Queer/Crip Time

A workshop by the Queer Futures Collective June 15th, 2020 | GB Media Pride ...a radically vulnerable and trans centered multimedia We are/ knowledge hub/activist laboratory exploring the intersections of disability studies, feminist technoscience, queer arts, transformative pedagogies, and spiritual activisms in practices of Future Making. This is a platform to create communal knowledge about what is yet to come while centering disabled queer/trans folks, disrupting traditional ways of teaching/learning, and blurring the borders between non-academic/academic knowledge.

Website: www.queerfutures.com IG: @queerfutures_ Twitter: @queerfutures_ Facebook: The Queer Futures Collective Bios:

Sav Schlauderaff (they/them) is a queer, trans, Shoshana Schlauderaff (they/them) is a queer and disabled PhD student in Gender and Women’s Studies at trans multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and educator the University of Arizona. Their work in critical disability currently residing in Baltimore, Maryland. Their work studies focuses on the rise of “health” biotech products, includes astrophysics education, interactive biohacking, and navigating the medical industrial installation, meditative virtual reality, trans justice complex. Within this they center chronic illnesses, performance, animation, and more. Shoshana is an (embodied/felt) memory, bodymindspirit pain, trauma and art/tech educator for youths in Baltimore and self care/community care. Sav combines their academic Annapolis and also works with “The Queer Futures training in genetics, molecular biology, and gender Collective” to make radical educational art pieces that studies with poetry, autobiography, current research in center on trans/crip magic and survival in relation to molecular biology and genetics, and theoretical work in academia and socialization. their writing. Outside of research, they currently are the

Graduate Assistant at the Disability Cultural Center, work at the LGBTQ+ Resource Center as a Safe Zone facilitator, is a member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the U of A, and is a co-founder of “The Queer Futures Collective.” Access Statement

Please exist in this space in ways that are most comfortable for you. You can stand up, sit down, lay down, stretch, walk around, leave the room, stim, use your electronics as needed. Feel free to have your video on or off, and to speak as much or as little as you like. Understand that everyone exists in spaces in different ways, and how someone can best engage and listen might look different than how you do. Please let us know if we need to slow down or repeat any information during this discussion. Discussion Guidelines

Adapted from AnaLouise Keating’s Teaching Transformation1 1. What is shared in this space, stays here. But what you learn here, can leave this space.

2. Please be mindful of how much you are speaking and if you are speaking over someone else. Please let folks finish their sentences and thoughts, only one person should be speaking at a time

3. Acknowledge that discrimination and oppression exists in many forms (e.g. sexism, racism, Anti-Blackness, classism, ageism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, islamophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, fatphobia etc.) Discussion Guidelines

4. We will assume people are doing the best that they can. We all make mistakes despite our intentions. However even good intentions can have harmful impacts, therefore when someone says something offensive or inappropriate we will call them in. This is a learning environment and we are all constantly learning and (hopefully) trying to do better.

5. We will share information about our groups with other individuals and we will never demean, devalue, or in any way put down people for their experiences. Zoom Best Practices 1. Please mute your mic if you are not talking to decrease the amount of background noise 2. Make sure to check your audio & mic when you join 3. Aim to only have 1 person talking at a time 4. You are welcome to have your camera on or off, and to engage as much or as little as you like 5. You can use the chat in Zoom to also answer any questions or to talk with people on the call 6. You can change your name and/or add your gender pronouns after your name 7. Please state your name before you speak (e.g. “Sav is speaking”) Introductions:

● Names ● Gender Pronouns ● Question (please keep it brief!) ○ What does queer mean to you? ○ Why did you choose to attend this workshop? Brief Overview

● Terminology ● Go over big concepts with discussions & writing prompts ○ Queerness ○ Queer Time ○ Crip Time ● Grounding Exercise ● Resources & References Terminology

After reviewing the list, do you have any additional questions about the terms or definitions? Or is there anything you would like to add?

