DRAFT 5.14.20
Rhizome
ent. embodim
My queerness is embodied within. Through force I can mark it within time though artificial boundaries - a first thought, a first kiss, a first coming out. Yet my queerness is like the twilight; marking the moment between night and day, between queer and not, is impossible and a mark of priviledge, of comfort. The queerness is more than a label, it is ways of being, a way of self and of practice. It’s my specific queerness constantly informed and shaped by the situated knowledge of my community and our past. Seeping from the bounds of the present, my queer embodiment is a hopeful glimpse of queer futurality flush with cultural wealth.
Design is the embodiment of a method: a ‘designer’ using a ‘tool’ for transformational practice for the ‘user’. My autoethnographic design practice pushed and pulled at the roles and rules of design, I am both the designer and the designed, the researcher and the researched. To play at the objective gaze reflected inward, whilst an ethical boundary projected outward onto a community, my community. I know and I don’t know. It is my life and it is not. It is my research and it is my past, my present, and my future. It is from, through, with, of, and during.
An excerpt from my journaling of a experience that took place during the research of this thesis
Rhizome
A tree grows from a seed, rooted in soil through a solid centralized trunk, branching all the way to the singular leaf. All parts of a genealogy that has become a standardized metaphor for our own human genetic inheritance, one in which queers are often cut out of - trimmed heteronormative topiary trees rather than a wild forest. But that does not mean we don’t exist, instead queer inheritance is a creeping rootstalk, growing and weaving horizontally, our history is not owned but collectively managed and held dear. Our ancestors are axillary buds, paving the way and also providing the ability to always sprout anew.
non-hierarchical
Autoethnographic design shifts a typical hierarchical relation to a horizontal conversation. I am not designing for a user in which I am the giver and they are the receiver. My own examination of self is entangled with the political, the inheritance, the other, and the future. This is not co-design, I did not design with others. But it is participatory design, in that I am the participant. The work is still deeply informed by queer experiences, my own short internode focused centrally but surrounded by intentional and unintentional roots and through which the work shoot grew.
om fr / t p ly y er ami t m c a ex /f d end ech e it ri e ed ’s (f t) sp n A arli ian g C ffic din o ed w
Rhizome
My queerness is not identical to your queerness, nor should it be. Queer culture is not one thing, one culture, instead its beauty comes from the diversity within. And it is not a static copy of what came before. Each individual journey is unique, from its entry to the relative time and space it occupies, relates, loops, creates, and edits. The roots and webs that these journeys form new maps of queer being by each queer generation that are in conversation with affective pasts. The conversation is not always easy, in fact it is quite often very difficult. How to pay respect to the realities of a different map while simultaneously drawing a new one?
y.
it multiplic
I am a cis-gendered. I am white. I am middle class. I am able bodied. With a few exceptions my immediate networks look similar. How then can autoethnography provide for a multiplicity? It cannot. In that rawness and unexceptionalism though is its strength. I have no claim, no attempt to trace others’ lives or what came before. I have listened and learned; never alone but in relation. My goal was not to know all (autoethnography is rather humble in that aspect, I’m still struggling to know the I), but to afford, through my perceptions, a map of the system and new opportunities, entryways, malleable by each to reflexively tell their own stories.
I posted the survey on the same queer Facebook groups I had advertised the workshop, as well as to my own networks. I received a comment on the survey which called out the survey’s lack of inclusion for people to identify their gender separate from sexual identity, as well as whether someone identifies as cis or trans or neither. My response was not adequate, brushed the response aside, and ultimately led to trans erasure as called out by the respondent in a subsequent comment. In reflection I did not initially understand the point the respondent was making, and therefore did not respond with the thought and consideration that was needed. After the respondent’s second comment I reached out to my own queer support community to talk through the point the respondent was making and how I should best reply. I now understand the point the respondent was making and how my first comment was inappropriate. Pride has a long history of not including the trans community, to the point of being actively anti-trans. By not including a space for people to claim a trans, cis, or neither
identity, I was minimizing and erasing the trans identity and the potential to differentiate how a cis person and a tran persons’ experiences at pride may be significantly different. It did not matter that I have never seen such a question asked. I assumed that people would include trans or cis in their gender identity if they felt it was relevant, and then effectively dismissed a person when they suggested to me that they would identify differently. I deeply regret that I caused any pain or anger or continued erasure, especially in what should be a safe queer space. While the interaction forced me to examine my own knowledge and reaction to the comments and was a personal growth moment, it also taught me about my role and responsibility as a researcher and designer. Excerpt from final research paper submitted Spring 2019 as part of a project related to the purpose of Pride.
Rhizome
The strength of queer culture, its wealth, is drawn from the threads that tie our beingness together. Simple gestures, such as a smile or nod on the subway, communicates, I see you. Mutually bound, our collective memory can also be seen through manifested physical artifacts such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Built from the memory and recognition of individual lives, bound together it unfolds farther. These intangible and tangible connections communicate a way of being queer that goes beyond singular identity. We are connected, but the connections are easily lost unless we focus time, energy, and life into fortifying the lines between us.
