I was at uni all day, reading but it feels like treading water and then other things come up that keep me from working and it feels like time is running out.
I was reading a lot this week, more theory to add to my backlog of supposed support, more concept I have a hard time expressing myself but ones that weirdly soothe my mind and enforce a sense of sanity in whatever it is that I am doing.
This whole project was about framing the process as project and relieving myself from stress that way and it is not really working. There is process, but I am unclear where it is pointing towards but that is the point. I start doubting the efficiency of that but at the same time this should not be about efficiency.
I keep thinking this process is leading nowhere but I found Stefan Brechts writing on theatre and Renate Lorenz Queer Art and it is all making so much sense. All this identity and becoming and queer desire stuff is so intangible though. It lives in the margins and the in-between. It is arresting because it is intangible. Objects of desire are stand-in manifestations of a most personal interest. One that I want to argue defines, but this definition simultaneously constitutes something I want to flee through regaining agency.
Agency was the starting point of this project.
How can we regain agency over our self-definition and identity - especially as queer people.
Insult and the making of the gay self showed how we a pre-defined, pre-subjectified as queer people in society. Even before we come into ourselves.
There are expectations and prejudices at work before we have any chance at dispelling them.
The mainstream interpretation of a kind of queer liberation is assimilation. Becoming straight. As in Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology. We would take up the social folds that pre-exist ourselves, and align with a system as straight. Living in a 2-partner family, having children, a recreation of the nuclear patriarchal family concept. This form of liberation is more of a surrender, one that negates any difference, that undermines any need for a differentiation to the heteronormative reality.
There is the other extreme of liberation, one that takes back agency by hyperbolising any widely accepted queer markers - for men that would mean effeminate dressing, overflowing gestures, loud, high-pitch speaking, or on the contrary to that a hyper-masculine performance.
This is where I hit a crossroads.
Assimilation seems inappropriate for it negates and erases any past trauma on a wider queer community. It also negates inherent differences.
And on the other end, a maximalist queer aesthetic does not personally appeal to me.
It again discourages individual experience and sensibilities. (I want to note here a distain I have for stereotypical tropes of a contemporary queer aesthetics. I am talking about cyber-latex-slick-gloopy-neon-metallic-cold aesthetics. Think leather and silicone stretched over organic metal shapes, a constant play on soft and hard surfaces and textures)
This aesthetic feels impersonal.
I am going off of the idea of a rural queer aesthetic, basing this other one - the one just described - in the urban context. This is guesswork for now.
Somewhere along the project came the question of objective truth - on the one hand because the starting point was a perceived loss of agency over identity - especially in the online context of a post-truth reality where outside conviction can refashion individual's narratives.
As a proposal for a process-based project that meant constant intuitive production fused with in-depth reflection on what elements of the product were informed by. A certain stripping away of the process.
In line with this idea, a lot of time was spent untangling my own identity, stripping away layers of experience - positive and negative - that shaped me which ultimately felt redundant as a technique? What would I end up with if all is stripped away? Would there be anything left?
Intuition and gut feeling were instinctual answers to what could be left. (Here for the wrong reasons)
Or maybe just the present moment? A snapshot as the only objective truth?
I don't know - it feels a bit stupid to look for objective truth obsessively. It feels compulsive. I think it is a form of coping with unsettledness for me personally. This strong sense of having to back up any opinion or action with fact. I do not take my own decisions lightly usually.
Which brings me to the image of the fool. Or the jester.
It started off as an innocent symbol. The first card of the major arcana in tarot and one that always resonated with me.
I think it is a two-fold interest.
Let's unpack the archetype a bit: The fool is free, whimsical, naive, oblivious, experiencing things for the first time but not in a fearful manner but one of complete openness and unquestioning presence. Simultaneously the jester has a kind of subversive position of power. Being allowed to say anything without risk of punishment, for clothed in jokes and foolery he could critically comment on any person of a higher rank.
So first I think this is something I admire. Foolishness. I believe it is also something I repress.
I remember being a very "bad" kid. Screaming and being angry and swearing a lot. Until I harnessed that energy into being a class-clown sort of character. An entertainer.
I believe it was a way to get attention and I was probably not too ad at it.
I was a child jester of sorts, but then puberty set in and with it a bunch of shame around plain being. I knew of my queer identity quite early and had little problem accepting it for myself. My childhood rural bedroom being the place of escape into the internet and books for other queer lives that seemed very much worth living.
