openings, and a slew of androgynous flannel shirts, denim overalls, Birkenstocks, and t-shirts. This sentiment was reflected in my interviews where one participant stated that they felt immediately comfortable once other campers surrounded them at the airport and began to think to themselves "these are my people."
The power of such aesthetics should not be underestimated, as fashion and style perform essential functions regarding both individual self-expression and community recognition. It has long been established that clothing and hairstyles are often necessary in asserting and signaling a queer identity (Holliday, 2001). Queer style can also be a means of resisting and challenging normative expectations of dress and appearance that often come with hefty gendered baggage, a rhetorical function that especially helps explain why queer appearance aesthetics play such an important role at A-Camp (Rothblum, 1994; Traub, 2002). In addition, one of the more compelling aspects of decorum is its ability to help us develop roles and a sense of community based on the standards of appropriateness (Hariman, 1992; Pérez & Brouwer, 2010). By embracing styles that are deviant, loud, sometimes outrageous—one camper arrived at the airport in a full-blown boy scout uniform—campers were definitely establishing a sense of community.
Many campers cannot express their queer style in the "outside" world for a variety of reasons such as dress codes at their place of employment or the fear of being outed by their clothing. At camp, however, we were encouraged to "let our queer freak flags fly" and fully embrace queer style and aesthetics fully in a safe environment. 83
Related to the function of queer decorum is the celebration and embracing of the literal bodies that campers reside in. In relation to queer style spoken about above, many campers took the opportunity to wear clothes such as crop tops, sports bras, and short shorts that they might have avoided while going about their day to day lives outside of camp due to the immense pressure that many people feel to meet a very narrow body type. Several campers who participated in interviews spoke about how camp gave them the confidence to wear a crop top in public for the first time at camp, and that this lasted long after camp was over. One interviewee, for instance, told a story about seeing an A-Camp staff member wearing nothing but shorts and a sports bra during a workshop. This had a profound impact on the camper because the camper resonated with both the queer expression and bodily confidence being represented by this staff member. The camper remembered thinking that if this staff member could rock this look, so could she. Not only did the camper wear a crop top during camp that year, she also felt confident wearing a revealing shirt at a Pride event after returning home.
The ability to feel at home in the physical body that we reside in was especially highlighted by the atmosphere created at the swimming pool. The pool at the 2018 and 2019 camps contained one large pool comprised of swim lanes, a diving board, and an open play area, as well as a second pool that was shallower and outfitted with two water slides. The whole area was fenced in by a large wooden fence, giving it a sense of seclusion and privacy. While the physical properties of the pool were nothing unusual, what set it apart was a camp rule that stated that while bottoms were required at all times, tops were optional.4 The lax policy regarding swim
4 The tops-optional pool, I have come to understand, is a common A-Camp practice. Earlier camps that had been hosted in California had a similar policy, but the camp in 2017 in Wisconsin, unfortunately, shared the lake with neighboring properties, so tops were required at all times. This news was apparently met with boos and complaints when it was announced at 84 clothes resulted in a diverse range of poolside aesthetics. Some chose to be quite covered, in full- piece suits or T-shirts covering the entire top half of their bodies. The afternoon that I made my way to the pool, on the other hand, I witnessed someone wearing nothing but small metallic gold swim bottoms. Another camper who danced next to the pool, wore only a pair of men's boxer briefs, while a friend had X's taped over their nipples and wore a short plaid skirt. Even still more diverse, two women dangling their feet in the pool across from me were wearing what I can only describe as a romantic, gothy get up that I found myself immediately jealous of. Both wore vintage inspire-back swimsuits covered by lacy black cover-ups, large sunglasses, and impeccable lipstick.
Because the space allowed for a lack of clothing, rather than having the more modest dress codes that are so prevalent at public swimming pools, you would think that swimming would make campers feel more vulnerable or open up a slew of sexualization and/or body policing. Instead the opposite happened. While the pool could not cure anyone of their deeply held insecurities, dislikes, or dysphoric feelings about their bodies, it became a more comfortable place to exist within our bodies and our complicated relationships with them. In fact, several interview participants, as well myself, found the pool to be one of the safest and most body positive spaces that we had ever experienced. A former camper spoke to me about how freeing it was to swim in the pool topless, stating that this was the first time she had ever been topless in a public setting. For her, this experience was incredibly empowering and left her feeling more at home and at peace with her physical body.
breakfast one morning, and the rule was bent by only wearing a life jacket without a swim top under it. 85
Figure 4: The A-Camp pool at the Ojai, CA location Clothing and bodies were not the only aspects of A-Camp that pushed up against normative notions of what is considered appropriate decorum. A key feature of A-Camp is the frank and open discussions around topics such as sex, pleasure, and how our bodies work and function. All of these topics were both celebrated and approached without shame. In mainstream settings, sexuality, and in particular women’s and queer sexuality, are shied away from or presented as perverted, deviant, and dysfunctional. As Warner (2000) observes, sexuality and the open expression of it is considered shameful for everyone, not just queer people; however, women and queer people, with their “messy and unruly” bodies become the scapegoat for sexual shame. To address the role of sexual shame and queer identities and experiences, the demystification of sexuality played a significant role in the conversations facilitated at camp.
Examples include a panel on sex and disability, where door prizes such as a waterproof furry blanket were raffled off (a camper I attended a later workshop with proudly showed off their newly won blanket). Other topics included polyamorous relationships, sex game relay races, erotic collage making, and how to have sex with a trans woman. Within these workshop spaces, I personally witnessed several campers allow themselves to become incredibly vulnerable as they 86 spoke about their experiences with pelvic floor pain or asked questions about their lack of sex drive. Not all of the engagement with sexuality were serious, however. A great moment that exemplifies the lack of shame was the dildo making workshop, in which participants were invited at the end of lunch to pick up their completed projects on the lawn. After the meal, we were greeted by the workshop's instructor seated on a blanket in the grass surrounded by the newly cured dildos. Campers eagerly picked up their creations and were excitedly making conversations and comparing the molds and colors used. I overheard one camper excitedly describing the glitter and unicorn motif that they had chosen for their dildo. What all of these examples illustrate is that A-Camp created an environment where "taboo" or inappropriate topics that in other contexts would be riddled with shame and embarrassment become resources for empowering and orienting queer bodies and experiences. At camp, in other words, queer expression, body diversity, and ‘taboo’ topics become resources for queer decorum.
In the context of camp, these modes of queer decorum actually become expected at camp through an “adjustment of thought and style to context and circumstance” (Fantham, 1984, 124).
Queer bodies and their expressions especially become resources for building a community, as A-
Campers came together and found common ground in their “othered” bodies. Dolmage (2009) argues that traditionally the rhetorical body has been a male body and that for normativity to function, this body must remain unmarked. Women, on the other hand, inhabit "monstrously different bodies" (3). If we expand Dolmage’s argument to include not just women but those who inhabit othered bodies, then we can make the case that these "monstrous" othered bodies provide rhetorical resources for individual and collective knowledge that exists outside of the norms which depend on straight, white, cis-male, able-bodied perspectives being centered. Queer bodies become important collective resources for shifts around meaning, identity, and cultural 87 practices because, as Deleuze notes, “a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies”
(2005, 58). When queer individuals are allowed to see and experience other queer bodied people, they can hail observers into queerness and reestablish norms in regard to how to be a queer body in a queer space. In spaces such as the pool, as we saw for instance, queer decorum related to bodies become an important resource for communal identification and unites A-Camp as a community (Pérez & Brouwer, 2010).
The queer decorum of A-Camp—especially in regard to bodies, physical appearance, and topics of expression—not only re-establishes community norms and expectations that have a unifying effect. The embrace of what outside camp would be considered to be indecorum also allows participants to envision what a world that centers queer aesthetics and embodiment could look like. The queer decorum that guides what is considered appropriate and in good taste at camp is an important aspect of establishing A-Camp as a form of utopic rehearsal. When queer sensibilities are whole heartedly embraced and encouraged within the boundaries of A-Camp, participants are able to not only imagine what a queer normative world would look like, but quite literally, embody the possibilities queer decorum enables.
Figure 5: Trans, bisexual, and asexual flags hanging outside of a cabin 88
To dynaton
As I have just established, A-Camp responds to the current needs of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks through the creation of an environment where they can experience an alternative temporality, feel at home in their bodies and their sexuality, and express themselves through stylistic elements such as clothing and hairstyles. Queer temporality and decorum are profound because they lay the groundwork for a version of worldmaking that allows staff and campers to imagine, or rehearse, what a different means of existing in the world could look like. Taken together, A-Camp offers an example of a future where people can fully express themselves and where access to this expression is not only taken seriously but centered.
The ability to feel at ease and comfortable with oneself and existence is important, but I argue that the temporal elements of camp, combined with an embrace of queer decorum, enable the ability to shift focus from survival to enacting a world that establishes new norms of possibility such as centering care and affirmation.
When utopic rehearsals, such as A-Camp, establish renewed norms of such as care and affirmation, they are acting within the realm of the possible, or to dynaton. As Poulakos (1984) explains, the rhetoric of possibility “opens new horizons and advocates for their pursuit, thus giving man [sic] the chance to venture finding what he lacks” (224). Marginalized communities often turn towards the sphere of possibility because “in the sphere of actuality they usually find pain, misery and suffering; conversely, delight, joy and happiness are to be found in the region of possibility” (Poulakos, 1984, 221). Looking towards the possible is a means of survival for many marginalized communities as they must find ways to persist in a world that often inflicts violences on to them. When marginalized communities reside within the realm of the possible, they not only create more just worlds, but they also call attention to the injustices they 89 experience. “These world-making practices function partly as critique, naming how the world that they live is one produced through social differentiation and inequality, and also as an articulation of a different, more ideal world, one that moves beyond the here and now in ways that are more just” (Catungal, 2019, 153). By orienting towards a world that is possible, then, A-
Camp is able to both identify and critique the ways that the world is unjust while at the same time construct a possible world where participants are freed from some of the suffering and violence that they face in the present outside camp.
As emphasized earlier, the ability to let go and simply exist in the present moment allows campers to experience and envision a world where they don’t have the pressures of their day-to- day lives breathing down their necks. In terms of to dynaton, this experience enables queer people to experience a more care-free world while simultaneously implicitly, if not explicitly, confront the injustices of the everyday life. During my interviews, former campers spoke about feeling a sense of relief at being in a space where they felt safe to fully be themselves and did not have to explain their existence to those around them. It was amazing walking around camp and seeing other queer people living their life to the fullest. I witnessed, for instance, a group of dancers embrace their masculinity as they performed a choreographed number inspired by the movie Magic Mike, complete with the bass lines from Ginuwine’s sexually suggestive song
“Pony” that shook the auditorium as the dancers’ tore off their shirts and slung them into the air.
As mentioned earlier, other campers I met spoke about using camp as a chance to try out using different names and/or pronouns in what they considered to be a safe space. One interview participant shared with me that after camp, they felt that they had a better sense of who they were as an emotional person. 90
The possible future that A-Camp fosters is not only concerned with individual expression; it is also concerned with attending to the multiplicity of identities that co-exist with queerness. A-Camp, its staff, and the campers go to great lengths to recognize the often complicated and overlapping identities that staff and campers bring to the space. This shift in relational aesthetics is achieved through workshop programming devoted to those who hold specific identities, as well as accessibility accommodations. In an attempt to acknowledge the intersecting aspects of identity that can exist alongside queerness, such as race and disability, A-
Camp creates enclaves within the enclave. Examples of this include the QTPOC Speakeasy—a space dedicated to campers who also identify as people of color—to connect, have conversations, and share feelings about camp. The Speakeasy is described as a closed space, and white campers are asked to abstain from attending these workshops.5 Programming also includes special lunches for trans women, people who lived in rural places, and sex workers, in addition to AA meetings held on site, a smores night for non-binary campers, a plus-size fashion event, and a Shabat dinner on Friday night.
Additionally, A-Camp also makes strides to accommodate those with disabilities. They provided shuttle services from the bunks to programming areas, ASL interpreters, a quiet room for those with sensory needs, and seating at crowded events for those who could not stand for long periods of time. An interview participant noted that A-Camp was one of the first places that did not ask her to provide justification or proof of her invisible disability. She stated that it was a relief to have people believe her and take seriously what she said she needed. By acknowledging that campers are more than just their sexual orientation and that there are other, sometimes
5 The inclusion of the Speakeasy, and other programming related to race, such as a workshop on white privilege, are the direct result of critique from former campers and staff members. 91 complicated identities and experiences that also make up who we are, A-Camp is able to honor the complexities of queer identities and experiences.
A-Camp, of course, is not without flaws. Despite efforts to create a more equitable world,
A-Camp as an institution also suffers from systemic issues that plague the outside world. Camp attendance is overwhelmingly white, meaning that white experiences and voices are often still centered at camp. This has led to former campers criticizing A-Camp for harming campers of color. In a step to remedy this, the current camp co-directors, who both identify as white cis- women, stepped down after the 2019 camp in order to allow for more trans and people of color to assume leadership positions. Additionally, campers who have accessibility issues have also noted that despite the efforts of A-camp administration mentioned above, their needs have not always been adequately met by the camp. For example, the shuttle that circles between the cabin and workshop areas was often late and the main venue space was hard to navigate due to tight aisle and chairs that were too small for some people. In August 2019, A-Camp co-directors, as well as Autostraddle’s founder sent emails to A-Camp list serves apologizing for their mistakes and outlining the changes that would be made in the future to attempt to remedy the larger systemic issues faced by A-Camp.
While there were missteps at times though, overall, the staff and campers make an effort to create an equitable and inclusive environment that enables future possibilities of enactment beyond camp. This is vastly different to the current social and political climate where many people with power are doing all they can to erase and deny personhood. What I find so radical about this approach is that accommodations were seen as necessary, and I did not witness people become frustrated or annoyed at the accommodations made for others. It was an unspoken norm that everyone at camp should have an equitable chance to participate. In the last several years we 92 have been subject to harsh immigration enforcement, bathroom laws, bans on trans people serving in the military, people fighting for their right to health care, proposals that would make it hard for students with disabilities to access quality education, and discourses about the potential overturning of same-sex marriage. In contrast, the attitude of care, accommodation, and acknowledgment of intersectional experiences at camp works to acknowledge and dignify these experiences rather than take cheap shots at other's personhood in the name of personal rather than collective gain. This is another powerful example of how to dynaton comes into play at A-
Camp; while embodying a possible future, A-Camp also actively critiques the current state of our social world.
This element of future possibility at A-Camp especially helps to foster an affirmative sense of care for self and other. The affirming culture encouraged us to reveal the most vulnerable and tender parts of ourselves to each other at camp. This vulnerability was sometimes literal, as campers learned how to tie each other up in rope bondage courses or shared their struggles with infertility. However, there was also another sense of vulnerability that was much harder to capture. As a staff member put it, during a meeting for introverts during the first day of camp, “everyone here is approaching each other with a sense of goodwill.” In a similar vein, one camper I spoke with described camp as being an “aggressively affirming culture” referring to the fact that at camp people almost constantly cheering each other on. This show of support varied from the seemingly insignificant—my cabin mates and I spent an entire afternoon clapping for everyone who went down the water slide—to more serious moments of affirmation related to experiences related to self-care, gender identity, and mental illness. A-Camp is different from most semi-public places in that everyone was taken at their word when they expressed their identities, pronoun preferences, or shared painful experiences. It is risky to enter a space as your 93 whole self and let your guard down. While this type of vulnerability in some contexts could be seen as a weakness, when vulnerability is approached in a way that allows us to recognize the shared humanity in each other, it becomes a powerful tool (Butler, 2004).
The culture of affirmation and care that A-Campers participants and staff enacted offers a possible alternative in regard to how we might organize society and approach each other. As one camper I interviewed stated, A-Camp is “the best version of society we could get to.” Jenny
Block (2017), in her writeup regarding her A-Camp experience, sums up the possible future A-
Camp offers beautifully, stating:
So, for one week, A-Camp creates a magical place to witness and support our community; to remember who makes up our community; to treat everyone gently and with kindness; to remember words can be weapons; to be accessible to anyone and everyone who identifies as “us;” to serve those who society not only underserves, but in almost every possible way, doesn’t serve at all; to be what the world has forgotten to be — good. Truly, purely, unselfishly, openly good.
Care, acceptance, openness, and being unselfishly good are qualities that make A-Camp unique and should be viewed as resources for creating a different default mode of operation for relating to ourselves and others. This was a sentiment by several of my interview participants when asked how A-Camp differed from other, more public queer spaces such as Pride where you are indeed surrounded by the queer community, but, do not necessarily feel the mutual responsibility and accountability to each other. A camper used the phrase "in community” to describe her experience at camp. The camper explained that the use of the word “in” came from a feeling of accountability and mutuality fostered at A-Camp.
This sense of vulnerability, validation, acceptance, accountability and mutuality emerged,
I believe, because staff and participants at A-Camp managed to help all participants reinvent the norms related to affirmation and care, While A-Camp takes place in and responds to the exigency 94 of a problematic current moment, camp offers a possible blueprint for what a future social world could look like if we took seriously the critiques of injustices that A-Camp addresses and adopts new norms of affirmation and care in our daily lives. As Poulkos (1983) reminds us, rhetorical action that takes place in the present moment has the ability to attend to the realm of the possible.