Can be accessed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4l9QSIF5D4gmxhEfkGrkMz0j87B9cxFs Ic71jPYkPE/edit?usp=sharing Big Concepts What is Queer? Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz2 Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is a thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetic map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world (1). Writing Exercise | 2 minutes

What does Utopia mean to you? Queer Time

We will largely be working from José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 text Cruising Utopia: the then and there of queer futurity

● Straight Time ● Ecstatic Time ● Aesthetic ● Ephemera Straight Time “Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life. The only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality, the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction” (22)

“Queerness’s time is stepping out of the linearity of straight time...Queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (25)

Breakdown: that everyone is presumed straight and to follow the normative path of heterosexual relationships, marriage, and reproducing (heterosexual) children. All on a specific timeline for people to hit these “checkpoints.” Ecstatic Time “To see queerness as horizon is to perceive it as a modality of ecstatic time in which the temporal stranglehold that I describe as a straight time is interrupted or stepped out of. Ecstatic time is signalled at the moment one feels ecstasy, announced perhaps in a scream or grunt of pleasure, and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present, or future” (32)

Breakdown: experiences of joy and pleasure that offer glimpses into the future by stepping out of the constraints of straight time. This b(l)ends timespace of past/present/future -- this is queering time. Connection to affect theory and emotions/affect we feel in relation to others. KEY CONCEPTS-Aesthetic: What do these artists make you thinkfeel?

@angryarrows formerly @alokvmenon they/them @/itsarifitz he/they @brookecandy she/her @mykkiblanco they/them Queer Dance & Energy

“Queer dance is hard to catch, and it is meant to be hard to catch-- it is supposed to slip through the fingers and comprehension of those who would use knowledge against us….Dance, like energy, never disappears; it is simply transformed. Queer dance, after the live act, does not just expire. The ephemera does not equal unmateriality. It is more nearly about another understanding of what matters” (81) Kevin Aviance “Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left hanging in the air like a rumor” (65)

“Gestures transmit ephemeral Din Da Da3 by Kevin Aviance 1999 knowledge of lost queer histories and possibilities within a phobic majoritarian public culture” (67) Zebra Katz Tear the House Up 2014 - Hervé x Zebra Katz 4 In The Name of Alloura APESH*T5

Start at 1:54-2:53

Gesture and Ephemera Ballroom Competition Gon Blow - Cakes da Killa ft. Rye Rye 6

Gesture & Ephemera Gon Blow by Cakes da Killa ft. Rye Rye Writing Exercise | 2 minutes

1. What threads have you noticed running through all of these videos? 2. What do you feel watching and listening to these videos? 3. What gestures, sounds, energy, patterns were repeated throughout the videos? Intersections of Queer & Crip • Cripple: often shortened to crip is a pejorative term reclaimed by some disabled and chronically ill individuals • Crip was defined by Carrie Sandahl 7 (2003) as “cripple, like queer is fluid and ever-changing, claimed by those whom it did not officially define … The term crip has expanded to include not only those with physical impairments but those with sensory or mental impairments as well” (p. 27). Eli Clare 8 (2015) has described crip as “words to shock, words to infuse with pride and self-love, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help forge a politics” (p. 84). • Both queer and crip are used to mark bodyminds as abnormal & have been used within academic writing to denote something as “non-normative” • Both terms are inherently political terms, as well as specific ways for people to identify. They signal a desire to dismantle oppressive structures/systems & binaries. Disability Justice

10 principles of Disability Justice by Sins Invalid 9, Read more:

● https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-prin ciples-of-disability-justice ● https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disabilit y-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne ● https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Care- Work