Making connections between others has led to just as many connections internally. A constant internal interview, autoethnography is a cultural probe into my life. I apologize to the friends who experienced the casual subway conversation subverted into research. The point of the personal space, already turned political. Because when your rights of being are debated through (not my) president tweets, the being of a queer person is already politicized. Autoethnography design draws out those points, makes the routes between them clear, and poses opportunities to not only drive between them but carpool with others.
Happy to be part of it, and standing at an admiring distance were the younger people. Also hanging out, talking, flirting, happy, excited, but the two worlds were not mixing. Before me I saw two distinctly different experiences, separated by the gulf of action fueled by suffering on one hand, and the threat of pacifying assimilation on the other. When the ACT UPers were in their twenties, they were dying. And the replacements for the dead, these young, were on the road to normalcy. The young had the choice to live quietly because of the bold fury of the old. In the rare cases when the old have done the right thing, this is as it should be. And somehow, the presence of the young showed that they understood this, that someone had done something right and yet these ones were curious, attracted, intrigued by the potential of living for more than LGBT domesticity as their fate. Maybe they too would like to change the world. They had never been that profoundly oppressed. And yet, they wanted to relate. The initial inspiration spark of this thesis, an excerpt of The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman
Rhizome queerness;autoethnography is a alliance uniquely alliance history doing more than the tree imposes the verb ‘to be’ but the fabric of the rhizome queerness;autoethnography merely evidencing is the conjunction ‘And… And… and…’
Queerness is alive. Our aliveness is valid and political and is sometimes enough. And is sometimes not enough. It is constantly reaching further, never settling, creeping toward disruption and dismantlement of the systems that refuse for us to be alive, to thrive. To be queer is to be everything and nothing, a heightened acceptance of all in alliance through intersectionality. History isn’t in the past, it is politically constructed in our present and feeds us the nutrients to say, “and….” to ask “and…” against the hegemonic powers that be. “And?” “And!” “And.”
Paradoxically, autoethnographic design is not really about myself. It’s the alliance between myself as a researcher, myself as a being, and the relationships that have become part of the research and me. It’s finding the intersections in approach, to bring the puzzle pieces of research together. I contemplate internally with care and consideration through my own lens in order to propose an intervention. It is reflexivity and asking, “and so what?”
We March in our communities’ tradition of resistance against police, state, and societal oppression, a tradition that is epitomized and symbolized by the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. We March against the exploitation of our communities for profit and against corporate and state pinkwashing, as displayed in Pride celebrations worldwide, including the NYC Pride Parade. We March in opposition to transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry based on religious affiliation, classism, ableism, audism, ageism, all other forms of oppression, and the violence that accompanies them in the U.S. and globally. We March for an end to individual and institutional expressions of hate and violence as well as government policies that deny us our rights and our very lives, from the NYPD to ICE, from the prison industrial complex to state repression worldwide. We March to oppose efforts that deny our communities’ rights and that brutally erase queer people worldwide. We March against domestic and global neoliberalism and the ascendance of the far right, against poverty and economic inequality, against U.S. military aggression, and against the threat that is climate change. We March to affirm that healthcare is a right, including treatment for all people
with HIV/AIDS worldwide and intensive prevention efforts, and to demand an end to HIV stigma and criminalization. We are trans, bisexual, lesbian, gay, queer, intersex, asexual, two-spirit, non-binary, gender non-conforming + and allies. We March to celebrate our communities and history, in solidarity with other oppressed groups, and to demand social and economic justice worldwide—we March for Liberation! Queer Liberation March’s statement on Why We March
rhizome queerness;autoethnography may be broken shattered at a given spot We may never touch but it will start up again as the warm illumination the line of flight of a horizon imbued with potentiality on one of its old lines an ideality that can be distilled from the past or on new lines used to imagine a future Those lines always tie back to one another schemata of a forward-dawning futurity
We fall down. We get tired. Thinking about a whole generation of gay men whose laughter we can no longer hear. Hearing of our transgender and gender nonconforming siblings who are being murdered an increasingly alarming rate. Feeling homophobia and fearing for our lives. But with a deep breath and a head held high, we march on with tears flowing, towards our queer futurity, fighting for those we cannot touch and those who have been shattered. I pledge to learn from the light left behind, leverage my privilege for my community, for the dawn of a new horizon. We’re here. We’re queer. We’re fabulous. Don’t fuck with us.
Design through self. At first the self felt like a weakness; I must be objective, a pillar of exemplary research and design. But my self is my strength. The design criteria, the life values, I have measured myself against have constantly pushed the work farther. I lived the research. I was knocked down by the barrier surf that threatened to not even let me enter the ocean, but also felt the high of surfing the crest of connection. I am proud of the broken lines, of self and connection, that I have darned. Autoethnographic design does not end. It lives on in the changes in me and the queer utopia we’re building.
“I have an obligation to share what I know. So, I would love to just, to share what I know in terms of everything and everything that I’ve learned.” - Shatzi, 89 year old lesbian