When campers and staff choose to affirm rather than shame or deny the identities and experiences of others, they are engaging in a communal act of making visible alternative paths, allowing for spaces outside of heteronormativity to be imagined, and making collective potentiality possible (Muñoz, 2009). The communal nature of A-Camp’s enactment of possibility is crucial to spreading a contagious enactment and affect of affirmation and care. While clearly staff members made conscious efforts to cultivate affirmation and care, without the campers affirming each other’s decisions and experiences and allowing themselves to be vulnerable with each other, then camp would be a vastly different experience.
In cultivating vulnerability, affirmation, and care, A-Camp offers one possible solution to the often hostile and precarious world that we have found ourselves occupying. As one interview participant describes it, A-Camp is “a beacon of hope,” creating connections to Muñoz who reminds us that hope is where we access possible futurity. Without hope, there is no point in imagining a future. At A-Camp, staff and participants not only hope for a different future but rather they enact a possible future. While it is not realistic to for most of A-Camp's participants to live permanently in a separatist community—and I am in no way offering this as the answer— what A-Camp does is model how we can take the lessons of into the wider world and potentially shift how we relate to ourselves and each other. A-Camp, as a model of a possible utopic rehearsal, then, harnesses to dynaton as it speaks back to Samaran (2019), who asks:
What would it look like to belong in the world as our whole selves? What kind of culture, knowledge and community structure would we be able to 95
create if we could nurture one another without our armor on, if we could draw out and develop gifts in one another, if we could care for one another in concrete, meaningful ways, and could protect one another from systemic harms and forms of structural violences, even as we're struggling to dismantle them? (14)
A-Camp answers Samaran by offering an exemplary for creating a community of affirmation and care that encourages and allows people to show up as their whole selves and be met with open arms. Identities and experiences of queerness are often met in the outside world with shame and a strong sense of feeling like a burden. At A-Camp, on the other hand, new possibilities of self- care are embraced, and participants are encouraged to share their needs and accommodate others, even if it means giving up some of your own comforts. As Butler (2004) reminds us, there is an immense power in our abilities to "undo" each other. A-Camp is an example of this power being used for good, as A-Camp provides a utopic rehearsal for what a more compassionate, just, and equitable world may look like.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have shown that A-Camp is a contemporary example of the productive force of separatist spaces. A-Camp has come a long way from the feminist bookstores and back to the land movements that have become synonymous with lesbian culture. Instead, A-Camp attempts to create an experience for its participants, offering a safe haven from the world while simultaneously attempting to address the injustices that many of its community face. A-Camp is an example of how a community functions in solidarity with each other, and this unity is enabled and encouraged by the separatist nature of the space. I have argued that this utopic rehearsal has the potential to prompt social change, “renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility” (Muñoz, 2009, 97). 96
As demonstrated above, utopic rehearsal is constituted of the three components of
Poulakos’ definition of rhetoric: kairos, to prepon, and to dynaton, in conjunction with the focus and appreciation for the knowledge and possibilities carried by “othered” bodies found in other strains of neo-sophistic rhetorical theory. A utopic rehearsal not only responds to the current social and political moment, but it also takes into account how the past and present can become resources for constructing a possible future. Additionally, rehearsal implies that what is being enacted is not necessarily set in stone. A rehearsal is (as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us) “an experience or event that helps to prepare you for something that is going to happen in the future.” Because rehearsals are spaces of preparation, they can be liminal spaces for experimentation, to try new things and test how they might turn out. Rehearsals are also often closed off to the public, meaning that those enacting the performance can safely experiment without fear of scrutiny (much like the enclaved nature of A-Camp and other separatist spaces.
Utopic rehearsals take advantage of their temporary states to discover what is and is not possible as they layout possible blueprints for the future.
The experimentation performed by utopic rehearsals also includes asking what is and is not appropriate. A-Camp and the participants value bodies and experiences that normative social and cultural expectations have deemed as monstrous, deviant, or unwanted. Like many queer spaces and actions, A-Camp embraces “othered’ and monstrous experiences as a resource rather than something to be shunned. A-Camp embraces the “otherness” of queer bodies and takes up a queer decorum that allows campers to ask what a world where radical acceptance would look like. By creating a space where queer bodies ae not “monstrous” but rather a valued resource, A-
Camp is able to create a space where queer people feel not only safe but welcomed and 97 embraced. This allows people to enter and exist within the space with vulnerability and trust rather than with their guards up.
Taken together, the temporality and appropriateness put forth by A-Camp enable queer bodies to also shift their focus to caring for and affirming each other. This opportunity is only possible because A-Camp, as a performance of utopic rehearsal, exists within a liminal or space that acts as a threshold between the actual and the possible. By critiquing and responding to the in justices faced by queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks, A-Camp looks towards the possible. Existing in the space in between the present and the future may seem disheartening, as those us who attend camp must board the bus back to the airport and the “real” world at the end of the week. However, if these liminal states can find support systems that allow them to continue operating, they can move from the realm of the possible to the realm of the actual (Turner, 1969). Because utopic rehearsals are embodied enactments of a possible rather than just a vision, it is entirely possible that with work they can become enacted in the wider social world.
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Chapter Four Kitchens and a Queer Aesthetic of Everyday Life
I've had a fascination with domestic spaces for years now. It was something that started to creep into my life after I graduated from college and had moved into my first apartment with my very own kitchen. It was there that I started to unlearn my teenage messy and cluttered way of existing. I began to teach myself how to cook the strange vegetables that arrived in my weekly
CSA deliveries, proudly serving tofu scramble to my friends as we gathered for brunches in which we tried to put aside our graduate school duties for a few hours. I found a strange calm in sweeping the kitchen floor and scrubbing out the bathtub. Part of this was about claiming my own adult space for the first time, but I believe that there was much more than growing up, caring for myself and my space; instead, it became a way to center and ground myself in an increasingly uncertain world. I still find a sense of perverse enjoyment in sweeping my current tiny living room and making pancakes in the even smaller kitchen. It is my relationship my body has to these mundane activities that not only sustains the other work I do in my life but also constitutes me as a person.
So far, I have had four kitchens since I stopped living in dorm rooms and my parents' house. The first kitchen that I had all to myself was in an older adobe-style apartment building, in Albuquerque, NM that I lived in while completing my second undergraduate degree. The apartment was built in the late 1940s or early 1950s, and I believe that nothing other than the refrigerator had been replaced since then. The room itself was ugly. There was dingy, peeling linoleum on the floor and the cabinets had been painted so many times that they no longer stayed latched and had a habit of opening with a creak that sounded suspiciously like a loose floorboard in a hall in the middle of the night. There was a door leading out to an alley, and it was a constant 99 fight to keep the dust from blowing in under it. The sink was stained and chipped, the faucet tended to leak, and the apartment's water heater sat unceremoniously in the corner by the refrigerator. However, despite the aging room's appearance, it was one of my favorite spaces. It was where I brewed countless pots of coffee, for both myself and friends, where I did my school work at a fold-out table on loan from my parents, and where began to teach myself the art of becoming an adult.
Figure 6: Picture of my first kitchen pulled from my Facebook page
Figure 7: Picture of my first kitchen pulled from my Facebook page
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Figure 8: Sliced grapefruit on the counter of my first Denver apartment
Figure 9: A photo of my kitchen table taken from my Instagram account. The text accompanying this photo stated, "I have zero motivation to leave the kitchen table and join the real world today." Despite the amount of moving I have done in my adult life, I have fond memories of all of the kitchens I have occupied. One particular kitchen had a big sunny window where I would stand on weekend mornings and leisurely drink my coffee. My current kitchen has been witness to celebratory pizza making and roasting marshmallows for smores in the oven. My kitchen table also has a history of acting as my desk, resulting in my kitchen space playing host to academic paper writing and grading student assignments. Therefore, it is not inaccurate to say that the kitchen has also played a role in my professional development. 101
However, my positive feelings towards these spaces are contested, mainly because kitchens have often seen as a space of oppression for women. After all, I had grown up in a world where generations before had fought so hard to liberate themselves from the domestic realm, and here I was trying to lay claim to the space, not only as a woman but a queer woman. I relate strongly to Quinn (2016), who, in a personal essay, offers the following reflection as she works through her own complicated relationship to domestic longings:
You can’t win, you can’t have it all, but you can remember how varied and boundless your life can be, and disregard the voices scolding on every side – too liberated, not liberated, feminist, not feminist, queer, normative – the hard thing is to silence them all and listen to what you want. And then, hardest of all, give yourself permission to change your mind.
As for my own complicated relationship, I found myself longing for the comfort and stability that domesticity offered while at the same time feeling incredibly guilty for wanting to lay claim to a space that generations before me had fought so hard to free them from.
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Figure 10: My current kitchen not long after I moved in. Many feminist arguments claim that the kitchen and the domestic duties imposed on women represent “the locus of women’s emotional, physical, spiritual, and economic vulnerability” (Abarca, 2006, 19). Cooking and other kitchen-related activities, while often essential for supporting daily lives, have been conceptualized as part of women’s oppression, and the space is often not taken seriously as a place of liberation and creativity for women. However, as Avakian (2005) and Arbaca (2006) argue, for women who hold other marginalized identities-- such as being a woman of color or coming from an immigrant family--the kitchen can become a space of freedom, creative expression, and resistance. The women included in Avakian’s anthology (a collection of essays about the meaning of food and cooking) exemplify this by introducing us to cooking and eating as a way to maintain once colonized and now fragile histories; as a means of creativity, sensuality, nurturance, love; as a way to combine diverse even opposing traditions; to claim or reclaim food rituals, transforming them or creating new ones and in doing so revising personal or collective histories (9). By turning our attention to the ways in 103 which kitchens enable agency, creativity, and resistance, as well as connections with other intersectional identities, we gain the opportunity to re-open kitchens as productive spaces and examine how women and other folks who occupy these spaces both reproduce as well as rebel against the gendered expectations imposed on them by broader society.
Several scholars, as of late, have also turned their attention to the contested nature of kitchen. For example, Hayes's (2010) Radical Homemakers studies how homemaking functions as a site of political and social activism in the face of capitalism, while Matchar’s (2015)
Homeward Bound examines why so many millennial women are flocking to the domestic arts that our mothers fought so hard to free us from. Much like Hayes, Matchar argues that home is where millennial women are finding peace and refuge from problems plaguing our current realities such as the economy, environmental destruction, and an American Dream that seems to have ghosted us.
My own ethnographic research into others' kitchens reveals that kitchens are spaces that not only have potential to be spaces of retreat but also to be transgressive and productive. My research involved visiting the kitchens of eight welcoming strangers, in which my nervous doorbell rings were met with nothing but kindness and generosity. As I found myself inhabiting strange yet familiar kitchens with coffee brewing, conversations moved between a wide range of topics. Despite never having met most of my participants, we were able to find common ground as we discussed topics such as vegan cooking, family recipes, pets, grad school, romantic relationships, building community, and how queerness intersected with kitchens. These conversations with queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks confirmed what I had already suspected--that kitchens play an essential role in the development of queer identity and culture. This sentiment is echoed by Autostraddle author (Al)iana who wrote in a 2018 piece that 104 chronicled their morning routine: “Domesticity is queer culture. It is taking a space, making it feel good for you, taking care of it, showing it love, and then letting that place show you love in return." This project thus seeks to not only make room for queer domesticity as a legitimate means of occupying the world but also examines how queer kitchens, in particular, participate in the creation of life-sustaining and world-building aesthetics.
Queer Domestic Spaces
The notion of queer domesticity, at face value, appears to be an oxymoron. Domesticity, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the quality or state of being domestic.” The state of domestication implies being tamed, which is very much at odds with queer's investment in the unruly, the messy, and the refusal of normalization. However, if we take domesticity to mean an investment in a home space, then queerness very much has a place at the literal and figural table of domesticity. Even those who reject assimilation and normative practices still need a home space to retreat to, to care for themselves and others, and to host the mundane and everyday routines that make human life sustainable and enjoyable. Besides, homes are much more than a physical dwelling place; instead, they take on ideologies and expectations that go beyond physicality into the social and cultural understandings of who we are and where we belong. As
Wise (2000) argues, homemaking is a cultural process and "to label a space ‘home' in and of itself territorializes that space depending on cultural and social norms" (300). Because home spaces become territorialized through cultural and social processes, home as place provides productive material contexts for "analyzing ideas and practices about intimacy, family, kinship, gender, ethnicity, class, age, and sexuality" (Mallett, 2004, 84).
Despite the social and cultural significance of domestic spaces, a hyper-focus on the kitchen may seem incongruent with rhetorical scholarship and methods. Homes and domestic 105 spaces are conceived of as private spaces, and with a few notable exceptions, rhetorical scholarship has historically invested in forces that impact public meaning-making. Yet, boundaries between public and private are not so clear. As Pink (2004) acknowledges, while home spaces do not often circulate within the public sphere, these “private” spaces, and the individual engagement that happens within, occur in relation to cultural norms and expectations, which are very much public constructions. Also, in a world with increasing social media presence, enabled by sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, images of everyday kitchens are circulating publicly. Studying kitchens can lend insight into the tensions between public expectations and the private individual engagements that occur in spite of normative notions of these spaces.
In addition, studying kitchens can help elucidate everyday rhetorics. The realm of the everyday is often crucial in accessing the discourses and practices of marginalized communities that often don’t circulate widely within the public sphere. The mundane nature of discourses that enable the livelihood of marginalized communities often “precedes the production of traditional forms of rhetorical action (i.e., speeches or image events)” (McHendry et al., 2014, 304). These preceding practices are crucial to “understanding rhetorical action that shapes everyday, vernacular, and oppositional rhetorical communities” (304). By studying the everyday and mundane, rhetorical critics can thus not only expand where everyday rhetorical practices unfold but also the range of what counts as rhetoric in the first place. Turning to the ordinary and mundane can especially help to enhance critical rhetoric’s aim to take the voices of marginalized communities seriously; document rhetorical action that often goes unseen; and make visible practices that serve emancipatory functions (Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011). 106
This project takes seriously the potential that domestic spaces, specifically kitchens, have in both understanding and gaining insight into underrepresented voices, as well as viewing these spaces as holding transformative and emancipatory potential. In order to demonstrate this, I turn my attention to Autostraddle’s "Queer in the Kitchen" gallery, a collection of reader-submitted photos and captions of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming people and their kitchens; additionally, I conducted fieldwork and interviews in the kitchens of eight queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. My fieldwork also included taking photographs of participants and their kitchens, which resulted in a photographic archive titled "Queering the
Kitchen." Based on my analysis of these field observations, interviews, and photographs, I ultimately argue for a queer aesthetic of everyday life that accomplishes several things. First, it creates space in the cultural imagination for queer bodies to occupy, use, and enjoy domestic spaces such as kitchens. This is critical because it allows queer communities to see themselves represented not only as being in states of crisis, participating in activism, or engaging in moments of excess or camp. Through the representation of mundane kitchen spaces and usage, queer communities can see what queer normalcy and happiness can look like. Second, the granting of a queer ordinary and mundane illuminates homonormativity as a means of building upon the ordinary and giving queer communities access to a source of happiness they have long been denied.
Autostraddle’s Queer in the Kitchen
The “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery, hosted on Autostraddle, offers a unique glimpse into the home lives of queer women and gender non-conforming folks. On a roundup published on
January 5, 2017, executive editor Laniea Jones posted a link to a study about the dietary habits of bisexual and lesbian women. The link was initially published on a Huffington Post piece titled, 107
"A Look Inside Queer Women's Kitchens." Jones commented on how disappointed she was when she realized that the link was not, in fact, a photo gallery of queer women standing in their kitchens. She also said she wanted to fill the void by creating a gallery of queers in the kitchen on the Autostraddle website (Laniea, 2017a).
On January 6, 2017, Jones posted the call for submissions for the “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery (https://www.autostraddle.com/submit-to-autostraddles-queer-kitchen-gallery-364878/).
Readers were asked to submit a high-resolution photo of their kitchen (being present in the kitchen was optional but preferred), along with name, age, and a short statement. The call defined a queer person as a “human who identifies as not straight. If you don’t like the word
‘queer’ just pretend it says the word that you do like — lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, sapiosexual (jk that is not real), gay, faggy, fresh as fuck, etc. If you don’t like the word ‘person’ just pretend it says the word you do like.” The call defined kitchens as “a space, no matter how big or small or narrow or bright or outdoors or in or covered in cat hair, where you prepare food”
(Laniea, 2017b).
The gallery became the first in a series of reader-submitted photos titled "Queer in Real
Life" (IRL)—with later galleries including themes such as bedrooms, outdoors, vacations, and bookshelves. As explained by Laniea, the Queer IRL series is "a monthly Autostraddle community photo series that gathers little clips of lesbian, bisexual, queer and otherwise- identified women, trans and non-binary folks, just living our lives in 2017” (2017b). The “Queer in the Kitchen” Gallery debuted January 27, 2017, one week after the inauguration of President
Trump and following several years of increasing hateful rhetoric. Trump's promise to "Make
America great again" cast the country as belonging to white, straight, and cis-gendered people.
The campaign promises made by Trump aimed to return individual rights to America's citizens; 108 however, this move involved tearing away the protections granted to America's most vulnerable citizens, including those who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum as well as communities of color, those with disabilities, and immigrants. It was within this context that Autostraddle readers captured themselves living and, at times, thriving despite attempts to strip away basic protections and personhood. Living an ordinary life in spite of precarity and abjection can be seen as a political act of resistance.