Additional Readings on Crip Time

● Kafai, Shayda. (January 27, 2019). “Sleeping in is How we Crip Time”. Sunday Sentiments. Queer Futures Collective. Retrieved from https://www.queerfutures.com/sundaysentiments/2019/1/27/sleeping-in-is-how-we-c rip-time-by-shayda-kafai ● Kafer, Alison. (2013). Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ● McRuer, Robert. (2018). Crip Time: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. NYU Press. ● Price, Margaret & Stephanie Kerschbaum. (2016). “Stories of Methodology:Interviewing Sideways, Crooked and Crip”. Telling Ourselves Sideways, Crooked, and Crip. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. 5(13): 18-56. ● Samuels, Ellen. (2017). “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”. Disability Studies Quarterly. 37(3). Retrieved from: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684 ● Schlauderaff, Sav. (Dec 29, 2019). “When Crip Time is Chronic:”. Sunday Sentiments. Queer Futures Collective. Retrieved from https://www.queerfutures.com/sundaysentiments/2019/12/29/when-crip-time-is-chr Image created by cripfemmecrafts, can be purchased here: onic https://cripfemmecrafts.com/collect ions/original-art-prints/products/no -more-spoons-tulip-femme

Spoon Theory Graphics Take Ecstasy with me...

“We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion. We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present. In this book I have argued that queerness is not yet here; thus, we must always be future bound in our desires and designs. The future is a spatial and temporal destination...What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion, its status as a destination. Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy.” (185) Grounding Exercise

● Let’s engage in a 5-minute meditation led by Shosh! ● How can we extend queer/crip time into our meditation space? Let’s use it to help us slow down and exist in our own timespace(s). Discussion & Questions Thank You! Thank You Any contribution will sustain work towards queer liberation & anti-racist practices

We recommend making donations to funds we have supported:

Baltimore Bail Fund: https://www.baltimoreactionlegal.org/donate Organizing Black: https://organizingblack.org/make-a-donation The Pride Center of Maryland: http://www.pridecentermd.org/donate-2/

Other orgs to follow (no current donation links): Baltimore Transgender Alliance www.instagram.com/bmoretransalliance/ Balti Gurls: www.instagram.com/balti_gurls/

Share your experiences from today! Follow: @queerfutures_ Rad People & Orgs to Support ● Aaron Philip (@aaron___philip) ● Autistic People of Color Fund (@awnnetwork_) ● Triple Cripples (@triplecripples) ● Deafies in Drag (@deafiesindrag) ● HEARD DC (@behearddc) + Talila “TL” Lewis ● Lauren “Lolo” Spencer ● Drag Syndrome (@dragsyndrome) (@talilalewis) (@itsLOLOlove) ● Angry Arrows (@angryarrows) ● BEAM (@_beamorg) ● Annie Segarra (@annieelainey) ● Jade Fox (@iamjadefox) ● Sins Invalid (@sinsinvalid) ● Andrea Lausell (@AndreaLausell) ● Imani Barbarin (@Imani_Barbarin) ● Disability Justice Mutual Aid Fund (June 3-16) ● Pidgeon Pagonis (@pidgeo_n) ● Vilissa Thompson (@sheabutterfemme) ● Alok Vaid-Menon (@alokvmenon) (@VilissaThompson) ● House of GG (@houseofgg1) ● Travis Alabanza ● Disability Justice Culture Club ● Leroy Moore (@kriphopnation) (@travisalabanza) (@disabilityjusticecultureclub) ● Ericka Hart (@iHartEricka) ● Joshua Allen (@joshuaobawole) ● Project Nia (@projectnia) ● Imade Nibokun ● Indya Moore (@IndyaMoore) ● Mykki Blanco (@MykkiBlanco) ● Survived and Punished (@survivepunish) (@DepressedWhileBlack) ● Ijeoma Oluo (@IjeomaOluo) ● Dream Defenders (@thedreamdefenders) ● Alice Wong (@DisVisibility) ● adrienne maree brown ● Mia Mingus (@miamingus) ● Critical Resistance (@C_Resistance) (@adrienne maree brown) ● Sylvia Rivera Law Project (@SRLP) ● Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) ● Rebirth Garments ● Marsha P. Johnson Institute (@MPJInstitute) ● Lydia X Z Brown (@autistichoya) (@rebirthgarments) ● Audre Lorde Project (@audrelorde) ● Dustin Gibson (@notthreefifths) ● Kay Ulanday Barrett ● G.L.I.T.S. (@glits_inc) ● Keah Brown (@Keah_Maria) (@brownroundboi) ● Wear Your Voice Mag (@WearYourVoice) ● Tonya Ingram (@tonyainstagram) ● Danez Smith (@Danez_Smif) ● Cyree Jarelle Johnson ● Salty Mag (@salty.world) ● Walela Nehanda (@itswalela) (@cyreejarell) ● Sick Sad Girlz (@sicksadgirlz) ● Alan Pelaez Lopez ● them. (@them) ● Fatimah Asghar ● The Queer Muslim Project (@migrantscribble) (@asgharthegrouch) (@thequeermuslim project) ● Amata y’Inyambo (@gira_amata) ● Amber St James (@MxsStJames) Books & Media to Check Out ● Happy Birthday, Marsha! by Tourmaline & Sasha ● Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Wortzel Piepzna-Samarasinha ● MAJOR! By Annalise Ophelian ● Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice ● The Son I Never Had: Growing Up Intersex by Pidgeon Movements Ed. by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne Pagonis maree brown ● The Queen by Frank Simon ● Skin, Tooth & Bone by Sins Invalid ● Crip Camp documentary ● Being Heumann by Judy Heumann ● Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon ● Black Madness :: Mad Blackness by Theri A.Pickens ● Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz ● Haben: The Deafblind woman who conquered Harvard ● This Bridge Called My Back Ed. by Gloria Anzaldua & Law by Haben Girma Cherrie Moraga ● Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare ● Pedagogies of Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander ● How to Survive Today by Tonya Ingram ● Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde ● All The Weight of Our Dreams Ed. by Lydia X. Z. Brown, ● All About Love by bell hooks E. Ashkenazy, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu ● The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang ● Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington ● Sick by Porochista Khakpour ● Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts ● Dirty River by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ● Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts ● States of Delinquency by Miroslava Chavez-Garcia Resources & Further Readings Queer Futures has on ongoing document with places to donate, resources & abolition reading lists: https://www.queerfutures.com/sundaysentiments/2020/5/31/053120-resources- community-organizations-amp-reading-lists-blacklivesmatter-amp-prison-abolitio n-work

