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Queer/Crip Time 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.
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