The Queer IRL series not only elicits content from readers, but it takes their lives and experiences seriously, fosters a community feeling in an online space, and speaks to
Autostraddle’s mission to create queer normative spaces. The first installation of Queer in Real
Life, “Queer in the Kitchen,” included almost 200 pictures of queer individuals, their kitchens, family, friends, and pets in a nine-page vertical spread that takes a significant amount of time to scroll through. Name(s), age(s), and occupation(s) appear above each picture, and most include a caption provided by participants as well. Most images feature the queer-identified occupants of the living space, and many include pets (with the numbers skewing more towards cats than dogs). The spaces and people in them are diverse in terms of location and aesthetics. Some kitchens are tiny, crowded, or shared with multiple people. Others are large and bright; many are cluttered with boxes of tea and mugs. Some are obviously multi-purpose spaces. Despite the diversity, the images (and the queer humans in them) echo Pink’s (2004) observation that there is something comforting and familiar about kitchens, domestic spaces, and how they are used.
Inspired by the Autostraddle "Queer in the Kitchen" gallery, I decided to conduct fieldwork and interviews with queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. I sat down with eight participants. Six of the participants identified as white, five identified as cis-women, and all were in their mid-twenties to early thirties. None of the participants were parenting or 109 providing elder care at the time of the interview. The interviews began with a sit-down interview in which I asked participants about past kitchens and their associations with kitchen spaces. The second part of the interview involved interview subjects showing me around their kitchens while
I took photographs. The resulting photos were compiled into a gallery titled "Queering the
Kitchen." My engagement with material kitchens started with a sit-down interview in which I had participants share memories and experiences about the kitchens they've had in their lives, followed by me having participants give me a tour of their kitchens which I documented using a digital camera. Additionally, I interviewed my partner about our shared kitchen and photographed them in the kitchen as well as used a remote shooting app to capture my image.
The goal of creating this gallery was twofold. First, I wanted to gain deeper insights into the experiences that queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks had with their kitchens.
Second, I wanted to contribute to the representations of queer kitchens by making them accessible to a general queer audience.
Defining Kitchens as Space and Place
It is essential to understand how homes and kitchens function as cultural spaces and places. Space and place are often two terms that are used interchangeably. However, Dickinson,
Blair, and Ott (2010) use the terms to differentiate between the particular and the open and social. Dickinson and his co-authors conceptualize place as specific, bounded, meaning-infused locations. To refer to place is to reference the materiality of spaces and acknowledge that actual people inhabit real places (Johnston & Longhurst, 2010). Space, on the other hand, refers “to a more general notion of how society and social practice are regulated (and sometimes disciplined) by spatial thinking (e.g., capitalist mode of production or gendered notions of private and public spaces) (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011, 260). Space, a social process, gives place meaning, and 110 place gives space a martial dwelling. Space and place, in other words, co-constitute one another
(Dickinson et al., 2010). Space becomes material through how it plays out in specific places, and we understand specific places through our understandings of them as spaces.
Massey (2005) also argues that space needs to be conceptualized as being dependent on interrelations, or the relationships between embedded practices among things, places, and subjects that themselves become constructed through relations. Therefore, space is not a given; it does not come into being before identities, and objects, but rather the relationships between space, identities, and objects are co-constituted (Dickinson et al., 2010; Massey, 2005). Also, it is not just symbols or material elements that space and place need to gain meaning, but a complicated web of bodies, material locations, ideologies, institutions, power structures, and symbolic understandings that give rise to space and place.
Kitchens can be understood on an ideological level as a space. The space of the kitchen is often associated with domesticity, cooking, caretaking, and nourishment, and the kitchen is often gendered as a woman's space. For these ideological spaces to materialized, they require specific material places. How we understand kitchens is thus also dependent on actual, particular built kitchens (either in the face-to-face world or in representations). I understand my apartment kitchen, for instance, through the lens of kitchen space, but kitchen space is dependent on my and other kitchens' particular existence as a place to become a broader social phenomenon. The co-constitution of space and place is what enables space to be in a continual process of becoming rather than being a closed system that is not capable of changing or adapting (Massey, 2005).
Because change can happen within the mundane practices of everyday life (Pink, 2012), shifting how we operate or who inhabits a place can change our conception of (cultural) space. The open, relational, and co-constitutional nature of space means that there are infinite numbers of 111 connections and relationships that have yet to be made, rendering space as open to shifting and spurring broader ideological change.
The space of home is often constructed as occupying binary tensions as places of
“belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear” (Blunt & Varley, 2004, 3).
While open to change, domestic spaces such as homes and kitchens are contradictory spaces, sites where different bodies experience various forms of exclusion and alienation. Home is not always a refuge for all bodies. Home is often the place where bodies face death and violence at the hands of loved ones, emotional abuse and neglect, and moments of precarity. Despite the contradictions in what home as space means, one of the prevailing ideologies attached to homes and domestic spaces is the idea that they are spaces of private refuge where people can retreat to and take a break from the outside, public world (Moore, 1984). Home becomes “the process of coping, comforting, stabilizing oneself” (Wise, 2000, 300). However, this stabilization is not always as reassuring as it sounds. It is a fact that most closets reside within homes, and for many queer bodies homes are the only place where violences of the "public" world can be easily avoided.
Within the home, kitchens are typically seen as belonging to the realm of heterosexual married women, with the ideal occupant being the housewife (Johnston & Longhurst, 2010;
Pink, 2004). The associations between kitchens and heterosexual reproductive identities can leave those who do not fit this identity as feeling out of place in domestic and kitchen spaces.
While the home has been articulated with concepts such as privacy, comfort, care, and refuge, it can also thus be a source of alienation and confinement. Lefebvre (1991) argued that private life is a crucial source of alienation within everyday life. This alienation is seen in both the idea of 112 women being held prisoner by their domestic duties and queer women/gender non-conforming folks as illegitimate occupants of kitchens and domestic spaces.
The power relations embedded within everyday practices, many of which are highly gendered and rooted in heterosexual assumptions, can especially cause the lesbian or queer body to feel ‘out of place' within domestic spaces such as the kitchen. Sara Ahmed (2007) argues that the out-of-place feelings experienced by many queer bodies are due to their inability to orient vertically, by which she means they can’t or won’t orient towards normative, straight
(heterosexual) ideals. Orientation is what brings objects that constitute “a good life” into view or makes them unavailable. Heterosexual, vertical orientations bring into view the nuclear family, marriage, and babies (all which embody happiness and a good life), and kitchens and domestic spaces become sticky with these promises. “To become straight means that we only have to turn toward the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also we must ‘turn away’ from objects that take us out of line. The queer subject within straight culture hence deviates and is made socially present as a deviant” (Ahmed, 2007, 21). The stickiness, or stubborn conflations, that kitchens have with connotations of a heterosexual “good life” force queer bodies to be seen as orienting away from or losing access to the sense of comfort offered by these spaces. However, all is not lost when bodies orient away from “the good life,” for Ahmed also argues that while a queer orientation pushes some objects out of reach, it brings others into view.
While kitchens are not universally safe spaces for creativity and play for queer bodies, my research focuses on those instances where creativity can flourish. Even though the kitchen is often the space where social norms regarding gender and sexuality are upheld through domestic activities, it can also become a space where these norms can be contested (Barrett, 2015). When a queer body comes into contact with a kitchen or other domestic space, possibilities for creative 113 interpretations open up. Queer kitchens especially can become spaces of creative play, experimentation, and sites for contesting cultural norms and allowing queer objects to come into view (Elwood, 2000; Gorman-Murray, 2006; Young, 1980). Wise (2000) states that cultures are open to change and that “cultures are held together by their rhythms, their collection of resonances, the aggregate of meanings, texts, and practices that they make resonate to that particular rhythm or frequency” (306). Often the adjustment to home culture involves taking on new aspects while retaining older cultural habits. Queer occupied spaces such as kitchens offer a rich site for examining the tensions that arise when new understandings and uses of a space collide with older and more established cultural practices. These tensions become inventive resources for worldbuilding within domestic spaces.
The Autostraddle gallery and my fieldwork are by no means the first or only representations of queer kitchens as a site of transformation, resistance, and creativity. Murphy
(2017) argues that lesbian pulp fiction novels from the 1950s and 60s disrupt narratives of lesbians as warped and unstable through depictions of them enjoying and creating domestic spaces together. Representations of lesbian domesticity in these novels not only paint lesbian relationships as healthy and stable, but in depicting domestic routines such as cooking, they enable lesbian relationships to be seen as mundane and ordinary. Fast forwarding quite a bit, in
2012, Hannah Hart, who rose to fame through her spoof YouTube hosted cooking show My
Drunk Kitchen, released a video revealing to her fans that she identified as gay. Hart has remained visible within both queer and food culture through an Instagram account, a memoir, the continued posting to her YouTube account, and a travel food show on The Food Network.
Additional representations of queer domesticity have also emerged, as evident in a 2018 issue of
The New York Times introduced readers to queer supper clubs such as Queer Soup Night, which 114 seeks to create an intersectionally informed space for the queer community to gather and share nourishment. In addition to functioning as productive research sites, both the Autostraddle gallery, as well as the one I produced, add to these limited representations of queer domestic life.
Queer Aesthetics of Everyday Life
In order to better understand how queer kitchens function at both the public and subjective levels, I turn now to the aesthetics of everyday life and the role that these seemingly intimate and subjective choices play in constructing communities and enabling individuals to connect with and relate to one another and imagine new futures (Highmore, 2011). This chapter diverges from extravagant and shocking queer aesthetics such as camp, which celebrate artificiality and excess and often function as a critique of social norms, as well as other queer aesthetics that value mess, disruption, or sexuality (Taylor, 2012). The outlandish and loud expressions of queer identity are crucial to A-Camp; however, I focus less on extravagant queer aesthetics and more on how queer aesthetics impact day-to-day routines. More particularly, I look to queer aesthetics of everyday life, queer banality, and ordinaries in order to shed light on how the quiet, softer moments within queer lives can offer new or transformed means of building a more humane world.
An aesthetics of everyday life does not only depart from queer camp aesthetics but also from more traditional notions of aesthetics that are associated with “high culture” and from more traditional categories, such as the aesthetics of art and nature. In addition, the aesthetics of everyday life does not concern itself with events that are rare and profound, but instead with lived phenomena that unfolds within our mundane experiences as humans (Leddy, 2005). An aesthetic which focuses on the ordinary or everyday nature of human lives is also not concerned with reason or facts, but rather “is an ambitious attempt to approach the human creature as a 115 physiological and ethical being, through being attuned to sensations, the senses, perception, sentiments, and so on” (Highmore, 2011, 11). Essentially, the goal of everyday life aesthetics is to attend to and seek possibilities within the mundane and ordinary tasks, objects, and activities that make up our day-to-day lives through an engagement with the embodied, sensual, and affective aspects of these experiences (Saito, 2017).
Due to its pervasiveness, what constitutes the everyday has the potential to become large and unruly. To combat the potential for the category of everyday aesthetics to be so extensive that it is no longer a useful category, Melchionne (2013) offers a valuable set of principles or guidelines that heavily inform my analysis of my field observations, interviews, and photographs. These principles help identify the mundane nuances of individual’s and communities’ lives; for as Melchionne points out, farm work might be very mundane for a family that lives in a farmhouse and works the land but extraordinary for tourists from a large city. These guidelines also help restrict or constrain what we, as researcher, can and should be studying as an aesthetic of everyday life.
The first principle posited by Melchionne is that an aesthetic of everyday life is ongoing, meaning that the object or activity in question must reoccur rather than being something extraordinary. For example, getting dressed is a reoccurring activity for most people, and while there might be exceptions to this that make the act of getting dressed extraordinary activities
(such as your wedding), the act occurs daily and without much consideration. Next, the object or activity is common, meaning it is so widely experienced or practiced that the average person can engage with or enact it without needing specialized training or certifications. Third, the value that such object or activity takes on is often gained from the practice of doing. For example, the everyday doing of making coffee is where the routine’s value comes, more than the coffee or the 116 cups it is served in (though these are part of that doing). Finally, Melchionne argues that what gives everyday aesthetics its importance is the pervasiveness that it has in our lives, emphasizing that the realm of the everyday offers the aesthetic we encounter most.
The aesthetics of everyday life becomes important to rhetorical scholars in its ability to transcend the public and private spheres and to compel us into action (Highmore, 2011). As touched on above, the choices we make in our private everyday lives do not exist in isolation but are co-constituted by public discourses and expectations. “Aesthetics, at its best, attends to public feelings that are experienced intimately: it posits our most subjective experiences as social”
(Highmore, 2011). Moreover, an aesthetic of everyday life can account for the affective relations that we build with each other through our engagement with ordinary actions, routines, and objects. As Kathleen Stewart (2007) observes in her discussion of ordinary affects, the stuff of our intimate lives often circulates broadly within public culture. It is through their public circulation that ordinary affects can move between bodies and participate in the building of a social world. Everyday aesthetics are much like these ordinary affects in that they move between the public and the private and not only build social worlds but foster and support connections and relationships.
Aesthetics are often the currency of social relations, meaning that rhetorical inquiry into style and aesthetics can uncover "the collective vibration [and] the shared sentiment" (Vivian,
2002, 239). When we turn towards an aesthetic, we are acknowledging a rhetorical power that is affective rather than rational, and often collective rather than individual. An aesthetic engagement with rhetoric acknowledges that we "touch" each other rhetorically and allows for a focus on sentiment and performance rather than logic or reason (Vivian, 2002). Aesthetic sensibilities and performances allow us to come to know ourselves as individuals and members 117 of a group (Lund, 2017). For scholars such as Vivian and Lund, aesthetics are thus both local and collective. The individual may experience their own subjecthood through the aesthetic experience, but ultimately, this experience is mediated through mutual understandings. This communal engagement with aesthetics is critical for the affective creation of a queer community and understanding its social reality. A queer aesthetic also has the potential to prompt ruptures and cracks in normative understandings of the social world, rending aesthetics as a potential site for political and social action (Brummett, 2008; Vivian, 2002).
Queer Presence in the Kitchen
Vivian (2002) argues that when rhetorical critics engage aesthetics, it is not enough to highlight their importance in organizing social and political life; one must also pay attention to the role that style plays in engendering, maintaining, and/or reconfiguring these relations.
Aesthetics are important when considering how they function to produce, invent, or highlight queer or non-normative means of existing in the world; however, if we are to highlight and appreciate the possibilities and opportunities offered by an engagement with the mundane, queer bodies must make space for them within domestic spaces such as kitchens.
The first layer in the creation of a queer kitchen aesthetic is the establishment of a queer presence within the kitchen. Queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks have been left out of the social imaginary of who belongs in kitchens and how the kitchen as a space functions, so galleries like Autostaddle’s and the one I created for this project play a vital role in expanding that imaginary. Building a queer presence within the space of the kitchen entails the occupation of kitchen spaces by queer bodies, the inclusion of symbols and other stylistic markers that hailed the space as queer, as well as lifestyle choices and experiences that have become associated with queer culture. The queer presence in the kitchen accomplishes two 118 things: first through a queer aesthetic, it creates a queer identity and community that feel as if they belong within the kitchen space; second, this, in turn, creates the potential for ruptures and subversions that allow for the routine and mundane aspects of queer life to become resources for new cultural patterns and habits to exist alongside established understandings.
Queer Feminists in the House
Key aspects of everyday life aesthetics such as commonness, pervasiveness, and their ongoing nature are exemplified in the objects and other decorative elements that gallery participants kept in their kitchens. While many of the photos included objects that would not stand out as unique in a general roundup of millennial kitchens, the kitchens in both galleries feature material objects that marked the spaces as having queer and/or feminist leanings. The home, how it is decorated, and the objects that reside within it are not neutral, nor do they exist apart from the house's occupants. Instead, "the house and home are frequently perceived as symbols of the self, the psyche, and the body" (Briganti & Mezei, 2012, 8). Working under this assumption, it can be argued that it is not just bodies that co-constitute kitchens but the objects that take up residence there too.
Moreover, it is not entirely clear where bodies and the material objects that surround them begin and end. The material objects and artifacts present in the photos can thus potentially tell us about the queer identities of the gallery participants and provide insights into their lives.
While all of the images feature individuals and their taste in style and decorating, Dyer (2002) argues that there is a common language of symbols, that while neither universal nor set in stone, can signal queerness. He states that signs of gayness are "a repertoire of gestures, expressions, stances, clothing, and even environments that bespeak gayness" (19). Additionally, queer individuals often express their queer identities within their domestic environments through the 119 use of flags, posters, books, or other objects that affirm the identities (Elwood, 2000; Gorman-
Murray, 2008).
Many members of the Autostraddle community, as well as my interview participants, proudly and openly incorporate feminism into their queer identities, and often, this aspect of identity was present within the kitchens that were photographed. For example, Casey (28,
Vallejo, CA) is wearing a hoodie with female symbols on the chest. In Zsuzsanna and Laura’s
(26 & 27, Budapest, Hungary) photo, one of the women is wearing a “The future is female” t- shirt; and a poster featuring the phrase “Feminism for now. Feminism forever” appears on two separate refrigerators (Chelsea & Leah, Seattle, WA; Alanna, 26, Missoula, MT). Additionally, I encountered and documented a fridge magnet containing the phrase "Feminist Killjoy" in my fieldwork. Marne’s (30, Berlin, Germany) caption states “you can tell we’re giant queers because the kettle is peeking out from behind those pink Tegan and Sara tickets on top of the fridge, just above the purple ‘still loving feminism’ postcard.” Finally, a pink, glittery cutout of the internal anatomy of the clitoris is hanging in the middle of a star banner on the wall of Kelsea & Hebe’s kitchen (24, Manchester, UK).
