Crawling Out of Fear and the Ruins of an Empire: Queer, Black, and Native Intimacies, Laws of Creation and Futures of Care

Abstract

Queerness is a generative desiring; it is an evoking of the playful, unpredictable, capacious possibilities of being in bodies, expressing selves, and exploring intimacies. In a society of definitive meanings, where identities signify specific and predictable positions, queerness insists on the incompleteness of any one structure of organizing individuals and relationships. While the social order is diluted by narratives instructing how relationships form, evolve, and get hierarchized, queer relationalities reject the simplicity of common-sense assumptions; in their place creating a playground of love, care, and dependencies. Against the fantasy of the monogamous couples and their biological families, for example, queer peoples have developed hand-made relational configurations. They intermingle friendships, families, lovers, and partners; they render these categories flexible and allow the individuals to give them meanings based on their unique patterns of connection, communication, and communion. Queer peoples have metamorphosed sensuality, from a private act of coupled intimacy, into what can pervade across social relations and positions. Intimacies take shape between individuals who may not know each other’s names, and in public spaces where privacy is carved out; sensuality becomes a part of body language between those who may not engage in sexual acts — it structures one’s disposition and gendered presentation. Intimacies turn into enactments of losing and gaining control, which stretch the definitions and functions of bodies.