● The New Jim Crow by Michelle ● http://mariamekaba.com/ Alexander ● https://www.deanspade.net/ ● Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Y. ● https://www.8toabolition.com/ Davis ● Race After Technology: The New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin References in order of use 1. Keating, A. (2007). Teaching transformation: Transcultural classroom dialogues. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York: New York University Press. 3. Ralph TV. (2007, March 29). Kevin Aviance “Din Da Da”. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/5l7_Zu2AQyQ 4. ZEBRA KATZ. (2014, May 30). Tear The House Up (Official Video) - Hervé x Zebra Katz. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/m5By5X6sl_U 5. Ballroom Throwbacks Television-Brtbtv. (2019, February 18). In the Name of Alloura" ApeS**T" Part 4 @ BrtbTV X 2-16-2019. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/LHP6G5iXhts 6. Cakes Da Killa. (2017, August 15). Cakes Da Killa - Gon Blow (feat Rye Rye). [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/OhYf1cYyibo 7. Sandahl, C. (2003). Queering the crip or cripping the queer?: Intersections of queer and crip identities in solo autobiographical performance. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9(1-2), 25-56. 8. Clare, E. (2015). Exile and pride: Disability, queerness, and liberation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 9. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice 10. Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 11. Dysautonomia International. (2016, April 19). [Facebook]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/DysautonomiaInternational/posts/947275792037967:0 12. ZebrasAUS Chronic Pain and Fatigue Centre. Spoon Theory. Retrieved from https://zebrasaus.com.au/the-spoon-theory/ 13. Kaleidoscope Fighting Lupus Formerly Molly’s Fund. (2014, August 11). [Facebook] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/mollysfund/photos/understanding-the-spoon-theory-an-everyday-reality-for-those-who-live-with-lup us/10152598226760629/