Figure 11: Photo of refrigerator taken during fieldwork 120
Figure 12: Photo of refrigerator taken during fieldwork In addition to explicit expressions of feminist leanings, many of the photos and their participants feature visual cues that have become associated with queer women and non-binary folks. This includes décor such as light-up letters spelling out the word “pride” on Ira’s (31, New
York, NY) kitchen wall. Many of the participants also wore clothes or styled their hair in ways that are often closely associated with queer culture. Some participants wore clothing that specifically addressed their queer identities such as rainbow and trans pride pins (Chelsea &
Leah, 28 & 32, Seattle, WA), queer rights T-shirts (Emma, 26, Madison, WI), and a shirt stating,
“gender is a drag” (María José & Kate, 31 & 29, Vancouver, Canada). My refrigerator features a postcard with the statement "Protect Trans Kids" printed over the blue, pink, and white stripes of the trans flag that my partner acquired at our local pride celebration. In terms of physical features, several of the participants have what has become known as alternative lifestyle haircuts
(often featuring shaved portions of the head), short hair, or hair that is dyed unnatural colors such as blue or green. Other fashion markers include a disproportionate number of participants wearing hoodies, flannels, beanies, skinny jeans, scarves, cuffed shorts, sweaters over button-up shirts, facial piercings, and plastic framed glasses. (A caveat I would like to make here: while many of these styles are also at home in hipster-filled and Pinterest inspired straight communities, they play a significant role in millennial communities of queer women and non- binary folks.) 121
Figure 13: “Protect Trans Kids” postcard hanging on refrigerator The types of food that were present in the kitchens or mentioned in captions on the
Autostraddle gallery or during my interviews also worked to create a queer presence in the kitchen. An example includes the prevalence of vegan food. Vegan cookbooks were present in the gallery I created, and one of my interview subjects spoke at length about vegan baking and her attempts at recreating vegan versions of favorite childhood recipes. Additionally, several
Autostraddle gallery participants included veganism in their photos and commentary. Zsuzsanna and Laura (26 & 27, Budapest, Hungary) had several cookbooks lined up on their counter, with the first being the popular Vegan with a Vengeance (which I also have in my kitchen). In the caption, Zsuzanna and Laura state, "we love trying new vegan recipes with the limited resources available in Hungary." The associations between queerness and vegan/vegetarianism is not a new development with the galleries and interviews. Hall (2013) provides several examples of this connection in pop culture, including the stereotype of granola lesbians and the inclusion of tofu in the iconic film But I’m a Cheerleader. Hall’s examples, as well as the inclusion of veganism within the galleries, make direct ties between veganism and queer identity. This is significant because as Lindenmeyer (2006) argues, food—including vegetarianism—is involved in the creation of both sexual identities and queer communities. 122
Figure 14: Vegan cookbooks hanging on a kitchen wall encountered during fieldwork A theme that was not obvious in the Autostraddle gallery but emerged from my interview data was the role that the kitchen plays in activities and experiences that are specific to queer individuals. These experiences include Cea who spoke about maintaining their partner’s undercut in their shared kitchen.6 Other participants spoke to a broader range of queer experiences such as coming out to parents or other family members in the kitchen. Jenifer talked about the role that cooking and domesticity played, not only in her experiences of coming out but also regarding how she worked through her queer identity for herself. When Jenifer, a cis-woman in her mid- twenties, came out, she felt the need to shed the traditional role of stay-at-home wife and mother who put others' care needs ahead of her own. During our conversation, she stated, "When I was first discovering that part of myself--because my family is very conservative and religious so coming out was this huge process. When I finally did come out, I kind of rebelled against all traditional relationships and female roles. I was like I can't be in the kitchen because that's not who I am anymore…It took a long time for me to come full circle and realize that it's something
I enjoy as part of me." Despite feeling the need to turn away from the kitchen and other domestic roles when she was younger and still working through her relationship with her queerness, then,
6 An undercut refers to a hairstyle that is popular in many queer communities in which a portion of the hair is shaved off, often near the neck or sides of the head while the rest of the hair is left long. 123
Jenifer now sees the kitchen as a place where she belongs and now enjoys baking and cooking with her partner. The kitchen for her, then, again became a place where she could embrace her longings for domestic activities and perform caregiving for her loved ones, and she has come to realize that these activities can be worked into her queer identity.
Figure 15: Interview participant cutting their partner’s hair in the kitchen
Figure 16: An interview participant standing in her kitchen Banality of Queer Everyday Life
Many of the photos included in the galleries, as well as my interviews, revealed the mundane and banal nature of queer kitchens. Many of the images of queer identities and experiences that circulate publicly don’t include the day-to-day activities that make human life enjoyable and sustainable. Representations of queer experiences often focus on events such as coming out, navigating queer relationship dynamics, sexual activities, and legal and activist movements. While all of these are relevant to queer experiences, they miss the mundane routines 124 that enable these other activities and fights to happen. By focusing on the mundane and “lived in” aspect of queer kitchens, we can get a glimpse into how kitchens support queer life.
The call for the Autostraddle gallery encouraged contributors not to stress about making their kitchen look Instagram perfect. As a result, many of the images featured the mundane banality that is living and existing in the space, rather than the polished and posed photos of interior decorating and food that flood our Instagram feeds. For instance, in the caption under a picture of herself standing in her kitchen, Laniea states, “See I took this picture just last night, in poor lighting and my sock feet, without even tidying up the room! Then my phone fell from its perch on the staircase and scared the dogs. You can do this, surely." Several of the pictures include overflowing recycle bins, juice bottles and boxes on the floor, and other forms of clutter.
In their caption, Wiley Reading (28, Burlington, VT) comments that they thought about taking out the trash for the photo but didn't to reflect the true nature of the space. Most of the refrigerators featured in the images are cluttered and covered in papers, photos, children's artwork, and magnetic poetry. In her caption, Ella (28, Melbourne, Australia) references the importance of decorating the fridge, "Growing up, my mum would never let us put anything on the fridge because she hates clutter. As soon as I moved out, I filled the door with as many pictures that would fit. I can't wait to put my kid's drawings all over it." Many of the images also featured evidence that these kitchens are indeed sites of day-to-day living for their occupants, not just staged, social media shots. This includes dishes in the sink and drying on dish racks, bottles of oil lined up on counters and shelves, spice racks, hanging fruit bowls, vases of flowers on tabletops, and half-full French presses of coffee on relatable counters. The clutter and artifacts of everyday existence make the photos and their occupants relatable, not idealized aspirations that can never be reached. 125
My interviews and gallery echo the findings from the Autostraddle gallery, in that they also revealed moments of queer ordinaries that highlight the more banal aspects of queer lives.
Many interview participants spoke about their morning coffee routines, as wedding invitations, birthday cards from their mothers, and magnets from local take-out restaurants clung to fridge doors. Two of my participants had a clean/dirty sign for their dishwasher that had simplified the daily task of cleaning up, as well as a whiteboard where they kept track of things such as grocery lists and events. Participants also talked about the day-to-day activities which occurred in their kitchen spaces such as studying, buying cereal, and cooking and cleaning together with partners or roommates. Many had daily coffee rituals that often included a caregiving element, such as bringing a partner or roommate coffee in bed.
Figure 17: Interview participants fixing coffee
Figure 18: A refrigerator covered in take-out menus, coupons, wedding invitations, and magnets These mundane moments that make life both livable and enjoyable take on heightened importance because as Sarah Ahmed (2017) writes, queer lives have lost access to an ordinary because fighting has become what is considered ordinary for queer bodies. Despite strides that 126 have been made for LGBTQ communities such as marriage equality and an increase in media representation, the community still faces many barriers and struggles when compared to their straight peers. For example, queer couples face discrimination in regard to day-to-day experiences such as parenting; it is only recently that queer parents have been visible within mainstream media, and many families still face barriers in building their families through adoption or conceiving using medical technology. Additionally, housing discrimination against queer individuals and families is still legal in most US cities and homelessness is a pervasive problem within the queer community. By featuring images of explicitly queer spaces that don't shy away from overflowing trash cans, disorderly refrigerators, and counter clutter, the gallery is returning a banal ordinary to queer bodies. Even bodies that are fighting and calling for social change still need a place to eat and refuel, to rest, and to strategize. It is these moments that support their activism and the fighting. An everyday banality, in other words, supports the extraordinary acts that queer activism has become so known for. And by allowing their well- worn kitchens to circulate publicly, gallery participants are providing a more complete picture of contemporary queer existence and give a glimpse of an ordinary behind a queer extraordinary.
“Home”o-Ordinary
In addition to moments of banality, both my interviews, gallery, and the Autostraddle gallery engage with themes and experiences which could be labeled “homonormative.” In its most straightforward iterations, homonormativity refers to queerness as ordinary and unremarkable (Papacharissi & Fernback, 2008). At this level, homonormativity seems like a promising path for the tired queer subject who is searching for the lost ordinary identified by
Ahmed. However, homonormativity often casts "normal" queer lives as those that have been patterned off of heterosexual modes of relationship and family building that are no longer seen as 127 threatening or troubling to mainstream society (Richardson, 2005). This non-threatening model creates a queer subject who follows in the footsteps of their heterosexual counterparts, where marriage, raising a family, buying a home, and being a good consumer are seen as cornerstones of what counts as “the good life.” Lisa Duggan (2002) takes up this incarnation of homonormativity, defining it as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions — such as marriage, and its call for monogamy and reproduction — but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption" (179).
Duggan is critical of queer culture assimilating into its heterosexual counterparts, arguing that queer people and communities become entangled in neoliberalism and the privatization and consumerization of public life. This entanglement is exemplified in the fight for marriage equality, parenting and adoption rights, and military service. Frequently the arguments for these fights are based on the premise of specific gay and lesbian individuals deserving rights because they are just like their straight counterparts. By arguing that sameness is what renders the LGBT population as worthy of rights, it could be said that the nuances and creative interpretations of daily living practices enacted by queer individuals becomes at best lost and at worst demonized and seen as invalid ways of existing in the world.
Some scholars have argued that this interpretation of homonormativity is too limiting and prevents critics and researchers from engaging with the emancipatory potential that ordinary day- to-day activities have. Homonormativity has been invoked to write off queer homes and domestic lives, assuming that investing in a home space automatically makes the home fall into alignment with middle-class, conservative assimilation. While we must be cautious not to fall into the romanticism of assuming that all acts committed by a non-heterosexual body are radical, 128 we must also recognize the resistive and transformational work that domestic and other private spaces can enable. Home life and the everyday activities that take place within domestic spaces still do identity work and offer a setting to enact political and cultural change. Therefore, it would be detrimental to overlook these domestic spaces simply because they lend themselves to homo and heteronormative longings.
As Issac West (2013) reminds us, when anti-normativity is valued above everything, we will be disappointed more often than not because we can never completely separate from normativities. When antinormativity at all costs becomes the gold standard, nothing will ever be queer enough. Gavin Brown (2012) calls on us to theorize homonormativity differently, in a way that does not cast a demonizing shadow over lifestyle choices and actions that may fall under the homonormative umbrella. Instead, Brown encourages us to ask questions that deepen our understanding as to “how particular sexual subjectivities and practices arise within specific regimes of accumulation, …consider[ing] how they function in specific contexts” (1071).
Because everyday life scholarship reminds us that the rhythms and patterns of mundane life can set the stage for resistance and re-imagination (de Certeau & Rendall, 1984), this work can aid us in a more compassionate reading of actual, lived, and material queer lives and answer West’s call for a queer generosity in our acts of criticism. Taking a page from the authors cited above, I give the moments of homonormativity that emerged from a generous reading and considering what work they are doing rather than writing them off as assimilationist.
Domestic spaces such as kitchens provide fertile ground for examining the role of homonormativity because many aspects of homonormativity are dependent on private spaces and how they foster relationships such as dyadic romantic partnerships and parenting. Much of the work of building and maintaining romantic relationships happens within the home, and child 129 rearing is also considered a private and domestic activity. It could be argued that Duggan’s
(2002) connection of homonormativity is directly linked to public policy and the participation in public life renders homonormativity a public concern. However, I am more concerned with how homonormativity manifests within the day-to-day routines that are connected to kitchen spaces and how this manifestation of homonormativity enables queer individuals to feel a sense of grounding in the larger social world.
Not surprising was the presence of dyadic, romantic partnerships being fostered in the kitchen. Many of the Autostraddle photos and statements as well as my interviews spoke to the importance of such romantic relationships. Examples include images such as the one of Amanda and Rachel Walwood (28 & 29, no location). In this photo, one partner is at the stove, stirring a blue Dutch oven with a wooden spoon. A hand is on her hip, and she is in profile, her gaze towards the stove. The other partner is sitting on the counter with a small dog curled up in her lap, knees crossed, looking towards her partner. Both are smiling and look happy and comfortable. Another photo that features a happy couple is the image of Lauren and Faith (31 &
27, Hamilton, Ontario). Both are standing near the sink holding coffee mugs, there is a plate of pancakes on the stove, and they are smiling and looking lovingly at each other. A third example is Deirdre and Amanda (25, Philadelphia, PA). The two are standing in front of their stove; one partner has arms wrapped around the other who is holding a very round cat. Additionally, two of my interview participants disclosed that they often slow dance with their partners in the kitchen.
Cea also spoke about how the kitchen is the space where they reconnect with and engage in mutual caretaking with their partner at the end of the day.
Many also spoke about the role of cooking in the development of their relationships.
Examples include Chelsea and Leah (28 & 32, Seattle, WA), whose photo shows one partner 130 leaning on the counter with her hand in her pocket, the other standing close, hips touching with one arm around their partner and the other holding glass of wine. Both are looking at the fluffy black and white cat who is eating out of a dish on the floor. Their caption states, "We're two bisexual genderqueer nerds who fell in love teaching cooking lessons together and making each other breakfast. Leah is a baker, and Chelsea is a cook; our kitchen is tiny, but it's the best room in the apartment." In the photo of Janice & Hallie (28 & 30, Portland, OR) one is sitting on the counter, her bare feet hanging off. Her partner is standing next to her, and their arms are around each other, both looking and pointing at their dog sitting in front of them. The words below the image state, "Our favorite thing to prepare together is pizza because Janice makes the best tomato sauce and I make the best crust and Fee is the best at eating the cheese that falls on the floor, so together we are unstoppable."
There are many other examples. Consider the photo of Zsuzsanna and Laura (26 & 27,
Budapest, Hungary): in this image one partner is seated at counter stool, legs crossed with an elbow on the counter, while her partner is standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder. Both are smiling softly and looking towards the camera. The caption reads, “We moved in together last year and just got engaged!!! What we love most about this kitchen is the sociable counter.
Zsuzsanna is the one who makes coffee, Laura drinks it and makes pancakes and/or margaritas.”
Some of the other statements referenced partners even when they weren’t included in the image.
The caption in the photo by Jen (27, Hamilton, Ontario), whose partner is not visible, reads, “I couldn’t boil a potato before my wife got her hands on me.” Ally Sterling (28, Holyoke, MA) states, "My partner and I spend most of our time at home in our kitchen. We love to cook, bake, can & preserve, using ingredients from our garden. My most prized kitchen item is the hand-built drying rack I'm standing behind, that my partner built for me with the help of our friend." 131
While the examples above illustrate the role of kitchens and cooking in romantic relationships, other statements chart how the kitchen and cooking have impacted the progression of relationships. This sub-pattern includes Leah (30, Chicago), who writes, "On our first date, my fiancé Katie and I made lasagna together in my shitty grad student kitchen. She still loves it when I make that (and so do the cats)." Similarly, Mel and Kelly (23 & 22) note, “Cooking has been a huge part of moving in together and learning how to adult; it sometimes seems like the only thing that makes sense in our world!” Meanwhile, the photo of María José & Kate (31 & 29,
Vancouver, Canada) shows both standing in the kitchen near the stove facing each other and smiling. Their caption states, “Three years ago, this was just Kate’s kitchen, and María sat on top of the fridge (a thing that rock climbers do when they’re nervous?) while Kate made pancakes, rounding off a very successful third date. Last weekend, Kate made huevos rancheros
(one of María's favorite breakfasts), and María did the dishes.”
Marriage, another aspect of romantic partnerships that is regarded as homonormative, represented a relationship progression featured in both the galleries and my interviews. While a case could be made that queer partners living together and nurturing their relationships within the space of the kitchen is transgressive, marriage, an act that radical queer individuals and theorists see as assimilationist, also had a presence within the kitchen. Gallery participants such as Alex and Erica (London, UK) speak about the fruit bowl they received as a wedding present in the caption under their photo. Several of my interview participants made ties between their marriage and the kitchen. For example, Jamie spoke about cooking for Lauren's wedding shower, and
Jamie and Lauren spoke fondly about the KitchenAid mixers they were given as wedding gifts.