In the rest of my world this did not quite feel this way.
I hid myself and my mannerisms for the most part. I was obviously gay and that obviously was a surface of attack.
I think in a way this anchored shame in me very deeply.
Okay so the fool I admire for I want to be it. (And believe I was it at some point and tragically repressed it.)
Second (and this feels very apt for more general reading of queer romance) I am attracted to fool-type people. (It seems almost obvious to trace this desire back to the above mentioned repression, but I am not an expert.) It is whimsical people that seem self-assured in any action they perform that weirdly draw me in. Ones that do not really fit in, are hard or impossible to categorise but draw from that not shame or insecurity but a fascinating sense of freedom and play and self-assurance.
Now bread. This is a bit of a tricky one. It stems from my obsession with my grandmother, her house and my small pockets of time of childhood spent there.
The connection from her to bread is clear. She baked bread, everyone ate her bread. She cared for a family.
What is less obvious is my incessant obsession with it. One possible explanation would be a certain frozenness in time. She dies and suddenly the place freezes all memories. No new ones to overwrite the old ones. My time there was predominantly positive. Times when my parents were off work for the most part, things felt easy and cozy and I suppose a time where my sexuality was of nobody's concern?
So maybe a space that was never reached by Insult as in Didier Eribon's reading of that word.
Also I think care and food is a way for me to show affection. I do not express it verbally well because I think again it is a shameful act somehow. But food makes it easy. It becomes a medium for affection and love. In my own right a queer medium of love.
Okay. So how do we keep our agency as queer people?
Wait first, I think another deception of urban environments is the feeling of resolve you can experience there as a queer person. Which sounds great at first, and as Didier Eribon also argues is exactly what draws queer people from the countryside into the cities. It is this artificial space, this heterotopia that makes it possible to be queer freely within queer spaces and moreover to be queer anonymously in a general public sense.
I feel this also, especially in the social bubbles I engender. My sexuality is hardly a topic. And that is beautiful but all the while makes the apparent struggle I experience still feel at times unjustified. Which made me question the validity of centering queerness in my work at all. It can feel archaic in this woke urban setting where social constructs feel dissolved enough to hold unquestioning space for a myriad of identities.
It feels like someone is taking something away from me, a point of identification. I feel stupid for needing it maybe also.
Anyway.
Agency and queer identity.
I think it is important to center queerness in discourse.
I think it is important to diversify perceptions of queerness.
I think it is important to restrain from focusing on narratives of trauma. (I do not want to be defines through trauma. Trauma is a part of queer existence but should not be the main thing.)
Going into the Queer Art, a freak theory. It proposes queer art as a medium apt to employ dissonance and distance - creating moments of disruption within institutional and organised systems. See here comparisons to undoing gender by Judith Butler, moments of disorientation by Sarah Ahmed and newly (to me) epic theatre and queer theatre by Bertolt and Stefan Brecht.
So queerness basically produces moments of rupture in a heteronormative environment. In regards to identity and self-subjectification these ruptures/disorientations/undoings can be points of departure into new/other/queer directions. Moments that create a gap (radical drag), a possibility for a change of perspective on what is even considered a norm. (Norms as mental models that are central to identity. Abiding versus refusing this norm creates identity.)
When it comes to Stefan Brecht's notes on "Queer theatre", especially the theatre of the ridiculous a lot of these aspects seem to coalesce. He mentions the fool as a queer stereotype, one that allows utter being in the moment, exposes the theatre of the ridiculous as utterly stupid while stating that this ridiculous stupidity is what moves it towards a transformative form of art. It is in embracing the utter camp, trash and diy aspects of the theatre that they expose the normalising effects of a heteronormative society, institutions and states.
Their genius lies not within their contents but within their form?
It is an ode to playfulness, foolery, whimsy, the erotic, desire and camp. And he wrote about the bread and puppet theatre in the subsequent book "The bread and puppet theatre."
I do not want to talk about all this didactically in the project. I want the project to speak on these things through its medium. I want to make a film or film/performance that recreates these queer modes of subversion.
Fuck I just want to have fun in the process. And produce something that feels intuitively right. That feels true to me? And thus true to a queer sensibility.
I want to play and be the fool. I want to ride a wave of whimsy. Embrace my shame as the only way out being through. It's this shame that speaks of everything I did endure and whatever embraces banal creativity is thus an act of queer resistance and self-subjectification.