This particular KitchenAid was extra special to Lauren because their chosen family and community had gathered their resources together to purchase it as a wedding gift. 132
KitchenAids not only made an appearance in relation to wedding gifts but seemed to also be present in both the Autostraddle gallery as well as my interviews and fieldwork. KitchenAids appear to be having a moment with millennials, who have been placing these stand mixers, which in the past couple years have been released in fun colors, onto their wedding registries. In an Autostraddle 2018 holiday gift guide titled “Holigay Gift Guide: Fancy Wedding Gifts, but for Your Single Friend for the Holidays Instead,” writer Vanessa states under a photo of a pink
Kitchen Aid mixer, “In my mind, this has always been The Gift you give someone at a wedding shower. This item is the reason this gift guide exists. Please goddess, let someone gift me and all the other single femme kitchen witches the classy classic stand mixer of our dreams this holigay season, amen.” Despite all of the associations that this particular product has with marriage, weddings, and other normative markers of adulthood, many participants spoke about their mixer being a prized possession or something they cared deeply about. While a Kitchen Aid mixer could be seen as the epidemy of heteronormative longings, within the context of queer kitchens, it has the ability to tweak or rework the mundane practices of everyday life, enabling possibility of altering or changing the symbolic resources that construct reality. Queer uses and longings for
Kitchen Aids are an example of the potentiality of queer kitchens to alter or disrupt the common tools that people use to make sense of the world. Objects such as the Kitchen Aid, my research shows, are becoming re-signified as they come into contact with queer bodies and experiences.
Rather than representing a suffocating hetero or homonormativity, then, Kitchen Aids and other markers of normalcy, community, and family ties. 133
Figure 19: A Kitchen Aide found in an interview participant’s kitchen Another sub-theme related to normative relationship patterns involves parenting and the inclusion of babies and children. Lydia (31, Olympia, WA) self-identifies as “Mama” in her caption and Ella (28, Melbourne, Australia) is holding a baby in her picture. Others speak about their children and parenting in the captions. Megan (30, Minneapolis, MN) states that she has found joy in “sitting down at our polka-dot covered table for crowded family meals saturated in love, laughter, fart noises, and political/social/feminist rants.” In another image, Megan (36,
Minneapolis, MN) and her 3-year-old daughter Hazel, who is wearing a cat costume, are standing on either side of a kitchen island, both looking at camera and smiling. In her statement,
Megan says, “I like teaching my daughter to create in the kitchen even though it gets pretty chaotic.” An interesting caption appears under Mary Roth and Katie Mackenzie’s (25 & 35,
Eugene, OR) photo. In the image one is sitting on the counter, the other is behind, and they are very close and touching each other. The caption states “Caitlin: ‘In very lesbian fashion, Mary and I love to talk about our future family, and we even (preemptively) made Friday our ‘family night,’ specifically reserving that time for making pizza.’” Additionally, my interview with
Jenifer also revealed longings of cooking and the kitchen being part of her vision for her future family as she stated that she hoped to be able to pass on the skills and recipes that her mother taught her to children of her own someday. 134
The romantic relationships and family building through children that arose from the galleries and my interviews do little to shake the normative assumptions about romantic relationships and parenting. An easy critique of the galleries and my interviews would cast these individuals as blindly upholding homonormative ways of being in the world. My response would not be to disagree, but instead, hold space for the work that these normative kitchen activities are doing. As Ahmed (2010) has established, happiness has become associated with heteronormative activities such as marriage and raising children, and until very recently, this happiness has been off limits and inaccessible to queer individuals. Queer comedian Cameron Esposito summarized this well in an interview stating, "What a gift it is to be able to be sort of the first generation of people in the LGBT community that can have a happy ending. Like, we can just get married, and we can just have jobs. And it can be normative." What Esposito and the gallery participants are demonstrating is that despite queer's investment in the disruptive and non-normative, queer individuals and communities are participating, and even thriving, within homonormativity.
The homo/heteronormative objects, gestures, and practices all take on new meaning when placed in relation to queer bodies and represented publicly. When images of queer domesticity and an embrace of heteronormative practices circulate publicly, they prompt ruptures in regard to who and what are allowed to have access to ordinaries. Much like the authors spoken about earlier in this section, Butler reminds us that we should not automatically demonize moments of normativity. Instead, we should stop and consider if the norms are permitting "people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live" (8). Butler goes on to argue that some broader cultural norms not only allow marginalized groups to live their lives but allow them to become real and legible.
Butler states, “I think when the unreal lays claim to reality or enters into its domain, something other than simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place. The norms 135 themselves can become rattled, display their instability, and become open to resignification"
(27). A queer aesthetics of everyday life allows us to appreciate how mundane, ordinary, and pervasive aspects of queer domestic work within the space of the kitchen can change how we view homonormativity. Simply because the activities and relationships that kitchens foster appear to be in line with hetero or homonormative understandings of the world does not necessarily mean that they are not doing important cultural work.
The engagement with homonormative activities and relationships within queer kitchens reflects a queer aesthetic of everyday life. By fostering relationships that may follow homonormative patterns within domestic and day-to-day spaces, queer kitchens enable queer bodies to see themselves as being able to occupy and access a sense of ordinary.
Homonormativity within the realm of mundane spaces and activities is a means of building an ordinary life. Aesthetics become a social currency, embedding homonormative understandings of kitchens and the types of relationships that may be fostered there. As established earlier, aesthetics have the ability to organize, maintain, and reconfigure relationships (Vivian, 2002).
When queer individuals use kitchens and other domestic, day-to-day spaces and routines to structure their relationships with others, they exist within the contradictory space of everyday aesthetics that both apricate and diminish the cultural work that homonormativity can do in the realm of the mundane.
This generous reading of homonormative uses of the kitchen fosters an appreciation for how homonormativity can be used not to justify access to rights or enable queer communities to be seen as fully human by mainstream society, but to tap into and reclaim the right to what constitutes happiness and a good life. When queer bodies occupy the space of the kitchen, they are laying claim to their right to participate in norms and institutions that have become associated 136 with happiness. I do not wish to romanticize institutions such as marriage and parenting as the magic cure for queer unhappiness,7 but I am not ready to completely throw them out. As the galleries and interviews have attested, engaging in homonormative behaviors is not only a reality for many queer individuals and their families, but it also enables them to experience and lay claim to an ordinary. Brown (2012) asks that we consider the context that homonormative practices take place within to determine how it is function. As my research shows, homonormativity can be one means of tapping into what the social imagination has classified as happy, ordinary, normal, and part of the good life. Therefore, homonormativity becomes a means of finding some relief from the constant fight that is existing as a queer body in a cis and heteronormative world. A queer aesthetic of everyday life enables us to embrace the contradictory nature of kitchens and other everyday spaces.
I argue that the homonormative leanings of family connections, marriage, and parenting that repeatedly appear in both galleries and my interviews do not reinforce Duggan's notions of homonormativity as a means of assimilation through the domestic. Instead, these are means of allowing queer bodies to experience a normal contentment, not necessarily participate in harmful, neoliberally informed notions of normativity. Both my archive and interviews as well as the Autostraddle gallery document how participants to engage with queer domesticity and its homonormative leanings to develop insight into how this particular community negotiates queer modes of existence while engaging with normative actions as a means of creating a sustaining and fulfilling life.
Conclusion
7 Ahmed (2010) argues that the promise of happiness is often used to justify social norms as well as hide the violence that takes place within these institutions 137
The kitchens and their occupants featured in this project accomplish several things. First, they establish a queer presence in the kitchen, ultimately creating representations of queer mundane lives that can occupy and generate reimaginations of domestic spaces and lay claim to an ordinary. They demonstrate, that despite the constant fight that makes up so much of queer life, it is possible for queer bodies to tap into the promises of stability, happiness, and sense of ordinary that kitchens and heteronormative practices have been offering heterosexual people for years. As Butler (2004) states, “The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible” (219). By allowing queer people to know themselves to be possible within the space of the kitchen, this enables a reading of the homonormative aspects of queer kitchens to be read in a more transgressive way.
Second, the simultaneous assertion of kitchens as queer spaces, complete with the markers of queer culture, alongside more broadly normative kitchen relationships and activities, enable queer kitchens to exist within a contradictory space. Scholars such as Oswin (2004) have identified the conflicting position that normative activities and relationships within the queer community spark. However, instead of seeing the contradictory as a failure of queerness fulfilling a radical and disruptive goal, they frame it as an asset. Queer kitchens, like their sibling feminist kitchens, can simultaneously be both spaces of confinement and transformation. On the one hand kitchens can uphold broadly normative understandings of the space and foster homonormative patterns of relationships, which can be interpreted as acting as a confining agent.
However, kitchens also can offer a sense of normalcy that allows queer bodies to gain an understanding of the mundane and ordinary. A queer aesthetic of everyday life embraces the contradictory nature of kitchens—indeed, contradiction itself can be seen as a queer concept as it 138 resists the binary—and allows for an embrace of the pervasive and ongoing activities that will enable kitchens to become places where queer bodies seek out and achieve happiness. 139
Chapter Five Doing Archival Criticism: Performative Approaches to Archives of Queer Ordinaries
In July of 2018, I found myself on a humid subway train making my way from
Manhattan to Park Slope in Brooklyn. I was making a pilgrimage of sorts, to the Herstory
Lesbian Archives. I was introduced to this particular archive in a graduate queer theory seminar where we were assigned to read Gieseking’s (2015) essay “Useful In/stability,” which chronicled the author’s first-person accounts of conducting research at the Archives. After reading
Gieseking’s account of the space, I felt inexplicitly drawn to the Archives and made a promise to myself that if I ever made it to New York City, I would visit in person.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives are self-described as part library, museum, and community gathering space and claim to house the largest collection of materials related to lesbian lives and communities. The archive started as a humble collection in a founding member’s apartment in 1972 and by the early 1990s had outgrown the space and was moved to its permanent location. The mission of the archive is to recover, collect, and preserve the memories and experiences of the lesbian community in order to preserve the “herstory” of a community. The Archives cite the hetero-patriarchal nature of other archives and seek to protect this history from being ignored, forgotten, or lost. The Archive exists outside of formal institutions such as museums and universities and is entirely funded by financial support from the community and operated by volunteer work.
Part of the Archive’s purpose is to pass down not only history but archiving skills from generation to generation. This is done largely through its network of volunteers and commitment to maintain the archives within the community. This addresses the problem referenced in
Halberstam’s (2005) observation that in queer communities there is often a slippage between 140 community members and those studying or archiving queer culture. Queer archival techniques, as a set of practices, are disruptive and challenge normative understandings of what counts as an archive and who can collect and house the materials (Kumbier, 2014). Additionally, the archive strives to be accessible to those for whom the contents may touch in a meaningful way. Their mission statements clearly invites anyone who identifies with lesbian culture to come and experience the archives for themselves stating, “We would love for every lesbian in the world to be able to visit the Archives” (The Lesbian Herstory Archieves, 2017).
Accepting such invitation, I found myself exiting the subway station and making my way up the steps into a Brooklyn neighborhood. I made my way towards the archive, walking through the summer sun and humidity down a street full of brownstones. Because the building itself is doesn’t stand out from its neighbors, I approached the door cautiously, convinced that I was at the wrong address until I stopped and saw a small rainbow sticker near the door and a single sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve indicating the archive’s hours for the month. I felt nervous as I rang the bell. A volunteer, about my age dressed in a plaid shirt, opened the door and showed me in. The entryway was dark, and next to the doorway stood a table with flyers, a donation box, and a guest book. As I made our way into the house, the hallway led to a large room filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves and filing cabinets. Several people seated at the tables were engrossed in their own work. After perusing some of the periodicals that were filed away in the room, I made my way upstairs. The second floor was unoccupied and contained a series of rooms cluttered with shelves and boxes. I opened built-in cabinets full of boxed T-shirts, dug through piles of activist pins in the bathroom sink, and read through email chains belonging to a chapter of the
Lesbian Avengers. The number of artifacts and history contained in these rooms was overwhelming in the best way possible. Despite the almost dizzying amount of stuff—papers, 141 posters, T-shirts, books, pins, and periodicals—the space had a strange grounding affect on my body.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives are not unique in the affective impact that they had on me. Queer archives, because they delve into intimate and constitutive details of lives such as gender identity and sexual orientation, have immense affective power (Arondekar et al., 2015;
Zepeda, 2018). Queer archives, then, must be looked at beyond the surface of what they house; one must delve into how these objects and records constitute communities. Queer archives don’t just simply document, but rather have the ability to transmit embodied knowledges, affects, and culture (Arondekar et al., 2015; Cvetkovich, 2015).
It is with this experience of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and theory of queer archive’s affective power in mind, that I decided to build my own digital queer archive. My choice to utilize a digital site rather than a brick and mortar archive space was influenced by several factors. First, digital spaces are much more accessible to both archivists as well as those accessing the materials. Second, due to technology, digital archives can be curated and developed at a faster pace, thus, facilitating the capturing and archiving of experiences as they happen. Additionally, digital queer archives, as Rawson and other queer scholars such as
Alexander and Rhodes note, can be important examples of, in Morris’ (2006) terms, “queering the archive.” According to Morris, queering the archive can take many forms. For one, it might simply mean writing queerness into history. For others, such as Cram (2016), it might entail taking up the ambience of the archival space as a means of engaging with queerness. Queering the archive can also, I argue, entail making visible the banal and ordinary experiences of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks, as well as other marginalized communities. As discussed in previous chapters, representations of queer ordinary have the power to help queer 142 bodies feel grounded and oriented in the world. For this research project, I thus queer the archive by co-creating and curating digital photographs that I took of queer folks in their kitchens and displayed in an online gallery I have published called “Queering the Kitchen.”
This archive was inspired, in part, by my previous participation in Autostraddle’s “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery that I discussed in previous chapters and further analyze below. In the remainder of this chapter, I first identify the general benefits of digital queer archives and then narrow to identify how archives such as Autostraddle’s “Queer in the Kitchen” have the power to promote a sense of representational belonging and prompt important moments of becoming for queer individuals and communities. I then model how a participatory/arts-based approach to queer archival scholarship can enable critics to enact a type of performative criticism that can facilitate feelings of representational belonging through the production of online queer archives.
To demonstrate this, I first overview my own making of the Queering the Kitchen gallery. I then identify the role that photography can play in the creation of queer archives and create opportunities for critics to help foster moments of unbecoming and engender new subjectivities and possibilities. My discussion cumulates in an argument for the productive potential of arts/participatory methods as a supplement to RFM and queer archival scholarship, especially their ability to help facilitate the creation of archival subjects who not only have a past, but a powerful present.
Queering Archival Methods
The word archive refers to both the collection as well as the place in which the collection is housed (Brown, 2014). Archives have been traditionally viewed as passive resources; however, in actuality, archives hold a great deal of power and influence. This power and influence have spurred rhetorical interest in the archive as a site of rhetorical action rather than 143 merely a tool for rhetorical scholars (Morris, 2006). When viewed from this perspective, archives become not only the remnants of historical events, people, and places. Rather, we can see that what gets collected in an archive determines what history is remembered and, in a way, controls our access to the past. Latimer (2013) states that both the collection and curation of archives are
“the process of making history” (34). Whoever controls what is deemed valuable enough to archive, as well as controls access to the space in which archives reside, has enormous power over who and what becomes part of the public historical record (Schwartz & Cook, 2002).
It is precisely because of an archive’s immense power that many queer individuals and organizations began to collect and document queer history. Historically, queer artifacts, when included in public archives such as universities, libraries, and museums, were at best miscataloged in a way that erases queerness or at worst problematic in that they often framed
LGBTQ identities and experiences as criminal or associated with mental illness (Brown, 2014;
Jules, 2016). The often silencing, neglectful, and stigmatizing nature of mainstream archives has driven the desire for queer communities to document, collect, and archive their own histories
(Cvetkovich, 2015). By seeking out and collecting artifacts and histories related to queer experience, LGBTQ archives enable queer experiences and histories to become both knowable and legitimized (Morris & Rawson, 2013). While the archiving of queer history has been happening informally for as long as there have been queer people, queer archiving took off in the
1970s, spurred by the gay and lesbian liberation movement. These archives were often associated with activist organizations, LGBT service organizations, publications, and businesses (Brown,
2014). Several of these archives, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives, still exist as brick and mortar institutions today and continue to do important work of not only collecting and storing 144 historical artifacts but also providing safe spaces for community members to gather and learn about their histories (Wakimoto, Bruce, & Partridge, 2013).
By the 2000s, many mainstream archival organizations began to openly collect and catalogue LGBTQ materials in a way that was much more affirming for the LGBTQ community.
However, as scholars such as Rawson and Morris have observed, pitfalls of these straight institutions for queer scholars and community members still exist. Morris (2006) argues that although many “straight” institutions now house and catalogue queer materials, these institutions still present barriers to access and comfort due to the bureaucratic nature of most archival spaces.
Rawson (2009) clearly demonstrates this phenomenon in their discussion of their experiences as a trans-identified person attempting to conduct research at the National Transgender Library and
Archives housed within the “straight” University of Michigan. The University of Michigan library only provides access to gender-segregated bathrooms. As a transgender scholar, Rawson noted that they felt incredibly uncomfortable in the library space because they did not have a safe space to use the rest room. Unlike other queer-run archives that Rawson visited during their project, the lack of bathroom access prevented Rawson from being able to spend long hours in this particular archive. The sense of alienation that Rawson felt having to take their queer body into a “straight” archival space is not unusual. Morris (2006a) notes that due to institutional as well as cultural influences, declaring yourself a queer scholar in these spaces can lead to push back that scholars who pursue less taboo topics do not face.
It is not just scholars and researchers who face alienation and obstacles when accessing queer pasts. Brick and mortar archives can present difficulties for everyday queer people hoping to gain access to historical materials. Despite open-door policies that many queer organizations hold in regard to their archival collections, it is not necessarily economically or logistically 145 viable for an individual to visit the physical locations where their histories are stored. In light of such circumstances, digital queer archives have become an important means to expanding the circulation and access of queer archival artifacts. Alexander and Rhodes (2012) argue that digital technologies are an invaluable resource for enacting queer networks because they facilitate easier access to the collection, curation, and circulation of queer history. Mass digitization widens possibilities for discovery and access by moving archival work away from dusty basements and long wooden library tables into the literal hands (or screens) of those who seek out history.
Digital artifacts (both those that are digitized and born digital) 8 and digital curation tools also offer a “new means to recover marginalized or forgotten rhetorics” (Solberg, 2012, 71), especially as blogs, websites, online forums, and vlogs take on the same importance in terms of historical evidence as historical photographs, documents, or transcribed oral histories. In addition to expanding what can be recovered and curated, digital archival spaces enable members of queer communities to see themselves reflected back on their phones and computer screens—a reflection that is extremely important, as I discuss below, for identification and validation.
For queer and other marginalized communities to be able to see their identities and experiences represented in spaces such as archives, which often determine who and what becomes part of the public memory, can especially enable feeling of inclusion (Caswell, Cifor, &
Ramirez, 2016). The archival experiences that enable underrepresented individuals to feel seen and included can be conceptualized as moments of becoming. Grosz (2011) defines moments of becoming as moments or forms of change that are transformational in a way that often enables life. Due to structural conditions, queer bodies become accustomed to not only experiencing
8 Born digital refers to materials that originated in digital formats and platforms, such a digital photo or blog post, rather than digitizing artifacts such as documents and photographs that previously only existed in paper or analogue form. 146 trauma but expecting to see that trauma parroted back at them. It can be empowering then for queer individuals and communities to engage with online galleries such as “Queer in the
Kitchen,” where participants and viewers can experience the process of becoming. In this sense, the photographs included in this gallery provide what Hariman and Lucaites (2016), following
Kenneth Burke, call “equipment for living” –resources for making sense of ourselves and our place in the world. As exemplified in my reflection of my participation in the Queer in the
Kitchen gallery below as well as the comments section of the Queer in the Kitchen gallery posts, online queer archives can provide not only relief and calm, but also equipment for building a world in which queer is not necessarily equated with a subject who has no future and is dead on arrival. In addition to providing a means of resistance and a resource for culture transmission, online queer archives can especially produce representational belonging.
Queer Archives, Affective Collisions and Representational Belonging
The “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery is a productive example of how queer archives are spaces for affective collisions and representational belonging. As a reminder, the “Queer in the
Kitchen” gallery is an online gallery that was co-produced by readers such as me who responded to Autostraddle.com’s call in 2017 to submit pictures of their kitchens. Readers were specifically asked to submit a high-resolution photo of their kitchen (being present in the kitchen was optional but preferred), along with name, age, and a short statement. As an avid reader of
Autostraddle, I was excited when I first read the call to participate in the gallery. I spent a good portion of an afternoon testing camera angles and specific kitchen locations as well as changing my outfit several times. Because the call also encouraged the presence of pets, I wrangled a very grumpy cat into posing with me. To capture the image of in my kitchen space, I used my SLR camera and a remote shooting app that syncs with my phone. I then experimented with several 147 different camera angles and framing as well as my placement in the kitchen. I ultimately chose a photo taken from my bedroom doorway that captured most of the kitchen. By participating in the gallery and becoming a contributor, I was excited to take an active role in co-constructing knowledge about what a queer person and their domestic kitchen space may look like.
As the public debut of the gallery got closer, I, like many of Autostraddle’s readers, eagerly awaited, feeling, in the words of one commenter Vikki, “for what seems like forever!!”
When the gallery finally posted, I was in the campus dining hall eating a late lunch. I excitedly began to scroll through the photos, pausing to read the writing that accompanied the images, and
I found myself unexpectedly emotional as I worked my way through the first several pages. I decided that I would rather not cry in public (especially not in the campus dining hall), so I closed the computer window and decided to wait until I was home in my own space. Once at home, I sat cross-legged on my bed with the cat and a mug of mint tea and slowly scrolled through the photos. I felt a strange comfort as I gazed at the images, but I was also nervous to see my image nestled among the others. When I finally scrolled upon my picture, my stomach jumped, and I paused for a second wondering if I was going to regret including myself in the project. Instead, when seeing my image staring back at me from the screen, I was met with a sense of belonging that I had never experienced before.
I was not the only reader who experienced such embodied, emotional, and visceral reactions to the gallery. As I made my way through the comments section, I encountered several other readers who, even if they did not participate in the project, found themselves moved by the images. For example, several readers described emotional reactions such as crying at their desk at work or tearing up as they scrolled through the gallery. Commenter Samantha wrote, “Welp I definitely teared up seeing all your gorgeous, kind faces and creative kitchens. This was a bright 148 spot in a bad day, and my lesbo heart has grown three sizes. Wow do I love my people.” Others noted the sense of calm and comfort that they felt when interacting with the gallery, an experience commenter Dera described as “cathartic.” Reader Charlie stated in their comment,
“This was magnificent to look through and now I feel all warm and cozy. I could not stop smiling seeing all of these! Ah, thank you everyone for sharing this.”
The experiences that the other Autostraddle readers and I had while engaging with the gallery reflect Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez’s (2016) theory of representational belonging, which attempts to capture the affective reaction individuals have to seeing themselves and communities represented in complex and nuanced ways. Representational belonging refers to the response to the symbolic annihilation experienced by marginalized groups when they are ignored or misinterpreted by existing representations. Archives, especially those created by community members, play a key role in facilitating representational belonging. The authors state that representational belonging refers to
the ways in which community archives give those left out of mainstream repositories the power and authority to establish and enact their presence in archives in complex, meaningful, and substantive ways. Seeing oneself reflected in archives has significant epistemological, ontological, and affective consequences (74).
As Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez have established, archives can facilitate community visibility and identity legitimization as well as foster an affective sense of inclusion and belonging. The
“Queer in the Kitchen” gallery accomplished all of this by generating a space for shared recognition, complex representation, and affective communication.
The “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery especially generated a space for an assemblage of queer bodies in which participants could reorient and begin to feel more at home and at ease in the world, ultimately and simultaneously offering moments of innovation, discovery, and 149 transformation. Through this collision, both the contributors to and viewers of the “Queer in the
Kitchen” gallery could be transformed into subjects worthy of an everyday, mundane queer ordinary, capable of powerful heteronormative critique, and able to appropriate dominant heteronormative spaces to generate alternative spaces of possibility. This is incredibly powerful, since, as Ahmed (2017) has pointed out, queer ordinaries and mundane lives have become about fighting, rather than the day to day living that makes life sustainable. The “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery counters this by providing access to images of a mundane, everyday, something that most queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks are not used to seeing. Commenter
Susan’s remarks point to the importance of archives such as “Queer in the Kitchen” stating:
I wish I had a time machine and could go back and give small-town baby dyke me a copy of this collection of images. It would have been so comforting. It still is; aside from direct action (which I know we are all participating in), the most radical act we can all engage in in the face of our current political reality is to live, work, love, and thrive in spite of those who hate us. These images are a rich and beautiful tableau of the act of resistance that is choosing to exist.
Susan’s comment points towards the important work representational belonging can do. When communities are able to see themselves reflected as have access to an everyday existence, they gain resources that can potentially enable them to thrive in the face of oppression.
While the “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery can be understood as cultivating representational belonging, in another sense, the gallery can be understood as an archive of feelings (Cvetkovich, 2015) in that, as obvious in the comments above, this experience also included a collision of affects that help make visible this queer community and foster cultural transmission. Affect is a useful concept in accounting for the non-discursive embodied responses that the other readers and I were having to the gallery. Gregg and Seigworth (2011) define affect as: 150
those intensities that pass body to body (human, non-human, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves…(affect is) the name we give those forces –visceral forces beneath, alongside, or general other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion (1).
Affect allows for the marking and recognition of cultural and social contexts which “might otherwise remain ephemeral because they have not solidified into a visible public culture”
(Cvetkovich, 2015, 47). Too often, as Lee (2016) argues, the absences of non-normative bodies, identities, and experiences can render non-normative bodies and communities as affectively lost, forgotten, or even empty. The “Queer in the Kitchen” archive makes highly visible that queer bodies and communities are neither absent nor affectively lost. Instead, I argue, that this archive counters the symbolic annihilation felt by queer communities who feel as if they don’t see themselves reflected in representations of ordinary and mundane aspects of day-to-day lives.
More specifically, I argue that what elicited so many "feelings" and embodied and visceral reactions from myself and other viewers of “Queer in the Kitchen” is our recognition that it both fills gaps in representation and affords the cultural transmission, or “the process of learning through which the values, standards, norms, etc. of a culture are passed on to succeeding generations” (Reber, 1995, 177), that we long for as a community and that has been historically underrepresented and heard. Through the collision of queer bodies and affects, then, "Queer in the Kitchen" is far more than a space for housing the “stuff” of queer lives (Cvetkovich, 2015); it is a significant rhetorical means of affective and cultural transmission that not only captures the experiences of a queer moment in history, but also facilitates feelings and emotions that make visible important aspects of queer culture (Cvetkovich, 2015; Kumbier, 2014). As commenter 151
Susan also remarked: “This is a powerful and important document, and a snapshot of a community and a moment in time that has historical value.”
Despite the presence of online galleries such as “Queer in the Kitchen,” there are still very few images circulating of queer people simply existing in domestic spaces. This lack of representation, combined with the stigmatization and silencing of “straight” archives, has contributed to very little being known about the day-to-day lives of queer folks. As Latimer
(2013) argues, the most ordinary and mundane objects can be important links to the past.
Ordinary objects and experiences also provide members of queer communities’ links to each other and a different sense of the present. It is vital, then, that online queer archives continue to thrive in online spaces where they are more easily accessible to queer individuals and provide spaces where queer individuals and communities can experience representational belonging.
Archiving the Queer Kitchen
Typically, in rhetorical studies, scholars of queer rhetoric visit and analyze brick and mortar and online archives built by others. But for this project, I, as a critics/scholar, participated in the actual creation and publication of an online archive I designed titled “Queering the
Kitchen.” I argue that this gallery intervenes in queer rhetorical scholarship by helping to establish the legitimacy of kitchens as worthy rhetorical artifacts and shifting the focus of queer archival scholarship away from a past or future-oriented temporality to the present moment. This shift is especially important for queer archival research which is often concerned with reclaiming a forgotten past.
Photography, as demonstrated below, plays a key role in the creation of the “Queering the
Kitchen” archives. Capturing queer kitchens and co-constructing online galleries through photography serves several purposes. Photography gives ordinary objects and experiences 152 archival significance and makes what we typically consider to be an archive more open and fluid.
As Cvetkovich (2014) argues, photographing the ordinary objects of queer lives such as books, beds, and mugs transforms them into something worth archiving. By displaying these images in online galleries, room is made for experiences and feelings often deemed as belonging in private spaces to be felt and circulated publicly. Photographing everyday experiences of queer folks not only allows us to see and recognize the routines and rituals that often happen behind closed doors but can also validate these experiences. Also termed “banal imaging,” the capturing of our day- to-day lives has proliferated on social media as we share with each other our coffee cups, re- decorated living rooms, and cats lounging on half-made beds. When we view images of others’ daily lives, we often see something recognizable in these photos. This recognition not only provides a sense of identification but validates our own experiences that we now see reflected back at us (Ibrahim, 2015) and helps to generate a sense of representational belonging.
An Archive of One’s Own: Creating the “Queering the Kitchen” Archive
While the “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery has taken great strides to generate representational belonging, I wanted to add to such efforts and contribute to the conversations that gallery had started. Therefore, in order to create the “Queering the Kitchen” archive, I decided to not only interview queer women and gender non-conforming folks about their kitchens but to also photograph individuals in their kitchens and make these photos publicly available on website devoted specifically to “Queering the Kitchen.” As Cvetkovich argues, queer archives that have the ability to impact viewers affectively are often born out of affective needs (Arondekar et al., 2015). My desire to continue the work that the “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery started was fueled by the affective circulation that the original gallery inspired within the
Autostraddle community. 153
The process of creating the “Queering the Kitchen” archive is similar to other forms of qualitative scholarship. Working from established contacts I had already made in the queer community, I sat down (often with tea) with queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks and chatted with them about their experiences and connections to their kitchen. After the interview, I asked that participants show me around their kitchen, lingering in spots and pointing out objects that came up in the interview, and I followed, snapping pictures as they spoke.
Additionally, I interviewed my partner about our shared kitchen and photographed them in the kitchen as well as used a remote shooting app to capture my image. I felt that it was important for me to “be there” within the actual kitchens of my subjects and experience kitchen in situ, rather than simply speaking with participants over the phone or in a neutral location. Pezzullo
(2016) reminds us that being present can attune practitioners to the affective and ephemeral forces that move bodies. By “being there” in the kitchen alongside my participants we were able to co-create the kitchen space together (Pink, 2008).
My method also echoes Pinks’ (2004) mobile video interview techniques in which she asks participants to show her around their homes as she films the tours. Pink claims that this technique allows participants to engage with her in a way that gives them confidence and ownership of a space that normally is not opened up to the public. I saw this transformation take place with my own subjects. The interview would often start out stiff and strained as we walked through the kitchen, the camera structuring the purpose of my visit. Yet, often times, as I hovered my finger over the shutter and held the camera to my face, my participant’s bodies would take on a stance of confidence as they took ownership of the space.
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Figure 20: Screen shot of the “Queering the Kitchen” gallery The final “Queering the Kitchen” gallery is a curated collection that creates a collage of photos and interview snippets hosted on a public internet site. While the process of capturing the photos employed visual ethnographic methods such as Pink’s mobile interview technique and aspects of RFM, it is also a clear example of the creative presentation of research, a category of arts/practice-based research methods (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2012). The creative presentation of research allows the products of research to move outside of academic audiences and become accessible to the community that the research focuses on. When scholar/critics produce research product that are accessible to the community, such as digital archives, they aid in combating symbolic annihilation by enabling those who have been left out of public discourse and memory the ability to see themselves represented. This could be seen as an extension of an ethic of care by the research to the community being studied.
Caswell and Cifor (2016) argue that archivists (and researchers) should not only see themselves as caretakers of archival materials but also practice an ethics of care towards the communities they work with. This practice entails considering not only who is directly represented in or uses the archive, but also the larger community that the archive addresses.
Because archives can have a ripple effect in regard to how community identities are formed, 155 those collecting and circulating information should especially take into account and practice radical empathy in regard to the unseen people who may be impacted. Radical empathy refers to
“the learned process of direct and deep connections between self and another that emphasizes human connection” (Caswell & Cifor, 2016, 30). Within the context of archival practices, radical empathy demands that archivists and researchers take up an ethics of care in regard to the deep emotional bonds that form between archivists, creators, of archival materials, and the community being represented within the archive. This results in archival practices that not only center and seek input from othered communities but acknowledge the affective responsibilities that occur when archivists seek out and foster human connection between themselves and their subjects.
Performative Criticism, RFM and Arts/Practice-Based Archival Methods
Figure 21: An attempt to capture myself and my kitchen that ultimately was not submitted for the gallery
Figure 22: A second attempt to capture myself and my kitchen that ultimately was not submitted for the gallery
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My practice of capturing, submitting, and creating an archive of images can be considered a performative, subject-hailing act. Several authors such as Cvetkovich (2014) and
Hariman and Lucaites (2016) have made links between the photographic image and performative acts. They argue that the act of taking a photograph is not passive, but instead it presents a sliver of time to an audience in a way that confers importance and invites spectatorship. Capturing an image is not merely a moment of documentation, rather it is a performative act within itself which can transform what it captures (Cvetkovich, 2014). Taking photos and documenting queer women and gender non-conforming folks in their kitchens is a means of hailing new queer subjectivities—ones that belong and flourish within kitchen spaces.
While RFM practitioners often co-construct alongside protesters and activists, my co- construction takes the form of performative photography. In this context performance is not only a creative presentation such as a poetry reading or theater—rather, performances are expanded to include embodied practices that take place outside of conventional performances spaces such as theaters and other performance venues. Performance is not just an object of study but is also “an act of criticism, a mode of engagement, and a product of research” (Endres, Hess, Senda-Cook,
& Middleton, 2016). In this vein, Conquergood (1991) argues that "performance-centered research takes as both its subject matter and method the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history” (187). The collapse between performance as both object and method of study shifts the focus from outcomes to possibilities, as well as creates opportunities for doing criticism in inventive ways (Endres et al., 2016).
The creative act of performance has the possibility to “repeat, transform, contest, or transgress established cultural patterns” (Gencarella & Pezzullo, 2010, 2). Therefore, critics who engage with participatory methods such as RFM and/or arts/practice-based methods "do" 157 criticism alongside those whom they are studying and have the potential to not only critique but to actively transform social and cultural patterns and traditions. The act of taking a photograph can be considered a form of “performative criticism.” McGee, believing that it is important for rhetorical critics to break down the dichotomy between theory and practice, called for rhetoricians to produce their own rhetorical performances in response to current social and political moments (Haskins, 2003; Simonson, 2010). While McGee called for rhetorical critics to take up the ethos of speakers responding to the context around them, I make this my own by becoming a critic who captures images. This mode of performative criticism not only gives me a richer understanding of photography as a practice, but it allows me to take up Baker’s (2011) call for researchers to aid in the creation of queer subjectivities. My moments of performative criticism intervene by adding to the cultural imagination of what constitutes who occupies the subjectivity of queer domesticity.
The creation of new subjectivities occurs not only in the reception of discourses but also
"in the performative moment of production” (Baker, 2011, 45). Butler (1993) defines performative acts as “statements which, in their uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power” (17). Butler’s definition relies heavily on Austin’s (Austin, Sbisà, &
Urmson, 1975) How to Do Things with Words, which argues that performative utterances do not merely describe a situation, rather they “do” and perform actions. Austin labeled these utterances as speech acts because the utterance is considered an action in and of itself. Speech acts hold power because they have the ability to produce what they name. When framing photography as a performative act, focus moves away from treating photos as aesthetic objects and privileges the act of ‘doing’ photography (Levin, 2015) that help to generate new subjectivities. 158
The “doing” aspect of photography is what enables it to be an active and performative act that generates subjectivities. While audiences are not privy to the moments leading up to the photograph or performative the act of snapping the shutter, we can gain insights from what is left-over from the actions in the photograph. Photos document the choices made in the moments before an image is frozen in time. Because of my own participation in the gallery, I knew that there were choices about where and how participants were positioned in the space, what part of the space was included and what was left out. Even the pictures that seemed more candid had some intentionality involved in their creation. Overall, when the collection of photos is viewed as a whole, there is an overwhelming sense of happiness, pride, and comfort captured within the photos. This is exemplified by several themes such as posing with food, prepping meals, confident body stances, and the inclusion of pets and loved ones in the photograph, all which point towards a turning towards the promise of happiness that kitchens contain in the moments before the shutter snapped. As modeled by my own photography, then, the performative act of photography also has potential to generate queer subjects who feel as if they belong and have a sense of ownership in regard to occupying kitchen spaces.
Building upon the claims made by Cvetkovich, Hariman, and Lucaites, as well as speech acts literature, I argue that in addition to opening up the image to spectatorship and helping to generate a sense of belonging, the act of taking a photograph actually hails new subjects through the process of unbecoming. An "unbecoming" subject not only alters subjectivity but also what hails that subject into being; agency through unbecoming is not only found in representations but
"in the creative force of a becoming that is also an unbecoming, wherein and through abjection from the social order one critiques and transforms it” (Bunch, 2013, 40). Despite its negative connotation, unbecoming is a place of hope and transformation. Unbecoming subjects are 159 political in their refusal to fall in line with what are often repressive social regimes. When it comes to queer individuals, unbecoming subjects can also be political in their refusal to be unhappy and uncomfortable. As I have emphasized in previous chapters, queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks have often been denied the promises of happiness that have become equated with kitchens and other domestic spaces. By allowing our/themselves to be documented in the kitchen and then subsequently allow those images to circulate publicly, the gallery participants and myself are attempting to counter the social abjection from the kitchen and the domestic and mundane happiness that kitchens take on. And in doing so, we are not only altering queer subjectivity but also the ideologies about who can inhabit kitchens. This claiming of an ordinary, through photography, is an agential act of hailing ourselves into transformed subjects. We are engendering new queer subjectivities that are hailed through our own unbecoming.
In addition to new subjectivities, we are also engendering new possibilities. The performative act of photography and subsequent publication allows alternative worlds and possibilities to come into view by hailing a new kind of queer reality, space, and subjectivity, that intrudes upon gendered ideologies of domestic space and happiness. Baker (2011) argues,
“creativity as performativity foregrounds the appearance of subjectivities within creative artifacts as a deployment or intervention into discourse for a critical or creative purpose” (43). And as
Bunch (2013) states: “To be a subject is to hold a certain prescribed position in relations of production. To be a political subject is to change these relationships, to make possible a different position by shifting the relation of production” (51). The act of capturing and publishing images,
I argue, generates new possibility by changing the subject relations between queerness, 160 happiness, and kitchen spaces. Our participation enables us to become self-hailing subjects, ones that declare ourselves and our lives as livable and viable through our "unbecoming."
“Doing It” in the Kitchen: Arts/Practice-Based Research Method’s Intervention into
Rhetorical Field Methods
Because of such affordances, I want to end this chapter by arguing that arts/practice- based research methods can be a productive intervention into Rhetorical Field Methods (RFM).
As established in the Chapter Two, RFM necessitates the critic placing themselves in the field so that critics can more adequately attend to the significance of “the embodied, emplaced, material, visual, affective processual, and vernacular dimensions of rhetorical practice that intersect in these places inhabited by activists, speakers, audiences, and observers to shape shared understandings of significant phenomena” (Middelton et al., 2015, xiii). Within RFM, the critic bears witness to moments of rhetorical invention as they unfold, and often the critic goes beyond the role of documentarian and witness to participate in the invention of the rhetoric itself, making space for the critic to “do” rhetoric. For example, RFM practitioners may actively participate in protests, community outreach efforts, or consult with their subjects to understand how rhetoric acts upon bodies. For critics invested in RFM, participation in the field allows for access to moments of invention that a static after-the-fact text cannot necessarily reveal, an access that ultimately enhances critical judgments made about their objects of study (Middelton et al., 2015).
Therefore, the RFM critic is far from disembodied or objective; rather, critics who practice RFM see their presence and participation as a valuable and crucial means of gaining knowledge about a particular rhetorical situation (Pezzullo, 2016).
While RFM has been instrumental in allowing critics to engage with rhetoric as it unfolds, as a method it often lends itself to more public situations such as protests, museums, and 161 memorials. RFM is not necessarily the most effective method for rhetorical critics to access and understand less public spaces of invention—such as the kitchens of queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. The mundane everydayness of queer kitchens can be difficult to access because unlike publicly accessible queer spaces such as protests, nightclubs, or bookstores, kitchens literally reside behind closed doors. It is one thing to theorize about the creative and affective potentiality of queer kitchens; it is another actually to access these spaces and the bodies that inhabit them. Arts/practice-based research methods, which value the act of creation in the research process, can be a productive supplement to RFM by enhancing the critic’s ability to access, observe, and participate in the creation of rhetoric, an ability that, in turn, impacts the questions critics can ask, as well as the conclusions critics can draw from rhetorical productions and artifacts.
Arts/practice-based research is also a generative supplement to RFM in that it opens up opportunities for critics to participate in the co-creation of archives, a rhetorical invention in which RFM is already invested. Because rhetorical field methods are invested in “doing” rhetoric, as well as studying vernacular rhetoric that is often unseen and invisible, RFM often entails not only capturing observations but can also generate secondary archival materials
(Middelton et al., 2015; Pezullo, 2016). Doing rhetoric in situ results in field notes and other evidence of rhetorical activity that are brought back from the communities from which they originate (McHendry et al., 2014). Pezzullo (2016) notes that often when she documents her experiences in the field through autoethnographic accounts, field notes, or interviews, she is not only documenting the knowledge gained by placing her body in the field, but she is often compelled into the field because an archive does not yet exist, and she thus must create her own. 162
This creation of a new archive is often imperative for scholars who work with communities that fly under the radar of mainstream textual accounts; as Ono and Sloop (1995) argue, many communities have been written out of history. Jules (2016) confirms this argument stating:
The politics of what we’ve traditionally preserved means the archive is filled with silences, absences, and distortions, mostly affecting the legacies of the less privileged, including black women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, poor people, and victims of police violence, to name a few. In the name of neutrality, we’re erasing people, communities and their humanity from the historical record.
Arts/practice-based research’s intervention into RFM can help generate archives that address such erasure that more traditional archival practices facilitate. Arts/practice-based research, to be clear, entails taking creative and artistic practices seriously as modes of research, theory building, and situated knowledge production. As evident in this methodology's name, the integration of creative practices and artistic work are part of the research process (Rolling, 2013;
Sawchuk & Chapman, 2012).
In addition to helping critics gain access to everyday rhetorics (such as those explored in
Chapter Four) and create archives alongside participants, arts/practice-based research can also serve emancipatory functions. Rolling (2013) refers to this intervention as critical-theoretical art- making. As a form of creation-as-research, critical-theoretical art-making draws from critical theory (see Chapter One) and positions creative practices as a mode of critical reflection. Within this model, creative practices render invisible assumptions, norms, and values visible in order to transform and critique unjust social relations. Critically informed arts/practice-based methods can not only make visible the lives and experiences of marginalized people and communities but also move people towards action. For example, Finley and her co-authors (2014) examine how mural projects can be a means for underserved and represented K-12 students to participate in 163 conversations surrounding food justice, which intimately impact their own lives. By painting public murals, the students become empowered to speak out about the issue, a communicative act which has the potential to transform not only their sense of agency and role as an active participant in their communities but also the students’ future health. In such way, arts/practice- based research can empower marginalized communities and individuals through creative embodied action.
Critical practices in arts-based research can also open up new modes of existence and generate inventional resources for the creation of and experimentation with identities. Finley
(2014) states that "Good critical arts-based research grasps our imaginations, grabs ahold of our souls, and unabashedly strives to affect our very ways of living, being, and co-being, as researchers, as social scientists, as people. It transforms our identities and gives new ways of expressing our differently evolving identities” (531). In its ability to create space for discovering and engendering new modes of expression and identity, critical arts/practice-based research can ask questions about what is "not yet." This speaks to Muñoz’s (2009) conception of a queer futurity which places queerness as on the horizon, something that is not here yet. Art/practice- based research can help imagine the not-here-yet by opening up opportunities to reimagine and represent identities through a critical activist approach. Such an ability to both render visible the normalizing nature of the status quo and engender new worlds and identities makes it an especially useful tool to and approach for creating space for marginalized voices to transform dominate discourse rather than merely critique and react to oppressive discourses.
Finally, and in thinking specifically about queer communities, practice-led research can help queer subjectivities be invented and come into being as folks produce their own discourses and subject formations. Baker's (2011) definition of a queer practice/arts-based research is one 164 that brings together entwined practices such as research, creative acts, theory engagement, and subjectivities that not only result in creative or critical artifacts but also "new or emergent subjectivities" (46). For Baker, in other words, practice/arts-based research can render subjectivities through creative and critical acts. Co-creating online archives such “Queering the
Kitchen” through the use of digital photography, I argue, is one kind of practice/arts-based research that can enable such rendering of subjectivity by facilitating the rhetorical creation of archives in the present moment.
Conclusion: (Un)Becoming the Present Tense
In this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate how arts/practice-based interventions into RFM can be a productive in situ method for gaining access and insights into banal, queer ordinary spaces and co-creating rhetorical artifacts and archives of feeling with potential to construct and render changed subjectivities. Through the process of co-creation and the experience of (un)becoming, gallery participants, including myself, found ourselves transforming into subjects who not only found solace and comfort in kitchens but also were able to engage with this new subjectivity to construct alternative world making possibilities. This co-creation opens up new ways for critics to not only interact with subjects but also generate archives that enable underrepresented communities to see themselves represented and experience a shared sense of belonging. In addition, this co-creation enables queer bodies to make themselves present in our contemporary moment. Experiencing a sense of representational belonging is vital for communities who have been cast off by mainstream representations and whose voices and lived experiences have often gone unaccounted, and online archives can helps generate representational belonging. 165
Queer rhetorical archival scholarship often attempts to help remedy this unaccountability by working to recover and reconstitute a queer past. The history of queer communities has often been neglected in or altogether omitted from popular accounts of history. Queer archival research thus often attempts to recover queerness that has been written out of history and conduct queer readings of noteworthy historical events and figures. This research, in other words, seeks to
“queer the archive” in order to disrupt archival practices and institutions which often write queer figures and experiences out of history (Morris, 2006, 2007; Zepeda, 2018). Archival work is vital for recovering lost voices and experiences, as well as theorizing about queer lives and experiences (Alexander & Rhodes, 2012). Yet, in only focusing on history, we inadvertently often end up writing queer bodies and communities out of the ordinary lived present.
When RFM is supplemented by arts/based practices such as performative photography to co-produce queer archives such as “Queering the Kitchen,” it enables researchers to shift how we approach queer experience, forcing both critics and queer bodies into the present tense. For instance, in co-producing and analyzing the “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery, I was able to experience and make visible how we, as a community, were (un)becoming together in contemporary unfolding moments of our ordinary lives. As Pezzullo (2016) argues, “What occurs in the immediate moment shapes us—it is not all that shapes us, but it is part of what shapes our process of becoming” (181). This shift to the present, this experience of
(un)becoming alongside other gallery participants, was not a return to hetero-reproductive time governed by heteronormative domestic practices, it is important to note. Rather, it was a collision of bodies and affects in which queer bodies were experiencing being “out of time” in the present.
This shift to present tense and contemporary queer ordinaries is perhaps the most promising affordance of arts/practice-based research, for it enables scholars to more fully and immediately 166 embrace queer experiences and subjectivities as they unfold in contemporary ordinary lived moments.
While I found the time I spent wandering through the Lesbian Herstory archives in New
York rewarding, grounding, and a good use of my time, it gave me the sense of being transported into the past. In contrast, both the “Queer in the Kitchen” and “Queering the Kitchen” galleries allowed me to find a similar sense of belonging and connection, but one that unfolded in the present moment rather than a past I could never myself touch. While the present moment can never be truly captured, as time continues to move forward, taking approaches to archival methods that allow queer communities to see themselves represented and reflected in moments as they are unfolding. This can provide grounding in the present while also setting the stage for future queer communities to access their past.
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Conclusion
The last day of camp feels very different than the first night. At the start of camp, we all enter the auditorium wide-eyed, excited, and overwhelmed. Optimistic energy bubbled around the room and between bodies. The last morning, however, is far from optimistic. Coming down from the concert and dance the night before, breakfast on the final morning feels similar to
Christmas afternoon when Santa's surprises have been revealed, all the gifts have been opened, and the relatives have returned home. All the buildup and excitement has come and gone and you are left with some wonderful experiences but feel an aching sense of loss. During that last morning at A-Camp, you can no longer pretend that the outside world isn't requiring your presence. Breakfast is a somber affair, followed by frantic last-minute packing before we lug our suitcases out of our cabins and board the bus back to the airport, forced to leave the temporary home we have created for ourselves.
As established in the Introduction, the goal of this project was to discover how queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks and their communities communicatively co- create and enable possibilities for experiencing and building fulfilling lives. I have primarily focused on how the everyday—and departures from it—can provide resources for worldbuilding possibilities in the face of violence, hostility, and precarity. While it is vital to examine the forces that perpetuate violence against marginalized bodies, it is also vital to consider how marginalized communities are thriving and even offering models that could be applied to the broader social world. This dissertation has shown how spaces of retreat can enable queer communities and individuals to take a break from the fight of queer existence, access stability and happiness, and see their experiences represented. It has also show how everyday spaces such as kitchens and 168 archives can become and how archives can inventional resources for feeling seen and represented, as well as someone who is represented as having access to a mundane ordinary.
My research shows, for instance, that A-Camp and the utopic rehearsal that its participants and staff perform there is a creative response to addressing the current political and social climate that can be hostile and violent towards queer communities. A-Camp makes room for a myriad of queer individuals and their unique experiences and positioning within the world.
A-Camp not only allows queer bodies to take a break from their everyday lives and feel at home with their identities and bodies, but A-Camp also models how we can relate to each other in a way that privileges equity over individuality. What makes A-Camp such a transformative and magical place is that, for myself and those I spoke with, camp is one of the few places where we are not only encouraged to be our true selves, but we can communally witness the collective blooming that takes place. It is powerful to create spaces of retreat when you have become so used to the world telling you that you are too much, deviant, perverse, unwanted, and uncared for by the wider social world. A-Camp responds to the hostility, unacceptance, and violence that the world hurls at queer individuals by creating a type of enclave. Rather than cowering or giving into the precarity of a threatening world, A-Camp staff and participants re-assert that love, care, affection, affirmation, and collective community building offer a better path to a better world.
Because A-Camp is a liminal space, a time out from ordinary time, it requires efforts beyond it where members of queer communities have access to spaces where they can retreat and feel grounded and oriented in their day-to-day lives. This is where queer kitchens come in. Queer kitchens provide a consistent backdrop for worldbuilding that camp cannot. They are the places that allow queer communities and individuals to tap into the promises of stability, happiness, and a sense of ordinary that have become associated with the cultural space of kitchens. In this sense, 169 queer kitchens become an inventional place where queer individuals use the normative constrictions to prompt moments of rupture that give way to queer transformations. These transformations result in the creation of a queer subjectivity that has access to the signifiers of stability and happiness that their heterosexual peers have been enjoying for years.
My research uncovered a queer aesthetic of everyday life that calls for a generous reading of hetero/homonormativity and the cultural work that normative practices can do. Such queer aesthetic of everyday life in the kitchen reflect tensions and contradictions that allow queer bodies to achieve a sense of normalcy and embrace the mundane parts of life. While some might see such acts as catering to heteronormativity, I have argued that queer kitchens appropriate homonormativity in the service of queer possibility. Queer kitchens enable queer experiences and help queer bodies come to know themselves to be possible.
Aesthetics is not only important to queer kitchens and everyday life. Aesthetics and style are overarching themes in the creation of spaces of retreat. A queer aesthetic and style, especially as it pertained to clothing, hair, and other forms of identity expression were important aspects of both A-Camp and queer kitchens. The ability to loudly and openly participate in queer expression becomes a moment of queer decorum at camp. Camp rewrites what is and isn’t considered appropriate, especially in terms of personal style. In contrast, queer styles and expressions are important for queer kitchens because they clearly mark the spaces as queer. A queer aesthetic in spaces such as kitchens asserts that queer bodies can and do occupy these spaces that are often culturally reserved for normative, straight, cis-women’s bodies and activities. Each aesthetic point towards different opportunities for queer people to exist more comfortably in the world. While A-Camp, kitchens, and archives are all vastly different spaces they all nod toward a more humane and comfortable existence for queer and other marginalized 170 communities. Overall, aesthetics function across the sites to help build community and allow those who came in contact with A-Camp, queer kitchens, and archives of queer ordinaries to feel not only seen but hailed into a community.
Finally, while digital archives don’t necessarily fit traditional notions of spaces that we can retreat into, they too can play a role in allowing marginalized communities to see themselves and their possible futures or aspirations reflected back at them. It can be powerful to see representations of mundane queer experiences while scrolling through your phone. For many queer people there are limited representations of queer life that don’t include violence or fighting for recognition. Archives are spaces of retreat, because we can turn to them when we need reassurance about the possibility for a mundane existence. The final portion of the dissertation moves us from analyzing the performance of queerness in queer spaces to exploring how digital queer archives can facilitate feelings of representational belonging and prompt moments of
(un)becoming in both participants as well as viewers. Additionally, I argue that combining RFM and arts/practice-based research methods as interventions into queer archival scholarship can enable an active and performative mode of criticism and facilitate co-creation, participation, and collaboration between critics/researchers and communities.
Through all this research, I hope to have shown that all three spaces—A-Camp, queer kitchens, and queer archives—play an important role in engaging with queer ordinaries and everyday experiences. In their own way, each site confronts Ahmed’s concern that queer communities have lost a sense of normalcy in their lives because fighting for recognition and survival has become a default means of engaging with the world. A-Camp provides a means of imagining a world where this fight does not exist and can potentially provide the blueprints for crafting a world where fighting is not necessary in our day-to-day interactions. Queer kitchens 171 highlight how queer individuals and communities are already using the resources they have at the present moment to craft queer ordinaries. Queer archives allow queer people to see themselves within the realm of the everyday and help manifest queer subjects who deserve access to an everyday mundane. Taken together, the sites and the performances that take place within them, point towards the value of everyday life within queer lives. They insist that queer everyday life
(both an embrace of as well as departure from) can be an invaluable resource for building more humane and compassionate worlds where all individuals feel seen, valued, and feel as if they can exist comfortably within the social world.
The queer ordinaries spoken about above share an investment in temporality in the invention of these spaces. While all offer a model of how we can use the present moment as a means of looking towards a possible queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009), they also ask participants and critics to embrace the present as it actually unfolds, rather than just focusing on how the present can enable a future. A-Camp demonstrates how attempting to leave the responsibilities and pressures of existing in a heteropatriarchal world can enable participants to radically engage with an alternative present. Although the present that A-Camp encourages is liminal, it can become an inventional resource for ways of existing in the world that participants can take back to their day- to-day lives when camp is over. Kitchens answer the liminality of A-Camp by providing a consistency that exists across time and space. This consistency enables critics to conduct a type of performative archival criticism that asks critics to not only witness rhetorical acts as they unfold, but to pay attention to how the acts of documenting this unfolding impacts the creation of queer subjects. Because queer kitchens host a variety of day-to-day activities and routines, they make the perfect space for examining performances of queer ordinaries as they play out in the present moment. 172
In addition to establishing the worldbuilding potential of queer everyday life and experiences, this dissertation also makes several interventions into theoretical and methodological conversations. First, my project makes the everyday life of queer individuals and communities directly applicable to queer rhetorical scholarship. While worldbuilding and the centering of othered bodies have clearly been established as an important aspect of these theoretical traditions, my dissertation offers new, complementary directions to the work done regarding public spaces, queer activism, and queer media texts. I offer concepts such as utopic rehearsal and queer aesthetics of everyday life as heuristics that can be taken outside the communities they originated. Utopic rehearsal allows for an examination of embodied and enacted invention by marginalized communities that acknowledge the creation of alternative futures as a response to current social and cultural climates, even if these solutions are liminal or short lived. Additionally, a queer aesthetics of everyday life provides a compassionate or generous reading of contested spaces such as kitchens. It enables normative means of existing in the world to be seen as creative resources for building a life rather than simply as processes of assimilation.
Second, in regard to methodological contributions, the most obvious is establishing how
RFM, visual ethnography, and arts/practice-based methods, can expand upon current queer archival methods and scholarship. Methodological approaches that ask critics/scholars to co- create rhetorical artifacts and performances can contribute to and enhance archival representations of marginalized communities and experiences. This type of active and performative criticism in regard to archival work can move beyond queer representations and can model archival methods with other underrepresented groups. A performative orientation towards archival research sheds light on the process of archive creation as well as encourages 173 critic/scholars to contribute to publicly circulating representations and potentially contribute to feelings of representational belonging.
Renewed Critique and Limitations
While this project was able to provide insights into queer performances and identities in the face of a hostile world, it is by no means a complete picture of the everyday lives of queer people. Additionally, this dissertation must be held accountable for the institutions and power relations, such as whiteness, that my act of performative criticism upholds. While critical rhetoric, as an act of performative criticism, is able to bring together fragments of discourse in order to construct a text suitable for criticism, it also asks that the critic remain accountable for the text they in turn produce. It is not enough to merely name the limitations that this project was constrained by, but it is also necessary to acknowledge and examine how my particular critique may be upholding forms of domination at the same time it identifies and presents modes of resisting other forms of domination (McKerrow, 1989; 2009).
My theoretical grounding in neo-sophistic theorizing, critical rhetoric, and queer worldmaking share the ability to inspire rhetorical critics to cast our gaze towards the inventional possibilities of the world. This is one of the strengths that these theoretical traditions offer those of us who work with marginalized communities. My theoretical grounding offers a means to not only examine forms of domination, but give us the tools to imagine potential futures, which can be both affirming and life granting. When our attention is turned towards a future and better world to those who have been denied this privilege, it can also turn our attention away from the injustices that could hitch a ride into the futurity we are imagining, enacting, and embodying.
McKerrow (1989; 2009) offers a solution he called renewed critique to account for how critiques of freedom could still be acting as forms of domination. This renewed criticism requires 174 that critique should and must be subject to further critique in order to examine what forms of domination it may perpetuate. This renewed critique does not cancel out or render irrelevant the critique of freedom that was originally established, but rather holds both the critic, critique, and community accountable for forms of domination that may still be present despite strides that may have been gained.
Renewed critique encourages scholars, critics, and communities to not simply throw out critiques of freedom that do not necessarily provide liberation for all. Rather a renewed critique, much like the concept of rehearsal, pushes us to ask questions about how we can do better as we move forward. This does not excuse the harm caused by the originals text and resulted critique, but rather creates space for acknowledging any hurt or violence caused and asking how future iterations can begin to correct these aspects. In regard to my project, it is not just A-Camp that can benefit from a renewed critique, but my generous reading of the space. As we continue to exist in a world that seems to grow more hostile by the day, it is vital to acknowledge how different bodies move about spaces in different ways due to multiple marginalized identities and precarity. When critics, such as myself, engage with spaces such as A-Camp and other spaces of retreat, we must not simply ask how it is enabling worldbuilding, but who is and isn’t benefiting from this worldbuilding and at whose cost does this freedom rely on? The following is my attempt to answer this question, lay out the limitations of this critique as well as the spaces I examined, and offer a path for future research.
In regard to this particular project, it is important for me to not only acknowledge aspects such as race and class that played out across the various sites, but also my own embodiment of these identities. As a white cis-woman, who has pursued advanced degrees and is upwardly mobile in regard to class, I was able to comfortably move through spaces such as A-Camp and 175 the homes and kitchens of my interview participants, and to access the technological resources that made building my own archive possible. My positionality impacted not only how I moved through spaces, but also how participants interacted with me, what they were willing to disclose, and also how I interpreted what I experienced.
My own positionality and embodiment were especially prevalent in my engagement with
A-Camp. Because I was white, cis, and do not suffer from mental or physical disabilities, it was difficult for me to identify how A-Camp may perpetuate things such as ableism and racism firsthand. Overall, my summers at camp were affirming, safe, and I generally felt cared for by my fellow campers and the staff. Additionally, none of my interview participants I spoke with after camp openly identified as people of color and the one camper who identified as having a disability, reported feeling that her needs were met and that she felt comfortable and welcome in the space. This severely limited the perspectives that I was able to take into account when examined A-Camp.
A renewed critique of A-Camp would be remiss to also not address the whiteness and economic class that is still very present at camp. In a Facebook group for former campers, discussions around how racism plays out in the camp setting began to emerge in the summer of
2019. Both the original post and comments that followed raised concerns that A-Camp staff and white campers were not fully acknowledging their privilege and had actively caused harm to campers of color, and that not all accessibility needs were taken into account or executed appropriately. My heart sank as I scrolled through this post. So much of me had wanted to believe that A-Camp could actually achieve creating a more equitable community that did not ignore difference, but rather made space for difference. I was ignorantly unaware of the observations that others within the community had experienced. Part of me wanted to defend A- 176
Camp; after three camp sessions I could see all of the emotional labor that went into making the space on the part of the staff, and I honestly didn’t want to believe that this potentially utopic space could still be perpetuating forms of oppression and domination that are so present within the world outside of camp. However, as I reflected on my very generous reading of A-Camp and the possibilities that these types of communities can offer as we try to imagine what a better future might be like, it is important to also acknowledge the work that must still be done, even within possible utopias.
A-Camp, like many of the lesbian separatist spaces that have come before it, was not immune to the centering of white voices and experiences. One interview participant stated that she was shocked at how many of her fellow campers were white, and how white the space seemed in general. Despite hosting workshops on white supremacy and privilege, carving out spaces for campers of color, and inviting performers and special guests who identify as people of color, until August 2019 when the current camp leadership decided to step down in order to make room for people of color and trans individuals to assume leadership positions, the public face of A-Camp was predominantly white. This resulted in the centering of whiteness, both at the camp itself and my own engagement with it.
In addition to issues of race and whiteness, A-Camp is accessible only to those with the material and mental resources to be able to take a break from their day-to-day lives; many do not have this privilege. While Autostraddle and A-Camp have taken some steps to address the economic inequalities that may prevent individuals from attending camp, such as attempting to keep costs as low as possible and offering scholarships, most campers were there because they could afford to attend and had support in the world outside of camp, such as vacation time or access to childcare, that allowed them to take a break from the heteropatriarchy for a week. For 177 many people, leaving your life and all the responsibilities that come with being an adult are not possible. This resulted in the gathering consisting of those who were middle to upper class, and my resulting critique did not fully take into account how the space may alienate or disregard queer individuals who are working class and/or housing insecure.
The queer kitchens I engaged with over the course of this project were also not immune to similar upholding of potentially oppressive norms and values. I specifically sought out private homes and spaces that often implied some sense of permanence. Even participants who were living with family members or in roommate situations as they made their way into adulthood and were in less than ideal financial situations, due to being grad students or serving with
Americorps, had enough economic stability or family support that allowed them to occupy these spaces. Additionally, by focusing on the home and kitchens, I possibly alienated other forms of kinship building or sharing of community resources. By concentrating on the restorative power of homonormative longings that were found within these spaces, I potentially upheld the more damaging parts of homonormativity and did not take into consideration other ways of creating home spaces or grounding yourself within the world.
Additionally, most participants in the "Queer in the Kitchen" gallery, my interviews in kitchens, and A-Camp attendees were between the ages of 20-35. While this is a crucial age for the formation of adult identities and the establishment of lives outside of one's family of origin, it leaves many life experiences out. This project did not ask questions about queer teenagers, parents, or queer elders, whose experiences, needs, and desires are very different based on their life stages. Both the academic and the larger queer communities would benefit from a broader scope of everyday experiences and analyses of how these routines and rituals provide tools of resistance and aid in the building of livable worlds. 178
Another limitation of this project was how I went about finding participants. I relied heavily on communities that I was part of in order to identify potential participants. This resulted in a very restricted pool of voices that were highlighted. Many of the participants shared many overlapping aspects of identities and experiences with me such as whiteness, identifying as a cis- gendered woman, being college educated and pursuing an advanced degree. Many of the connections were made through internet communities for Autostraddle readers and reflected the age, education, and class demographics of Autostraddle readers.
Ultimately, despite my intentions to highlight how subsections of the queer community thrive and experiment with renewed ways of being in the world and the ability for me as a critic to participate in representational belonging, I must account for how my performative critique can potentially reinforce or create renewed forms of violence on bodies that hold multiple marginalities. I went into this project hoping to be generous in my readings. However, at times my readings of some spaces and experiences may have been too generous. In my quest to find good in the world, I did not interrogate as thoroughly as I could what harms were also present.
Future work must also account for both the critique of freedom as well as a renewed critique of domination.
However, McKerrow’s critical rhetoric and my concept of utopic rehearsal offer the ability to make corrections and do better as we move forward. It does not excuse violence or hurt that spaces or critiques perpetuate but offer opportunities to envision futures that don’t carry the domination into the future with them. This line of thinking corresponds to Muñoz’s (2009) observation that queerness is a futurity, a not yet here, something that is always on the horizon.
When we open our critiques of freedom to renewed critiques and frame these acts as a rehearsal, 179 we are acknowledging that there is still more work to be done. That we are not yet there, and that we need to consider both the past and present as we look towards the future.
Future Directions: Queer Interdependency and Care
In addition to future iterations of this project needing to address issues of domination as well as freedom, there were heuristics that I did not have the space or time to examine. As I reflect on fieldwork, interviews, and textual documents related to the project, I realize that while moments of invention and spaces of queer retreat are central to the questions I am asking, my research sites also are also immersed in notions of interdependency and care that queer communities engage in. This realization came to me in a yoga class of all places. On this particular day, the yoga instructor had centered the class around the concept of interdependency and as part of this theme, she asked the class to partner up and assist each other in handstands.
As we struggled to kick our legs up into the air, the instructor walked through the room offering guidance. At one point she stopped at the front of the room and asked us to reflect on our vulnerability, stating that offering and receiving support from a stranger had the power to prompt change and move us forward. It was in that moment—as I was halfway upside down, sweat dripping off of my skin, desperately trying to kick up my right leg while a stranger I had just met minutes before held my left shin on her shoulder—that I realized this lesson had been important in all of my sites.
Care, as both value and practice, turns our attention towards how people are connected and have responsibilities toward one another (Beasley & Bacchi, 2005; Held, 2007). Care
“includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, 40). 180
Care includes the work we do to maintain both our physical bodies and our interpersonal relationships (Cooper, 2009). Care is an essential element to the human condition. When we take on a perspective of care we prioritize the relational and interdependent nature of humans (Held,
2007). When we care for others we not only build trust, mutual concern, and connectedness within interpersonal relationships, but we can build trust and connectedness at the wider social level (Held, 2007). The ability for care to move between the personal and social levels, like everyday life, creates an opportunity for different social and political worlds (Beasley & Bacchi,
2005).
While I did not delve heavily into how care manifests within spaces of queer retreat in this particular project, it is a fruitful focus for future analysis and theorizing. Because the world is often so hostile and makes life harder for queer communities, care plays a large role in how queer individuals and communities not only survive but thrive in the face of abjection and precarity. I saw care (of both self and others) manifest at A-Camp and within kitchens, and it informed the building of my archive of photographs. Methodologically, performative archival criticism could fruitfully explore how archival critics and creators extend care and empathy to the communities they document.
Concluding Remarks
This project has been a humbling experience for me, not only as a researcher and scholar but as a human being. As I was riding the shuttle bus out of Ojai towards the LA airport after the
2019 A-Camp, I experienced a moment of profound gratitude. I couldn't help it as I looked around at the campers sitting on the bus with me, most of us feeling a bit shocked and exhausted after participating in creating a space for ourselves. We all had just been through a moment of transformation, even if that moment was short-lived. Not only had I spent the last week of my 181 life surrounded by people who were willing to not only share and reveal the tender parts of themselves with me, but they had been willing to witness my own moments of vulnerability. I did not realize the power that witnessing could have until I began this project. Throughout the last several years of conducting research, I was granted the privilege of being able to witness and hold space for others. I was a bit naive to not realize how great of a responsibility this is, and I hope as I conclude this project and take steps forward in my own personal life, that I have done justice to the lives and experiences that I have had the privilege of documenting.
182
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Appendix A
INTERVIEW GUIDE
A-Camp Interview Guide
Tell me what motivated you to sign up for camp?
What expectations did you have for camp before you attended?
What concerns did you have about attending camp?
What was your favorite part of camp?
What surprised or stood out to you about your experience at camp?
How did camp compare to other queer centric spaces such as pride, bars, or other queer events?
How does being at camp compare to your everyday life?
Did anything disappoint you about camp?
Kitchen Interview Guide
Walk me through one of the daily routines that takes place in your kitchen?
How would you describe your relationship with your current kitchen?
What is your favorite part of your kitchen?
What types of care taking practices (of yourself or others) occur in your kitchen?
What memories or sensations do you associate with your kitchen?
How does your queer identity intersect with your kitchen?